To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination. – Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, 1994 On community: The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. – Communion: The Search for Female Love, 2002īut many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin. The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself.
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I am happy about it and feel ready for the Disney+ TV series next year. I did good on continuing some series and even finishing some! I finished with The Trials of Apollo book series by Rick Riordan and brought an end to more than a few book series from the Percy Jackson universe. Any updates on the series you are reading or are you starting any new series? I think I did good managing and finished two out of three reading challenges!ĥ. I ended up prioritizing for the two reading challenges and reading less books for the third one. I was very aware that my reading plans by the end of the year left too many books for December. How did the books you were reading last month fit in your reading plans if you had any? She examines the rituals honoring the lares, their cult sites, and their iconography, as well as the meaning of the snakes often depicted alongside lares in paintings of gardens. She makes the case that they are not spirits of the dead, as many have argued, but rather benevolent protectors-gods of place, especially the household and the neighborhood, and of travel. Weaving together a wide range of evidence, Flower sets forth a new interpretation of the much-disputed nature of the lares. In this comprehensive and richly illustrated book, the first to focus on the lares, Harriet Flower offers a strikingly original account of these gods and a new way of understanding the lived experience of everyday Roman religion. These shrines were maintained primarily by ordinary Romans, and often by slaves and freedmen, for whom the lares cult provided a unique public leadership role. Throughout the Roman world, neighborhood street corners, farm boundaries, and household hearths featured small shrines to the beloved lares, a pair of cheerful little dancing gods. The most pervasive gods in ancient Rome had no traditional mythology attached to them, nor was their worship organized by elites. Soon after Laing moves in, the building's social structure begins degenerating. He purchases a long lease at the apartment and intends to integrate into his new community in the complex. Robert Laing, moves to the apartment after his divorce, at the urging of his sister. The plot of High-Rise centers on the inhabitants of a brand-new luxury high rise apartment complex. As such, I felt it was important to become acquainted with at least 1 of Ballard's works. Ballard's works, and High-Rise in particular, are referenced in the writings of Nick Land and Mark Fisher, and Reza Negarestani has referenced his work on his blog. The particular aesthetic crafted by Ballard has found a receptive audience among the far-right and neo-reactionary sorts, who seem particularly drawn to Ballard's dark imagery. Ballard's 1975 novel about an apartment building and its inhabitants is as disturbing as it is iconic. He is the only one who wants to protect Arnold (who often is called Junior) from his bullies and physical abuse. When Oscar gets sick his father kills him and now his only friend is Rowdy. He is very poor and he only has two friends, his dog – Oscar - and Rowdy (a boy who also live on the reservation). This is the reason he is regularly beaten up and calling names like ‘retard’ (for the brain damage) and ‘globe’ (because of his large head). He has several problems like ‘born with water on the brain’ (he has a big head), he has a poor eyesight, seizures and lips and stutters. My first reaction was then of course that the book was really funny – it already was funny on page one.Īrnold is a boy who lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation. He said that this book is really funny and easy to understand. The expectations I had for this book were pretty high because of what I’ve read on the Internet and of what my teacher told me. Laskar, Sugar Land by Tammy Lynne Stoner, and Lot: Stories by Bryan Washington. This year’s shortlist of nominees were The Atlas of Reds and Blues by Devi S. As far as literary prizes go (many of the most prestigious ones seem basically to just be head-nods) it’s playful and generous: authors are given $5,000 and the promise of a free glass of wine at Crook’s Corner for the rest of the year. Inspired by literary awards presented by Parisian cafes, the yearly award is given to a debut novel set in the American South. Now seven years in, the Crook’s Corner Book Prize is an oddball literary tradition that feels like it couldn’t have emerged out of any place except Bill Smith’s venerable kitchen. Gary Crunkleton, who presented the award, admitted to laughter that he “wasn’t a big reader,” but-nodding to Charles