Book Log 2021 #11: Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Confession time: prior to reading this, I had never read a Kurt Vonnegut novel. We were never assigned one in high school, and I missed that Vonnegut phase that it seems like so many people go through in their teens and early adulthood. My only experience with Vonnegut was his story "2 B R 0 2 B," which was in a non-Vonnegut anthology of sci-fi stories. It was fine.

And honestly, I had pretty much the same reaction to reading this. It was fine. It was actually a pretty similar response that I had to reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it was fine but didn't quite measure up to what I'd heard about Vonnegut over the years. 

Maybe I just don't jibe with Vonnegut. At some point I'll read another of his books and we'll see.

Lentorama 2021: Take Your Holiday to Go

Day 11: Feast of the Crown of Thorns

In 1239, French king Louis IX brought what he believed to the Crown of Thorns, worn by Jesus during his crucifixion, to Paris. A royal chapel was constructed to house it and other relics, and feast day was instituted in August. Originally specific to the chapel, the feast would later be celebrated across northern France.

Additional feast days for the crown were adopted over time, specific to other locations, with Rome settling on the Friday after Ash Wednesday as the feast day. But it's not a universal feast, so it does still crop up at other times in other places, such as Heiligenkreuz in Austria, which celebrates the feast in August. There are a couple of crown relics in town, between one granted in the 12th century by Leopold V (given to him by Baldwin IV, king of Jerusalem), and a thorn that Louis IX took from his crown and gave to the Austrian duke Frederick II (also known as Frederick the Quarrelsome). Not sure why they chose August - as far as I can tell neither gift was made in that month - but August it is.

 Lentorama 2021: Take Your Holiday to Go

Day 10: Trinity Sunday

Occurring on the first Sunday after Pentecost (for Western Christians; it's on the Sunday of Pentecost for Eastern Christians), Trinity Sunday celebrates the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. While it got its feast day in the 14th century, it was celebrated well before then. Pope Alexander II refused to create a specific feast in the 11th century, but allowed local feast to continue, so it was likely being celebrated for some time before then.

The basis for the feast comes from an office that was created in response to the Arian heresy, which cropped hundreds of years before Alexander II. How it went from something observed every Sunday to an annual feast day isn't clear, but one theory is that Thomas Beckett, after being made Archbishop of Canterbury, decreed that the date of his ordination should be a feast day in honor of the Holy Trinity.

Johann Sebastian Bach composed a number of cantatas for the holiday, three of which are still known  (BWV 129, 165 and 176). A fourth (BWV 194) wasn't created for the day but was later played on it.

 Lentorama 2021: Take Your Holiday To Go

Day 9: White Sunday

Held on the second Sunday in October, this holiday is celebrated mostly in the Pacific. There is some debate as to its origins, as some tie it to a Christian adaptation of native harvest festivals, while other say it's a version of a family-based celebration that became widely significant after the influenza epidemic of 1918-19.

Or both could be wrong, as the first White Sunday celebrated by the The Congregational Christian Church in Samoa (former the London Missionary Society) happened in 1898 (albeit in June). Then as now it was a holiday honoring children, with church services focused on children and childhood. Kids also got presents and in a sort of Boxing Day twist, were granted special privileges usually held by adults only. There is also now a public holiday on the following Monday. In American Samoa, the holiday also causes traffic headaches and a shortage of cash at ATMs.

The name comes from the tradition of wearing white on the holiday, though some include red and blue elements to reflect the colors of the Samoan flag 

 Book Log 2021 #10: Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker

By all appearnaces, Don and Mimi Galvin were the ideal family of the Baby Boomer era, raising their 12 kids in a large house in Colorado. But as the kids grew into adulthood, it was clear that some of them were progressing differently from their siblings. In the end, six of the kids - all boys - developed schizophrenia. This book tells the story of how the family coped with this run of mental illness, and how the family played an important role in our current understanding of mental illness (and schizophrenia in particular).

Both the personal and clinical stories here are fascinating, and the author does an excellent job of telling both in a clear, straightforward manner. There are plenty of places where he could have played up the more lurid parts of the personal story, or focus on the researchers to the point of dehumanizing the family, but that never happens.

This is likely the best book I will read all year. You should read it too.

