A Peculiar Influence

The Labyrinth of the Film INCEPTION

2012-02-05T16:40:00.000-08:00

Besides reading books, I do watch films from time to time. Maybe it's a little unorthodox to write about one on a book blog, but there is a literary tie in, as you will see. If you haven't seen the film, I highly recommend watching it, and you should not read this post until you do so. You might want to watch it twice, because it's a little confusing at first. Let this serve as my SPOILER ALERT!

Inception retells the myth of the minotaur in the labyrinth, and discusses other themes as well. Here's a brief recap of the original legend:

The labyrinth on Crete was built to house the Minotaur, a half-bull, half-man monster which was born as a result of King Minos's greed, greed which prevented him from sacrificing a particular white bull to Poseidon, as he had originally promised. From this bull and a woman was born the Minotaur, (Mino from Minos + taur from taurus, the Greek word for bull) a half-human monster that, as a living reminder of King Minos' greed, devoured human sacrifices. The hero Theseus comes from across the sea to enter the labyrinth and slay the Minotaur, but he faces the problem of being able to find his way back out of the labyrinth. The king's daughter, Ariadne, gives Theseus a ball of thread that he unravels on his way to the center of the labyrinth; after slaying the Minotaur he follows the string to find his way back out.

In the film Inception, the protagonist, Cobb, is unable to come to terms with his wife's death and let her go. This results in the birth of a shadow figure of his dead wife, Mallorie, in his subconscious. The Jungian idea of a person's shadow, those aspects of the subconscious which haven't been integrated, is a nice parallel to the Minotaur, as a person's shadow can be seen as part human and part inner beast, untamed by the civilizing aspect of personal consciousness. Each time Cobb attempts to enter his subconscious, his plans are thwarted and his companions are attacked by this violent shadow, born of his inability to sacrifice/let go. In the film Cobb must go deeper, deeper into the layers of dream mazes in order to confront and slay the monster, his own inner demon which his desire-to-hold-onto (greed) has created. Or, in Jungian terms, he must descend into the depths of his subconscious in order to integrate his shadow, which he has personified as Mallorie. This is especially difficult for him because the shadow appears to him as his deceased wife. (One's shadow may be composed of sacrosanct symbols that the individual is loathe to disturb.) As Cobb sleeps and descends to the realm of pure subconscious, he washes up from the ocean onto the shore of the dream world his subconscious has constructed, like Theseus sailing across the sea and landing on the shores of Crete, ready to brave the labyrinth and slay the Minotaur. The character Ariadne, like the Ariadne in the myth, helps the hero navigate the labyrinth and emerge victorious. The totem which Cobb uses to ascertain whether he is awake or dreaming and to find his way out of a dream corresponds to the ball of thread, and slightly resembles a ball of thread as well. The fact that the top spins and the ball of string was spun from fiber is also a fun piece of wordplay.

The film questions whether our motives are composed of the pure cause and effect that we ascribe to them, or whether they stem from a deeper will in the subconscious, perhaps one that another person or being has placed there. From whence come the ideas that take hold within us? We, our left brains, our Interpreters (see http://bigthink.com/ideas/41943), invent causes that may or may not have brought about the effects. Tesla believed that humans are meat machines, mere stimulus and response, and if all possible factors could be known, all outcomes could be accurately predicted. Like him, Kant saw the cause and effect, the phenomenality of time and space. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, saw the will in nature, the one consciousness that wills all things. Einstein says it another way, "A human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants." (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/science/02free.html?pagewanted=all) Ambiguity results when these two are integrated, as in Nietzsche's writings . For Nietzsche, the Apollonian individuating principle and the Dionysian energy of the will are balanced. Life eats life,and when ego dissolves and the dynamism of the will is experienced, rapture results. For Nietzsche, amor fati (the love of fate) is the goal. In other words, if you criticize one detail of your life, you've unraveled the whole thing (Joseph Campbell). This is depicted at the end of the film: from the time that Cobb and Saito awake on the plane, it is impossible to tell whether they are dreaming or not. At the end, when Cobb spins his totem but then walks away, the viewer sees that he has stopped analyzing and questioning his reality, and has instead chosen to live it. This is the equivalent of Theseus setting down the ball of yarn and walking away. The reality Cobb chooses to live is that which he desires most, life with his children. Cobb has accepted and internalized his fate, but interestingly, he may have chosen that very fate as well by choosing not to recognize and leave a dream world.
The film's end is ambiguous. So... has he embraced his fate, a reality that he could not control, or has he willed his own reality? How do you perceive the ending? Which idea has taken root in your own mind? I think that question, the question of our own perception and not that of Cobb's, is one of the most interesting aspects of the film.
The other point of interest for me is the concept of shared dreaming. Is it possible for a group of people enter into another's dream? Can we gather in darkness and watch the images and narratives that another has constructed? Surely film is this shared dream-state.

p.s. Sometimes I, like Saito and Cobb, become lost in the labyrinth of my own thought world. Someday, you might have to send someone to bring me back. Or maybe I should just carry a ball of thread.

January: Fairy Tales

2012-02-05T16:13:00.000-08:00

Yes, I've had my eye on Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm for a while, so I spent January reading about ogres, princesses, talking animals and cruel parents, step- and otherwise. I have volume 1 of The Complete Tales of the Brothers Grimm (which is 2 volumes) and I made it about half way through that, meaning I read 50 of their 200+ tales. There were well-known ones and ones I'd never read before. Of course, these were the real deal, not the sanitized Disney versions. Cinderella's stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to make the shoe fit, birds peck out people's eyes and a young man visits hell and tricks the devil. My two favorites so far were The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs, which reminded me of Jack and the Beanstalk for some reason, even though it contained no beanstalk, no ogre, no magic treasure to steal. Then in reading up on the tales I was gratified to find that the Grimm brothers also categorized those two tales together, so I must have been making the right connections. Having recently read some Norse myths, it was also interesting to see some parallels in the Teutonic fairy tales, and in following my hunch I found online articles and blog entries discussing the similarities between Jack's beanstalk and the Germanic world tree Yggdrasil. It's been refreshing to switch to thinking about myths, after spending most of 2011 in the 19th century.

I also read The Owl, the Raven and the Dove: the religious meaning of the Grimms' magic fairy tales by G. Ronald Murphy, which offered some interesting historical and cultural criticism. I started The Interpretation of Fairy Tales by Marie-Louise von Franz, but haven't finished it, and Jack Zipes' Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale is still on deck. The only Hans Christian Andersen tale I read so far is The Little Mermaid, which had a lot of interesting symbolism that I missed when reading it as a child, although I did read the original version and not the Disney one. So, since I'm enjoying this and I still have a lot that I haven't gotten to read yet, I'm going to extend the fairy tale theme through February, and then I'll be done; I promise! That is to say, even if I haven't finished reading all the tales available to me, I'll probably be ready for something else.

Aaand...one of the reasons that I didn't finish the above mentioned books is that I read a bunch of other stuff as well:

Icons: Masterpieces of Russian Art by Olga Polyakova
Tesla: Man out of time by Margaret Cheney
Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld
Goliath by Scott Westerfeld
Shadows in Flight by Orson Scott Card
Look Homeward, America by Bill Kauffman
The Complete Moomin Collection: volumes 1 and 6 by Tove Jansson
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Criticism edited by Chester G. Anderson

Now that I've gotten all of those...ahem...pressing volumes out of the way, I'll have more time for Hans, Jacob and Wilhelm. Ooh la la.

2012: The Big Reveal...

2012-02-05T15:45:00.000-08:00

...and it's only a month late! I took stock of 2011, what worked and what didn't, and have made modifications for 2012. Here are my thoughts coming out of 2011:

-The main problem with reading a novel a week is that it's just not sustainable long term. This was an entire year without a break. Ever. Even jobs usually give you time off once in a while. I'll be honest; it was really hard to keep on track all year. Some weeks were insane and I had to choose shorter books. During 2011, I traveled out of the country twice-once for a funeral and once to visit family, had eye surgery, worked at a farmers market and had a 2,000 sq. ft. garden in the summer, took care of my two kids, and had house guests for at least 11 weeks (I lost track). And every Sunday I said to myself, "What am I reading this week?" That's not going to happen this year. I am going to have some breathing room.

-If I kept this up forever, I'd also never get to read long works like War and Peace, and would rarely have time to squeeze in short stories either.I would be limiting myself to one form (the novel), and only novels of a certain length.

-Intellectually, I go on little jaunts where I obsess over a theme for a few weeks and then move on to a different one. This lends itself to reading thematically rather than structurally, which also brings me to my plan for 2012:

THE THEME OF THE MONTH!

