The Morville Hours by Katherine Swift

"However small one's garden becomes, even shrinking at last to a flower on a bedside table, the whole of creation is there" [p. 176]

Katherine Swift worked as a rare books librarian in Dublin, Ireland before she and her husband moved to The Dover House at Morville in Shropshire in the West Midlands region of England, near the Welsh border. In Morville Katherine Swift dedicated herself to gardening.

The Morville Hours is a fantastic book full of quiet charm. I first learned about it from Eva, who posted her thoughts about the book in February. I was intrigued by what Eva wrote and immediately checked our library catalogue for a copy. Luckily we did have one and I soon had the book in my hands. However, at first I was not at all sure I would actually read the book. I was intrigued, it sounded interesting, but I have a very bad read/return unread -ratio when it comes to nonfiction. Last year I actually read one (yes, O-N-E) nonfiction book. In the end with The Morville Hours I did not need many pages to know that this was a nonfiction book I wanted to read from cover to cover. And during the time (numerous metro rides, some evenings at home, 15 minutes to half an hour every morning before work) I spent with the book it grew on me page after page and I ended up really loving it!

The Morville Hours is a hard book to place neatly in any one category. In our library catalogue it is classified as history of garden design. True, it is partly that, but it is so much more. Swift uses the Hours of the Divine Office as a structure for the book. And within that framework she is able to cover so much, numerous topics starting from the obvious gardens and garden history, planting and taking care of a garden, to old books, especially the Books of Hours, etymology of words (from latin, from Old English), nature during different times of the year, her own and her family history, history of Morville and all the previous owners of Morville Hall and The Dover House, ancient mythology and astronomy... I'm sure I forgot some topics, but the list perfectly illustrates how much there is in this one 340+ page book. But the narrative is not busy or crowded, quite the contrary! This is a very meditative book, a very calming read. For example I sat reading The Morville Hours in a full packed rush hour metro and Swift's text put me in my own bubble in a beautiful, serene garden full of colours and scents. No matter the hustle and bustle around me, reading the book I felt calm and relaxed.

I just noticed that Swift has written a sequal to The Morville Hours called The Morville Year. I definitely have to keep my eyes open for that one, too!

Even though The Morville Hours is more about gardens than books, books, too, play an important role in the story. I cannot help but finish this post the same way I started it: with a quote from The Morville Hours. This quote about books and "book people" is from p. 37:

"It's a quiet sort of heroism, the making and keeping of books. You don't get medals for sitting in the library each day, scratching away, writing it all down. Still less for dusting the shelves. But it is what civilisation is made of: the collective memory, passed on, passed down."

Beautifully put, isn't it?

In Other Worlds -Science Fiction and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood

First of all, sorry for the silence these past few weeks. I've spent more of my free time reading than blogging which is a good thing, isn't it? :) The downside is that now I have quite a few books I want to blog about queued up... Better get on with it then... :)

I've been interested in Margaret Atwood's writing ever since I took a course on feminist classics during the early days of my university studies. The course was about non-fiction (de Beauvoir, Millett, Firestone, Woolf etc.), but the lecturer happened to mention a novel by a certain Canadian author. :) That novel, of course, was The Handmaid's Tale.

I must have known about Atwood before that, I worked part-time in a library after all, but the lecturer talking about The Handmaid's Tail is my first recollection of the writer or her work and I was immediately intrigued. I just had to find a copy of The Handmaid's Tale to read as soon as possible! Working in a library helped there. :) I read the book and I loved it so much! I have reread it since and I still love it! During the years I have read other novels by Atwood, but The Handmaid's Tale is, and probably always will be, my favorite of all her work. It just might be, however, that the (mostly) non-fiction collection of some of her science fiction related writings In Other Worlds -Science Fiction and the Human Imagination, is now my second favorite!

Atwood herself describes the collection as "an exploration of [her] own lifelong relation with a literary form, or forms, or subforms, both as reader and as writer." (p. 1.) After first stating what the book is and is not about she then goes on telling us about her first forays as a child into writing what might be called SF: Blue Bunny and White Bunny the flying, superhero rabbits. :)

In Other Worlds is divided into three parts. In the first part she writes about her own personal history with SF starting with the above mentioned flying, superhero rabbits and ending with a chapter about ustopias (her own word that combines utopias and dystopias) and how she ended up writing about them. The second part includes articles by her about science fiction novels by others and the final part brings to us few short SF fiction pieces by Atwood herself.