 Lentorama 2021: Take Your Holiday to Go

Day 7: Reek Sunday

This Irish holiday sees pilgrims climb the highest mountain in the country, Croagh Patrick (which is nicknamed The Reek, hence the name of the day), in honor of St. Patrick, who is said to have spent forty days on its summit fasting and praying. Some pilgrims climb barefoot as an additional act of penance, while others practice a "rounding ritual" where they circle various features a number of times. 

It's estimated that the climb has been held annually for at least 1500 years, though there's evidence that the climb has much earlier, pagan origins (like almost every other Christian holiday or festival) connected to Lughnasa, the start of the harvest season.

The climb up takes a couple of hours, probably due more to the number of climbers (which can be up to 30,000) than the mountain's height (764 meters, which is just over 2500 feet). Considering the mountain has about 100,000 climbers annually, you can imagine how busy things get on this one day. So if you're ever in County Mayo on the last Sunday of July, you've either got a lot of climbing buddies or a reason to do something else, if you're not into crowds.

 Lentorama 2021: Take Your Holiday to Go

Day 6: Store Bededag

Apparently, Switzerland isn't the only country into organizing religious observances into one day. Denmark created Store Bededag, or Great Prayer Day, in the late 17th century to consolidate a number of minor Catholic holidays that held on in that country after the Reformation. It then survived a revision of the national calendar of holidays and continues to this day (held on the fourth Friday after Easter).

On the day before the holiday, residents of Copenhagen would walk the city ramparts and eat a traditional bread called varme hveder, which are apparently some sort of wheat roll. According to this page the bread was made the day before the holiday so people could eat them when the bakeries were closed, but the people couldn't wait and ate them on the day they bought them (which based on my experiences with fresh baked bread seems about right). Nowadays people in Copenhagen walk elsewhere (the ramparts being long gone) but apparently still eat the bread.

This page gives a little more about the holiday, not that much really, but it's from the Lutheran church in Denmark, so if nothing else it's about as close to the source of the holiday as you can get.

 Lentorama 2021: Take Your Holiday to Go

Day 5: Federal Day of Thanksgiving, Repentance and Prayer

So this is a weird one. It's a Swiss public holiday, but is an interfaith feast day celebrated by a number of religious denominations, Christian and otherwise. Only the Swiss.

It's held on the third Sunday in September, and this page gives a pretty good explanation of how the holiday came about (short version: it was created in the Middle Ages so everyone could do their fasting, penance, etc. at the same time, which seems even more Swiss). This page also talks about the holiday a bit, and has links for other Swiss holidays in case you're interested. Both pages note that the holiday is pretty much secular at this point, so if you're in Switzerland for this feel free to tuck into that raclette.

 Lentorama 2021: Take Your Holiday to Go

Day 4: Feast of Our Lady of the Audience

In the early 15th century, a wealthy family brought a statue of the Virgin Mary and Jesus to the town of Sambuca di Sicilia, and hid it in the fortifications there. In 1575, the statue was rediscovered by a farmer, and he and his colleagues decided to parade it around town. There was an outbreak of leprosy going on, and they hoped that the procession would miraculously stop it. Which apparently is just what happened, giving the statue the name of Our Lady of the Audience (referring to her hearing the prayers of the sick).

This led to an annual procession, held on the third Sunday in May, where the statue is again paraded around town (though no further miracles, as far as I can tell). Other cities and town in Sicily also celebrate the feast, using either a replica statue or a painting of the miracle. In the US, some churches that were founded by Sicilians also observe the feast, perhaps most notably Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Kansas City (which has a page dedicated to the feast and their replica statue).

 Lentorama 2021: Take Your Holiday to Go

Day 3: Plough Sunday

On this day, celebrated primarily in England, a plowshare is brought into church, and blessings are given to farmers and farm workers prior to the start of the new growing season. Typically, no work was done in the field until the day after, known as Plough Monday (which doesn't appear to have any religious connections other than coming the day after Plough Sunday). 

Plough Sunday occurs on the Sunday after Epiphany, so in early to mid-January, which seems really early to go back into the fields, though I suppose English winters aren't quite so cold or snowy as New England winters. I did read one article that linked the day to the end of the Christmas season and getting back to work generally, so maybe more work in the barn than the actual fields.

Modern celebrations often include farmers driving their tractors to the church for a blessing. There are also special prayers for soil and seed (or both together, as seen in this service bulletin). 