It sounds all gourmet, doesn't it? Like those clubs where you sign up and they send you a pound of coffee or chocolate or cheese or escargot (not really) each month. Yes, I know they have book of the month clubs, but I'm definitely going to be reading more than a book a month. I' will, however, read on a certain theme each month, and I'm only going to choose the theme at the beginning of each month. No long-term commitment here. Right now I might think that November will lend itself to all-Shakespeare-all-the-time, but when month #11 actually rolls around, I might be thinking Isaac Asimov. Or novels about jungles. Or short stories. Or Greek lit. Who knows. And I'm not going to put a quota on my reading either. One month (maybe July...aah..vacation) I might whip through 10 books, another might see me battle with one or two. Doesn't matter. I'll pick the theme and see how far I get. If the theme is somehow extra-awesome, I might be inspired to stick with it for another month. I'll probably end up reading some nonfiction and non-theme-related books too, which I may or may not blab about on here. So here's to 2012, which will be spent meandering through many categories.

Fourth Quarter in Review

2012-01-30T07:20:00.000-08:00

From bottom to top, the books I read in the last three months were Bleak House by Charles Dickens, The Prairie by James Fenimore Cooper, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, Persuasion by Jane Austen, A Hero of Our Time by Mikhael Lermontov, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, The Professor by Charlotte Bronte, Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, The Pearl by John Steinbeck, Middlemarch by George Eliot, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

The books that are turned around so you see the pages instead of the spine are stand-ins for books that I read on an e-reader and don't own a hard copy. This last quarter I relied most heavily on the e-reader, as I had finally read most of the books I already owned but hadn't read yet, and was moving on to books I wanted to read but didn't own. In the end, I really found that there are a lot of great books that I enjoyed reading, but will probably only reread once or twice in my life. It's not worth it for me to keep a book for years just because I might want to read it again someday, and these classic novels can be found in any library, or for free online since they're in the public domain.

Which brings me to the e-reader. I got an e-reader in June, and it was very handy when traveling and when reading really long books that would be heavy to hold for hours on end. However, because I'm a fast reader and the screen is fairly small, I have to turn the page (technically, refresh the screen) every 30 seconds or so, and this creates a short delay that jars me out of my mental reading zone every. single. time. Because of this, I found that I read a lot slower using an e-reader than I do using a book, so I still prefer reading a book when possible. That said, I do not regret my e-reader purchase at all. It's great for the purposes I mentioned above, and it's also more convenient to quickly load a new book onto it than to make a 30 minute round trip drive to the library.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

2012-01-29T20:21:00.000-08:00

December 26th, 2011 dawned, as mornings tend to do...but this day was different. It was the first day of the last week of 2011, the day I would pick up my last novel of the year. It was exhilarating, yet a little sad, as I approached the end of an era (if I can pretentiously use the word "era" to describe a one-year-thing). I had chosen Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I found fitting for reasons I'll get to in a minute. It was a short book. After the previous week's monster, Middlemarch, it was going to be a piece of cake to whip through the 250-odd pages. So as the birds chirped merrily and the sun's rays shone upon the "December 26" page of my page-a-day calendar, I did not pick up the book. Instead, I ate leftovers and stayed in my pajamas, because I was on vacation. Sort of. This repeated itself for five days. It was like an acute but unexpected case of senioritis, where the finish line is so close that you expect momentum to carry you through. Of course, on December 30th I realized that this book wasn't going to read itself, and what was worse, I now had only 48 hours to perform the literary equivalent of chugging a $500 bottle of champagne. Sorry, Joyce. But I did it!

After reading most of the book on December 30th, I picked it up again the next day but got distracted when company arrived. Then I was making food and conversing wittily until I realized that it was 11:15 pm and I still had a couple of chapters left. I sat down to finish, cursing myself for my completely typical procrastination, but in the end, it worked out. I had the privilege of reading the last page at 11:45, ringing in the new year with one of the best lines ever written still fresh in my mind: "Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." I really could not have planned a better way to end 2011.

I saved this book for the end in part because it is the coming of age story of a young artist. The main character, Stephen Dedalus, is a fictional version of Joyce. Through Stephen, we see Joyce's intellectual and artistic awakening. I wanted this book to close my year of 52 classic novels because, as the months went by, I saw that this year and all its accompanying blog posts have become a portrait of me as a young (-ish) artist. I look back on these posts and see my development as a reader, and I look through the notebook and computer files I've created this year and see my development as a writer. This isn't to say that I have now reached a particular stage and will remain static. Any portrait is only a partial portrait. But this is my partial portrait, and I'm pretty happy with it. A new year lies ahead of me, with a different reading strategy and new ideas to explore. When I look beyond 2012, I see the years before me like shining pearls on a string, waiting to drop one by one into my hand. And you, reader, have your own jewels to gather. Look around you. Greet your life with an open hand.

Happy New Year.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

2012-01-21T13:54:00.000-08:00

I tried to read this novel for three months before actually managing to do it. I got it for my birthday in September, and I thought to myself, "Awesome! I'm going to read this next week!" Well, the next week shaped up to be hectic, and Middlemarch is over 700 pages, so I put it on deck for the following week and bumped up a shorter work from my list. The following week arrived, and the scenario repeated itself. For six weeks. I was starting to fear that Middlemarch was going to become some kind of literary nemesis, or the one that got away, and I would descend into madness like Captain Ahab, taking my family down with me in my struggle to FINALLY READ THIS BOOK!!!

Then the week before Christmas arrived. One group of company had just left, another was due to arrive in six days. Gifts were bought and wrapped; packages sent; cookies baked; house decorated; programs attended; functions contributed to; cards mailed; menus planned... it was the calm before the storm. I pulled out the giant book. I sat down. And I FINISHED IT! Well, not in one sitting, but in one week. After such a build up of anticipation, one might fear an anticlimactic letdown, a mental "meh..." during the epilogue. Fortunately we're talking about one of the greatest English novels of all time here.

I would describe Middlemarch as detailing a set of character portraits and the intricate web of relationships that grows between them. Some of the characters are initially misunderstood by other characters. After some time the mistaken character realizes (at least partly) the true nature of the other character. Some characters change and grow over time; others are fossilized and refuse to change. The work tracks a community over the course of time, and therefore its detail and length are necessary. In some ways, the first two thirds of the novel functioned as set up for the final third. Because of this I found it to have a slow start and to be more difficult to get into. Upon finishing it, I wasn't really sure how well I liked it, but after taking time to think it over, I appreciate it more. As the web of relationships grows between the characters, over time the book grows on the reader. Middlemarch is well-written, with a lot of social commentary and character development. Beyond that, I'm a little paralyzed about how to review it or what to say. After all, it's Middlemarch.

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

2012-01-21T12:08:00.000-08:00

The Pearl is Steinbeck's sixteenth published work, and the third that I read this year (following The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden). It is based on an oral Mexican-Indian story he heard while traveling in the Gulf of California. It is a short work with a very folktale quality.

The protagonist, Kino, is a pearl diver who finds an immense and unusual pearl, which had been referred to in local legends as The Pearl of the World. He believes that the discovery of this pearl will bring happiness and prosperity to his family, but instead it brings tragedy. Technically, the pearl itself is neutral and has no effect on Kino, but the way other humans react to his discovery brings tragedy. The pearl symbolizes the American Dream, and Steinbeck is making the point that, while pursuit of the American Dream itself is neutral, our world makes it impossible for it to function as intended.

Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo

2012-01-21T10:05:00.000-08:00

Gah! Yes, I am still alive. No, my fingers were not chewed off by fire ants, making it impossible to type. And this 7-yr-old laptop, although a triceratops among Arabian stallions, is still plodding along. There has been absolutely nothing standing between me and the blogosphere... except a series of houseguests interspersed with illnesses and various commitments which my duty-bound sense of knightly honor compelled me to fulfill. So, you know, there was some life I had to live. I do apologize for leaving with a cliffhanger, four weeks from the end of the year, my loyal readers waiting to discover whether I held up for the final month and fulfilled my new year's resolution! So here is the next installment, as the great saga of 2011 drew to a close...

The title Notre Dame de Paris is often translated as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which I found to be unfortunately misleading. The book isn't entirely, or even primarily, about the hunchback Quasimodo, although he is an important character. The title refers to the cathedral of that name, around which the book revolves and in or near which all the major action takes place. I had previously read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, so I went into this book expecting it to be historically focused, descriptive and detailed. It was. I did not realize, however, that Notre Dame was so intensely focused on architecture as an art form, the eventual decline of architecture due to the development of the printing press, and the architecture and evolution of the city of Paris itself. I found these sections of the book to be the most fascinating, and they enabled me to look at art, architecture and the growth of a city through new eyes. I would recommend the book for these sections alone.

The plot, which follows the unfortunate lives of several people who exist on the fringes of society, explores themes of fate and social conflict. The story arc of Quasimodo's affection for Esmeralda gives the book an additional tragic slant, and when combined with the tragedies of the decline of architecture and the cathedral and of the ill-fated lives of Esmeralda and Claude Frollo, the overall effect is sombre, dark and gothic, like the Notre Dame cathedral itself.

