Outside the Labyrinths, looking in..,

This is only indirectly related to what I read this past week or so, but I thought it was an interesting image of the Grace Cathedral Labyrinth.

The connection being that Grace Cathedral is selling Tim Farrington's The Monk Downstairs as a fundraiser and I liked that book (the Upstairs sequel um, not so much, I will get a bit cranky on that subject later in the blog.) I should say that I have no connection even karmically with Grace Cathedral, Episcopalianism or labyrinth walking. The odd connection I have to labyrinths is that I have had books published by St. Martin's Minotaur in the US and by Argument Verlag, Ariadne Krimi in Germany. Ariadne was the girl who got through the labyrinth and the Minotaur was the monster at the heart of it.
But I'm including the graphic because it's a pretty image and so is the book cover.


Returning to the thrilling reads of yesteryear--April 6 to April 16, 1978 I read:

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

Marlene Dietrich, Sheridan Morley

Swindled! Classic Business Frauds of the 70s, the staff reporters of the Wall Street Journal

The young romantics: Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Vigny, Dumas, Musset, and George Sand and their friendships, feuds, and loves in the French romantic revolution, Linda Kelly
Didn't like this one. My note was too negative to quote, but included the word "pompous".

Monty, a Biography of Montgomery Clift, Robert LaGuardia
Note: a little difficult to read because he was so sick and sad and tragic, poor bastard
Interesting site with the kind of stuff one collects when one
idolizes...

The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler
Note: The Santa Monica one, v. good
Ah, Raymond Chandler!

Gone, No Forwarding, Joe Gores


April 6 to April 16, 2008 I read:

The Monk Downstairs, Tim Farrington
Interesting that this book is being sold by Grace Cathedral as a fund raiser.

Ironically, I hadn't expected to like the Downstairs book but I heard it was so well-written that I gave it a try, and I liked it. It was a bit like a Nicholas Hornby book with a bunch of religious meditation thrown in. So, I thought I would try Upstairs, the second one, based on the first one and I found it unreadable.


The Monk Upstairs, Tim Farrington

In all fairness I think it's major challenge to write a sequel that starts off with "then they got married." A book that ends with a wedding in the offing is a very different animal than a book about marriage. And Upstairs...sigh...

Downstairs had much less meditation and much more tension between the hero's uncertainty coming out of a 20-year monastery stay and the single mother's gradually learning to trust him and the process of intimacy.

For the purposes of full disclosure I should say that although I practice Buddhism daily, I never got into silent meditation, and reading about someone else's meditation has never been on my list of interesting pastimes. That said, the first book kept a balance between the hero's conflicts about going back into the secular life and his yearning for the divine.

In the second book the hero's going off to meditate is just annoying. He's totally irresponsible, leaving his fragile, old former abbot (who has just had a couple of rounds of chemotherapy and is about ready to fall over) standing at the altar waiting to perform his wedding while he meditates off in the woods, not deigning to appear till his exasperated bride hauls him out of his meditation hut to go to the ceremony. He seems amazingly similar to her stoner, surfer first husband and the heroine's annoyance with the ex-monk's frequent absences do not make entertaining reading for me. In fact, he looks a bit like a jerk.

Downstairs was seen from the point of view of the heroine with the hero's feelings being disclosed in letters to a fellow monk who is still in the monastery. The suspense was whether the two would get together, with the heroine's mother having a stroke that brings the two together dealing with the young kid and life or death hospital stuff.

With Upstairs one of the points of view is the mother-in-law who is not recovering well from a stroke. The suspense item is when, not whether but when she will have another stroke and die. I kid you not. I was rooting for earlier rather than later. The book had as much of the hero's meditation as it did any other thing, and I finally put myself out of my own misery, skimmed the last scene (Yup, I don't want to be a spoiler but I wasn't the only one put out of my misery).

I said I was cranky, right? Sometimes I just enjoy being cranky. This is probably one of those times.