sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: religion

I started my reread of Heaven Official's Blessing in September and have been working my way steadily through it ever since. This time I posted my as-it-happened thoughts to mastodon as I went, because there's just SO much book in this book that there's no way I'd remember everything by the end! So now I'm copying all those thoughts over to here for posterity. Warning, this is like 22,000 words of thoughts. But this book is so GOOD it's worth every one of those words and so many more besides! I could talk about this book forever it feels like.

Anyway. On with the liveblog! (originally posted to: https://federatedfandom.net/@soph_sol/tagged/tgcfthoughts)

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THE END.

Over on mastodon I'm participating in a group readalong of TGCF, one chapter per week, and a few weeks ago we finished the first volume of the official translation so I might as well crosspost all my thoughts over to here as like, my book review? Yeah okay here we go! Putting it all below a cut to save your reading page

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This is the first time in my life that I have gotten to hold in my hands a real actual published book written by a friend of mine, and let me tell you, it is a GREAT experience and also this book lived up to absolutely everything I hoped for from it. Five stars, would collapse into a puddle of emotions again. And I say this without bias! I would have loved this book even if I didn't know Becca!

So The Iron Children is a scifi novella about cyborgs warriors and a robot nun and one squishy human traversing a treacherous landscape together in the midst of war, and also is about questions of identity and religious ethics and duty and kindness and freedom. I loved EVERYTHING about this, I adored all the characters, I loved the worldbuilding, I loved its careful pacing and the way it built on its ideas, I loved that it managed to pack so much into such a short book without ever feeling like it was overcrowded.

The book is told through three different POVs: the squishy human, Asher, who's a young nun-in-training getting thrown in over her head; Barghest, the leader of the cyborg warriors, whose dedication to duty is above and beyond the call of duty; and a character whose identity is a mystery until partway into the book but is definitely one of the other cyborg warriors. The first two characters get their POV sections in third person, but the mystery character's sections are in first person.

I have gone on record in the past as stating that I find it irritating when there's multiple povs and some of them are, for no reason, in a different person than the others.

BUT the key here is that there IS a reason in The Iron Children, and when there's a reason it works! It's got a destabilizing effect, to have one of the three in a different person than the other two; it shows that character as other, as separate. It works thematically! (Okay and incidentally it lets the name be hidden to allow a reveal later on as to which character this one is, which is convenient!)

And now let me go into the realm of spoilers because I have to to talk about everything else I love.

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ANYWAY read this book!!!

A graphic novel telling a story in a series of character vignettes about the points of tension and points of connection in a small Mennonite community in southern Manitoba.

It's....hmm. It does a great job of giving an accurate and nuanced portrayal of the current state of the Mennonite community and the conversations of the current time in Canada (including: relationships with indigenous people and the history of residential schools; queer people's degree of welcome in churches; relationships with war and the military; dynamics between modern megachurches and more traditional churches; voluntourism; and more). I 100% believed in the realness of every single character in this book. And it left me unsettled at the end, but in a good way? idk the whole thing is somehow both melancholy and hopeful.

I do wish though that the book was saying something more though than just holding up a mirror to go "this is who we are." I mean there's value in that! But it wasn't quite enough for me. But maybe that's just, like, where we're at with fiction that actually explores Mennonite identity: there's so little Mennonite fiction out there that we can't get beyond just going for representation through depiction.

I also struggled in places to follow the story — although the art is great, it is not quite distinctive enough in how it depicts all the many different characters, and I had a huge amount of trouble following who was who as they interwove throughout each other's stories. And checking the character cheat sheet at the front didn't always help as much as I wanted it to.

I did love that the book is clearly by someone who at the very least knows birders, and might be a bird enjoyer himself. (but it doesn't go overboard on the bird content, just makes choices of what birds to include that aren't birds the average non-birder would have thought much about!)

Overall.... I'm glad I read it. I'm curious how it would read to someone who isn't intimately familiar with the things it's depicting, though!

