Thirteenth tale

I'm thinking about Diane Setterfield's mystery The Thirteenth Tale and RSSS feeds. The challenge is to tie these disparate things together! My angle is that they are both about collecting information to figure out what's going on.

The Thirteenth Tale is an old school gothic mystery about an English mansion full of eccentrics. If your book club hasn't done a mystery recently, it's a great page turner, similar to Daphne Du Maurier or the Bronte sisters' writings. The twist is clever, the characters are interesting, and the setting is evocative. A young writer Margaret tries to figure out the story of a famous old author named Vida Winter. What is the Thirteenth tale? Slowly you gather information and put it together to guess what happened.

RSSS feeds are a way of collecting information from your favourite websites. Instead of visiting your favourites to see what's new, you collect them into one place. In my case, I'm using Bloglines. I'm gathering information from book review sites like the New York Times book reviews and Publishers' Weekley bestsellers. I added a Bloglines option to this post, if you want to build one for yourself. Keeping up with it seems like a lot of work though, just another chore to add to my to do list. I'd rather be reading a happy book!

Ulaanbataar

I just like typing that word- Ulaanbataar... This blog's book is The Horse Boy by Rupert Isaacson. It is a true story about a father with an autistic son. He discovers that his son is more communicative when he is on a horse. Rowan also responds to a shaman healer. Rupert decides to take Roan to Mongolia to visit the "reindeer people" and see if the combination of horses and shamanism will help his son.

Although not the greatest writer in the world, Rupert has an interesting story to tell. Different people in book club responded to different parts of the story: parenting, the religious angle, travelling in Mongolia, even the "husbands with crazy ideas" part! We mostly talked about what it would be like to have an autistic child, and Kristen who works with autistic children joined the club to tell us what her job is like. (not Kristin the wife in the story)

Back to Ulaanbataar, which is the capital of Mongolia. This week I'm playing with Google Earth. I swoop wide over Mongolia, finding the tree line that they crossed as they entered the forest. I can't find the shaman Ghoste's teepee, for which I am grateful. I like the idea that some few people are invisible in the digital world. I also enjoy the street level views made by video cameras positioned on cars. It is fascinating to swoop over the countries depicted in the books we read.

Snoopiness... or empathy?!

Dreams of trespass : tales of a harem girlhood by Fatima Mernissi.

Now the word harem sounds titillating, but really is just refers to being sequestered from the world. In this autobiography, eight year old Fatima contrasts her cloistered life with that of her male cousin, who is allowed outside the house walls. The house is in Morocco in the 1940's. Tradition versus change, colonialism, and the difference among womens' lives are explored. There are vivid scenes that I remember six years after we read this in book club. Recommended if you like descriptions of childhood, developing feminism, and different cultures.

This curiosity about others' lives. My favourite poem, The Waste Land has this line:
I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only

The same impulse that has me imagining lives other than my own leads me to novels, and to Facebook! Over time, I get a sense of what is important in peoples' lives by what they post about. I stay connected with people I wouldn't normally talk with. I'm hearing their stories.

Sixteen pleasures

Many years ago our book club read the novel The sixteen pleasures by Robert Hellenga. Margot Harrington is a young American book conservator who goes to Florence, Italy as a "mud angel" to help with recovery after the 1966 flood of the Arno River. In a convent, she finds a rare 16th century book written by Pietro Aretino. All the known copies of the Sonetti lussuriosi (Lewd sonnets) were destroyed because of their pornographic nature. Margot restores the book and tries to decide what to do with her life. The travelers and art fans among us particularly enjoyed the novel. There are some memorable scenes of Margot's Italian love interest rescuing pieces of art. Refreshing to read about a man rushing to save a fresco instead of a damsel in distress!

I looked in Wikipedia to find out about the real Pietro Aretino. He is credited with inventing "modern literate pornography". I compared the articles about him in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia appears to have the facts right, and they included some portraits by his friend Titian. Britannica said, "Aretino lived in a grand and dissolute style for the rest of his life." A Venetian happily-ever-after!

Wikipedia had hotlinks, such as this promising one: "[Aretino] is said to have died of suffocation from "laughing too much". This promising link leads to an article on Death from laughter, which includes a list of historical and modern people who died while laughing. The modern people were watching TV and movies, not reading a book, or I would have continued to follow this diverting chain of ideas for more book club ideas.

Wikipedia also mentioned that the composer Michael Nyman, who wrote the Piano movie score, set some of the sonnets to music. This is the kind of pop culture content for which Wikipedia is so useful.

As you read The Sixteen Pleasures, it's interesting to look on the internet for maps of Florence, images of frescoes, and information about the floods. And if you really engage with this book, Robert Hellenga returns to his characters in later novels.