Then and Now #16 (11/29 - 12/5)

The Sunday Post is a blog news meme hosted @ Caffeinated Reviewer. See rules here: Sunday Post Meme. Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came in their mailbox during the last week.  It is hosted weekly over at Mailbox Monday and every Friday they do a round-up of some of their favourite, shared reads!

Last Week

 Happy Sinterklaas! It's a celebration here in the Netherlands today, admittedly one kind of rife with difficult but important debates on our colonial history, etc. but I hope everyone has a lovely day nonetheless!

I've been kind of MIA the past week or two as everything gets a little more intensive before the Christmas break. On top of that we've had loads of rain which has revealed a leak in our roof which has been steadily dripping into my room whenever it pours. Not the ideal situation in which to try and relax or focus, but at least the landlord is on top of it so hopefully it can get fixed soon. I still can't believe that it's December and that that means that Christmas is almost here and 2022 is almost here...

I have had some great news academically though! I found a great supervisor for my MA thesis, which I'm starting in February, and I got two paper proposals accepted for two different academic conferences this week! Now I just need to write the papers xD But those came at the perfect time to motivate me and keep me engaged over the winter. 

What I posted this week:

• Review: Guillermo del Toro: The Master and His Work by Ian Nathan
• Friday Friyay: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo

Recommendations

I have become absolutely obsessed with Halsey's album If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power and especially the two songs below! It's a stunning album, co-produced by the guys from Nine Inch Nails, and fingers crossed she gets a Grammy for it!

Bells in Santa Fe

Darling

Mailbox Monday

The first two books I was gifted by my dad for Sinterklaas, the other two are from NetGalley!

Baudolino by Umberto Eco, trans. by William Weaver (Vintage; 2003)

An extraordinarily epic, brilliantly imagined new novel from a world-class writer and author of The Name of the Rose. Discover the Middle Ages with Baudolino - a wondrous, dazzling, beguiling tale of history, myth and invention.

It is 1204, and Constantinople is being sacked and burned by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion Baudolino saves a Byzantine historian and high court official from certain death at the hands oft he crusading warriors, and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story.

My dad is a big Umberto Eco fan as well, so when I was chatting to him about The Name of the Rose he must have gotten the idea that Baudolino should absolutely be my next read. I'm about two chapters in and loving it so far! 

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel (Allen Lane; 2016)

This is a book about why medieval manuscripts matter. Coming face to face with an important illuminated manuscript in the original is like meeting a very famous person. We may all pretend that a well-known celebrity is no different from anyone else, and yet there is an undeniable thrill in actually meeting and talking to a person of world stature.

The idea for the book, which is entirely new, is to invite the reader into intimate conversations with twelve of the most famous manuscripts in existence and to explore with the author what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history - and sometimes about the modern world too. Christopher de Hamel introduces us to kings, queens, saints, scribes, artists, librarians, thieves, dealers, collectors and the international community of manuscript scholars, showing us how he and his fellows piece together evidence to reach unexpected conclusions. He traces the elaborate journeys which these exceptionally precious artefacts have made through time and space, shows us how they have been copied, who has owned them or lusted after them (and how we can tell), how they have been embroiled in politics and scholarly disputes, how they have been regarded as objects of supreme beauty and luxury and as symbols of national identity. The book touches on religion, art, literature, music, science and the history of taste.

I love manuscripts so much, they're just so beautiful and fascinating! While the book itself is no doubt fascinating, I do think it is elevated by the many colourful images of manuscript. I will definitely be reading through this over Christmas.

The Lying Club by Annie Ward (Quercus Books; 3/3/2022)

Three women. Two bodies. One big lie...

At an elite private school nestled in the Colorado mountains, a tangled web of lies draws together three vastly different women. Natalie, a young office assistant, dreams of having a life like the school moms she deals with every day. Women like Brooke-a gorgeous heiress, ferociously loving mother and serial cheater-and Asha, an overachieving and overprotective mom who suspects her husband of having an affair.

Their fates are bound by their relationships with the handsome, charming assistant athletic director Nicholas, who Natalie loves, Brooke wants and Asha needs. But when two bodies are carried out of the school early one morning, it seems the jealousy between mothers and daughters, rival lovers and the haves and have-nots has shattered the surface of this isolated, affluent town-a town where people will stop at nothing to get what they want.

Set in a world of vast ranches, chalet-style apartments and mountain mansions, The Lying Club is a juicy thriller of revenge, murder and a shocking conspiracy-one in which the victims aren't who you might think.

I love the sound of this book. Give me all the private school catty mums and their crushes on, of course, the gym teacher! 

Antipodes: Stories by Holly Goddard Jones (University of Iowa Press; 5/10/2022)

A harried and depressed mother of three young children serves on a committee that watches over the bottomless sinkhole that has appeared in her Kentucky town. During COVID lockdown, a thirty-four-year-old gamer moves back home with his parents and is revisited by his long-forgotten childhood imaginary friend. A politician running for a state congressional seat and a young mother, who share the same set of fears about the future, cross paths but don’t fully understand one another. A woman attends a party at the home of a fellow church parishioner and discovers she is on the receiving end of a sales pitch for a doomsday prepper.

These stories and more contemplate our current reality with both frankness and hard-earned hopefulness, realism and fabulism, tackling parenthood, environment, and the absurd-but-unavoidable daily toil of worrying about mundane matters when we’ve entered “an era of unknowability, of persistent strangeness.”

I love me a story collection, especially if it seems that there is something uncanny in each of them. Don't know how I'll tackle actually reading about COVID in my fiction, so that'll be interesting.

So that's it for me! How has your week been and what's new in your mailbox?