I got this book from

skygiants' review, and like, reading through this book I could ABSOLUTELY see how it is obviously the poison for Becca, Becca's poison, but also: I read the first two pages and was immediately confident I would like this book too. And I was right!

It is a historical fantasy novel with three main characters. The first two are an angel and a demon who live together in a Jewish shtetl in Poland as chevrusas, or study partners in their study of the Talmud, but who for a variety of reasons end up immigrating to the US. The third, Rose, is an extremely lesbian Jewish teen girl who immigrates to the US as well, for opportunities and for adventure and for getting away from her best friend Dinah who had the temerity to marry a man. Then they all get involved with labour activism! And also dealing with ghosts and dybbuks and gentile demons and oppressive immigration policies and more.

The three main characters are all so different from each other and I adore all three of them so so so much! Never ever a moment of disappointment on switching viewpoints, just excitement to spend time with that character again. Also: the narrative itself is a character with an "I" which I love too. Actually I would have loved if this was an even more prominent feature too! Love me a book where the narrative isn't trying to disappear into the background but has its own opinions separate from that of the characters it's writing about.

Plus the book as a whole is suffused both with very Jewish and very queer vibes and I love this about it. I am not Jewish myself so cannot speak in detail to that aspect of it, though I always love to read books that go all in on depicting very specific experiences like this! And the queerness....ohhhh it was beautiful. This book not just a book with queer characters; the whole narrative is queer in its soul, and I love that for it. And for me, reading it!!! It's just like, this is a book that understands me.

( minor spoilers I think )

At any rate, thank you Becca for the rec because this was a GREAT read.

This is a small book from the 70's written from a very christian perspective but speaking earnestly to anyone who cares about injustice, urging people to act to make a difference. It's a plea for revolutionary change, but one that argues for non-violent action -- not necessarily from a moral ground (though I think he also believes it morally), but from a belief that non-violent direct action is more likely to be effective at creating the world he wants to see. How can oppressed minorities successfully wage a war of violence against the powers that have all the money and arms and armies, he asks.

The book is a collection of small essays and small poems interspersed with each other. The poetry isn't as good, in my opinion, as the essays, but they're clearly heartfelt at least.

The book does use sexist language and says the occasional awkward or uncomfortable thing, but it's clear that Câmara is genuinely doing his best to be open and expansive with his love, his understanding, and his welcome, and so I was able to read past this myself. He seems to just genuinely love humankind!

It's also very clearly of its era in other ways, like the particular political framework he's discussing throughout of communism vs capitalism. And also, this is the time when liberation theology was blossoming in Latin America, and it's clear he's writing out of that tradition too. I have a lot of respect for liberation theology!

Overall an interesting look into a particular era and a particular perspective in the ongoing efforts to change the world into a better place.

I just reread Piranesi, and you know how when a book is so close to perfect and yet falls short in a few specific ways, it can feel more disappointing than a book that didn't get so close? Yeah, that.

There's so much about this book that's truly glorious, that I absolutely adore. Things that it's doing that are really special and unusual and incredible. But. For a book published in 2020 to unquestioningly reproduce a) the evil gay trope and b) the heroic police officer trope, with no indication there was ANY thought put into complicating either those ideas.....it's disappointing. Look, I'd absolutely be okay keeping Arne-Sayles gay; it's relevant to him as a representative of outsider thinking, especially during the era he was academically active. But there needs to be other non-evil, non-predatory queer characters as well to balance him out! In fact, let's just make 16 a non-cop lesbian, and maybe make Matthew Rose Sorensen gay as well, and the book would be fixed.

It's especially disappointing from an author like Clarke, who in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell created a book where the persistent theme throughout is that people with social and political power abuse it, and that the outsiders and people from oppressed people groups are worth listening to. But of course, as was pointed out to me, just because people are interested in those themes doesn't mean they're capable of recognizing all of who has power and who's oppressed.

On my first read of Piranesi I was so transported by the good things the book is doing that I didn't think much about these issues except to note that they were present. But now on reread, they sting a little more. SIGH. I want this book to be perfect, dangit!!!!

