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Enchanted here! Peace and hope and more to come, Tara! Blessings for the mention ... I will post and enchantment for Inner Life and perhaps as well on my own site, tagging you on August 27th. I know that's not in this month. I hope, Tara, that you will take a look. xo ~ Mary

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I look forward to it with pleasure, Mary! I'm happy to read enchantments all the year 'round. 🥰

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Wonderful!

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Given violent headlines, I find certain liberatory partisan books most enchanting, and heartening and moving. Not least in a long squiggly line of novels: Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, Leo Tolstoy's Hadji Murat, Stella "Miles" Franklin's My Career Goes Bung, Claude McKay's Banjo, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow, and Andre Vltchek's Aurora or Point of No Return. Partisans enchant, and encourage and move things forward, I find. It all seems bound up as one. That said, partisans are far from all that enchant.

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I love the length of this list of enchanters. You've given me some new names to check out! :-) Are you also a fan of Octavia Butler's Kindred? I love what she does there with time and history.

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I haven't given Butler's Kindred enough of a chance to be able to say anything about it, unfortunately. Her Talents sequel to Sower I didn't find as compelling. I sometimes duck in and out of a lot of books quickly, too quickly for a lot of purposes, I suppose. Something of the same goes for the other authors on the list there, with the exception of Andre Vltchek whom I worked with. I do appreciate Hugo's The Last Day of a Condemned Man, a quick partisan read ahead of its time both stylistically and thematically, I think, and as others have noted.

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Tell me what you think if you try Kindred. I have the impression that sometimes Butler writes with ideas first and characters second, but Kindred leads with characters and draws a person in to suspense. Compelling is a good word for it, if you like her with a stronger narrative pull.

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I'll try to get to it. I think I appreciate various sorts of suspense in novels and I think also what might be called the repetition of the humane in battle against Evil, destruction, and so on. The etymology of "repetition" is "re-attack," and if a story has the humane attacking and attacking and attacking again against that which would otherwise destroy, I'm there for it in many ways that it might manifest in artful, well-crafted stories. This might be the definition of a partisan story, if it doesn't generalize farther. Lots of different ways to think of, create, and appreciate story, even aside from myriad approaches to genre and mode, especially once you put the "literary" tag into the description of any story.

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I like your formula of "the humane" attacking "that which would otherwise destroy." That sounds like a lot of writing that gets the "literary" tag, but maybe not all.

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I think a depiction of what lit is commonly lauded for can be considered that way, though, too often what is seen in literary novels, I think, is the humane attacked - and left to the reader to decry or despair or whatever, and so you have novels of pathology, unwitting and otherwise. More of a symptom of problems than anything more liberatory, illuminating, healthy, or even all that much redeemable. Or what is created/produced may be somewhat valuable but in very limited and limiting ways - oftentimes wholly offset by greater lacks or other issues. There's the curious notion of the suicidal English major that is passed around on campuses as both grim and humorous that may reflect this tendency. A lot of lit embodies the ideological and financial constraints of the editing/publishing institutions, in my view, as well as plenty of other cultural problems. (Most of the novels on my little list had tortured or telling publication issues.) I think plenty of novelists are aware of this whether they commonly admit it or not. This can be a touchy subject but also must be a touchy subject as these matters in the humanities involve norms that are not only sociological flashpoints but also part and parcel of our central nervous systems... Sorry to belabor the point, but I think it leads directly back to Octavia Butler's notion and depiction of the very powerful and very effective empath in her Parable of the Sower, which I find so valuable and compelling. In evoking a big chunk of the full human condition, Octavia Butler's intelligence and heart really shine in that novel, it seems to me, and are reflected in the aesthetics and content as must be. Anyway, glad you like the notion of the humane attacking the destructive. I think plenty of authors have discovered that the greater or the more particular the humanity of their books, sometimes the greater the chance of their work being attacked and/or going unpublished in a culture hostile to too much humanity, of certain sorts.

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I recently finished Ann Patchett's Tom Lake and started Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks. The novel was a delicious, summer getaway, a way of tapping into my mother-daughter connection which is burdened, these days, by the distances between us. The latter feels like it might turn out to be what I most need to learn, though before starting it I was feeling too tired to learn much of anything. Maybe both are their own kind of fairy dust? Beyond that, poetry. No particular author, just those whose words bring me back to something peaceful.

