THE MISTS OF AVALON
Marion Zimmer Bradley

Jonathan recommended this to me after we went to Indiana with Dr Putzu and discovered that we both like DUNE and love WATERSHIP DOWN for their insightful and imaginative approaches to religion and belief. Those books are both gigantic in my mind, and this one is almost 900 pages long, and I often felt like I'd been reading it for years and years. Not in a bad way - one of the things I want a fantasy novel to do is give me a different world to escape into, and this one did that for me. At first it was a fun place to go, a world that seemed both old and young, populated with wizards and magic and demigoddesses. About a third of the way through though, watching everyone have sex with the wrong people and marry the wrong people and choose the wrong loyalties and cast the wrong spells for the wrong reasons, everything started to feel heavy and gloomy. The main character is lonely and bitter and I often related to her more than I wanted to. A major theme of the book turns out to be christianity's gradual displacing of druidic beliefs and practices, and the slow disappearance of magick from the world. Watching a world - or a way of being in the world - fade away was not fun, but it did make me have a lot of feelings, and I like having feelings - especially, maybe, imaginary ones.

ASSATA
Assata Shakur

This was the first book I read as part of the radical intl book club Because We've Read. I liked it a lot. Assata spells 'amerika' with a K like I do and gets bored and frustrated at parties and in groups for the same reasons that I often do, saying "I want somebody I can relate to and talk about serious shit with." She's angry as hell but she's also warm and funny and sometimes joyful. A real and complex radical. Here's some quotes:

"No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them."

"Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them."

"Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is."

"I despise violence, but I despise it even more when it's one-sided and used to oppress and repress poor people."

"You can't claim that you love people when you don't respect them, and you can't call for political unity unless you practice it in your relationships."

other books I read this month:
CITY OF CLOWNS - Daniel Alarcon and Sheila Alvarado
MAGDALENE - Marie Howe
NOWHERE NEARER - Alice Miller
THE PATH BETWEEN US: AN ENNEAGRAM JOURNEY TO HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS - Suzanne Stabile
I'M STILL HERE: BLACK DIGNITY IN A WORLD MADE FOR WHITENESS - Austin Channing Brown