EDIT: can't believe I forgot to mention: Piranesi must have had a background as a birder! he confidently identifies herring gulls instead of being like "um, they're seagulls of some kind"

A children's book from the 90's, this book holds up surprisingly well! It's historical fiction set in the 13th century about two young folks who go on pilgrimage from their village in England to Santiago in Spain.

The style of the book is a little too abrupt for me, switching between short little vignette scenes constantly, and often with different POV's. But it's a really good and solid depiction of the experience of medieval pilgrimage and medieval life, and of the main characters' growth and change on the way. It even manages to include an interlude with a sympathetic muslim character.

Whew, I'm done reading TGCF!!! I read the first half in the officially published translation, and the second half in a fan translation since the official one isn't all published yet, but let me tell you I am ABSOLUTELY going to be rereading the whole dang thing once the official tl is all out.

Anyway! What a book! What a lot of book in which a lot of things happened! I've been reading this thing for over a month, fairly consistently, and it took me this long because I gather the english translation is something like 750,000 words long?!? That is Long.

But what this means is that I feel like I do NOT remember everything that happened well enough to feel like I have a good grasp on the Things that the book is trying to do as a whole. How do all the themes tie into each other? What ARE the themes? This is hard to say when I had trouble even keeping track of who was who amongst all the different secondary characters, because a book this size can fit SO many secondary characters in it, and most of them have at least two completely different names if not more.

(Mu Qing and Feng Xin were particularly bad for this because they go by those names, and also by Nan Yang and Xuan Zhen, and ALSO by pseudonyms where they're pretending to be their own underlings. I absolutely 100% could not keep track of them by all these different names and as a result have very little sense of which is which between them, which I can tell is Problems!)

Anyway anyway! This is a chinese danmei webnovel about a guy who becomes a god (and then stops being a god, and then goes through that cycle a few more times...), and about heavenly politics between all the different gods, and also about the ghost who loves him. And I LOVED it.

There were some parts that got a bit tedious (some of the fight scenes went on a bit long, I will not lie, but then I think this about MOST fight scenes, lol) but overall it was remarkably moreish for the entire very long length.

It's a book about how choices make you who you are, I think, and about the importance of having people in your life whom you can love and trust and rely on. And the way these themes are intertwined with the love story between our hero Xie Lian and the ghost king Hua Cheng is just completely delightful. I adore Xie Lian as a main character and a viewpoint character. He's so endlessly fascinating! He's 800 years old by the time of the main events of the novel, and he's been through a lot (understatement), and he's made very definite and deliberate choices about what kind of person he wants to be. But at the same time, he's spent most of those 800 years living a life where he prioritizes the well-being of pretty much everyone except himself, because he sees that as his job - and in his relationship with Hua Cheng, he finally is introduced to the idea that it doesn't have to be selfish for him to allow happiness into his life, and to have someone prioritize him. I love them both very very much.

I feel like there's a whole enormous thread of another theme I cannot comment on though because I do not know enough about either a) Chinese cosmology or b) cultivation novels as a genre. Which is that although it seems to be the goal of all cultivators to cultivate successfully enough to ascend into godhood, in this book godhood does not uhhhhhhhh seem to be that great. Heaven is full of petty squabbles, a lot of the gods kinda suck in an exciting variety of ways, and you still have jobs to do and paperwork to complete and roles to live up to and asshole coworkers to try to get along with, and so on and so forth. Basically: it doesn't seem to be any better than ordinary human life, except that you get fancy palaces and exclusive access to Brain Twitter (dubious prize). There definitely seems to be questioning of like, why is this the goal? Is this worthwhile? Should we be aiming for something else instead? But again! I do not have enough context for this entire thread of questions to be sure of WHAT it's saying with all this!

