Re: What's everybody reading?

[Wes Morgan <wesm at libretech_org>]

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I just finished _The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse_ by Louise 
Erdrich. It's not super short (nor is it ridiculously long), but it is a 
collection of stories about several characters including a woman who is a 
priest (and thus pretending to be a man -- resisting the urge to add 
commentary on screwed-up-ed-ness of church...) on a fictional Ojibwe native 
American reservation in Minnesota. It goes through basically her whole life, 
and Erdrich's prose is beautiful. I often don't much care for the whole 
historical fiction genre, but Erdrich's work is so much more. This story 
takes place in the same fictional world as some of her other works (incl. 
_Love Medicine_). She has been compared to Gabriel García Marquez in this 
regard. Anyway, I highly reccommend this book, it was absolutely delightful.

I am now almost done reading _Mariette In Ecstasy_ by Ron Hansen (yes, I'm on 
a Catholic writers spree). This book is about a young postulant at a convent 
in New York at the turn of the 20th century. Supposedly it "forces one to 
reassess the relationship between madness and divine possession, gullibility 
and faith, sexual rapture and religious ecstasy." I don't know about that, 
unless it starts to do all that in the last 1/8 of the book... So far, I do 
not find this book nearly as enjoyable as _Last Report_, but that's not 
saying much. It's still pretty good so far, but Hansen's prose falls short of 
some of its descriptions on the cover while Erdrich's was always nothing less 
than amazing. I *do* feel that Hansen, overall, gives religion (of the 
Christian tradition especially) a more mature treatment than Erdrich does 
(she sometimes lays the "Catholic bad, indigenous good" on a little too 
heavy). This is a shorter book, and apparently the ending is pretty good, 
which I haven't gotten to yet.

Wes Morgan
- -- 
"We need to consider the reality of what God wants and how broken the world 
is, and the gap between them, and let a healthy discontent take over our 
souls so that we say, by God's grace and power, I will not quit because it 
matters. It matters." - Roberta Hestenes
- ----------------------------------
Libretech.org - Technology Is Free (http://www.libretech.org)
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