Booknotes 4.15

Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa, by Marilyn Chase, published 2020, nonfiction. I knew nothing about Asawa going into this other than that she was an artist, but I really liked it. (I love reading biographies of artist and writers and people who make things. Recommendations very welcome!) Also: ugh, internment camps.

Stone Speaks to Stone, by Victoria Goddard, published 2018, fantasy. #1.5 in the Greenwing & Dart series. It was okay, though I don’t care much for battles and this was no exception. The ending was good and mostly made up for the rest, at least for me.

Agamemnon, by Aeschylus (translated by Gilbert Murray), published 458 b.c. (translated 1920), play. As mentioned earlier this year, I liked Murray’s translation of Medea, and this one was also good (plenty of good lines, like “Who but a god goes woundless all his way?”), though it didn’t quite grab me the same way and I perhaps read it a bit too quickly, so it hasn’t stuck with me. (I didn’t remember what Clytemnestra does near the end until just now when I was writing this review, for example. That’s kind of a major part of the play.)

The Common Reader, by Virginia Woolf, published 1925, nonfiction. This was my first time reading Woolf and wow, it blew me away. Her prose is amazing, and her criticism felt incisive and thought-provoking. Enjoyed the Chaucer essay, the one on Margaret Newcastle, the Eleanor Ormerod one, the essay on Jane Austen, the one on modern fiction especially, and the one on the Russians and I could just keep going so I’ll stop there. Loved this bit from the Elizabethan play essay: “Theirs, too, is the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.” Also enjoyed the bit about Jane Austen’s revision practice, which reminded me of the Guy Gavriel Kay quote on Tolkien that I’ve posted multiple times, and color me fascinated by the thinking about how Austen and Charlotte Brontë might have changed as writers had they survived past forty-two and thirty-nine years old, respectively. Highly recommended! Looking forward to reading Woolf’s fiction, too.