The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell. Oh, you know I like Sarah so much, but this one is dry and almost boring. It's about the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Company, who wanted to remain loyal to England while "helping" the Indians and escaping from Catholicism and the influence of "The Great Whore of Babylon," the Pope. They were rather boring, and a book about them is boring.
There are moments when Sarah's voice really comes through, sarcastic and hilarious. But mostly it reads like a dry history lesson.
I did read the whole thing, and pretty quickly, but it just wasn't the kind of humorous history that I expect from Sarah Vowell.
Maybe the most fascinating part was the description of a monster-baby that was stillborn to a woman who refused to toe the Massachusetts Bay colony line. The child "'had a face, but no head, and the ears stood upon the shoulders and were like an ape's; it had no forehead, but over the eyes four horns, hard and sharp.' Also, her 'nose hooked upward,' her back was covered in scales, 'it had two mouths' and 'instead of toes, it had on each foot three claws, like a young fowl, with sharp talons.'" A minister exhumes the body! And verifies that the body had horns and claws, scales, etc... That will stick with me for a while.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
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I can't believe you already read 7 books this year. I gotta get off the internet.
ReplyDeleteMichele, I thought it would be fun to keep track of which ones I read this year, and see how many. So far it's about 2 per week. So now my goal is to read 104 books this year. We'll see...
ReplyDeleteI also think it's interesting to see which themes or genres I'm drawn to, since I tend to read a few in a row with some sort of connection. So far, the themes are Sarah Vowell and Jeffrey Deaver. That could continue for a while, because I have a BUNCH of Deavers on my bookshelf!