Other characters in this book I had strenuous feelings about:

- Ling Wen! I find her FASCINATING. A civil god who is really really really good at administrative work, such that when she rebels, the entirety of heaven is kind of lost without her! It was sooooo funny that when she and Xie Lian are fighting at one point, Xie Lian automatically goes to update Ling Wen about the situation because as the administrative manager of heaven she needs to know, and then is like. Uh. Right. She knows because she's HERE. FIGHTING ME. But we get remarkably little of her internal life and I want to know more about what's going on with her!

- He Xuan and Shi Qingxuan. Obviously! Beefleaf!!!!! God their story is so deliciously painful. One of those things where there is no way for there to be a happy ending but you can't help hoping anyway.

- Guzi - the poor kid! I spent so much of the book being like, auuuughhhhhhh this is so horrible that he's so attached to his dad but that asshole qi rong is possessing his dad and so he's running around after QI RONG endlessly, and then you get just this tiny info drop near the end that actually his dad was the worst and he's so attached to qi rong as his father because qi rong is actually the best dad he's ever had? (low, low bar) Anyway I still hate qi rong but. I want guzi to be able to have a better experience of family :(

This book started out SO strong, with a bunch of space nuns living in a living spaceship grown from a species of slug, each of the nuns with their own personalities and foibles and strengths and weaknesses that make living together in a small, isolated community a fun challenge. And it was so good at this!!! So good!!!!!! But then we went and had plot happen.

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I read this book on the sales pitch that it's a Jane Eyre retelling featuring Jane/Bertha, which like, obviously I was all over that! In practice, although there are many things about this book that are delightful, there are aspects that make it not quiiiiiite all hang together as a coherent narrative to me, but it's still definitely worth the read..

( this will require spoilers to discuss )

(Trilogy consists of: The Bear and the Nightingale, The Girl in the Tower, The Winter of the Witch)

I read the first book in this trilogy for the first time four years ago, and liked it a lot at the time, but wrote a VERY incomplete review of it. So I reread it before reading the sequels, so I would remember what actually happened in it! And then I read the sequels.

And now that I've read the whole trilogy I'm....hm. Evaluating the three books all together, I like it a lot less than I thought I was going to. And the thing is, I don't know WHY!!! It's doing so many different things that I generally find extremely compelling, and yet when all put together, I am left feeling cold.

It's a book set in medieval Russia, fairy tale inspired, about the tension between Christianity and the traditional beliefs, featuring a young woman with interesting complicated relationships with her family and also with the god of death. And it's well written, and the main character has a complicated morality but is dedicated to doing what she thinks is the right thing to do, and the winter vibes are powerful and delicious. You would think that this is my jam! And yet.

I mean, yes, there were some aspects of how the story was put together that did not agree with me. Like, Vasya spends most of the second book crossdressing as a boy, and she is very clearly experiencing The Genders about it, but the author is completely and utterly unaware of this fact in a very "I'm cis and have never considered what it means to be a gender" kind of way that feels like it belongs to a bygone era of crossdressing novels. And there were some aspects of how this played out that were really uncomfortable.

(and the books are also extraordinarily heterosexual........except for one brief moment where the god of chaos and the evil priest kiss. Because obviously gayness is something that only belongs to antagonists. SIGH. I would honestly be happier if I just thought the author somehow didn't know gay people exist.)

Also, although I am all about those delicious human/personification-of-death ships, this particular god of death felt so very human that it didn't really feel like that's what it was doing! And yes, there were watsonian reasons why he was more human than he ought to have been, but that doesn't actually make it satisfying to me.

But honestly these are things that would, in other books, not actually stop me from enjoying other parts of a book, if the other parts were good. So idk. *enormous shrugs* If you have read these books and have any thoughts about why it might not have spoken to me, then please talk to me about it!

Other thoughts:

I did, throughout the whole read, keep finding myself thinking "This is like spinning silver except spinning silver did it so much better. Why am I not just rereading spinning silver instead."