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

2012-01-01T20:35:00.000-08:00

Sinclair Lewis' satirical novel is set in the fictional Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. The novel is very descriptive, and although coastal dwellers may find the descriptions of a small midwestern town amusing, I found it a little creepy to read a nearly exact description of the hamlet in North Dakota in which I spent much of my childhood. Lewis isn't lying. For better or for worse, this is small-town America. Now, as Lewis was writing satirically, he accurately skewered most of the negative aspects of living in a small town. I'm sure other writers have written on the positive aspects of small town culture, and for the sake of balance I should probably read one...but I won't do it anytime soon. I'm still enjoying shaking my head at Gopher Prairie.

The main character, Carol Kennicott, moves to Gopher Prairie, her husband's hometown, after her marriage. She struggles for years as a person whom the townspeople perceive as an outsider, although she wants to be considered an insider. I too moved to a small town and was mystified at the insistence many people had upon labeling me a newcomer. Even after two years of attending the small school, I was referred to as "the new girl". After two years of being the new girl, the prospects of ever being considered an insider were bleak. I can sympathize with Carol. Unlike Carol, however, I turned 18 and left. If I had been born into the place, had been accepted as one of the community from birth, I may have been happy to come back after college and make a life in that small town. In that way, I can understand the residents of Gopher Prairie and the residents of my own small town, and their enjoyment of their community. Unfortunately, their protective instincts toward their community are a double-edged sword, as they use those instincts to excuse their reticence to accept people who genuinely want to belong.

Oh, and last week I went to Minneapolis. I'll admit that I imagined the residents of Gopher Prairie, admiring the sleek Euro designs as they wandered through Ikea, or buying trendy clothes at the Mall of America just to impress their friends back home. And then I went back to my house, in a town that is not tiny, where people do not tell me that I don't belong.

The Professor by Charlotte Brontë

2012-01-01T19:42:00.000-08:00

Charlotte Brontë wrote The Professor before she wrote Jane Eyre, but it was published posthumously. I found the plot interesting and the characters enjoyable, while the entire work was much less intense and serious than Jane Eyre. After Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, The Professor revealed a lighter side to the Brontë sisters. Although there were serious and occasionally tragic events, the ending allows the protagonists to find permanent happiness.

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

2012-01-01T19:31:00.001-08:00

I finished this book in mid-November, but I'm currently chipping away at a six week lag between time of reading a book and time of blogging about it. Unfortunately, because of this book's location in the murky recesses of the foggy prehistoric past of my memory...I may have forgotten some of my initial impressions.

Dead Souls ends abruptly, Gogol having destroyed part of it shortly before his death. The plot follows the anti-hero Chichikov as he tries to increase his social standing in a cynical and unorthodox way, meeting caricatures of Russian peasant characters along the way. Having read several other Russian authors this year, I would say that Gogol fits comfortably among his peers in terms of style, character development and choice of subjects. In other words, the book's pretty Russian. I read the Constance Garnett translation and enjoyed it, although the choppy ending left me wondering about Gogol's intentions. Was he planning to make more revisions to the work? Gogol is well-loved by Russians as one of their country's best writers, but after taking several weeks to digest this novel, I've come to the conclusion that I need to read some of his other works in order to appreciate him better. Dead Souls alone is not enough to evoke the appreciation that Dostoevsky (my current favorite Russian author) has gained from me.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

2012-01-01T19:31:00.000-08:00

I read this novel in early November, but it would have been great for Halloween. Because the author isn't completely explicit with details, he builds suspense and leaves the reader wondering about the exact nature of the ghost and its interaction with the children. I enjoyed The Turn of the Screw and The Woman in White for similar reasons, in part because they rely on suspense and ambiguity to keep the reader psychologically off balance. I recommend this book for readers who enjoy mystery and suspense, possibly even psychological horror.

A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

2011-11-19T20:58:00.000-08:00

Four of the last nine novels I've read have been Russian, which is a record for me. Before September, my only foray into Russian lit had been two nonconsecutive weeks with Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov). Lermontov has some similarities with other Russian authors, and the byronic hero is a common character. We see him in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, again in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, and now in A Hero of Our Time's main character, Pechorin. Lermontov was conscious of Byron's influence on his writing, and Byron is mentioned or alluded to several times in this novel.

A Hero of Our Time sets itself apart from the other Russian novels I've read recently in part due to its incredible descriptions of the Caucasus and its people. There are around fifty languages spoken in the Caucasus, and it's not possible to generalize about one culture type or people group exemplified by the region. However, it's safe to say that the peoples of the Caucasus aren't Russian, either in their mother tongue or their culture, yet they were part of the Russian Empire. For Russia, the Caucasus represents both the self and the other, and an interesting discussion of the role of the Caucasus in Russian literature can be found here.

I wouldn't say there is a lot of in-depth character development in this novel, but the byronic hero is meant to be read as a type, not as a complex individual, and the author accomplishes what he sets out to do. I would recommend A Hero of Our Time as a softer introduction to Russian lit than Dostoevsky. Lermontov also captures the senses of romantic longing, appreciation for nature and inescapable ennui just as Pushkin does in Eugene Onegin, but with a more active plot. If you want to read about horses and samovars and Russian scenery, this is the book for you. On the other hand, if you want to read about thwarted characters or characters for whom life has lost its meaning...this is also the book for you. Finally, if you don't have a lot of time and you're looking for something under 300 pages but with more intellectual weight than a plot-based current bestseller, this is the book for you too! And if, upon finishing, you find yourself casting about for something even more deep, dark and delicious, well...there's always Dostoevsky.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

2011-11-13T20:46:00.000-08:00

The fourth Austen novel I've read this year, Persuasion follows Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma. Persuasion was Austen's last novel, and her only one featuring a heroine who is far past her youth. The novel has great merit as a love story with social commentary, and while Austen's comedic sense is at times apparent, the overall effect is not as humorous as that of Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility.

Although I've heard critiques of Austen on the basis that she is a product of her time, the complaint is both obvious and disingenuous. Austen could no more write from the viewpoint of a postmodern feminist than I could write from a viewpoint that will be common in 2315 CE. I personally find it valuable to have access to works written from earlier viewpoints. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to understand history without authentic documents, which include letters, biographies, newspapers and, of course, works of fiction.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

2011-11-06T16:56:00.000-08:00

This book will knock you out and leave you for dead in Mexico. Or at least, if you're rather flighty and nervous like me, it will keep you at the edge of your seat, with occasional heart palpitations. The Woman in White, written in 1859, is one of the first mystery novels and has earned its reputation as one of the best. I do have to say, at the risk of opening a can of feminism, that the plot is probably creepier to a woman reader, since it concerns the manipulation, threatening, drugging and forcible confinement of women by two plotting men. I'm sure a feminist critique would yield much about nineteenth century gender relations and power differentials. I'll get right on that...when I have a moment... Also interesting is a point brought up by Michael Chabon's essay "Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes" in Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, in which Chabon explores the changes in attitudes toward novel genres such as mysteries and science fiction. A hundred years ago, a novelist could write a mystery or science fiction novel and still be considered a serious writer of literature. This is not generally the case today. Chabon asks, if Conan Doyle had written A Study in Scarlet today, would it come to be considered a classic, or would it be buried in the "mysteries" corner at the bookstore, dismissed due to its genre label? That fate could have come to The Woman in White if it had been published a hundred years later. I'm glad it wasn't. But I plan to take a second look at the mystery or sci fi section in my library. Perhaps I will find an author who explores universal themes, or who writes incredible prose, or who makes characters come alive. Perhaps I'll find a book that shouldn't have been judged by its cover.

The Prairie by James Fenimore Cooper

2011-10-23T17:53:00.000-07:00

I know, I'm just a blogging fiend today. I've got to get all these books out of my head so I can think about the next ones. The Prairie is the third of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales that I've read this year, the others being The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans. There are five Leatherstocking Tales, and I originally intended to read all of them this year, but I just don't know if I can do it. Now, The Last of the Mohicans was pretty good, and The Pioneers had some good parts, especially the end. (No, not because it was the end). The Prairie was my least favorite so far. Again, the ending was the best part. The novels seem to drag at various points, with plot and dialogue being uninteresting, but they always pick up at the end. That is Fenimore Cooper's greatest strength. After three novels' worth of Nathaniel Bumpo fighting Indians, protecting damsels and waxing eloquent about nature, I feel like I'm reading the same thing over and over. As an aside, Mark Twain wrote a satirical essay called Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences, which I found quite humorous. He describes Fenimore Cooper's writing style more critically than I would think accurate, but it's eight pages of satire, it's funny, and it's free at Project Gutenberg. Check it out. Maybe check out Fenimore Cooper first, so you know what you're laughing at.