I'd never heard of this day, but I suppose that's not surprising as I'm not English, a farmer, or Protestant.

 Book Log 2021 #9: The Summons by John Grisham

Ray Atlee is a law professor at the University of Virginia, and while he's recently divorced he has a pretty good life. But then he gets the titular summons - his father, a judge in Mississippi, requests that Ray and his brother Forrest return home to discuss the disposition of the judge's estate. Ray reluctantly returns, only to find his father dead in his study. Problematic as this may be, there are two further complications: Ray discovers something unexpected - and potentially illegal - in the house, and there is apparently someone else who knows about this.

I haven't read anything by Grisham in some time - I've moved away from legal thrillers in general outside of Scott Turow - but tucking into this book reminded me of why I read them in the first place. The lively pace and well-crafted twists keeps you engaged in the book, papering over the places where plot and/or character may be a little thin. I didn't necessarily like the book, but wanted to keep going to see how things turned out. 

I don't know that I'll go back to reading Grisham regularly, but an occasional visit might work.

 Lentorama 2021: Take Your Holiday to Go

Day 2: Feast of the Holy Winding Sheet of Christ

Over time there have been several feasts created by local churches in honor of a relic which purportedly was the sheet in which Christ was entombed. That there were more than one of these feasts - thanks to their being more than one sheet - should tell you something about the church and relics. 

In any case, this particular feast started around 1495, celebrating the sheet that has come to be popularly known as the Shroud of Turin. Pope Julius II approved the celebration of the feast in 1506, and it got its current date (Shrove Tuesday) from Pope Pius XII in 1958.

Why Pius decided to move the date nearly 500 years after the feast was approved isn't clear. Pius did undertake a number of reforms during his papacy, and this may have been a casualty of making other changes to the liturgical calendar. In some places it looks like the change didn't stick, as there are contemporary references to the feast taking place on May 4.

Anyway, as the linked article mentions, this is not a particularly notable feast in the US. I can honestly say I'd never heard of it prior to yesterday, and it's likely I won't hear about it again after today.

Considering I'm only about a third of the way through the entries for 2020, it seems a little presumptuous to announce this, but as today is Ash Wednesday it's time again for my annual "40 day" trip through a subject related to the season. And so we have:

Lentorama 2021: Take Your Holiday To Go

The theme this year is moveable holidays and observances, focusing on Western Christianity but certainly taking from other faiths as needed. And to start, might as well go with the obvious.

Day 1: Ash Wednesday

Easter is probably the best known moveable holiday on the Western Christian calendar, and by being moveable it makes all of the other holidays associated with it moveable too. Which is really pretty helpful if you're trying to write about 40 moveable holidays and observances.

Anyway, Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, the 40 day period where people prepare themselves to celebrate Easter. The day itself is said to be a day of prayer, fasting, and repentance. Fasting can take a few forms, from fasting during the day and having a light evening meal to having one full meal and two smaller meals which together don't add up to a second full meal. 

Repentance is signified by the ashes; there are several examples in the Old Testament of the use of ashes to signify a person's repentance for their sins (there's also the donning of sackcloth rather than regular clothes, giving us "sackcloth and ashes").  Covering oneself in ashes as a public penance started to fall out of favor in the first millennium AD, with the practice of taking ashes on Ash Wednesday starting as early as the 8th century (though as the strewing of ashes on the head rather than the cross we get today).

Ash Wednesday is 46 days before Easter, and can occur between February 4 and March 10. The year 2096 will be the first time that Ash Wednesday will occur on February 29, so mark your calendars accordingly.

Apart from the religious significance, Ash Wednesday is also National No Smoking Day in Ireland, due to the connection of smoking and ashes, and as a way to get people to think of giving up smoking for Lent.

 Book Log 2021 #8: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

And here we have what might be the exact opposite of Charles Lenox: Precious Ramotswe, a woman in present-day Botswana who leaves school at 16 and comes into detective work after discovering that a fellow employee is stealing from the bus company they both work for. Her agency mostly handles domestic issues - missing husbands and children, settling disputes between family members, and the like.

This first installment in the series tells the full story of how Precious became a detective and the difficulties in her personal life that helped shape that decision. We also see her work through her first three cases, using her common sense and innate intelligence to solve the cases - though perhaps not alway in the way her client might expect.

