^ Of course, thanks @Caraid – that makes sense. I didn’t catch that on my first read. The comment about “disappointment” followed by “relief” is telling. The rabbi not returning Rivka’s love makes her sad, but his declaring his love for her would have been worse (similar to Mary Magdalene’s quandary in “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” for you Jesus Christ Superstar fans out there).
That was a good point about Rivka and the rabbi, which I had not paid attention to, as so many things happened in the book. Good catch!
The rabbi was a good man and Rivka was a very good, hard- working woman. Ester was very fortunate to have both in her life.
And the usual question: What are you reading in the interim?
Downloaded “the weight of ink” ( which I bought at great discount thanks to you @Mary13 ! Leaving in couple days for daughters destination wedding…in the Azores, islands in the Atlantic which most people have no idea where they are. I didn’t know til daughter and fiancé went for two week vacation last summer, loved it soooooooo much, now 52 people heading there this week,
So “the weight of ink “ …Soon,
Wow, what fun, @SouthJerseyChessMom! Congratulations to your daughter and her fiancé. I had to look up The Azores. Gorgeous! Looks like it will be a wedding in Paradise. Have a wonderful time!
Bedside table books at the moment:
In Farleigh Field - Rhys Bowen. I’d describe this as a light WWII mystery - setting Great Britain. I’m about halfway through and like it - easy reading. Book Club choice in IRL.
The Library Book - Susan Orlean. Nonfiction. I’m in three real-life book clubs and all three have chosen this book for either September or October. The Library Book was chosen for Gulf Coast Reads 2019. (I’m not sure it’s been officially announced yet (Gulf Coast Reads takes place in Oct.) but neither is this year’s choice unknown - obviously as my three book clubs have penciled it in.
She Rides Shotgun - Jordan Harper. I picked this one up because I liked The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley and because, well, I looked on Amazon and …
So far it’s really good.
One of my husband’s summer projects was to put up a Little Free Library in front of our house. I quickly discovered that the books that move are bestsellers and celebrity bios. (Amy Schumer’s The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo: YES. Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth: NO.)
So in order to keep the neighborhood happy, I’m reading my way through every mystery and trashy bestseller lying around the house and then putting them outside. Currently having fun reading books by authors such as C.J. Box and Fern Michaels – all for the public good, of course.
I loved The Library Book!
I’ve been reading Jo Walton’s Thessaly series. (The Just City, The Philosopher Kings, Necessity) It starts with Athena deciding it would be amusing to have a bunch of Plato scholars swooped out from different periods in time and put them on an island in pre-Troy Greece (aka the island that will produce the Atlantis legend…) tell them their mission is to recreated The Republic and see what happens. Needless to say, it’s not that simple, especially after they brings in Socrates to teach rhetoric. Fun characters (especially Apollo who is trying out being a mortal), interesting exploration of ideas, like nothing I’ve ever read before.
I just finished reading Circe by Madeline Miller and really loved it.
A bold and subversive retelling of the goddess’s story," this #1 New York Times bestseller is “both epic and intimate in its scope, recasting the most infamous female figure from the Odyssey as a hero in her own right” (Alexandra Alter, The New York Times).
I highly recommend it. She does a beautiful job bringing Circe to life.
It took me a while, but I finally finished The Weight of Ink! The first half was a slog for me. I was annoyed by Mary, frustrated by Aaron, bogged down in figuring out the different Jewish communities and trying to get a handle on the philosophy. Glimpses of intrepid Helen and the promise of more Ester kept me going. And I’m glad I did. When the plot strands started coming together, I found the reading more rewarding, and by the end, I was deeply immersed in the characters’ fates in plague-torn London.
I kept thinking of the structural and thematic similarities to A. S. Byatt’s Possession, which I read recently (and CC book club read a few years back). Modern-day academics uncovering a mystery about personalities in the past. A male-female research duo on uneasy terms with one another … the female half accomplished and forbidding, the male half hapless/self-doubting. The rival academic teams, the rush to publish, the delicate dance with the wealthy owners of precious papers. Both the old poetry and the old philosophy were above my head, but I found the philosophy more bearable–perhaps because less of it was written out in the book itself! (I grumble, but I enjoyed both books.) Oh, and in each book, the young male PhD candidate does a bad thing with the precious papers-- in this case, Aaron ripping a letter on purpose so it would have to go to the conservation room before the rival team could see it … in Possession, Roland stealing a letter from the archives!
