Book Reviews: I Know What I am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi / Sicilio AND Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough

Artemisia Gentileschi was an artist who lived in the late 1500s and early 1600s. 
And these two novels about her life offer some two very possibilities for her mental reality.

If you are going to read both, try the Sicilio book first. This is a graphic novel which is FULL of contextual detail. It shares the contextual and historical background for Artemisia and her art. This isn't an easy book to read in any any. There are a lot of characters in this book to keep track of, a lot of context that sets the stage for what she went through - it is DENSE with historical information. But beyond that - this book is full of betrayal, abuse, rape, dishonesty... AND persistence, feminism, overcoming. I loved this book because it provided the context to better understand the world Artemisia lived in. I loved this book because many of the messages are universal to humankind - bigger than a time and place in the world. 

Once you have finished the  Sicilio book, try the McCullough. After having build the context of Artemisia's life, this different mind-set perspective (offered in a novel in verse) will offer another possibility for Artemisia's viewpoint of her own life, and how she overcame the hurdles she encountered.

In any case, this is a book about art but also about feminism and about #MeToo. Note that there are a lot of triggers in this book: rape, lecherous men, and living with a shaky foundation. 

Enjoy these books, look up the art - check out Artemisia's art as well as that of her contemporaries. Enjoy and learn.

Book Review: How to Stop Time / Matt Haig

 

Tom Hazard was born in  1581 with a weird disorder in which he only ages one year each 15 years. This creates a lot of havoc and some charges of witchcraft. When he loses his mother (she was placed on a ducking stool and drowned while the towns' people were determining if she was a witch. She died which "proved" that she wasn't, though the towns' people didn't believe that.)

Left on his own to figure out how to get by without aging, Tom does the best he can and finds himself falling in love with Rose - but despite moving around, people begin to talk when she ages and he doesn't. This story travels through time, mostly set in the 1500s, the second half of the 1800s, the 1920s and now. How would you live your life if you were Tom? How would aging so slowly change your perspective? And what can we learn from history? Are we destined to relive society's mistakes? 

I borrowed this book from the Nashua Public Library and enjoyed it so much that I have put on hold Matt Haig's next book - The Midnight Library.

Book Review: Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries / Kory Stamper

Read this book to get your nerd on.

Stamper's Word by Word is all about making dictionaries. OK - I know that sounds boring, but there is so much to it and it is really interesting in a learning kind of way.
"The vast majority of people give no thought to the dictionary they use: it merely is, like the universe. To one group of people, the dictionary was handed to humanity ex coili, a hallowed leather-bound tome of truth and wisdom as infallible as God. To another group of people, the dictionary is a thing you picked up in the bargain bin, paperback and on sale for a dollar because you felt that an adult should own a dictionary. Neither group realizes that their dictionary is a human document, constantly being compiled, proofread, and updated by actual, living, awkward people." Kory Stamper
This is a book about that process and all that entails.

Book Review: Prisoner B-3087 by Alan Gratz

This is a fictionalized account of the life of Jack Gruener. Yanek, a Jewish boy in 1930s Poland, survived the Holocaust and 10 Concentration camps. Jack and his wife, Ruth, reached out to Scholastic to make sure that their story was told. Read these pages to better understand those horrible times.

Note: Reading this story really puts my own troubles into perspective. Flesher