Review: The Philosopher and the Druid

I truly surprise myself sometimes! I actually did not expect to get another review posted so soon before the wedding, but today's review title was so good I couldn't help but devouring it. Freeman once again combines superb style, history, and storytelling in a wonderfully informative but warm look at the ancient Celts.

Genre: nonfiction

Plot Synopsis: Forget what you think you know about the Celts. Freeman is out to prove that most of our connotations concerning this much-loved culture is mostly myth and lore. By rediscovering the Greek explorer Posidonius and his lost History, Freeman weaves primary source material with other historical, linguistic, and archaeological discoveries to create a much better picture of the Celtic/Gallic culture. The result is a dazzling, fascinating work that is both historically sound (in my amateur opinion) and an engaging read. Oh that more history books were like this!

Structure: Freeman, author of the delightful St. Patrick of Ireland, has already proved himself to be a capable historian with a flair for storytelling. The Philosopher and the Druid is no different. Freeman first sets the scene by describing the ancient world Posidonius grew up in, including his philosophical point of view and the steps he would have undertaken to understand the Celts/Gauls (Freeman proves they are actually quite closely related) before venturing among them. He divides his work into several chapters. Then, the next five chapters retell the history of the Celtic cultures throughout Europe, organized by their history in several geographic regions (a chapter on Galatia, a chapter on Massalia, etc.) and the cities Posidonius would have visited on his journey to Gaul.

Finally, Freeman tackles what Posidonius and other ancient authors, such as Strabo, Pliny, and Julius Caesar, tell us about every aspect of Celtic life, including women, tribal authority, feasting, bards, druids, and religion.

Execution: As I have mentioned several times, Freeman is anything but dry and boring. He has a natural knack for pacing and storytelling, and I found his prose compelling but professional. It had just enough polish to keep me interested, but not enough that it did disrespect to his work as a historian.

Freeman also possess a great ability to tell us exactly what we can safely know. He never glosses over a problem or a gap in the historical record, but nevertheless tries to fill in the knowledge as best he can. This sort of open, honest but optimistic approach to history makes him very unique among the authors I have read. His unique subject matter and the way he straddles the popular/academic boundary makes him an author I will keep turning to.

Theme: Greco-Roman history, Greek philosophy, Celtic history and culture, archaeology, linguistics, ancient religion/myth

Read this if you are interested, even slightly, in the Greco-Roman world or Celtic history, because believe me, he will make you thirst for more.

5 out of 5 stars

Other works:
Freeman, a professor of classics at Luther College, has also written:
Julius Caesar: A Biography
St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography

If you liked this, you might also like:
Robert Graves' I, Claudius, based on actual Roman authors like Suetonius, Tacitus and Plutarch, also combines good storytelling with good history

Review: Under the Table

Besides reading (and crafting), the other big passion in my life is for food. I love to cook, especially to bake, and my husband-to-be never fails to remind me of his appreciation for this passion when I step up to the stove. So it's no surprise, really, that when I came across this title in a Barnes & Noble in Chicago, I knew I had to track it down. Turns out it was the best book I've read this year, and I can't wait to tell you why I devoured (haha don't mind the pun) it in just 3 days.

Genre: nonfiction (memoir)

Plot: Sick of her desk job and realizing her life has had a steady undercurrent of food, Katherine Darling decides to follow her dream and enter chef school at the French Culinary Institute in New York. This book is about her journey, her struggles and her triumphs (and her annoyances).

It also made me really, really, REALLY want to go to chef school myself and become pastry artist.

Structure: Darling put together her book in a really clever way. She has written each chapter as a short story, of sorts, recounting one experience or fiasco or lesson or reflections on supporting character, and has grouped them according to "levels" corresponding with her progress through the four levels of chef school. The result is a light, fun read that is hard to put down combined with a very clear progression. It's the best of both worlds! We know the plot is marching onward with every page, and yet at the same time, it has all the fun and jaunty storytelling of anecdotes shared around the table. In my opinion, perfect.

I also love that she included several recipes, either inspired by the chapter she just retold or similar ones. This is a great way to involve the reader in more than just the passive sense of reading about great food; it gives them a chance to make great food! What a wonderful idea.

Execution: Darling can WRITE! This isn't shocking considering her former career (in publishing) and her current one (in food magazines), but still, it's the hallmark of the book. Many people can write about being in chef school, but few can do it with candor, grace, and polish. She has this easy-going, light storytelling that is combined with these great, dramatic moments that make it worthwhile and interesting. It's like hearing her talk about a favorite memory from chef school at Starbucks. Her characterization is superb as well, shifting the focus between herself, her classmates, and her chef-instructors seamlessly, providing much more depth. Surprisingly, the wit that I usually enjoy in favorite authors like Jasper Fforde and C. S. Lewis is absent, but the prose still entertained, delighted, and explained itself nicely without it.