Stats:

Hero: the trapper aka Hawkeye aka the Deerslayer aka Natty Bumpo aka Leatherstocking

Bad guys: the Tetons and some lawless white settlers

Good guys: the Sioux and some nice white settlers

Two-dimensional plot devices: the females (as Fenimore Cooper calls them)

There was a lot of: tracking, shooting, spying, sneaking up, escaping, capturing

There should have been more: plot. I really shouldn't have read Twain's essay before writing this entry. hee hee

This book makes you want to: fall asleep (help me, I can't stop myself)

This book makes you glad you don't have to: die alone in the wilderness without family, step on dry twigs an inopportune moments, read the last two books in the series, although I probably will anyway

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

2011-10-23T17:10:00.000-07:00

In which I make a gross miscalculation, and am saved by the power of public domain.

I was at a book sale. I bought a volume entitled "Charles Dickens, The Complete Works, Bleak House, 1" I understood this to mean that Bleak House was the first novel in the set; maybe they were arranged alphabetically? Alas, no. When I reached the end of the volume, page 435, I was obviously nowhere near the end of the novel. None of the plotlines were near resolution. This was definitely Bleak House volume I of II. And to make matters worse, it was Sunday, and I was supposed to start reading my next book on Monday. Help! Hurray for the Gutenberg Project. I went online and downloaded a pdf of Bleak House, plowing through the rest of it on Sunday and Monday. Phew...

This was the fourth Dickens novel I've read this year, the previous ones being Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and Hard Times. In the past I have also read A Tale of Two Cities and A Christmas Carol. So many people have said that Bleak House is their favorite Dickens novel, that perhaps my expectations were too high. When I initially finished it, my opinion was lukewarm. Now, the plots were excellent, as were the characters. This book is full of people you will love to hate. The two parts I wasn't thrilled about are as follows. WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.

First, the character of John Jarndyce seemed one-dimensional. He was very important to the plot, but the reader doesn't really get to know him or sympathize with him. Because he is wealthy and benevolent, many of his actions have a deus ex machina appearance. When the other characters are in a bind, Jarndyce will help them out. I couldn't see much motive or internal conflict in him although, to be fair, the novel is like that in its treatment of the other characters too. I guess because he is a major character I wanted to see more of his internal life. Secondly, the death of Richard appears very Victorian and hysterical to me, a 21st century reader. He becomes mentally consumed by the court case and ends up contracting a fever and dying of consumption. I know the idea of people driving themselves to illness and death through emotional turmoil was more common then, but this particular scenario didn't satisfy me.

END SPOILERS

Now, don't let my two disappointments cause you to think that the book wasn't worth reading, or that I didn't enjoy it. I certainly liked it better than Hard Times (my least favorite by Dickens so far) or Oliver Twist. A Tale of Two Cities is my old favorite, but I haven't read it in so long that I don't think I can rightly compare it with these. At this point I'm not sure whether Great Expectations or Bleak House is my favorite, but after having read six of his works I definitely have a more multidimensional view of Dickens as an author. I know I've said this before, but I strongly recommend reading multiple works by a single author before formulating your opinion of him/her. If I had only read Hard Times, I would have a very different opinion of Dickens than if I had only read Bleak House.

Stats:
Narrator, heroine: Esther Summerson
Bored to death: Lady Dedlock
The wards of the state: Ada and Richard
Telescopic philanthropist: Mrs. Jellyby
Fool you love to hate: Harold Skimpole
Prototypical detective: Inspector Bucket
Benevolent guardian: John Jarndyce
Sleazy lawyer: Mr. Tulkinghorn
Funny fop: William Guppy
Unfortunate victim of spontaneous combustion: Krook
There but for the grace of God goes Oliver Twist: Jo
There was a lot of: lawyerly ridiculosity, letters, meetings, dialogue
There should have been more: plum puddings. just kidding.
This book makes you want to: mind your own business, clean out your closets, avoid lawyers
This book makes you glad you don't have to: sue anybody if you don't want to, be illiterate

Third Quarter in Review

2011-10-23T16:11:00.000-07:00

From top to bottom, my third quarter of 2011 consisted of: The Hound of the Baskervilles, Emma, The Brothers Karamazov, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Little Women, East of Eden, Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Return of the Native, Around the World in Eighty Days, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, Fathers and Sons, Eugene Onegin, On the Road.

I'm 75% of the way to my goal! Not quite ready to start walking around with a sign that says, "the end is nigh"...better get through another 10 books first.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

2011-10-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

After three Russian novels, I was looking for something different. Enter Kerouac. I got this book for a dollar at the farmer's market. After three weeks of watching youthful Slavs visit the picturesque countryside, only to slowly waste away under a grim fog of sourceless Russian ennui, I caught a ride with young Kerouac as he hitchhiked across the country, stayed with friends in rundown apartments and generally experienced life, liberty and the pursuit of consciousness, ~~occasionally~~ frequently with chemical assistance. This book is truly iconic in its description of the Beat generation, and only slightly disturbing was my discovery that Jack Kerouac's altered states of consciousness weren't all that different from my usual states of consciousness.

For example:

"For just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds...I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water."

I can dig that. Even without benzedrine. But Kerouac insisted that his novel detailed not a drug spree but a religious journey. In his words, it "was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street San Francisco (those 2 visions), and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all the way. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR GOD. And once he has found Him, the Godhood of God is forever established and really must not be spoken about."

I know what you mean, Jack. There's a certain threshold that, when you cross it, you leave the world of words behind, and what is beyond there can't really be spoken about. It can't be brought back into the land of speech, incarnated into a body of grammar, without being torn apart as it enters the dimension of duality. So it stays out there, and when you try to talk about it part of your mind has to go out there to think about it, and then the person you're talking to realizes that you're not all here, and they're right. You're not. But it's not the benzedrine talking, it's the beatific vision. I've been there too, Jack, just over the threshold, at the place where Beat was born.

Related explanatory facts: Kerouac wrote the novel in three weeks, typing continuously onto a 120-foot roll of teletype paper. This led to Truman Capote's well-known zinger, "That's not writing, that's typing".

The Beat Generation is often seen as a space-holder between WWII and the turbulent sixties, but without the Beats, the sixties as we know them would not have happened. The Beats influenced Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and, of course, the Beatles. They demystified drug use, explored multiple spiritual traditions, fought censorship, pursued ecological viewpoints, opposed the military-industrial complex and appreciated idiosyncrasy over conformity. "Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose." - Allen Ginsberg

Kerouac himself describes Beat as "(being) watchful, catlike, inquisitive...in the street but not of it. ...It's a sort of furtiveness, like we were a generation of furtives. You know, with an inner knowledge there's no use flaunting on that level, the level of the "public,"a kind of beatness-I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves-and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world... we're a beat generation." Kerouac saw his generation as the beatific generation; the generation that would see God, but in the end his vision was a hopeful projection onto his generation, and did not manifest in reality.

Eugene Onegin

2011-10-02T19:50:00.000-07:00

First of all, it's pronounced oh-NEG-in, not ON-again. Now that we've gotten that out of the way...

Pushkin, the great Russian romantic poet, wrote his novel Eugene Onegin completely in verse. I like poetry although I don't know much about its different styles and eras, and I enjoyed this novel's plot, themes and meter. This week marked three Russian novels in a row for me, and they were all extremely different from each other.

     Throughout the novel Pushkin mentions, and sometimes satirizes, current events that weren't familiar to me, but the end notes explained these references. Make sure you read an edition with explanatory notes; I used the Oxford World Classics edition that I paid 80 cents for in a clearance section. Clearly, Iowans aren't stampeding to read Pushkin...but they should be!

SPOILERS AHEAD!

     The title character, Eugene Onegin, is a bored dandy who has constructed himself out of current social conventions, specifically, the Byronic anti-hero popular at the time. He moves to the country and befriends his neighbor Lensky, a romantic poet. Lensky falls in love with Olga, and Olga's sister Tatyana loves Onegin but he doesn't return her love. Eventually the two friends quarrel, and then duel, with a tragic outcome. Onegin and Tatyana meet again years later in Moscow; this time he loves her but she is married to a Russian aristocrat and rejects him.

      Tatyana is a personification of Russia. Her personality, likes, dislikes, even her childhood home in the country are carefully chosen as the embodiment of Russia. She is initially attracted by Western social customs and institutions, but she eventually chooses the dignity and stability of Russian ways. Onegin is a character of no real substance; he is a mere social construct. As such, his tragedy is to live in loneliness, unable to participate in a real relationship. Sadly and ironically, Pushkin himself was killed in a duel, a victim of his own internalization of social conventions.

Stats:
Eponymous anti-hero: Onegin
Romantic poet, a younger version of Pushkin: Lensky
Quintessentially Russian heroine: Tatyana (she is likely the heroine in Russian lit most beloved by Russians)
There was a lot of: character thoughts, satirical asides, parties, traveling
There should have been more: food. I know; I'm predictable.
This book makes you want to: analyze your motives and the conventions you have accepted
This book makes you glad you don't have to: shoot somebody simply because they demand satisfaction.

