September 5, 2007

• book reviews

      Have read a couple of nifty books lately. Just finished a very good novel set in England & France about 10 years after the Restoration of Charles II. Called "Dark Angels" by Karleen Koen, it starts slowly, but the reader really grows to care about the characters. There's lots of period detail, humor & poetic sentences such as one describing lace: "It was costly, delicate, as fragile as if fairies had crept in at night and woven it from moonlight." Or another "...when she blushed, it was as if cream was suddenly mixed with new strawberries."

      But it's not all fancy metaphors, there's also a lot of suspense & intrigue at Court & the characters are well drawn & multi-dimensional. I highly recommend it. This book is a prequel to Koen's "Through a Glass Darkly" which I'm now eager to read.

      Another was "Away" by Jane Urquhart about Ireland during the potato famine(1846) & subsequent emigration to Canada. Along with eccentric characters, wonderful symbolism & lyrical sadness, there's also a mysticism throughout, espcially surrounding a certain character that gives it the feel of a folktale. It's quite a strange, beguiling story.

      My current book is a non-fiction account of the Columbia & Endeavor space mission by Chris Jones titled "Too Far From Home", which is excellent. The author, who surprisingly used to be a sports writer, manages to make technical stuff easy to understand without being condescending. And he is really focused on the personalities of the astronauts, which humanizes everything. An overview of the various space accomplishments is woven though the book, so we can see how it all fits together like building blocks.

      Any one of these books would be a treat to read, but all three in a short period of time has been like raiding a dessert cart.

  • 7:42 pm
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