July Reading

Phew!  The 85F + weather is here for the summer.

As a native Oregonian, I'm officially wilting and looking to the skies for rain.  It doesn't look like there's much in the forecast for the next week or so.

When I haven't been writing, I've been reading.  Currently I'm reading a bunch of things more or less simultaneously.  One of them is "The Christian Goddess: Archetype and Theology in the Fantasies of George MacDonald," by Bonnie Gaarden.  I think I've read one of his stories out of an anthology of Victorian Fairy tales, but judging from this analysis, he sounds quite preachy.  I'm reading it because it was a candidate for The Inklings' Mythopoetic award, and also because I wanted to see how another author writes female divinity within a Christian framework so I can then look at how it works in my own work.

The main difference between my representation of the female Christian divinity and MacDonald's is that I'm approaching the Divine She as both an immanent fiery forge/creatrix and Judge of Choices, whereas MacDonald is seeing Her as a transcendent Cauldron of Life / spiritual medicine.

In the same vein is "Fairy Tale Queens:  Representations of Early Modern Queenship," by Jo Eldride Carney.   It's interesting, but it's beginning to feel like a stuck record because all of the tales she's examining reinforce the patriarchal world order.  So far, the most memorial line is, "In order to find a prince, a girl's got to slam a bunch of animals against a wall."