BOOK BARN

#281:  KALEVALA.  Reading the Kalevala , Finland’s national epic, is like visiting an utterly strange and foreign country.  You don’t know the cities, and can’t quite make out the street signs; you don’t speak the language, have never read their poems, and know nothing of the local gods or cults.  The landscape is beautiful, in a northern way that denotes a demanding lifestyle; but the roads take turns you don’t expect, the fauna are unfamiliar, the people keep their distance

#280: SHAKESPEARE, OF AN AGE.  William Shakespeare in the year 1606 wrote King   Lear , Macbeth , and Antony and Cleopatra .  (The satiric songwriter Tom Lehrer once said “There are people who really make you realize how little you’ve accomplished.”  And added: “By the time Mozart was my age he had been dead for four years.”)  In his book A Year in the Life of   Shakespeare 1599  James Shapiro did a canny job of connecting Shakespeare’s work for that year-- Henry V , Julius C

#279: WITH TOOTHBRUSH AND WITHOUT.   Colm Tóibín’s book Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush  is a fairly splendid example of how much you can convey in the short space of 125 pages, and how much those pages can tilt your image of an artist and their time.  Lady Gregory, if she is only a name to you, was, with William Butler Yeats, one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which did so much to expand and alter the culture of Ireland, and a prime mover of the Irish Renaissan