I'm not a great fan of memoirs or biographies in general and of writers in particular. There are exeptions to this, but in general I rather let the fiction speak for itself than yearn to find out details of the writer's life. Atwood's recollection of her childhood reading experiences, however, were a treat, a funny treat! She no doubt has a great sense of humour. :) But she also weaves her personal experiences into something more in explaining the history, or maybe it is prehistory, of SF. I cannot help but include this quote (again there are those rabbits:)) to illustrate that in a small scale:

"Mythology, science fiction of the other-planetary kind, and modern technology: they all do fit together. At first glimpse, mythology might seem to be the odd one out, being ancient rather than ultra-modern; but as we have seen in the case of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, this is very far from begin the case.
In fact, all the most salient features of these early comicbook heroes - and thus my own flying rabbits, closely related to them except for the ears and tails - have deep roots in literary and cultural history, and possibly the human psyche itself." (p. 20)

As I mentioned above the middle part of the book is a collection of pieces written about various landmark texts of SF and I must confess that these articles were bad for my TBR-list! :) I had already earlier decided to read Brave New World by Adolux Huxler and The Birthday of the Worlds and Other Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin (Atwood dedicated In Other Worlds to Le Guin) this year, but now I also want to read She by H. Rider Haggard, Visa for Avalon by Bryher and The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells, as well as reread Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro! And it would also be interesting to reread The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake. And I haven't even read The Year of the Flood yet. Oh my!

All in all In Other Worlds is an interesting -and funny- collection of articles by one of the greatest writers of our time. There was not one text in this collection that wasn't a pleasure to read. All texts were interesting, some were thought-provoking, some were eye-opening. I would have never thought that I might want to read The Island of Doctor Moreau, a book I have always ticked off as a horror book not to my taste, but after reading Atwood's article about the novel I've completely changed my opinion! In Other Worlds in a must read for any Atwood and/or SF fan.

Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women

I first became familiar with Leila J. Rupp's work when I was gathering source material for my MA thesis. Her book Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement was one of the most important secondary sources I used, and one of the most interesting, too! I had always intended to read more of her books, but after finishing my thesis somehow I just didn't. Then I found out about her latest book Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women. As I'm participating into this year's GLBT Challenge and had not read any nonfiction that would qualify for the challenge, I thought Sapphistries would be the perfect candidate for my nonfiction GLBT read. I did start the book with the intention of reading it for the nonfiction minichallenge, but did not quite manage that. 

I must say I had very high hopes for Sapphistries. I had read Worlds of Women with great interest and hoped that Sapphistries would be a great nonfiction read. I must say that partly, even for the most part, it was. My problem was with the first few chapters of the book. Rupp's book tries to cover a huge time period from 40 000 BC to the present. The chapters covering the earlier historical periods really frustrated me. There really is hardly any sources about love between women from those earlier times and that lead into lots of speculation and little hard facts. I felt that Rupp should just have acknowledged the lack of sources and moved on instead of trying to overexplain the little info there is. 

When Rupp got into later time periods (1600->) the book became truly interesting. Also, throughout the book Rupp tries to be really global and uses source materials from different cultures f. ex. from China, Japan, India, and various African cultures in addition to Europe and the Americas. The book includes some amazing stories of amazing individuals: persons who passed as men all their lives and were found out to be anatomically female only after they died, biological women disguised as men, who fled from Europe to the New World and got married to women who sometimes seemed to have no idea that their husbands were in fact biological women, love between Chinese co-wives, sworn virgins of Albania etc. 

There is an interesting chapter about finding a name for love between women, and also a fair amout of information about romantic friendships between women. The notion of a romantic friendship has always interested me and Rupp's book provided new information about romantic friendships between women in different cultures.

Despite the, I think, rather inevitable problems with the earlier chapters of the book Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women was an interesting and informative read. It is also written in an engaging way and for me it was one of those nonfiction books that read almost like a novel. I do recommend it to anyone interested in women's history or GLBT history.

I conclude this post with a song quoted in Sapphistries on pp. 161-162. It is a song sung in certain Berlin clubs in the 1920s. Knowing what came later makes this heartbreaking. What if the steps towards openness and freedom found then would have continued without the terrible interruption of the Nazi regime and the war?

"We're not afraid to be queer and diff'rent
if that means hell - well hell we'll take the chance
they march in lockstep, we prefer to dance
We see a world of romance and of pleasure
all they can see is sheer banality
Lavender nights are our greatest treasure
where we can be just who we want to be

Round us all up, send us away
that's what you'd really like to do
But we're too strong proud unafraid
in fact we almost pity you
You act from fear, why sould that be
what is it that you are frightened of

the way that we dress
the way that we meet
the fact that you cannot destroy our love
We're going to win our rights
to lavender days and nights."

There will be a little pause here at A Book Blog of One's Own, as I will not be able to post anything next week. I'll be back posting after the 15th. Have a great week everyone!