I kept being thrown by Konstantin not being the character type I expected him to be, because....okay. When I was a teen, I began reading the Alvin Maker books by Orson Scott Card. They are, um, extremely baffling and horrible, and although they began with some compelling worldbuilding, they went very off the rails remarkably quickly and I think I gave up like halfway through the series. But they contain a character who plays a similar role to Konstantin: a priest/minister type person who thinks he is hearing god talking to him but is actually hearing the devil, and doing what the devil wants. And that dude from the Alvin Maker books is a very different person from Konstantin! But I kept expecting Konstantin to be him! Anyway Konstantin's terrible but in a different way, and I could never quite hold it in my head what kind of way that was, lol.

Dang I love this book. As I read it I kept on trying to figure out how to articulate to myself what it is about the way the story is presented that I love so much, and it's hard to do but I'll try to explain! It's like....prosaic and mythical at the same time, comfortable to portray mindsets that are very different from the reader's, comfortable to present the characters with all their prejudices and complexities on display without censure or applause, just like, "here's how things are, and how things are is sometimes a little weird to the reader, and sometimes a little weird to the characters, but it's all important and it's all a part of life and I'm going to tell you about it." I love this so much.

I also love the setting: it's fantasy-flavoured historical fiction, where all the characters definitely believe in magic (as many cultures currently do and have done throughout the ages) and magical things seem to happen, but it's not entirely clear whether the magic is really real. The main character is a Norse man from Iceland in the 9th century who goes on a trading journey to Mongolia, an extensive journey largely taken by land, and there's much mixing of culture and much encountering of unfamiliar languages and customs, and I love how the intermingling of peoples is portrayed. It's a complex interplay of alliance and enemy, of trust and mistrust, of people working together and benefiting from each other while still being other.

Also it's about how important a) horses and b) religion are to people!

It's a short book and a quick read and I found it mesmerizing.

Sometimes I finish a book and groan a bit at the thought of writing it up, because I don't know how to organize my thoughts into coherence, but I know I'll be happier if I do because then I'll have a better handle on my own understanding of the book!

So this is a sequel to Catfishing on Catnet, and after the exciting events of that book Steph and her mom are trying to settle down and live a "normal" life, now that the threat of her dad is gone. But because of a number of reasons, including her friendship with the AI CheshireCat, Steph gets drawn into trying to save the world from another AI. Among other things.

There's a lot that's good about the book, and I really enjoyed it a lot, when I wasn't totally stressed out with worry about what was going to happen to these kids. I felt so much for Nell, doing her best to escape the fundamentalist religious cult she was raised in but not yet sure how to feel confident in who she is outside of it. And Steph and her mom are doing their best after the chaos and trauma of the last many years but still struggling to learn healthy ways of relating to each other and to the world. And they're all in SO MUCH DANGER! As well as Nell and Steph's respective girlfriends, and their various other friends, and tbh most humans??

But one thing that made me laugh was how much I enjoyed all the adults in this YA novel......signs you've gotten old, I guess. (other signs you've gotten old: I just realized I referred to the main characters as kids in the previous paragraph.) But hot damn, Nell's dad's polycule! Steph's grandmother! the random lesbian activist in whose house they take refuge at one point!

I appreciated that there were understandable explanations for why a lot of these kids would not feel comfortable going to the adults in their lives for help, and also about interference in communication when they DID try, so that various excellent adults could be present and part of the story while still allowing for the usual YA thing of making sure the teens are the ones to save the day. Nicely done.

However. A lot of the plot in this book is kicked off because of all these people using what are honestly EXTREMELY sketchy apps, and it takes people forever to be like "hmm maybe there's something concerning about this app" EVEN AFTER it's convinced them to do all sorts of things that any reasonable person would be suspicious of. The cult's app, sure, it's a cult, that checks out. But the other apps???

Anyway as long as I turned up my dial in suspension-of-disbelief alllllll the way up, I think it was a good book. But that was a heck of a lot of belief to suspend, tbh.

Okay was this review helpful to me? might it be helpful to you? idk on either point but here we are.

Okay now THIS is how to end a book in a way where it's clear there will be sequels that you want to read, but where the narrative of the individual book is still solidly and satisfyingly concluded.