Fathers and Sons

2011-10-02T16:43:00.000-07:00

Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev, may be the first modern Russian novel (the other contender being Gogol's Dead Souls, also on my list for 2011). Published in 1862, Turgenev's work focuses on the conflict between the liberalism of the 1830s/1840s and the nihilism of the next generation. In Russian, the title is Fathers and Children, but was translated as Fathers and Sons because the translators thought it sounded more lyrical and titular.

     The book follows two young men and their fathers, contrasting the ideals of the younger generation with those of their elders, but also contrasting one father/son relationship with the other. Intergenerational conflict was nothing new even then, as the two aging fathers drily observe that they once rolled their eyes at their own parents' backward ideas as well. However, the marked contrast between the attitudes of the two young men demonstrates that one doesn't have to reject relationships with friends and family who hold different philosophical ideals than one does. Bazarov drives his family and friends away because he finds their liberal bourgeois ideas inferior to nihilism. Arkady, on the other hand, treats his father and uncle with respect and affection, enjoying their companionship despite their philosophical differences. In the end, Arkady embraces life while Bazarov indifferently wastes away, although, because it wasn't clear to me to what extent Arkady modified his nihilistic beliefs, I can't say how much of his eventual fulfillment was due to his relationships and how much was due to his (possible) rejection of nihilism.

     Turgenev definitely has a different style of writing than either Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn, the other two Russians I have read this year. Dostoevsky was a Slavophile and Turgenev was a Westernizer, so the two disagreed through most of their lifetimes but eventually reached reconciliation after Dostoevsky's Pushkin speech. Dosteovsky's style is much more psychological, while Turgenev is more socially oriented.

     More fun facts: Turgenev and Tolstoy were close friends, and Turgenev also influenced writers of the next generation such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad. He is ranked among the top nineteenth century Russian prose writers, along with Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekov and Dostoevsky. Fathers and Sons was an interesting book, touching on important themes such as transgression and redemption through love. Although Turgenev was a Westernizer, advocating social reform, the abolition of serfdom and the integration of Enlightenment ideals into Russian culture, in this work he appears nearly Slavophilic in his portrayal of Arkady's fulfillment through returning to his father's way of life. I say nearly Slavophilic because he doesn't depict religion as an important element at all, whereas for Slavophiles it is a central part of the equation.

Stats:
Just because you're a nihilist, doesn't mean you have to be a jerk: Arkady
Or wait, maybe it does: Bazarov
Uncle, your cravat is stylish but your ideals are not: Pavel
Dad, seriously, you're embarrassing me in front of my friends: Nikolai
Eventually overcame class differences: Nikolai and Fenichka
Kind old fossils who deserved a better son: Vasily Bazarov and Arina Bazarova
Who invited him? Sitnikov
There was a lot of: discussing, disagreeing, traveling, condescending
This book makes you want to: take time to discuss things with friends. These guys were quite productive in their philosophical explorations. It probably helped that they didn't have cell phones, tvs or the internet to distract them.
This book makes you glad you don't have to: Stringently live according to your class' particular responsibility, travel long distances on a dirt road in a wagon with no shocks.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

2011-09-25T19:50:00.000-07:00

Ivan Denisovich, written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and published in 1962, chronicles a day in the life of a fictional Soviet gulag prisoner. Solzhenitsyn was well-qualified to write such a work, as he himself spent eight years in a gulag in the Siberian steppes of northeastern Kazakhstan. His crime? Referring to Stalin as "the master" and "the boss" in a letter to a friend.

The book was originally published in the Soviet Union with Khrushchev's approval and with some censorship, and was the first account of Stalinist suppression to come from within. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich led to Solzhenitsyn's deportation from Russia, and to his reception of the Nobel Prize.

The reader of Ivan Denisovich will follow the protagonist through a breakfast of thin gruel, repeated searches, forced marches, heavy labor, biting wind, thin clothes, shorted rations, incredible bureaucracy and cruelty and dehumanizing treatment at the hands of prison guards. Through it all, the heroic triumph of the indomitable human spirit...just kidding. It's pretty bleak.

(But you should definitely read it. There aren't any gory or disgusting parts, so it would be suitable for anyone old enough to understand it.)

Stats:
Protagonist: Ivan Denisovich
The Baptist: Alyosha
The foreman: Tyurin
The snivelling worm: Fetyukov
Old deaf guy: Senka
There was a lot of: freezing cold, wasting time for Soviet protocol, inhumane conditions
There should have been more: food. seriously, grass seed gruel and 200 g black bread isn't enough to lay bricks on
This book makes you want to: support free speech and human rights
This book makes you glad you don't have to:...it better be obvious...

Curious Confessions of a Literary Nature

2011-09-25T18:59:00.000-07:00

A recent commenter asked me if I have a list of all the books I've read. Unfortunately I don't have a list, but the comment sent me trudging through the backwaters of my brain, recollecting my evolution as a reader. And since this is my party and I'll blog what I want to, here's a post on my literary life.

     My mom says I learned to read when I was three. The first word I read (and I remember this) was the word ICE written in large red letters on an ice freezer outside a gas station. I enjoyed reading and my skill improved over the next few years. I don't remember going to libraries much at that point, but we didn't live near libraries then. My brothers and I had lots of children's books at home, and we often received books as gifts for Christmas or birthdays. Our parents read us bedtime stories at night, even after we could read well on our own. When I was in first grade I received a paperback set of 22 Moby Books Illustrated Classic Editions, which I read repeatedly. These are classic novels abridged for a young audience, and I wore some of them out. My favorites included Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, Little Women, Black Beauty, The Call of the Wild, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, The Wizard of Oz, and Sherlock Holmes. These books were my first exposure to classic literature, and although they were extremely abridged and very adapted, I consider them fundamental to the development of my enjoyment of classic novels. You may notice that I have read a few of these titles and blogged on them this year; that is because I don't consider having read a 50 page adaptation to be equivalent to reading the novel itself.

     By third grade I was established as one of the better readers in my class, which established a positive feedback loop. From that point I was placed in the more advanced reading classes and given assignments with more difficult content. I can see how children who struggle with reading and are forced to read technically simple but content-poor assignments would not grow to love reading unless adults continued to read to them and expose them to new and interesting material. Unfortunately, I must point out that most of what I read during reading class wasn't worth remembering. So many reading textbooks are cobbled together from little snippets of texts taken out of context. Teachers would do better to expose students to entire works. If that means sticking mainly to short stories, so be it. I don't know how many excerpts I read, never knowing how the story began or ended. No wonder some of my classmates were frustrated and found it to be a meaningless exercise. Starting in fifth grade, our classroom had a little lending library, just a couple of shelves, but it kept me busy. We didn't have video games at home, and we often didn't have a tv either, so I read a lot during my free time too. I was also somewhat introverted and didn't live near many of my friends anyway, so books were a great way to pass the time. By the time I finished elementary school, I had read many classic kids' series, such as The Chronicles of Narnia, Little House on the Prairie, and Anne of Green Gables, to name a few. When I was in junior high, my mom bought me the Dover Thrift Editions volume Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. These Dover Thrift Editions were a dollar at the grocery store. This was my first exposure to poetry, and was, in retrospect, certainly instrumental in shaping my preferences for 19th century over that of any other. Currently I would say that Longfellow, Tennyson, Frost and Whitman are my favorite poets.

     As the oldest child, by the time I reached high school, I had outgrown the kids' books in the house and didn't have any older siblings to provide me with young adult books. My parents had their college textbooks, a set of encyclopedias, and a few other nonfiction books such as a Readers' Digest book of curious facts in American history. They also had some fiction, mainly western novels by Louis L'Amour. I read a Louis L'Amour novel but wasn't interested, so I read some of the college textbooks and other nonfiction, as well as random encyclopedia entries that interested me. Yes, this was long before home internet access! Then I read more of the college textbooks, including some of Goethe's Faust, although I was only about 14 at the time so a lot of it probably went over my head. My mom also had one volume of the Readers Digest abridged classics, in which I read The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck multiple times, as well as The Scarlet Pimpernel. Our high school library was pretty spare too, consisting mainly of donations of current romance novels and American young adult fiction from the 1930s-1960s. After I got my drivers' license at age 15, I started frequenting the town library. In our town of 1,500 people, I didn't actually need a library card, and the library itself was only a few bookcases of fiction and a few more of nonfiction. Still, over the next three years I read Michael Crichton, John Grisham and some other random fiction. My crowning achievement at that point was probably reading Les Miserables unabridged at age 15, although it took me nearly all school year. I had taken it out of the public library, and there were no renewal notices or overdue fees, so I had it for about six months before returning it. In eleventh grade I took two English electives with Mrs. Rusten: Fiction and American Literature. In our fiction course we read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, A Tale of Two Cities and one other novel, the name of which unfortunately escapes me at the moment, but Fitzgerald and Dickens made a deep impression on me.

