Entering a vast foreign land, at once both strange and familiar

-
Reading The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd is like entering a vast foreign land, at once both strange and familiar. It’s a story of women, their strength, intelligence, love, and endurance, living often as a subjugated class, finding freedom by forming alliances with kindred souls. It is about the beauty and joy of seeking knowledge, and the liberty to contribute to that body as a legacy for those who come after. It’s fiction knitted together with facts, this story of Ana, the wife of Jesus. 

Woven through the narrative are threads based in historic fact, such as the Therapeutae: a monastic commune near Alexandria and the Nag Hammadi Library: thirteen leather bound manuscripts containing 52 3rd and 4th century works (transcribed from older texts) buried in a sealed jar, the most complete of these “The Gospel According to Thomas,” discovered in 1946 by a farmer, and now housed in the Coptic Museum of Cairo, Egypt.

It’s a fascinating exploration of the gnostic religious communities surrounding the lands from ancient Israel to Egypt, the birth of Christianity within the context of those times, and most particularly the structure of society existing then. It makes me want to know so much more about that period.

The single line from this book that I will carry forward in my mind, “Each of us must find a way to love the world.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spend a Year Walkng in Stanley Tucci’s Shoes

-
What I Ate In One Year by Stanley Tucci is an interesting, light, humorous, and witty read for anyone interested in cooking, good food, restaurants, acting and actors, what Tucci’s daily business and family life is like, and what the heck is going on with his wife Felicity Blunt who Tucci portrays constantly throughout the book as potentially engaging in affairs, which I’m sure is just a humorous device of some kind. You couldn’t help noticing everytime he mentions where she’s off to, there is a tongue in cheek sarcastic suggestion that other men may be involved, throughout the entire book, yet they pair beautifully in the kitchen, and he makes the point, “Time cooking with someone you love is time well spent.” Before this book I was reading Richard Osman’s latest, We Solve Murders, and struggling to get through which I didn’t expect as I’ve loved previous books he’d written. I found it very different from his books in the Thursday Murder Club series. Tucci’s book by comparison was a v...
Read more

The Wager is a Safe Bet As A Gripping Book About Life, Death, and Adventure on an 18th Century British Warship

-
The Wager by David Grann is the poster book for “Truth is stranger than fiction;” this  narrative nonfiction book is a story about a crew of men and boys with ages spanning from 80 years (a cook) to adolescence, who work on the British 18th century ship HMS Wager in 1741. They are sent on a secret Naval mission with a squadron of other ships to destroy any Spanish vessels along the way toward South America and the Pacific Ocean (they were at war with Spain), and also try to locate and commandeer a legendary Spanish treasure ship. Author David Grann had access to “archival debris: the washed-out logbooks, the moldering correspondence, the half-truthful journals, and the surviving records from the troubling court-martial”(Kindle book blurb). This book is like a runaway train I didn’t want to leave. It is gripping and not easily put down.  I posted several passages from this book on social media, prompting a friend to ask if it was similar to William Golding’s book Lord of the Fl...
Read more

A Plot to Capture the American Zeitgeist

-
Image
Amazon’s book blurb for The Everglades by Louis Berry says this about it, “…a chilling saga unfolds where the pristine wilderness of Florida’s Everglades masks a sinister legacy of evil. In 1945, two Nazi war criminals, General Reinhard Hochstuhl and Colonel Wilhelm Von Unterscheisse , infiltrate 1945 Miami via a covert U-boat landing, seeding a multi-generational plot to subvert American society.” Berry writes, “No one in Miami was aware of the German U-Boat five hundred yards offshore; south of Flamingo Point . The ship operated within rat-lines moving high-valued Nazis to safety across the globe…Orders were to assimilate. Approach was to erode each generation’s connection to God. Free of dogmatic German machinery, lies became subtle; directed at influencing beliefs Americans held dear. Eliminating God from the collective consciousness was best accomplished across generations. The men knew they must find wives sympathetic to the Fatherland’s cause of world dom...
Read more