Outlandish, magical and unlikely things
Books I have recently read…
No Fire Escape in Hell- Kim Cayer. I picked this up because I really enjoyed Kim’s thoroughly mad tale ‘Lights, Camera, Dissatisfaction’ and her second novel is equally crazy and charming. Kim writes madcap middle aged romps, in which unlikely heroines with improbable ways of life face outrageous and bizarre challenges and somehow pull through. The heroine of No Fire Escape in Hell is trying to buy off her abusive husband so he’ll leave her be. To do this, she lives in her car while delivering singing telegrams to the Toronto area. Laugh out loud funny in places, but also a serious look at what it means to have nowhere to live, especially the social alienation it causes, and the way in which living with abuse can get you making insane choices.
More information here – http://www.roundfire-books.com/books/no-fire-escape-hell
The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. So it turns out that what we think of as Grimm’s fairy tales comes from the 1857 edition, massively edited and re-written and a long way from the original stories. This is a translation of the first edition, in which fewer tweaks had been made to the collected stories. Some are just fragments, many are bizarre and a lot darker than the versions we’re familiar with. There are glass slippers, but not in the Cinderella story – they turn up at the ends of tales ‘and I was there, in my glass slippers’ being a way of saying ‘and this is total nonsense.’ A fascinating read, somewhat repetitive with versions of the same stories, but a must for anyone interested in fairy tales and the possible Pagan subtext of fairy tales. (I may come back and blog about this properly some other time.)
More information here – http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10300.html
Pagan Portals Candle Magic – Lucya Starza This is an excellent little book for people starting out on a witchcraft path or interested in exploring magic. A light accessible writing style not dissimilar to Rachel Patterson, lots of things that can easily be undertaken and ways of working that can be flexed to suit your situation – broad theories of how to work rather than lots of terribly specific – and therefore often irrelevant – spells. It’s a book that encourages flexibility and creative thinking, rather than offering a set of instructions. Absolutely ideal for younger witches, and for solitary witches, but perfectly usable for anyone new to candle magic, and for group work. At the moment, spells are not a significant part of my life, but I’ve enough of a background to feel confident about saying that this is a good and useable book.
I’m running a Thunderclap campaign to draw more attention to this books, if you can loan me a tweet, tumblr of facebook post it would be greatly appreciated (it’s easy, quick and painless) – https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/37263-pagan-portals-candle-magic?locale=en
More here – http://www.moon-books.net/books/pagan-portals-candle-magic