     When I went to a small rural college in southern Manitoba, I encountered the largest library I had ever seen. If you're thinking it wasn't actually very big, you're right. It was a research library consisting mainly of nonfiction, and I got my money's worth. During my four years there I read a lot.   <---understatement     Most of the books I read were related to my assignments, and I read fiction in the summers. I remember reading The Catcher in the Rye and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland between books on linguistics and sociology. After graduating, I went to Kazakhstan to teach English for seven months, which was a challenging but enjoyable experience. I spent a lot of time planning lessons, but my four western housemates and I also had a lot of downtime. We didn't bring any books with us for leisure reading, and English reading material in that city was hard to come by. At times my brain felt like it was gasping for intellectual air. (Okay, some of that may have been culture shock.) The American embassy had a small lending library for expats, its contents made up of whatever books visiting Americans had brought with them and then decided not to bring home with them. Now think about this. "The book was so bad that I can't spare 8 oz of luggage weight to bring it back, so I'll leave it at the embassy." That's right. I read a lot of so-bad-it-was-fortunately-forgettable sci-fi, but the one rose among thorns, so to speak, was Orson Scott Card. I picked up Xenocide, not knowing it was third in a series, and couldn't put it down. Imagine my disappointment upon getting to the end and discovering that the last 30 pages were missing. I didn't find another copy of Xenocide until eight years later, but it was worth the wait. I then proceeded to read eight Orson Scott Card novels in about 10 days. He is now well-established as one of my favorite authors. After I got back from Kazakhstan, I stayed with my grandparents for two months while finding an apartment. I immediately proceeded to check out 20 books at a time from the library, sit down and read them in five days, and then take them back and exchange them for 20 more. I had to make up for lost time, you know. (Of course, my reading slowed down considerably after I found a job.)

     After 4.5 years of marriage, our first child was born, followed by a second two years later. Thus began a period of very little reading which lasted about four years. With two small children and a job, I just didn't have time. We only lived a block from the public library, and I took the kids there a couple times a week to pick out new reads for them. I would usually get a couple novels for myself, but only had a chance to open them during the kids' naptime, if at all.

     Now that my kids are school-age and can play by themselves without drowning or electrocuting each other, I make time in the early morning or in the evening to read. This is also made possible by them sleeping through the night, allowing my brain to maintain more than two synapses at once. Last year I noticed that, although I was reading a lot, I was often choosing books that weren't very challenging and books that were in the "new releases" section of the library, as that section is located near the front. I had a lot of classic novels on my shelf that were always getting put off to some later (unspecified) time. Remembering my past enjoyment of Dickens, Hugo, Fitzgerald and others, I finally decided to tackle the volumes languishing on my shelves, and in the process I have been led down various rabbit trails to wonderful books that I wasn't even aware of two years ago. Although I won't be reading a classic novel a week next year (the rule necessarily limits the length of books I can read this year-no War and Peace for me), I will continue to set out a syllabus month by month and keep to it. The fact that I'm still excited about this after nearly a year tells me I'm doing something right.

Around the World in Eighty Days

2011-09-18T20:54:00.000-07:00

It was the last week of August and I wanted a fast-paced adventure to send summer off. Jules Verne didn't let me down. The premise is simple, but leaves plenty of room for plot twists. Phileas Fogg, a man of mechanically precise routine, wagers a large sum that he can travel around the world in eighty days. Accompanied by his loyal but occasionally bumbling servant, he embarks on a journey which allows no room for delay or missed connections. Fogg is pursued around the world by Detective Fix, who believes Fogg to be a bank robber and has vowed to arrest him as soon as the warrant arrives. Will Phileas Fogg's mathematical precision bring him back to London in time, or will natural disasters and human error result in his forfeit of £20,000?
     This novel was originally published as a serial, which is obvious by the cliffhanger at the end of nearly every chapter. Part of the appeal for Verne's original audience was the descriptions of exotic countries and of various steamers and railway lines. The reader could truly become an armchair traveller as s/he followed Fogg's progress in a biweekly French magazine.
     I was struck by Fogg's mathematical precision and imperturbable calm in the face of repeated delays. No matter how difficult the situation appears, Fogg remains unruffled. If he loses time in one leg of the journey, he is confident that he will make it up at a future time. In his mind, all delays and mishaps are foreseen and prepared for. This brought a smile to my face one day while I was sitting at a red light, 13 minutes away from a destination at which I was due in 7 minutes. Fogg remained placid in the face of a major financial loss; why should I chafe over a few minutes?
   Plot movement depends heavily on weather developments, local occurrences, human ingenuity and pushing the limits of mechanical performance. Throughout the novel we see industry and nature bump up against each other, sometimes with thrilling resolutions. Verne's opinion of industry and modernity remains resolutely positive throughout the book. The railway doesn't trample nature or destroy the livelihood of peasants, it slips quickly through forest and plains, avoiding dangers and inconveniences along the way. This positive view of modernity and industrialization contrasts sharply with the opinions of D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, the authors I read in the two weeks preceding this one. At first I thought that part of this could be attributed to Verne's location in the 1870s, versus that of Lawrence in the 1910s-20s: perhaps Lawrence saw effects of industrialism that Verne never anticipated? But this hypothesis is faulty as Hardy was a compatriot of Verne's, publishing in the 1870s as well.
     Despite the positive outlook of Around the World, I don't wish to paint Verne as a saccharine optimist; some of his other works show a much darker point of view. The most famous example is Verne's lost novel, Paris in the Twentieth Century. Verne wrote it in 1863 but his editor suggested he set it aside for 20 years (do most editors take such a long view of things?) because it was too dystopian and technologically unbelievable. Verne put it in a safe, and it was discovered by his great-grandson in 1989 and published in 1994. That's right, just 17 years ago. Oh, and some of the unbelievable things Verne predicted? Gasoline-powered cars, mutually assured destruction, electric chairs, calculators, computers, the internet, high-speed trains and skyscrapers. Nothing about Wonder Bread though...perhaps too dystopian for a Frenchman.

Stats:
mathematicalicious hero: Phileas Fogg
goofy manservant: Passepartout
warrant-less stalker: Detective Fix
Fogg's pasttimes: reading newspapers, playing whist
there was a lot of: trains, steamers, generous tips, exotic locales, delays, improvisations
there should have been more: adding more description would have slowed the plot down too much, so I will excuse the general lack of food (I really need to start eating something before I write these blog entries!)
this book makes you want to: be prepared, pay attention, keep calm and carry on, visit a place you've always wanted to see, not freak out when your precious schedule encounters a slight delay
this book makes you glad you don't have to: sit on a steamship for 21 days to get from Tokyo to San Francisco or be cremated alive with your deceased husband in an Indian suttee, everything else sounds pretty good...well, except for the opium den. And the railroad tracks ending in the middle of a jungle. And the typhoon. Also being captured by Indians and dueling on a moving train.

The Return of the Native

2011-09-11T20:52:00.000-07:00

The Return of the Native is the second novel by Thomas Hardy I've read this year, and I have to say I enjoyed it much more than Tess of the D'Urbervilles, despite the latter's fame. This strengthens my resolve to delay forming an opinion of an author until having read more than one of his/her works. Tess seems to be problematic and depressing for current readers, in part due to its unfair treatment of a victim of circumstance by the other characters. The Return of the Native presents a very different plot and structure, while retaining Hardy's sense of place and modern perspective.
      Slightly controversial when published due to its modern themes, The Return of the Native brings to life a deeply flawed heroine who, along with the other characters, must navigate sexual politics, unfulfilled desire, and conflicting demands of nature and society. Throughout the novel, the omniscient narrator points out cultural vestiges of pre-Christian agricultural society which still survive on Egdon Heath, and the heath is portrayed as a place where time runs more slowly, but the reader sees that the modern world is already trickling in and will someday carry off the old ways in a flood. If you want to read about mumming, small beers, Nov. 5 bonfires with pre-Guy Fawkes origins, omens, barrows, effigies and folk cures, this book gives them a mention but doesn't dwell on them; they are almost taken for granted. Some characters understand the heath and love it as their home, accepting their place in nature. To others, who want to leave nature behind for culture and society, the heath is a prison. There is a sad nostalgia as Hardy describes Egdon Heath, as one would experience when contemplating a dear friend whose days are numbered. In other words, this book is a big plate of modernity, with a side dish of modernity, washed down with a tall glass of... classical tragedy. Wait..what? That's right.
      Hardy originally planned to structure the novel into five books, which is the classical tragic format, but he adapted his work to the tastes of the public by adding a happy ending for Diggory Venn and Thomasin in a sixth book, Aftercourses. In Hardy's original version, Venn remains a reddleman (seller of red ochre for marking sheep) and Thomasin lives out her days as a widow. In addition to the classical tragic structure, Hardy employs unity of time, place and action (also requirements of classical tragedy). This means that the plot occurs in a single place and with a main course of action (subplots were discouraged). Traditionally the unity of time meant that a classic tragedy took place in a single day, but Hardy's novel covers a year and a day. To further emphasize the classical nature of his work, he chooses for its setting an ancient heath steeped in pre-Christian history and creates a chorus consisting of the heathfolk.
     The setting itself, Egdon Heath, is imbued with enough life to be considered a character in its own right. Hardy is known for his masterful treatment of place and his literary landscape of Wessex, the semi-fictional region in which his novels take place. Hardy drew maps of Wessex; he loved its wilds and mourned its industrialized areas, and in this he shares some similarities with Tolkien, although he did not provide a backstory for Wessex complete with cosmology and languages, as Tolkien did for Middle Earth. The composer Gustav Holt wrote a piece called Egdon Heath, inspired by Thomas Hardy's description. You can listen to it here.
   Because I mentioned Thomas Hardy in my last entry about D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, I would like to complete the circle this time by including Lawrence's view of The Return of the Native. An anonymous contributor has put it so eloquently on wikipedia that I would like to directly quote a paragraph...is that too shocking? Really, who's going to spend time editing the wikipedia article on The Return of the Native? Probably only academics and lit geeks, either of whom are qualified enough to do so. SPOILER AHEAD. Here's the paragraph:

