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Musings of a Book Addict
I'm married to a scavenger of sorts and he often totes home rescued boxes of books that I paw through with shiny, hungry eyes. I pull out the odd and interesting and add them to my teetering stack.
Currently reading
The Hound of the Baskervilles
E.B. White: A Biography
Murder on the Orient Express
There Is Nothing Wrong with You: Going Beyond Self-Hate
Living Buddha, Living Christ
No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger
The Snare of the Hunter
Paintings of Henry Miller
Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul
Pentimento (Back Bay Books)
Till We Have Faces: A Novel of Cupid and Psyche
What a treat to find this book in my husband's latest scavenging haul. This is C.S. Lewis's final novel, and it focuses on the re-telling of the myth of Cupid & Psyche. As some have already said, the last few pages of this book are the best part, but I still really enjoyed the journey we take with our heroine, Orual. In the note by Lewis at the end of my copy (I have a beautiful 1966 edition with a gorgeous stained glass image on the cover) he says that his version of this myth was more "transmitted" than created by him and it has that ancient spiritual "channeled" feeling to it. I was particularly struck by the ancient stone that represents the old Goddess (Ungit). When the more modern Roman/Greek-influenced statue arrives, we see the shift away from the mystical Goddess energy to the more literal, patriarchal human form. We move away from the mysterious darkness into a more concrete form of worship, for good and for bad. And I love how C.S. Lewis does often take the more mystical Christian perspective. He is very respectful of the Goddess energy in this book, in a way that really surprised and delighted me. And our heroine, Orual is the aspect in all of us who questions the spiritual realm and the deities within it. She is the part of us that struggles with love and who has trouble seeing the magic that is all around us. C.S. Lewis really is one of the greatest storytellers that ever lived.