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Ooo, glad you found a book that spoke to the burden of right now. I hope the distance closes back to closeness before too long. I have also been reaching for more and more poetry. I wonder if the era of tweets and memes will be an era of flourishing for poetry, as an antidote and alternative. I can hope. :-)

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Makes sense, right, in the way the "Slow-" movements came in on the heels of doing everything fast?

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Yes!

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I have been utterly enchanted by a return to Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence with the Substack community of Haley Larsen's "closely reading". It's over now, but I'm still thinking about Wharton's story, characters, and craft, and our conversations about them. I'm reading through a centenary collection of Age if Innocence essays that Haley recommended, to keep the magic going. Next I might have to try "James"!

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I too find Edith Wharton incredibly immersive. From the outer edges, that looked like a wonderful community read.

If you try "James," you'll probably appreciate it all the more for reading Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn along with it, but I don't think it matters which one comes first. Some people will value chronological order, but as for the art and enchantment of the story, it does not matter at all. Percival Everett's novel stands alone just as well as it pairs with Twain.

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It's been a long time since I read Twain's Huck. Hmmmmmmmm.

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With even a faint memory of it, I'd say read *James* first. Then you might want to go back and reread Huck, but if life calls another direction before you can get through 2 books in a row, you won't miss James. ;-)

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A crockpot called Tara Penry? Whew. I’m already feeling better about myself, my morning, and even my life in general to be in such fine company.

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Haha! What good is a pot without some cracks? All function, no beauty. PS - Did you see the AI editor tried to make me a crockpot? Poor AI hasn’t got the foggiest idea. Here’s to fine company and a glorious Friday!

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Crockpots are also useful, although I harbor some doubts about AI.

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That’s a particularly nice one. :-)

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But it first requires crackpot to create such beauty, so there we are.

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Amen. My thoughts and feelings exactly right now. It was hard to muster the energy and brain power for my own post today. My throat was thoroughly parched, my eyes dry and scratchy. And yet, we persist. 🙏❤️

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It didn’t show in your post. Those ocean floats might be working. :-)

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Everett Percival's JAMES enchanted me from the first page. This retelling of Huck Finn from Jim's perspective took me on a trip down the mighty Mississippi River I found profound. Might be the best novel of this century imho.

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Jill, I completely agree with you! “Better than Huck Finn,” was my first thought when I finished it, which places it pretty high on the list of American must-read novels. What Everett set out to do (retelling such a well-known story), and the way he slowly pried his story away from Twain’s were achievements beyond the usual storytelling. I was smitten from the first sentence, and every time he addressed language, I was struck again. No contest from me for best novel.

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I was completely enchanted by the novel Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. By Mary Oliver’s poem, Hum Hum. By so many stories and poems!

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I've seen Piranesi around the bookstores but haven't picked it up. Good to have your recommendation. Thanks for "Hum, Hum." That wasn't an Oliver poem I knew, but I found it easily online, and I love it, too. Yes to so many!

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I wish I could write something for your community project but I don’t think I have time. I’m going away on Saturday and out and about for most of next week. I’ll try though!

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It’s definitely worthwhile to squeeze a bit of holiday out of high summer. A single poem works for a subject, if that makes it more realistic.

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Sadly I’m not a poet. I hope to change that someday though!

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Love this -- exactly the tonic I needed today. Late to the party, as always, but this is a great question: "You tell me: Who reads for enchantment in times like these? And what are you reading, rereading, or remembering? Is it an escape hatch, a buoy, a choral conductor raising her baton? What is an enchanting book to you?"

I almost always read for enchantment. There are different forms that takes, and sometimes it is a rapt horror (such as when I read The Chronicle). I did read for escape as a child, but I prefer to see it differently now as a choice of where to direct my attention and energy. After reading Sam Kahn's recent post on publishing, I saw Sally Rooney's "Opening Theory" in The New Yorker and forced myself to finish it, though the spell wore off before the halfway mark. I'm reading the novel "Gerta," about German refugees in the messy transition between Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia and the Communist coup. It's not enchanting yet, but it's important (and a client is working on a historical novel set during a similar time, tracing her parents' flight from the Soviet occupation).

But last night I looked at my pile of unread New Yorkers and then at two books that I purchased recently: Antonia Malchik's "A Walking Life" and Joe Wilkins' "Fall Back Down When I Die" (both Montana authors). And I decided to give Antonia's book a try. From the opening sentences straight through the first chapter, it immediately felt like home. The arguments she makes about reclaiming a walking life (with cultural history and first-rate journalism, as well as personal narrative) are compelling. But it's the voice, the cadence of her sentences, the lyrical tone that I recognized as home.

