August Reading

Goodness... there's been a bit of a gap since the last posting.  

The current news is that the water main between our house and the utility meeter has broken, so we're on day three without water in the house.  I'd noticed a damp patch in our front yard Sunday evening; by Monday morning it had turned into a seeping spring that moistened the sidewalk for about ten feet.  I suppose this is practice for when the Big Cascadia Earthquake hits (and, yes, the Earthquake Folks are right about how much water one goes through in a day).  So far the most troublesome aspect is making the toilet flush.  I'm not particularly looking forward to the bill, and hope that fixing the leak doesn't involve slicing through the front sidewalk.  

I'm been actively reading more.  I skimmed through Pete Buttigieg's "Shortest Way Home," and am currently reading Ronald Hutton's "The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present."  Buttigieg's book starts a slowly and didn't really pick up for me until about page 50, when he gets into college.  The slowest parts forme were the accounts and exposition blocks of the campaign trails.  The better parts were scenes with dialog or first meetings.  The best parts are usually at the end of chapters, where he shares an insight -- like his discovery of the blinders he had about Big Data.  I was hoping for more about his process of coming out and his relationship with the LGBTA community, but the book paints him more of a workaholic than someone who actually dates -- the way the book tells it, he was sort of busy and only until he was thirty did he realize that if he wanted a family he was going to have to do something about it.  

"The Witch," is slow starting.  I always want to go into Hutton's book like I remember going into "Triumph of the Moon":  turning the page to see the next "ancient wisdom's" genesis in the 1950's.  This is a longer overview, which starts by skipping lightly over ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia,  Africa and Canaan, for views of magic and a working definition of what a witch is -- as opposed to what he calls a "service magician."  He's got five criteria: 

1. A Witch Causes Harm by Uncanny Means
2. A Witch is an Internal Threat to a Community
3. The Witch Works within a Tradition
4. The Witch is Evil
5. The Witch Can be Resisted

I suppose I should note that this is a historical definition used by the book to try to get a grip on cultures spanning millennia and from around the globe.  The first section concludes -- which is as far in the book as I've gotten -- with the differences between shamanism and shamanistic practices and witchcraft.  I suppose it would be a much thicker book otherwise, but I do wish he had spent more time on actual artifacts like curse tablets and magical bowls and The Burney Relief (in the case of the Relief, there was some question as to its authenticity and provenance, which in turn has bearing on the question of Lilith as spirit, demon, or goddess).  

Anyway, skimming ahead, it looks like he touches on English fairy lore in later chapters, so that looks interesting.