Frazier-said, “I’ve read the Bible, and I’ve seen your movie.” While debauched Sheff would kill the priest and throw the rest in prison, Jamie argues for their lives. Among them is 18-year-old Brighid whose beauty catches Jamie’s eye. On a hunt in Ireland, they come across some Irish Catholics illegally observing their faith while conducting a child’s funeral. To help Jamie with the House of Lords, he seeks the aid of a friend from Oxford days, Sheffield, Lord Byerly, whose lands lay in Ireland. Set in Ireland (and some in England) in 1751 (prologue), 17 (epilogue), it tells the story of Jamie Blakewell (brother to Cassie in SWEET RELEASE), an Englishman with a tobacco plantation in the Colony of Virginia, who has returned to England to try and persuade Parliament to provide money for ships to defeat the French and their Indian allies in the war that has just begun. This is the second in Clare’s Blakewell/Kenleigh Family trilogy and it’s a good one. In that sense, this is a novel about being haunted by the past and the secrets that the past keeps. Finding out what really happened to Rory’s mother is the backbone of the book, something that Gods of Howl Mountain returns to at will and then makes you forget about not long after it’s brought up. It turns out that Rory’s mother has been institutionalized because she lost the will to speak, and took the eye of a man who killed her boyfriend - Rory’s father - during the murder. However, that’s not even mentioning what the real impetus of the plot is. Add into this mix a bevy of corrupt policemen and revenue agents from the FBI who aren’t afraid to use guns, and that’s not to speak of the fact that one of the other main characters is Rory’s grandmother, who is a bit of witch with her potions and lotions, and you’ve got a fair bit to chew on. He’s in love with the daughter of a preacher who uses rattlesnakes in his services, and he’s also run afoul of a local stock car racer. The main protagonist, though claiming there’s just one may be a stretch, is a man named Rory Docherty, who is a Korean War veteran with the amputated leg to prove it, who runs bootleg whiskey for the local kingpin from the top of Howl Mountain to the whorehouses and roadhouses in the valley below that was artificially dammed in the 1930s. Set in the early 1950s in the mountain country of western North Carolina, the book is about moonshiners. There’s a lot going on with Taylor Brown’s third novel, Gods of Howl Mountain, that it’s hard to believe that it runs less than 300 pages. When she’s not writing, she loves long country walks, romantic ruins, Thai food and travelling with her family. After graduating with a degree in History from Lancaster University, she moved to West Lothian, Scotland where she now lives with her husband and children. If you would like to see more about her Sadie King novels then please visit Sarah L King was born in Nottingham and raised in Lancashire. Her debut Regency romance novel, Spinster with a Scandalous Past, will be published by Harlequin Mills & Boon in January 2024. She also writes historical romance novels under the name of Sadie King. Her latest novel, The Wax Artist, was published in 2021 and is the first in a planned historical mystery series set in Georgian era Edinburgh. She is also the author of two contemporary mystery novels, Ethersay (2017) and The House at Kirtlebeck End (2019). These include Historical fiction novels, The Gisburn Witch (2015), A Woman Named Sellers (2016) and The Pendle Witch Girl (2018), all set during the Lancashire witch trials in the seventeenth century. Sarah L King writes historical fiction and contemporary mysteries which she self-publishes via her own Ethersay Publishing imprint. Some of the books I obtained myself with money earned from doing chores. The "civilized" world, she taught us had much to learn from the "primitive." Now this groundbreaking, beautifully written work as been reissued for the centennial of her birth, featuring introductions by Mary Pipher and by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson.ĭuring childhood summers spent at grandmother's cottage in SW Michigan there was little to do but go on walks with the dog, play solitaire, knit, assemble puzzles or read. Adolescence, she wrote, might be more or less stormy, and sexual development more or less problematic in different cultures. Here, for the first time, she presented to the public the idea that the individual experience of developmental stages could be shaped by cultural demands and expectations. It details her historic journey to American Samoa, taken where she was just twenty-three, where she did her first fieldwork. Margaret Mead accomplished this remarkable feat not once but several times, beginning with Coming of Age in Samoa. When they do - as in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, for example - they become classics, quoted and studied by scholars and the general public alike. Rarely do science and literature come together in the same book. |