I'm only one chapter in (I can't stay awake much longer at bedtime). But I already highly recommend it and Antonia's Substack, "On the Commons."

https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-walking-life-reclaiming-our-health-and-our-freedom-one-step-at-a-time-antonia-malchik/6464959?ean=9780738234885

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I completely agree about Antonia Malchik's beautiful cadences and her feeling for the land! I haven't read her book, but I do read her Stack (irregularly, but always with pleasure). She is one of the people who enchants like a choral conductor lifting her baton (for me).

I am increasingly willing to put a book down if it does not draw me into a world - even academic prose. There needs to be a world of thought, feeling, or both. Percival Everett's "James" is my latest enchantment. To rewrite Twain - and pull it off! The more his novel pulls away from Twain's, the better it gets.

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OMG, Tara! This pulled me in and kept me in a tight (welcome) embrace. Stunning. You cast a spell. And I have no choice now but to say YES to your challenge!! I've no time for it in the midst of all the other projects swirling - and last-minute taking on a whole new course, yikes! (at least it's not high-stakes like guiding 20 young people through the crucial research semester of their master's thesis projects. . . but oh! IT IS!). Which means, this is EXACTLY the project I need to take on. And I know what I'm writing about. It's a doozy.

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Wonderful! Thank you! It was a strange post to write. I jettisoned several other things and felt this one had a spare quality that suited the weather - or something. Haha! I understand the swirl that's pulling us toward the new semester. It's like an undertow in July, and then in August, it's a full wave. Your post *will* be a doozy. Hang onto a spar and swim for the island. Ariel's voice is divine. 🧚‍♀️

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Also - oooffff! When I read about Andrea Skinner and that whole thing, my first thought was of you.

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Yes. There were a lot of updates to add to my June posts last week. I noticed silence around her but didn't realize what caused it. It's awful how long she bore it, and a relief that her siblings have gathered around her with love and support.

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Ah ... TS Eliot ... somebody else has been reading The Waste Land. There is a bend in the river at Richmond upriver from Kew popularly known at one time as Arcadia. In the very long ago I saw Midsummer Night's Dream by a talented London amateur company in the grove of trees overlooking the river. Sweet Thames run softly for my dreams ... Downstream no longer sweats and toils and London is yet to find the means for a second tidal barrier against incoming storm. Ah ... children in the garden and other books and poems and the coolness of a light wind. Peace be with you.

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Mmm, thank you for sharing your MSD memory from Arcadia. What a beautiful memory! The desert breeze here just picked up a little riparian humidity, thanks to your words.

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I'm craving light reads these days; cozy mysteries have darkness to them, but you know it will never be unbearable. It all works out in the end, and isn't that what we all want this month? Nita Prose's The Maid and The Mystery Guest (audio versions) hit the sweet spot for me.

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Light reads and light salads go with this time of the summer, don't they? I'll have to look into Nita Prose. Have you ever read Joanne Dobson's mysteries (Quieter than Sleep, etc)? She wrote a series of academic murder mysteries with a female academic sleuth. The academic helps to solve the mysteries with her knowledge of 19th century literary figures like Emily Dickinson and Poe - all while students are knocking on her office door or she's trying to finish a stack of grading. They're especially fun reading for teachers, light reading with just enough tickle for the bookish mind. 😅

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I have time! I'm racing to finish Bring Up The Bodies on Simon Haisell's wonderful slow read; and yes, I see the irony of what I've just written, but hear this, I'm racing because it's So Good. Happy enchantments, Tara, and thanks for the shout out.

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Haha! I see the irony of your fast-slow read! I've been watching Simon's chat threads go by, and the books sound wonderfully engaging. But so are "Fallout" and other Substack serials. Thank goodness for so much good reading. No dry spell can last long.

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Very kind. I'm really thrilled you're reading it.

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There is something beautiful about reading in such times. It reminds us that not all is lost, that we may yet ride this storm and arrive safely at the shores of that island.

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With heat and smoke in our valley right now, your Dust Pirates drew me right in to the physical descriptions. I’m looking forward to reading more. Wonderful details!

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Thanks Tara, I wanted to publish this story during summer. After last year’s record breaking heat, this year feels even more surreal. There’s a lot of mixed feelings now about this story.

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Yes—wherever you find it 💪🏻❤️

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For sure! The view from your deck for starters. Hallelujah. 😄

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☺️

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Tara, thanks so much for the shout out and inclusion with the others. 🙏 very flattering.

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I’ll get over and read Moby if I have to chase whales to do it … !! 😂 🐳

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