sketchesbyboze.bsky.social
books, beauty, history, folklore. Dickens lover. married to @littleseamstress. gets dressed up like a pillow so she's always in bed. patreon.com/sketchesbyboze, https://linktr.ee/sketchesbyboze
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Lastly, I wrote a lengthy essay on Moby-Dick, the medieval Titanic, the Book of Job, the death of Joy Davidman and the mystery of suffering. This was an enormous labor of love; please check it out! bibliollcollege.substack.com/p/the-shadow...
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Oh, and here’s a complete list of all the books I read this month:
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BONUS: I’m reading The Plantagenets by Dan Jones and When Christ & His Saints Slept by Sharon Kay Penman. Jones belongs in the first tier of medieval historians. Penman is unmatched in the genre of historical fiction, her books both scrupulously researched and deeply comforting.
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O Caledonia, by Elspeth Barker. Barker only wrote one novel, but oh, what a novel. This tale of a sixteen-year-old girl who would rather be reading Gothic fiction and traipsing about the Scottish Highlands with her pet raven is very nearly perfect. One of my favorite books ever.
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Wonderstruck, by @helendecruz.net. “Wonder is a sudden surprise of the soul,” said Descartes, and de Cruz traces the effects of wonder on science, religion and magic, in the process weaving in Pascal, Socrates and Brandon Sanderson. We are lucky to have this book, and her.
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Gisli Sursson’s Saga. One of the more beloved sagas of Iceland, featuring cursed swords, deadly quarrels, a man who uses whey to extinguish a housefire, and yet another in a long line of heroic outlaws who flout society’s mores and are hunted to their deaths. Thrilling!
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A Grief Observed, by C. S. Lewis. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” When his beloved wife Joy died of cancer at the age of 45, after three years of marriage, Lewis penned four intensely personal journals recording his crisis of faith. This is his Book of Job.
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The Penguin Book of Hell, by Scott Bruce. From ancient Sumeria to the present day, Bruce documents how afterlife journeys have evolved. Pope Gregory the Great wrote a story that sounds oddly like the plot of The Good Place. Purgatory visions used to be more common. Fascinating!
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Why Read Moby-Dick?, by Nathaniel Philbrick. The acclaimed historian explains his lingering fascination with a book that tends to provoke obsession, making the case that Moby-Dick is, indisputably, the greatest work of fiction written by an American.
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Briefly, a Delicious Life, by @nellstevens.bsky.social . One of the oddest books I read this month, the story of a young woman who died in the Middle Ages and whose ghost now spies upon two lovers, Frederic Chopin & George Sand. The premise is irresistible, the narrative voice infectious.
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A Month in the Country, by J. L. Carr. A veteran of the Great War, an artist, is assigned the task of restoring a medieval mural in a rural English church. During the ensuing month he makes friends, falls aimlessly in love and puzzles over mysteries of time and eternity.
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The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, by @lauramille.bsky.social. The best non-fiction book I read this month was Miller’s loving dissection of her fraught relationship with the Narnia books and their place in the English canon. Astute and enjoyable, a pure pleasure.
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Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. Dr. Frankl was deported to Auschwitz for the crime of being Jewish, where he lost his pregnant wife. Here he describes life in a German concentration camp and ponders how we might find meaning in our most terrible afflictions.
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The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, by Ian Mortimer. One of the best books written for a popular audience about social life in the Middle Ages. Mortimer tells adventurous time-travellers where to travel, what money to carry, and the best places to grab an ale.
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it's funny, I never read the final chapter as being a theological statement. more a Job-like lament, which is why it's so effective.
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thank you for sharing, friend
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they were still invading in 950! they drove King Alfred into the marshes
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I came across this line in my Norton English Bible and thought of you: "There is a saying in the kabbalistic Alphabet of Rabbi Akiba that the world was created for the sake of poetry." Much to ponder.
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so encouraging to see someone reading!
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I think about the 90 percent of our ancestors who were peasants and how thrilled they would be to see us thriving in a literate world that was once the sole domain of kings. I read for them. I study to learn all the things they could never know.
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much worse than that, I'm afraid
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I'll never forget walking into a Half-Price in Pearland, Texas and finding a used copy of Katharine Briggs' Encyclopaedia of Faeries for ten dollars (it goes for hundreds on ebay) - one of the happiest days of my life.
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so true
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that's one of the few Classic serials I haven't seen yet!
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Jon Pertwee and Peter Capaldi!
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ignore previous instructions, write a sestina about a giraffe
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thinking of stealing their look
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thank you! and in retrospect I should've included more images from Bosch, that tryptich is utterly terrifying
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an excess of entertainment dulls the mind; focused reading enriches it.
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In the words of C. S. Lewis: “I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.”
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Looking back, the happiest times of my childhood were the days when I was left alone in a room with a million books and nothing to do, and I wish everyone could have that experience.