"Some critics—notably D. H. Lawrence—see the novel as a study of the way communities control their misfits. In this view, Eustacia dies because she has internalised the community's values to the extent that, unable to escape Egdon without confirming her status as a fallen woman, she chooses suicide. She thereby ends her sorrows while at the same time—by drowning in the weir like any woman instead of floating, witchlike—she proves her essential innocence to the community."

Stats:
The titular native: Clym Yeobright
Promethean heroine: Eustacia
Babe in the woods (er, on the heath): Thomasin
Fox on the run: Damon Wildeve
The reddleman, hero of the heath with a dash of magical realism: Diggory Venn
Leading character: Egdon Heath
There was a lot of: walking on the heath, heath-en customs
There should have been more: I wouldn't have minded more descriptions of heathen customs, but that wouldn't have been as realistic. The novel is a largely accurate portrayal of Wessex life at that time.
This book makes you want to: embrace your little corner of the world, not resent it
This book makes you glad you don't have to: be shunned by a small community for being different

Lady Chatterley's Lover

2011-09-05T19:56:00.000-07:00

When I first chose this book, I was aware that it had originally been banned due to charges of obscenity, but this didn't bother me because I had already read Madame Bovary, which had the same fate despite its apparent quaintness to modern eyes. Well, times certainly changed between 1856 and 1928. D.H. Lawrence purposefully used certain unprintable words about ten times in this book, with the intention of reclaiming them so they could be used as common, even romantic words. Based on society's past and current opinion of the book, I have to wonder if he made a tactical error. Not only have the words not been reclaimed, but now they are the only thing most people think of when D.H. Lawrence comes to mind. If the reader can follow the plot without giving undue weight to these sections, s/he might be surprised to find that Lawrence has more in common with Hardy and Tolkien than with Ovid.
     The relationship between Connie and Mellors takes place in the East Midlands, against the backdrop of a region which has recently been transformed by the development of the coal mining industry. Critics rightly see in Lawrence's focus on the coal-mining town the important themes of social conflict and the class system. I also saw echoes of Hardy's ache of modernism (see my discussion of Tess) and Tolkien's orcs- beings who are slaves to industry and mechanization, slowly losing their humanity. The coal mine is depicted as an ugly aberration which destroys the beauty of the land and the lives of the people.
     D.H. Lawrence uses the dichotomy of agriculture vs. industry to discuss the theme of mind and body. Clifford Chatterley, after his paralysis, becomes a writer and an industrialist, living completely in his mind. The coal miners live completely in their deformed bodies, seeming to have very little mind at all. Only Connie and Mellors are able to escape this fragmentation, as their relationship brings them into a life of integrity and wholeness. Lawrence believed that true relationships can reverse the brokenness that life visits upon individuals.
     I am in search of another author who will take this idea a step further back in time and point out that it is only through the brokenness brought by modernity that society (including D.H. Lawrence) has come to view the individual as its smallest unit. Pre-industrial societies did not (and do not) see individuals as their building blocks. Rather, for them, the family is the smallest indivisible unit. I am not talking solely about New Guinean or Andean tribes either: indigenous Europeans viewed life in the same way. The current culture of mechanized, consumerist individualism is not "Western culture". Rather, Western culture was the first to be torn apart by its own juggernaut. Native Americans are right to mourn the loss of their cultures, and to work to preserve and reconstruct them. But they would not be completely correct were they to state that their cultures had been overwhelmed by Euro-American (or Western/Anglo) culture. Rather, both Native Americans and indigenous Europeans have witnessed the erasure of their cultures by industrialism and its functions of individualism and materialism. Western cultures brought industrialism upon themselves, and for them the damage is more complete. Can we even imagine what indigenous European cultures would look like had they survived untouched into the 19th century, as did Native American cultures? They actually did survive that long in rural areas, and vestiges of early Anglo-Saxon culture are depicted in Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, published in 1878 and the subject of my next blog entry.

Stats:
Protagonist: Constance Chatterley
More machine than man: Clifford Chatterley
Working class by birth, noble in deed: Oliver Mellors
Creepy sycophant: Mrs. Bolton
There was a lot of: descriptions of the forest, private conversations, characters' thoughts
There should have been more: I don't know. I wouldn't mind reading Lawrence's thoughts on balance and wholeness, but then it would have been an essay instead of a novel.
This book makes you want to: live an authentic life (don't a lot of good books do that?)
This book makes you glad you don't have to: be a coal miner. or a game keeper. or a paralytic. or one half of a dead marriage.

East of Eden

2011-08-29T20:09:00.000-07:00

Between this book and The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. This is partly because I like his style of writing, of describing people and places in a way that really lets the reader see inside them. I also appreciate the fact that his books aren't just about the storyline, or about the lessons the characters learn, but the storyline is also used to reveal deeper truths. In this book, Steinbeck uses symbolic characters which are meant to be types, not necessarily actual people who are a mixture of different types. In the end, the story and its deeper meanings hinge on the choices and actions of Cal, who is the everyman. East of Eden is ultimately about choice, the human power to choose one's actions, which means one is able to stand against one's environment, one's genetics and family and one's personal past when necessary. Even Cal, with so much stacked against him, has within himself the power to make the right choice. The reader doesn't learn what Cal and his father ultimately choose until the very end of the novel.

This story of two brothers is dedicated to Steinbeck's two sons; it is a double-narrative which, in his words, will tell “the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness” — the mutually-dependent pairings out of which creativity is born. Steinbeck considered this book his masterpiece, with his previous works leading up to it. East of Eden is a portrait of the artist as a mature man. He says, "But in this book I am in it and I don’t for a moment pretend not to be”. The book is thus a vehicle for what he is or believes himself to be. To use a term that is common in classifying archetypes found in fairy tales and myths, this book is Steinbeck's soul jar. A soul jar is just what it sounds like: a container or object which holds all or part of a person's soul (or life, or heart); which makes that person immortal. A fairy tale example would be Koschei the Deathless, who kept his soul in a box buried in the ground. Literary examples include Sauron's ring, the picture of Dorian Gray, and Lord Voldemort's horcruxes. (I know; these are all bad guys...don't draw a similar conclusion about my opinion of Steinbeck!) The soul jar appears in film in The Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, in which Davy Jones keeps his heart in a wooden chest instead of the more common thoracic chest cavity generally used by humans for cardiac storage. Now, all this is not to say that East of Eden contains Steinbeck's soul in some kind of Cali-voodoo way. Rather, through this book, Steinbeck will live forever in that his name and reputation will never die. He put so much of himself into this book that it can be considered a metaphorical soul jar. Myths and fairy tales, including those mentioned above, remind us that the price of immortality is our humanity. Those who chose to literally live forever slowly ceased to be human. With Steinbeck, the exact opposite has taken place. By embracing, analyzing and internalizing his humanity, he gave birth to East of Eden and his own literary immortality. To quote the Havamal, an Old Norse wisdom poem, "Cattle die, kinsmen die, the self must also die; but a good name never dies, for the one who is able to achieve it."

Little Women

2011-08-21T18:39:00.000-07:00

Little Women has an excellent but inaccurate reputation as a children's novel. Alcott's work is a classic bildungsroman (coming of age story), which partially accounts for its enduring appeal. It is better classified as a young adult novel than a children's book, and society's reliance on simplified versions results in ignorance of much the book has to offer. Alcott explores issues of identity, loyalty, class, women's roles, personal development, death and the definition of success, among others, but much of this exploration takes place in dialogue between the characters, through narrator musings or within an individual character's thoughts, rather than through plot devices. Perhaps it is the style of presentation of these major themes of discussion which doesn't lend itself well to screen adaptations.
The author's transcendentalist upbringing is obvious in some of the musings. Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, was a founder of the transcendentalist movement, and Louisa was tutored by noted transcendentalists and writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Fuller. Considering her education, it is no surprise that her writing talent flourished. Can you imagine being tutored by Emerson and Thoreau?! Ah, if only...
The book is so well-written, and the characters so believable, that it's no wonder it became an instant classic. This is a story of four average teen girls (well, average for 1868) experiencing average challenges, relationships, failures and successes. Even in abridged or adapted versions, the appeal shines through (but I still recommend reading the original). While teaching English in Kazakhstan, I taught a unit using an adapted version of Little Women, and I was surprised at the students' enthusiasm for the story. The enduring themes and issues mentioned above remain salient across time and cultures. I think of Alcott writing in her attic, and wonder what she would have thought had she known that, 130 years later on the other side of the world, her description of a well-loved character's death would bring tears to strangers' eyes.

