Books I’ve been reading

HAMLET IN PURGATORY by Stephen Greenblat is a hodge-podge of idea variously including the English rejection of the Papist superstition of Purgatory, the treatment of ghosts in Elizabethan theater and the crux of his argument, whether Hamlet’s father should be seen as a spirit in Purgatory (“A Catholic ghost confronting a Protestant prince.”). The end result includes lots of good bits-I didn’t know that one of the criticisms of Purgatory was that if the Church could free the tormented souls, they shouldn’t wait for people to pay them money to do it-but ultimately goes nowhere; as Greenblatt admits, the question of Catholic themes in Shakespeare has been covered before, the conclusion can’t be definitive, and his broader argument that Purgatory is more a creation of poetry and imagination than faith never amounts to much.
TEA: Addiction, Exploitation and Empire by Roy Moxham, chronicles how a Chinese drink regarded as a curiosity in the 17th century, then a luxury, wound up becoming an item of mass consumption in subsequent centuries, leading to such side-effects as widespread tea smuggling, the Boston Tea Party, Opium Wars and the brutal exploitation of tea-pickers to keep prices down (Moxham notes that while conditions are much better today, there’s such a glut of overproduction that wages are still dreadful). Good, though probably more interesting to a tea-lover than the general public.
THE VALLEY SO LOW is a collection of Manley Wade Wellman’s (whom I was startled to realize lived in Chapel Hill not far from me) final Southern stories, starting with “Trill Coster’s Burden” and several more Silver John shorts and following them up with other tales of mountain folk battling witch folk, monsters, demons, evil cults and haunts. Even with stories where you can see what’s coming such as the vampire tale “Chastel,” Wellman makes it readable, though most of his protagonists lack the screen presence John had (you could swap Hal Corbett and Lee Stryker in any of their stories without making a difference), and this suffers the usual problems of reading multiple stories in a row (the details of making an old-time log cabin get hideously repetitive when they’re in so many tales in a row).