Vespertine's pitch is that it's Venom but about a nun and a spirit in a medieval setting. It's also kind of Joan of Arc in nature? And clearly written by someone for whom the Sabriel-Lirael-Abhorsen books were formative (or if they weren't, then this is a person who clearly needs those books in her life because they'd be perfect for her!).

Anyway Artemisia is a young woman who's been scarred by her past and is very happy with the idea of just continuing quietly in a retiring role as a nun in a backwater and hopefully talking to as few people as possible, but circumstances conspire to make that not an option for her, and instead she's sharing her body and mind with a wildly dangerous being who could control or destroy her easily, but with whom she works out an uneasy alliance to achieve what they each want.

It's incredible. I was a little dubious going in, because it's very catholic imagery in a way I often find tired and overdone, but the more I read the more I was there for everything this book is doing.

The relationship between Artemisia and her revenant! And the one between Artemisia and Marguerite! and Artemisia and Leander! and Artemisia and her horse! and tbh the Divine and [uh, spoilers] too, and also everything about Mother Dolours, and and and. Love it. A whole bunch of people doing their best in miserable circumstances, and not always getting it right (sometimes drastically wrong, in fact!) but TRYING.

I love this book and I love the ending and I cannot wait to read more books in this series.

I've read one book by Rogerson before, her debut novel, and though I largely enjoyed that one, I still had some fairly significant quibbles with it. Not this time. I think she's really leveled up as an author since her debut! Love to see it.

Islamicates Volume I, edited by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

A collection of stories that was made available free online, this book is specifically focused on collecting works of sff inspired by Muslim cultures. My initial reaction to the book is that it badly desperately horribly needs a copyeditor (AUGH it was painful to read in places!!) and tbh could also have used a stronger hand in a more in-depth editing too, but if I set that aside, it was a pretty interesting read!

Not all of the stories worked for me, and even the best stories were only fairly good, but I really enjoyed reading a whole book of stories about Muslim characters, a demographic who don't tend to get a lot of focus in sff. My favourite stories in the collection were "Calligraphy," "Searching for Azrail," and "Congruence."

A Mosque Among the Stars, edited by Ahmed A. Khan and Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

Like Islamicates, this book is a freely-available collection of Muslim-focused sff short stories. But it's an earlier effort and, imo, a weaker one. It's also badly in need of a strong copyedit and editor. But it has an even greater disparity between the stronger stories and the weaker ones, with the weak ones very weak, imo, and I was left with some complicated feelings even about some of the stories I enjoyed reading. I'd recommend reading Islamicates over this one.

Zen Cho is brilliant at writing difficult older relatives who think they know what's best for you, and she takes it to new heights here with Jess who is haunted by the strong-minded spirit of her dead grandmother, not to mention all the OTHER relatives in town who have their own ideas for Jess's life.

Cho is ALSO brilliant at writing stories imbued with magic that feel terribly grounded in mundanity, which feels like it should be an insult but it's not, her characters are just all running around having extremely understandable reactions to things whether they're magic things or not.

Anyway this is the story of a worried lesbian zillennial who grew up in the US but has to move back to Malaysia with her parents, and is trying to figure out what she's going to do with her life, but her dead grandma needs her to help out with some revenge first. It's GREAT.

Also lots of content about religion and the various ways people choose to engage with it to different levels and in different ways. Loved all the different gods in this book, the ones that showed up in person and the ones who didn't. Including of course the titular Black Water Sister. The way Cho wrote the emotional reaction of people to her presence was really effective at making her vibes come to life for the reader!

When this book was first announced, I was both excited and skeptical. Katherine Addison's previous book, The Goblin Emperor, is one of my top comfort-reads and a book I find an endless delight. (as evidenced by the fact that I've read it 5 times in the 6 years since it was published) So I was excited about the possibility of another Addison book! But on the other hand it's a Sherlock Holmes fanfic, featuring the Jack the Ripper murders, and I am a) a bit burned out on Sherlock Homes, and b) not interested in Jack the Ripper. But I figured I would give the book a try anyway, because I trusted Katherine Addison.

