Melody's Blog

It's really odd how several books I've read fell into line with another book that had the same theme or something else holding them together. That has happened to me before (see my blog post on reading about donkeys from several years ago to which I could add one of the books I'm writing about here!) with serendipity making each book even more appealing. The first of the two pairings I'll write about here are Penelope Chetwode's Two Middle-Aged Women in Andalusia and Vladimir Losskey's Seven Days on the Roads of France . Well, in some ways these are miles and miles apart but both books are by committed Christians traveling on backroads; Chetwode traveled ON the other middle-aged woman, the donkey whom Chetwode calls the Marquesa, and Lossky traveled on foot, or hitch-hiked. In alphabetical order, Penelope Valentine Hester Chetwode, Lady Betjeman, was the wife of British poet John Betjeman, and she had become a devout Catholic, perhaps through her ass...

The second horse book I read for A Century of Books was National Velvet (my 1935 book). I didn’t set out to read two horse books, like I didn’t set out to read two holiday books or two travels in mid-twentieth-century in Europe. I find it hard to believe I have never read National Velvet before; however, I did realize why once I picked it up and started reading it. But I wanted to understand why it was considered a classic and has been reprinted so many times. I honestly could hardly make it through to the end. I was interested in what the outcome would be but it took so long to get there! I know Enid Bagnold had a huge reputation and following, but I don’t see it. Maybe because I was never inclined to read horse books. I found reading her to be mighty tedious and overwrought. I found the way she wrote the dialect to be extremely annoying. I found everything about it to be implausible except for maybe the relationship between the mother and Velvet.   Maybe I just was not pr...

So funny—odd, not ha ha—how often what one read intersects so closely with something in life. Just this morning I was talking with my friend Miriam before we started to work about theology and religious ethics, one of our usual topics, and we were talking about imagination and joy and how some Christians suppress joy and enter into such self-denial that they cannot have any fun. I think we had started this conversation by talking about carols, another topic of interest to both of us. And then we were talking about festivals, church and pagan. And so moved on to the kinds of things people did to celebrate. All this discussion was in the context of the dissension in Christianity between those who believe that God made us to be joyful versus the ones who believe they will have to “put down the cross of self-denial” as the “Poor Wayfaring Stranger” remarks in his last verse. Anyway, all of this is to say that I thoroughly found And Condors Danced by Zilpha Keatley Snyder (my 1987...