Theme: food, chef school, french cooking, recipes

Read this if you love Top Chef. It's really very reminiscent of this show in terms of the gourmet food, the top-notch celebrity instructors, the competition in the kitchen, etc.

No question, this one gets 5 out of 5 stars

Other works:
Under the Table was published just a few months ago, so it's not surprising it's her only work right now.

If you liked this, you might also like:
Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love
Julie Powell's Julie & Julia (soon to be a movie! Yay!)
Julia Child's memoir My Life in France

Review: The Gum Thief

Normally, I try to write a review immediately after finishing a book, so that my thoughts are still fresh. With this exceptional title, however, I decided to marinate on it a few days instead, just because it was SO DIFFERENT from anything else I've ever read. In fact, it's uniqueness is one of the reasons I'm giving this the distinction of a Top Shelf book.

Genre: novel (pop culture)

Plot: This is quite possibly the only novel ever set in an office supply store. Depressed, middle-age creepy alcoholic Roger passes his days stacking paper reams, drinking Vodka like water, and writing a novel so cleverly entitled as Glove Pond. But co-worker and goth beauty Bethany discovers his secret journal and starts confiding in him. And then all kinds of crap happens.

Structure: By far the best part of this book is its structure, which is quite unique (I guess I shouldn't put a qualifier on an absolute like that, bad Ashley!). It's entirely epistolary, rotating between Bethany, Roger, DeeDee (Bethany's washed up mom), and Blair (co-worker at Staples) which makes for some interesting questions (especially in the middle, when Roger may or may not still be alive) and perspectives. Also, interspersed with the story are excerpts from Roger's novel, Glove Pond, which are hilarious in and of themselves but even more so when taken in conjunction with the novel's plot. All in all, a very clever, completely original way of storytelling that bumped this book from "great" to "awesome" in my book.

Execution: At first, Coupland's prose was incredible. Witty, engaging, funny (really laugh out loud funny), at turns sardonic and profound, it was some of the best prose I've come across this year. Additionally, he managed to bring complex, dynamic characters to life through notes, people. That takes skill. However, by the middle it became less funny and more somber, which was a little disappointing. But, the "what the !!!" ending totally makes up for it.

Theme: Staples, goths, alcoholics, divorce, writing, has-beens, wannabes, community college, England

Read this if you're a fan of The Office or, even more closely related, Office Space. Or if you work at a mega-chain store, because I bet you can relate to the characters extraordinarily well.

5 out of 5 stars

Other works:
JPod
Eleanor Rigby
Hey Nostradamus!
All Families Are Psychotic
God Hates Japan
Miss Wyoming
Girlfriend in a Coma
Microserfs
Life After God
Shampoo Planet
Generation X

(some of you may be surprised I'm willing to award an avowed atheist the highest review marks possible on this site, but I guess it just goes to show that pagans can use pen and paper, too).

By the way, website bonus! He totally lists some original aphorisms on his site.

If you liked this, you might also like:
Nietzche's Beyond Good and Evil

Review: The Rose and the Beast

What do fairy tales and sci-fi have in common?

Well, there are plenty of ways to answer this (some might even argue that the latter is merely a new brand of the former), but the one I was thinking of was that both genres have incredible capacity for innovation and great stories while, simultaneously, having ample room for laxity and mediocrity. Thankfully, Francesca Lia Block's The Rose and the Beast falls into the former category, making it one of the more delightfully rich books I've undertaken this summer.

Genre: this one's hard to place formally, but I would say young adult fiction (anthology)

Plot: Block has taken 9 classic fairy tales and retold them, but in a way that's both timeless and fresh. Sometimes the stories are obviously modern, but sometimes they're just told with a more contemporary spirit. Sometimes the endings are a little different, sometimes it's the emotional depth that has changed more than the plot. Most of them are set in L.A., which seemed a little bizarre at first but actually makes plenty of sense when you think about it.

Structure: Each story is self-contained, and they vary in length. One of my favorite elements of this work was that Block deliberately kept herself to one-word titles, which sometimes obscured the tale they were trying to tell, but sometimes added an extra layer of depth to it. Overall it was a marvelously thoughtful book, and the precise care she took with each word was very apparent.

Execution: I could write essays about Block's prose. It's so lyrical as to be almost poetic, but at the same time, it has a weight that poetry sometimes just doesn't. Poetry has glamour and flash, but sometimes the meaning is much more hollow. But with Block's prose, you have all the polished care of a poet combined with the hearty meat of fiction. Everything sparkles, yet nothing is said without meaning to it. In short, exactly the right way to write this book.

I have to pause to comment about her heroines, too. Like fantasy, it's all too common for fairy-tale revisionists to make the main characters from the same mold as Xena, Warrior Princess, which in turns makes them dull and forgettable. In these stories, the girls were not this unapproachable warrior women. They were fragile, passionate, humble, talented, beautiful, strong, violated, broken...as different from one another as the stories they sprang from.