I did like this book and the way it combined its unique setting with a plot that managed to stay positive even though there's a lot of heartache in it. It's the start of a long series, which I expect I'll continue reading.

 Book Log 2021 #8: A Beautiful Blue Death by Charles Finch

Charles Lenox is a Victorian gentleman of leisure, who spends his time at his club, studying the ancients, planning trips he will never take, and solving the occasional crime. In this case, his neighbor (and secret love interest) Lady Jane Grey, asks him to look into the apparent suicide of one of her former maids, who has gone on to work in the house of a much wealthier and powerful personage.

Despite the initial assumption of suicide, Lenox suspects murder. With the help of his butler and a a doctor friend, he takes on the case to see who, out of the numerous suspects in the great house, is the killer.

I did like this book, enjoying the depiction of Victorian-era London and the life of someone who takes on criminal investigation as a hobby. I do feel like it may have been a little light, but it may be that I've just gotten used to series (like Alex Grecian's Scotland Yard Murder Squad) that are pretty dark.

 Book Log 2021 #6: A Separation by Katie Kitamura

A woman goes to Greece to find her ex, whose gone missing six months after they agree to split up (a parting that they've not yet made public).  He was staying at a luxury hotel in a remote part of the country, and the juxtaposition of that arrangement only heightens the narrator's emotional state. She goes from high-end meals and clean modernity to a countryside full of burned woods, packs of dogs, and other omens that suggest her search will be in vain. She also quickly determines that she knew even less about her husband than she thought, that his serial infidelity was just the baseline of where his reality diverged from what she thought she knew of him.

Writing this, and reading some of the online reviews of the book, I think this novel reads a lot better in synopsis than in full. The book is much more of a psychological examination of marriage, relationships, and alienation, than it is a convential mystery. I think I wanted the latter, but the reviewers who were more positive about the book praised it for the former. Keep that in mind if you're interested in picking this up.

 Book Log 2021 #5: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

What is it that makes the most successful people successful? Is it all hard work, determination, and grit, or are there other factors that allow some to rise while others fall? Gladwell looks to asnwer these questions in this book, which I read to fulfill a self-help book requirement for a reading challenge. Which is kind of funny, as I don't think whoever classified this as "self-help" actually read the book.

The reason I say that is because many of the factors that Gladwell identifies as promoting success are beyond an individual's control. Things like birth date, family socioeconomic status, and where one grows up all can play an outsized role in whether or not you become an outlier. No one factor is determinative, but it can give a person a leg up that others with similar intelligence may not get.

This is also the book where Gladwell talks a lot about the "10,000 hour rule," where putting in that much practice at a particular endeavour allows you to develop the talent needed to succeed. He cites the Beatles (and all of their club gigs in Hamburg) and Bill Gates (and his access to a computer as a youth) as examples. I tend to not buy into this idea so much, as I think you need at least some innate ability to make use of this much practice. It's also worth noting that the researcher who is credited with the rule, Anders Ericsson, later clarified that the "rule" isn't really a rule.

The book was fine for what I needed to read it for. It's certainly better than most self-help books, for what that's worth.

 Book Log 2021 #4: Bruno and the Carol Singers by Martin Walker

It's the Christmas season in St. Denis, and local police chief Bruno is in the thick of the village's celebrations. But crime doesn't take a holiday, leaving Bruno to also figure out what happened to the money collected by the town for charity.

This is kind of a holiday special for the series, more like a novella in length and without the usual body count. It's a pleasant addition to the series, and just the right length and tone if you want a mystery for the holidays but not something too serious.

 Book Log 2021 #3: A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

The goon squad in this book (which is either a novel or a series of linked short stories, though I tended to think of it as a novel) is a metaphorical reference to time, and how its relentless march spares no one. Each of the chapters shows how this assault plays on each of its characters (and the main linking character, a record producer). 

The book was highly praised, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and made several lists of the top books of the decade.

And I didn't care for it at all.

I think I never really bought into the goon squad metaphor. To me, a goon squad comes in and causes immediate harm.  Time doesn't do that. Time is like a steady drip that slowly erodes. You don't notice changes day to day, but after a couple of decades pass you can really see what time's done to you.

I don't think that's the only reason I didn't like the book - I'm sure some of the characters rubbed me the wrong way - but it's likely the main one.