Three More Down

I'm (kinda) furiously trying to get through books that I bought while here or brought with me from the States, as I'm trying to lighten our ridiculously large load of clothes, school books, games, and bits and bobs (love this English expression) for a move to our new mystery location.

"The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome" by Robin Lane Fox
This is the last of the tomes that I bought this year. Fox is a professor at Oxford, and the book reads like it was written by an academic. Esoteric details wrapped in parenthetical asides engendered many a head-scratching, reread. Perhaps it's because we recently visited Rome that details of Roman history are easier for me to recall than those of ancient Greece. Or maybe it's just that the salacious stories of the Roman emperors were so shocking that one cannot easily forget them. The result: I do have a greater understanding about Greek settlements in the Middle East and Egypt, the issues surrounding the rise and fall of democracy in Athens and other parts of Greece, and how Rome took over the role as ruler of the Classical World after the collapse of the Greek empire after the death of Alexander the Great, who extended the Greece's control as far east as India.

"The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion
I had wanted to follow-up the above book with something light, and while choosing a book with at least eighty percent less text, "The Year of Magical Thinking" deals with the issue of grief and loss following the unexpected death of the author's husband during dinner. I am familiar with Didion, having read "Salvador" in college and "Where I Was From," and her skill in non-fiction writing is the key to the success of this book. This work is a poignant study in how the mind deals with grief—from unknowingly writing an address from 20 years ago on her request form for her husband's autopsy report (resulting in a six months delay in receiving the paperwork) to finding a large number of mistakes while editing her first writing assignment after her husband's death. The fact that their only child is, for a large portion of the work, in a coma or rehab after a bought of the flu, which freakishly morphed into pneumonia then into sepsis, adds to the sympathy her writing evokes in the reader. In addition, being aware that her daughter died nine-months after the book was finished, I had a sense that I was witnessing someone recovering from a significant blow, knowing, yet unable to warn her, that she would soon be flattened by another attack on her mental and emotional faculties.

"The Witch of Blackbird Pond" by Elizabeth George Speare
I found this book at a Cambridge shop called the Haunted Bookshop. My goal upon entering the shop was to find a collection of ghost stories for a friend, but I soon realized that Haunted had nothing to do with the type of works they had available (I'm guessing the building, not the books, gave rise to the shop's moniker). In a £1 bargain bin, I spied "The Witch of Blackbird Pond," which I instantly remembered reading as a young girl (When I told my sister about my find, she replied, "You loved that book."). While I recollected reading the book, I could not recall the story. I thought that reading the first few pages would bring back a rush of memories, but I quickly read the engaging story as though it was the first time I'd encountered it. I am happy to report that Speare's tale, set in 1687, of a 16 year-old, English girl raised in Barbados who moves to Connecticut to live with her Puritan relatives, is still relevant almost 50 years after it was first published.