Books I RED

S o, my Victober read has turned into something else. It's turned into a pile of possibilities including, T.S. Eliot Wasteland , Bonjour Tristesse, Mice and Men, Ghana Must Go and Purple Hibiscus by my favorite African feminist Chimanda Ngozi Adichie. I also have two Victorian novels North and South by Gaskell and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë also waiting and while I'm trying to muster the enthusiasm to Victorian literature I've had to make a SOS dive into African literature for personal reasons.  I couldn't put away Chimanda's debut novel once I started. It's about Eugene, a hyper Catholic philanthropist who is also a wife beater. The storyteller is the adolescent Kambili who skillfully narrates the horrible story of her family without really understanding how wrong her father is. Eugene subtly calls his wife to their bedroom where he beats her unconscious to the point of blood gushing, the wife loses two unborn children like this. I know of an ol

I had a cat once, called Cleopatra, she was grey and white, she had a sister, all black, named Bathsheba. Whom you see in this picture above, is an image like an afterthought, of the human Cleopatra, by John William Waterhouse (1888). One could have presumed that my black cat for it's sinister allusions to female malice should have been the one named Cleopatra, whereas the grey one for it's mellow coloring could have been the namesake of King David's wife, or actually the wife he stole from Uriah, the man he first killed so he could get her, because Bathsheba was like a sheep, like wolves prey (2 Samuel chapter 11). C.S. Lewis, in his book The Discarded Image - lectures on the medieval mind was right in saying that Western culture builds on the antiquity and the Bible. The archetypes and female characters echo way back and still exist in our time. In the month of October a multitude of literary fans, book lovers and readers of mainly Western literature, gather in internet