BOOKS DU JOUR

On the weekend I finished Joan Silber's Ideas of Heaven, a Ring of Stories.  It was a beautiful and heart-breaking collection, with the title story as centerpiece.  In this story a young family leaves their Connecticut home to become Christian missionaries in China, shortly before the turn of the last century.  This puts them there just in time for The Boxer Rebellion.  I knew from the start there would be no Happy Ending to this story, and indeed there was not.  There was a time, when I was very much younger, when I thought being a missionary would be oh so romantic, and seriously thought about entering the Maryknoll order, whose whole purpose then was mission.  Now, I'm afraid I see it as the Boxers (the English name for them, they actually called themselves by the much grander name of The Righteous Fists of Harmony) did - just another form of Imperialism.  The characters in the story are so beautifully and gently portrayed, not seeming to be imperialists at all.  At the end of the story I could only sigh for the waste of lives, lives of good and decent people pursuing something totally unfathomable to me.

Most of the rest of the stories are about contemporary lives, with wonderful intertwinings (a "ring" of stories) of characters and themes.  Love, or perhaps more truly - sex, and religion are constant themes in all the stories, as a quote from the last story in the book makes clear:  "I could see that sex and religion were always fighting over the same ground - both with their sweeping claims, their promises of transport - and each ran into the breach left by the other, each tried to fill in for the other's failure.  Forms of devotion, forms of consolation."  There are worlds within worlds in this book, the stories roam from New York to France, to Italy and China, and further - into secret realms of heart and soul that we all can recognize.

Currently I'm reading The Briar King, by Greg Keyes, about which I've read many good things in the past year.  It is straight up epic fantasy fiction, and I'm not yet very far into what is quite a stout little paperback of a novel.  Having to admit to a lot of confusion, perhaps because I haven't much consecutive time to read - picking it up and putting it down much too often.  It's the first of a series entitled The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, so if my confusion doesn't lure me into giving up on it, I may have follow-up adventures ahead.  Those old fairy-tale words, eh?  Briar, thorn, bone, king - hard to deny them.  Anybody else read this, or know of it?