First up, Hotter Than Hell by Jackie Kessler. This is the third book in her Hell series. I've been enjoying her books so far, she takes such joy in the mythology of hell, her characters are fantastic, and each book comes generously sprinkled with laugh-out-loud lines. This series is fun and rich in fantasy. But this book? Totally blew the first two away. It had an ending I never saw coming and yet was absolutely perfect (my favorite kind of ending). All I can say is, wow. Well done, Jax!
The only other book I read for fun in October was someone I'm sure Jackie would approve of as a follow-up: Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. This book has already been roundly praised pretty much everywhere, so I'll just add a "they're right, you know". I like the Jungle Book format, not so much a novel as a series of connected stories covering the key moments as a boy grows up. I hope when they eventually make the movie version of this they go more for the Chuck Jones style of adaptation than the Disney. Disney's Jungle Book had great songs, but Jones' adaptation was in all other regards superior. It kept the episodic structure and dark overtones intact. And I'm not just saying that because I'd listen to Roddy McDowall narrate almost anything (although that's true too).OK, I'm trying to polish off the novels that Aidan will be reading for history for the rest of the year, so I'm ahead of him and can help gauge how much time he's going to need to devote each. Our history curriculum is very reading intensive, perhaps a tad too much, but they pick such fine books. This month I read The Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell, about a young Native American woman who gets left behind when her tribe leaves their isolated island home, Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes about Boston in the early days of the American Revolution, and Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare about a boy left alone, waiting for his family to return, in a log house at the edge of civilization in Maine. Aidan will be writing some compare/contrast type thing for the Dolphin and Beaver books. These are all good reads if you like YA historical fiction.
On to the realm of novel research, which this month is all about Islam. Actually this will be in the novel sort of like a bay leaf is used in cooking; it will flavor other things but won't actually be served in the final dish (well, not much). My previous source for all things Islam moved to the United Arab Emirates a few years ago (after 9/11, sadly), so it's just me and a stack of books now. My friend considered himself a cultural Muslim; he had grown up in that world but as an aethist professor of philosophy wasn't really a part of it anymore (which makes me wonder how things are going for him in UAE).
Yahiya Emerick, who wrote two of the books I read this month, is the opposite of that; he converted to Islam as an adult. So it's pretty much the opposite perspective than I'm used to looking at Islam from. In some ways this is better, he looks more sharply at things which someone who grew up in that environment might take for granted. On the other hand, particularly in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Islam he would get pretty heavy handed with the "all other religions are clearly inferior" type of vibe. I had to set this book down and walk away from it quite a bit. Despite that, it did have a lot of useful information in it for me. I fared better with his Complete Idiot’s Guide to Rumi’s Meditations, mostly because I've already read several books on sufism and generally find the sufis more approachable to a pantheist like me. I should probably at some point just get a book of Rumi's poetry and drink from the source. The problem there is the strong temptation to learn Persian so I can read it in the original. That's likely to take a few years...
The last book I read I liked much better: No God But God by Reza Aslan. This is written by a man who spent his early childhood in Iran but moved to the US with his family when the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power (I knew kids in school in the same boat, at least during those times in my life when I was going to Minnesota schools. Tennessee doesn't attract many immigrants). This book covers all of the major historical periods of Islam, particularly dwelling on the culture from which it sprang. This I found very interesting; I like being able to put things into an historical and cultural context. Aslan also covers how the governments in Pakistan, Egypt, Saudia Arabia, and Iran formed, what they were intended to do, and how they've evolved since. I'd recommend this one for anyone interested in learning more about Islam (right up there with Karen Armstrong and John Esposito). It's informative, but it's also written with a strong sense of story (i.e. not dry reading). There are also extensive notes in the back with references to other books. Which just might be my downfall; I'm suddenly consumed with a hunger to learn more about the pagan Arabia that existed before Islam.
No, I'm never getting that To Be Read stack under 200, am I?
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