The format of the tales was also nice because it presented each case separately, allowing me to read a tale or two before going to bed. I love when author’s create works that conveniently fit into my own habits. I liked the tales so much I bought (for a whole 99 cents) the complete Sherlock Holmes collection for my nook. I haven’t decided which nookbook to read next. I have it narrowed down to three: North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (I just finished the mini-series starring Richard Armitage on Netflix), Silas Marner by George Eliot (from the rolled over book challenge) and by George Alan England (about which I know nothing other than it is the book that immediately follows Sherlock Holmes in the collection.) Any thoughts, my dear readers?

I think it is important to occasionally remind yourself that “this is what a serving size looks like”. Not because I think everyone should obsessively be on a diet but because being able to look at something and size it up is a useful skill when you want to make sure you’re getting all of your vitamins and minerals and macro-nutrients and such. Also, it helps me be mindful: mindful of my own needs, mindful of my own impact on the world (what am I throwing out, where is my food coming from, etc) and in a way mindful of the time I have. I feel like that is a good place to start in a new year.

So, this was a fun little book. It is mostly about Connie, researching, living in this little town, meeting an interesting man, and being tormented by her advisor who may or may not have gone completely off the rails. But, there are interludes in the book that go back in time to look at Deliverance Dane and her descendants who are introduced to us in the present through dry documents as Connie tries to hunt down the book. I really enjoyed the idea the discussions about what life must have been like before the scientific revolution and how if you’re not making the distinction between correlation and causation that the world would truly be a mysterious and hazardous place. And, I liked the feminist take on the Salem Witch trials and the idea that all of these women describing their worlds in the idiom of the time and that what looks like hocus-pocus or silly to us was a real way of organizing and understanding the world for them. If I have any complaint, I think it would have to be that Connie, who was really on the ball, didn’t seem to catch on to the connections between the present and the past as I’d have liked her to. But, we all have those moments where we realize something that is completely flipping obvious and that we’ve overlooked or taken for granted.

This was a pretty quick read, and you have to love that if you don’t have a lot of spare time to invest fiction.

And, then I didn’t get around to picking it up until the following December.

And, then I put it down again in January and didn’t pick it up until the summer, at which point I decided that I needed to read at least five pages a day in order to not take a whole year in finishing the thing. The book starts out slow. Since it is an autobiography, Mandela starts at the beginning and, maybe this makes me a terrible person but I was looking for the action, the politics, the rebellion, the prison term which you don’t get to until at least 100 pages into the book. But, as I read further I was glad to have had all of that background. First of all, because I know nothing, less than nothing, about African history or family structure, unless you count the occasional paper on kinship terms one reads in Linguistics classes. I don’t know how the tribal system works (Mandela was originally brought up and trained to be an advisor to the King) and I certainly wasn’t aware of how bad it got in South Africa before apartheid was actually ended. The government opened fire on unarmed civilians non-violently protesting. And, in later years factions of the apartheid government covertly funded organizations opposed to unity that went out and slaughtered civilians. That is horrifying. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to live through that. And, to have been in prison for 27 years, missing the childhoods of your children, not being there to take care of your Mother before she died, not being able to go to family funerals, all because you wanted a government where every person, regardless of the color of their skin, has a vote. So, I guess the answer to the question is Nelson Mandela an amazing forgiving machine or is he a man is this: He is a man, a stubborn man, but a man who wanted the freedom that was his. But more than that, Mandela wanted freedom not just for himself but for every South African. As he says at the end of the book:

“It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness.”

Freedom is something that must be protected and we must be mindful of all of the things that we do or say that can take that freedom away, from others and from ourselves. This was an amazing book and Nelson Mandela is a truly inspiring man.

Waiting

This is one of the images from the month themed ‘color’. I liked the look of the orange wall. The chair seemed lonely and expectant to me.

But, there is some to recommend it, for one thing the characterizations of the gods are a lot of fun. As far the descriptions of the magic tricks that are Shadow’s head-clearing nervous habit. I’ve never wanted to learn magic tricks more. I also enjoyed the constant characterization of America as being a land that is bad for gods. However, it sort of annoyed me that the gods didn’t evolve as their people did. (I might not perform blood rites, but I certainly knew where Easter comes from.) So, I guess if this were a paper and I were grading it, I’d give it a B+. It is good, but quite frankly I expected a little more from half of the team that brought us Good Omens and the author that brought us Coraline.