Enchantment, Katherine May
I have been listening to May’s podcasts and reading her newsletters for quite some time, so I was already aware of what a meticulous and eloquent writer she was, but reading Enchantment just proved that even more. She divided her book into the elements: earth, water, fire, and air, and in each one talks about getting more offline and more outside, and how appreciating small things has helped her regain her childhood levels of enchantment with the world around us, even when this world (re: society) is not the least bit comforting. She makes the point that the world itself will offer us comfort, but as we have become more and more online, we no longer no how to receive it. She uses the concrete examples of walking outside in the forest and swimming as how she reconnects with her inner sense of enchantment, but of course, they will be different for all of us. On one, though, her and I agree: “Reading is the whole of me, the foundation upon which I rest.”
I Capture the Castle, Dodi Smith
I Capture the Castle was the final book I hadn’t read on the #ThisBook 2014 list created by the Women’s Prize, in which they polled readers to find the books by written by women that had impacted them the most. The final result was a list of 20 novels, and some of my “recent” (re: in the last couple of years) reads from that list were The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, and The Women’s Room by Marilyn French (click here to see the rest). Smith is best known for her children’s book, The One Hundred and One Dalmatians but wrote novels as well. I Capture the Castle is a novel written in journal entry format by 17-year-old Cassandra, who details her family’s life living in a dilapidated castle in the English countryside. Her father, a one-time novelist, is full of eccentric quirks, one of them being that he does not write anymore, even as he sees his children go without clothing and food. Cassandra writes everything as neutrally as she can, detailing the minutiae of their lives, even as their fortunes begin to change. I enjoyed Cassandra’s frank assessment of the goings-in of her family, and the way the novel wrapped up in a nice bow at the end even more.