And unfortunately I found myself really disappointed in the book, and for unexpected reasons! (And now I'm feeling a lot more trepidatious about the Goblin Emperor sequel coming out next year...)

Usually when I write reviews of books I try to be fair, and acknowledge that books that don't work for me often do have their right readers out there even if I'm not one. But this book has enough stuff going on that I'm uncomfortable with that I don't think I can do that, even though it DOES have some genuinely good aspects too.

( cut for extensive spoilers and negativity )

Susanna Clarke's first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, is possibly one of my favourite books I've ever read. It came out 16 years ago and I have been waiting ever since for her to publish another novel. FINALLY IT IS HERE. Piranesi is very much its own thing, but there are some similarities to JS&MN in some of the things it does particularly well. Clarke is so good at balancing the numinous and the real in a way that works for me, and at immersing the reader in a world.

Piranesi is a book about a man called Piranesi who lives in a House, an enormously extensive and labyrinthine structure filled with magnificent statues and its own weather and also an ocean. The House is Piranesi's whole world. Other than him there are fourteen other people in the House, thirteen dead and one Other who is the only living person he knows.

Piranesi loves the House, values his friendship with the Other, and feels highly fulfilled by his endless work at cataloguing and understanding everything he can of what the House contains. But of course the status quo cannot be maintained forever.

This book is fascinating and lovely and odd and touching, and hugely immersive for such a (relatively) short novel. I was absolutely transported and riveted, and when I finished the book I felt a kind of a loss that I had to leave the world of the book behind.

( Read more... )

Having taken a scroll a little while ago through the tumblr tag and other reader responses, it seems clear to me that everyone finds different literary and cultural resonances in this book; there's a lot going on beneath the surface. But you don't need to catch any of the allusions and parallels and metaphors for it to still read beautifully. It's not gatekeepy about its assumptions of the reader's prior knowledge the way the Western canon can sometimes be, it just invites you to openheartedly explore what the book has to offer you, the way Piranesi explores his world for meaning. It's wonderful.

Note: contains a Good Police Officer and an Evil Gay

Okay this was such a cool book to discover! Etheria (more commonly spelled Egeria today) was a Christian woman who in the (probably) 4th century went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and wrote a document about her travels for her community of fellow Christian women back home. This is that document, translated, and with extensive commentary from 1918. Etheria's writing is the earliest surviving text outlining a Christian pilgrimage in detail. It exists only in fragmentary form but enough exists to give some pretty specific information!

I really enjoyed the beginning commentary, even though the librivox entry for this book describes it as "a bit scholarly and dry". I found the information interesting, and I was delighted by the passive aggressive academic shots fired at the people the commentator thinks are wrong.

The actual text of Etheria's letter I found a bit more dry, as she spends a lot of time just listing places she went and things she saw and doesn't give much description, commentary, or reflections upon any of it. On the other hand, taking into account cultural changes in the last 1600 years or so, it was really funny to me how much similarity I could see between this and accounts I have had cause to read from modern Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. Some things don't change, apparently! (something that has changed: referring to just everyone as "holy": holy monks, holy Moses, Holy Thecla, Holy Job.....)

The last few chapters are taken up entirely with Etheria listing in minute detail the specifics of the worship practices in Jerusalem, with particular focus on Lent and Easter. This to me felt like just a lot of repetition of almost the same thing over and over again, but it honestly became kind of meditative after a while and I didn't actually get bored of it, weirdly enough. Not a single piece of information from the whole section stayed in my head for longer than a moment though.

Also I enjoyed the various signs of humanity in the volunteer Librivox reader - it was obvious sometimes that he found a particular bit kind of ridiculous to have to read, and he needed a real run up to try to attack the various non-English words, phrases, names, and place-names that appear in this book. And overall he was a clear and competent reader, easy and pleasant to listen to, though he talked fast enough that I had to keep my focus sharp to follow!

Glad to have stumbled across this in my vague wanderings through the librivox archive.