Theme: Fairy tales (snow white, thumbelina, cinderella, sleeping beauty, little red riding hood, rose white and rose red, bluebeard, beauty and the beast, the ice queen), Los Angeles, love in all its many-splendor'd forms.

Read this if you appreciate the work of poetry but not the poem itself.

5 out of 5 stars

Other works:
Blood Vampires (another fantasy anthology)
Psyche in a Dress (similar blend of poetry/prose and mythology)
Ruby (a "modern day adult fairy tale")

A full list of her work is available here.

If you liked this, you might also like:
- Again, I have to run to the fairy-tale revisionist masters, Jane Yolen and Donna Jo Napoli
- T. S. Elliot's The Wasteland
- George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind

Review: Rasputin's Daughter

I’ve never been a huge fan of those “_______’s Daughter” (it’s a literary meme by now) books, mostly because the few I’ve tried left me rather unimpressed. So when I saw this volume by Robert Alexander, I was intrigued but not hopeful. By story’s close, however, I was left breathlessly closing one of the best books I’ve read this year. Alexander presents a story of the infamous Rasputin’s final days through the ever-changing eyes of his daughter, Maria, who is inevitably caught up in palace intrigue and secret societies herself.

Genre: Novel

Plot: One word sums it up: gripping. I’ve never read a character-driven novel such as this with so much suspense. Or, I guess conversely, I’ve never read a suspense novel laden with so much characterization. Either way, it was incredibly good, and one of the few books I can truly use the cliché “page-turner” on. The fact that educated readers will know what happened to Rasputin in no way diminishes the storytelling which is, in my opinion, the mark of an excellent writer.

Structure: The narrative structure is mostly story-within-a-story, as Maria Rasputin recounts her father’s last days upon request to another character. Maria’s recollections are interspersed with mysterious, foreshadowing interjections by an unknown narrator revealed only at the very last paragraph, which makes for a rather exciting element of mystery in the narration enhancing mystery in the characters themselves. On a technical note, each (each!) chapter ends on a significant and haunting note that successfully pushes the reader forward or creates a yearning to keep reading.

Execution and Style: Alexander has mastered the balance so many historical fiction authors struggle with: how to write an English novel with a non-English-language-setting. Put in too much italicized vocabulary, and the reader is lost. Put in too little, however, and the La Cucina effect occurs: why is this (blank)-speaking character thinking in English?

Alexander’s superb style immerses you not just in Russian language, but in Russian thinking, and yet somehow does so without feeling blocky or wooden. Alexander also excels at voice. 17-year-old Maria living at the early part of the 20th century actually reads like her, not a modern man trying very hard to become her.

What I found most interesting about this book though, and what really pushes it high up on the list for me, is how Maria’s vision of her father keeps shifting from naïve adoration to disgust to finally a mix of both. Alexander is not content to paint us a picture of a cleverly connived Rasputin; instead, he strives to give us a complex portrait of an undoubtedly complicated man.


Theme: The final days of Tsarist Russia, but also fathers and daughters. It touches briefly on Christian sects of Russia, too.


Read This If: you like good historical fiction, good suspense, or good character-driven stories. Seriously, I can hardly think of a reader out there who wouldn’t enjoy it on some level, but I suppose if you are a really big fan of this era of history, you will enjoy it the most.

5 out of 5 stars.


Other Works:
The Kitchen Boy – his first novel about this period
The Romanov Bride – his latest
The Todd Mills Mysteries (written as R. D. Zimmerman)

If you liked this, you might also like:
Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus

The Top Shelf

If you couldn't gather already, I read a lot. Just as wine connoisseurs enjoy the pleasure of the drink itself, I too enjoy the process of reading for its own sake.

But like sommeliers, I too have my favorites, the few books that I will take the time to read multiple times or that I will readily recommend to just about anyone. These are the reviews that get 5 out of 5 stars.

That's what this page is for; these are the cream of my literary crop, so to speak, the very best of the best. It's not about how old they are or how many weeks they spent on the New York Times' Bestseller List (does that even mean anything anymore?); these are my personal favorites, my treasures, the masterpieces I've stumbled upon.

Here is a list in progress:
Rasputin's Daughter - Spellbinding historical fiction
The Gum Thief - Witty and unlike anything you've ever read
The Rose and the Beast - Ingenious prosetry and imagination
Under the Table - Cooking + Memoirs = recipe for success
The Christian Mind - Intriguing, scathing look at modern Christianity
Til We Have Faces - A masterpiece from a cherished author
Christianity for Modern Pagans - Passionate, powerful, and profound
The Cross of Christ - Will forever change your view of the atonement; theologically sound and a literary triumph
The Time Traveler's Wife - Beyond beautiful; a perfectly realized romance
The Dogs of Babel - Haunting; lingers with you far after the last page
Snow Falling on Cedars - Another achingly beautiful work with excellent drama
First Love - Unparalleled in its creativity and execution
The Philosopher and the Druid - historically accurate storytelling