(this is long … more in another comment)
Ester’s sheer tenacity in leading a life of the mind, despite social obstacles, will stick with me! But I cheered the hardest for unsung Rivka (“I can read, you know!”). She had the presence of mind to save the precious papers when fleeing the plague mob.
I agree with @Caraid that she loved the rabbi. (And rabbis can marry, right? I guess their social class difference made it unthinkable for them to marry, if he even noticed her.) I wonder about her back story … I can’t remember if we know anything about her before she appeared as a taken-for-granted fixture in the rabbi’s house.
I did not consider kind-but-weak John a good match for our intense Ester. Proximity and youth and the contrast with his obnoxious anti-Semite friends made him appealing … but he and Ester never “got” each other, really. After she had given body and soul to him, with a deep spiritual connection on her part, he just inquires, “You were a virgin?” – to me, this showed he was on a whole different plane. He would not have been strong enough to buck social norms if they had married, and Ester could not have thrived with him. Good riddance, though she didn’t think so at the time!
Proximity and youth played into the Helen-Dror story, too. Which of us does not remember our first intense love? But haven’t we mostly moved on and lived our lives with other loves? I thought it a shame that she never found another. (Ah, I think too much about characters as real. I suppose that’s a testament to the success of this book. They all seem real to me now!)
Wasn’t Rivka an Ashkenazi Jew not Sephardic?
There were definitely lots of parallels with Possession which is one of my favorite books ever. In fact that’s what finally got me hooked to the CC Bookclub. I’d been meaning to read the books forever and the opportunity to reread the book seemed to good to pass up. That was a fabulous discussion, and made me realize what you can do with an online bookclub that you can’t do with one that only meets one day in person. (Share links, look up stuff, spend time thinking about the book, rereading bits, and even coming in late if you haven’t finished on day one.)
@Lemonlee , I’m looking forward to reading Circe. Just finished Achilles by the same author (audiobook) and loved it.
I also just read The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert. Yes, that Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, which I never wanted to read-- but this massive novel is entirely different, apparently! From Barbara Kingsolver’s review in the New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/books/review/elizabeth-gilberts-signature-of-all-things.html
Also reading Pete Buttigieg’s Shortest Way Home. The boy can write!
I thought of Possession many times as well. The fact that the movie version of Possession turned Roland into a brash American like Aaron (played by someone whose first name is Aaron!) didn’t help. Rachel Kadish acknowledges the similarities: “It won’t surprise anyone that I loved A. S. Byatt’s Possession,” she says in this interview: https://artsake.massculturalcouncil.org/rachel-kadish-weight-ink/
And yet, they’re very different, right? There’s an entirely different mood and period of history covered with each novel – I didn’t feel at all like one was a redux of the other.
Yes – also known as a Tudesco Jew. She was from Poland and there is a reference to her being driven out of her burning Polish village. She tells Ester:
I had to look up the history, but I think this must have been at the start of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, when pogroms in Eastern Poland resulted in the massacre of thousands of Jews (about 20 years prior to the setting of The Weight of Ink).
@Mary13 , I agree that the two stories are entirely different – but it makes sense that Rachel Kadish loved Possession!
Thank you for the back story on Rivka. That helps round her out as a character, and I’d forgotten it.
Sephardic - Tudesco - Ashkenazi – these terms were part of what kept me bogged down in the first half of the book. I acknowledge their importance but think I need to skip over truly understanding them, for now.
I think I mentioned this many many pages back, but since you all brought up Rivka –
As a Tudesco (aka Ashkenazi) Jew, from Eastern Europe, Rivka was looked down on. Apparently during the time this book takes place Sephardic Jews, from Spain and Portugal, were better educated and considered of a higher class, while the Tudesco/Ashkenazis were considered uneducated peasants. It was surprising to me because for the last century or so, Ashkenazi Jews from Germany have been considered higher class than Askenazi Jews from Poland and Russia – in the US, German Jews came here in the 1860s to 1880s, while Eastern European Jews came between 1890 and 1920. So they were looked down on by the folks who had been here for a few decades already.
@jollymama I am adding Achilles to my reading list and am looking forward to reading it!
Just finished “The Weight of Ink” and really enjoyed it. Liked the surprise ending! What an interesting question it posed. Now I will read through the thread to see what everyone thought.
@MaineLonghorn — remind me, what was the question posed by the book? I read it too long ago and have returned it Thanks.