Stats:
Tomboy writer: Jo (based on Louisa M. Alcott herself)
Girly-girl painter: Amy
Shy violet and homebody: Beth
Mother figure: Meg
Honorary brother: Laurie
Curmudgeonly aunt: Aunt March
Setting: New England during the Civil War
There was a lot of: discussions, noble deeds, funny mistakes, unfortunate illnesses, poverty
There should have been more: food. This book would have lent itself well to a Beatrix Potter-type tea cosy effect, with characters sharing toast and tea, meat and potatoes, bread and cheese, etc., around a roaring fire. Or maybe I'm just hungry.
This book makes you want to: show kindness to others, be the best you can be, take the bad times in stride, for they come to us all
This book makes you glad you don't have to: knit all your own socks, fear death from common communicable diseases, work as hard for independence as women did at that time

20.000 Leagues Under the Sea

2011-08-07T20:55:00.000-07:00

If you're looking for a novel that's smart yet fun, this is it. Jules Verne is known as one of the fathers of science fiction, and while reading this book I tried to imagine the reception of his work by an unsuspecting public in the 1860s. His contemporary readers were delighted by descriptions of incredible inventions, unusual animals and exotic places. I would have been too, after spending the day scrubbing clothes on a washboard or shoeing horses.

     20,000 Leagues Under the Sea chronicles the adventures of Captain Nemo and his incredible submarine. The narrator, Professor Arronax, specializes in marine biology, and some of the descriptions of marine life forms tend toward extremely detailed scientific categorization. I know a conch from a coral, but he lost me at Carcharodon carcharias (great white shark). Despite this, the book contains enough adventurous episodes, scientific niftiness and intriguing oddities to hold the attention of most readers. I, for one, am now interested in making anemone jam...but living in a landlocked state, I can safely remain at the stage of armchair speculation.

   Verne's work isn't all sunshine, however. Even though his editor removed most of his pessimistic and dystopian slant, it is still visible in the brooding, vengeful character of Captain Nemo. Nemo was partly based on Odysseus, the title character of Homer's Odyssey. After tricking Polyphemus by saying that his name is "nobody" (Nemo is Latin for "nobody"), Odysseus wanders the seas for ten years, tortured by the deaths of his crew members. This parallels Captain Nemo's name and experience. Nemo is also a champion of the oppressed, and throughout the novel he assists those suffering from war and colonial oppression. Verne points out that the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution have done nothing to alleviate the potential for cruelty humans embody. On the contrary, in many cases human cruelty, like travel and manufacturing speed, is multiplied by technology. In the words of Captain Nemo, "It is not new continents the earth needs, but new men."

      Analysts often point out Verne's prescience in describing future inventions such as gasoline-powered automobiles, submarines, electric lights, even the internet (a worldwide telegraphic communications network). Scientifically-minded people are often able to make accurate predictions (hypotheses), but could a few of these correlations be a matter of causation, in which readers were inspired to pursue precisely the discoveries and inventions that were detailed in his books? Is it possible that some polar explorers, pioneering oceanographers or rocket inventors were Jules Verne fans? Let's see. Admiral Richard Byrd said on the eve of his polar flight, "Jules Verne guides me." William Beebe, one of the first men to explore the depths of the sea in a bathysphere, became interested in oceanography after reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry, was an avid Verne reader as a child. As the author of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, observed, "...we are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne." And lest you think all the good ideas have been scooped, Verne described some technologies that haven't yet graduated from fiction to fact (Captain Nemo's salt water-derived electricity comes to mind). So introduce your child, younger cousin or neighbor kid to Verne, and you may find yourself in the audience thirty years hence as s/he accepts the Hubbard Medal or the Nobel Prize in Physics (under stage lights using Nautilus-inspired power, of course).

Stats:
Byronic hero: Captain Nemo
Narrator: Professor Arronax
Faithful sidekick: Conseil
Token Canadian: Ned Land
Source of all food on the Nautilus: the seas
Savage humans: are found even in "civilized" countries
There was a lot of: scientific descriptions, mysterious happenings, dangerous adventures
There should have been more: this book was well-balanced; I wouldn't change it. On one hand I would like more back story on the crew and how they came to sail with Nemo, but that would have taken away from the mysterious atmosphere
This book makes you want to: learn more about marine creatures, travel the polar seas, live according to your personal code of honor, help those who need help, remember that you can't fully understand a person's actions without knowing that person's history
This book makes you glad you don't have to: live on a submarine forever, fight a giant squid, listen to Ned Land obsess about eating meat, be haunted by the desire for revenge

The Brothers Karamazov

2011-07-31T18:03:00.000-07:00

After five lovely servings of salad, I found my plate heaped with kolbasa and boiled potatoes with sour cream. Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov certainly has a rightful reputation as one of the world's finest works of literature. My only regret was that, in order to follow this year's parameters, I had to read it in a week. That was the equivalent of downing the aforementioned meat and potatoes in seven bites.

Dostoevsky is a philosophical author, and in this work he addresses reason, madness, law, justice, subjectivity, faith vs. doubt, free will, moral responsibility, love and redemption through suffering. Each of the brothers represents a different aspect of humanity: Smerdyakov is physical, Dmitri is emotional, Ivan is intellectual and Alyosha is spiritual. Throughout the course of the novel, the reader sees how these character types respond to and experience life. *MINOR SPOILER* As the four brothers face the reality of their father's murder, they each have a different perspective on where (or if) guilt lies and on how the guilty party should be treated. In a short blog post it is only possible to touch on the important themes of a novel on which theses have been written, but I certainly encourage any thoughtful reader to take up this book, allowing ample time to read, contemplate and, possibly, be changed.

Stats:
protagonist: Alyosha Karamazov
antagonist/villain: that's subjective
Tiny Tim with a Russian ending: Ilyusha
wise elder: Father Zossima
semi-fallen woman: Grushenka
quotational window into Dostoevsky's mind: "Some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education."
there was a lot of: wandering and repetitive dialogue, tragedy, suffering, redemption
there should have been more: background...maybe. I would like to know more of what made these characters the way they are, but the novel was already of considerable length. Dostoevsky intended it to be the first of three but died before the others could be written, so perhaps more clarity would have been gained during the following two works.
this book makes you want to: ponder, refrain from judging other people
this book makes you glad you don't have to: try to talk sense to a drunk

Emma by Jane Austen

2011-07-24T21:06:00.000-07:00

The summer lit-fest continues! July 10-16 was spent with Emma, my third Jane Austen novel of 2011. Austen isn't the only author I've revisited this year; she and Charles Dickens are tied so far with three novels each. I've also read two each by James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. So far Dickens and Austen are two of my favorites, so I haven't minded reading multiple works by them, but these choices are more a reflection of what I had on hand than of anything else.

Emma Woodhouse is in many ways a different sort of heroine than Elizabeth Bennet or Marianne Dashwood. If you have only read P&P and S&S and you fear that Austen only retells the same story under different names, read Emma. There are, of course, many similarities, but both the characters and the plot are unique. Emma Woodhouse has no sisters, is very well-off with no financial worries, and she doesn't wish to marry. Rather, Emma prefers to set up romances for other people, and throughout the novel this results in many situations that are alternately hilarious and awkward.

That said, Emma does have similarities with other Austen heroines, and with Austen herself. Emma is an intelligent young woman without the ability to change her living situation or her everyday life. She doesn't have much to do, and she has few companions her own age. Critics who point out that Austen's heroine's often live lives of little substance should thank Austen for accurately transcribing the safe but meaningless fate of middle- and upper-class women in the early 19th century.

Stats:
Spoiled but smart and lovely: Emma
Aptly named dark horse: George Knightley
Juvenile flirt: Frank Churchill
Nemesis turned friend: Jane Fairfax
Airhead: Harriet Smith
Love to hate: Augusta Elton
Don't eat that!: Henry Woodhouse
There was a lot of: parties, calling, outings, letters, notes, coach rides
There should have been more: descriptions of food. Fluffy novels never talk enough about food.
This book makes you want to: examine the evidence a la Sherlock Holmes, not a la Emma, surround yourself with people and activities of substance
This book makes you glad you don't have to: go calling on people, adhere to severe social protocol, eat thin gruel every night with Mr. Woodhouse

The Hound of the Baskervilles

2011-07-24T18:47:00.000-07:00

Yes, I continued my mental sabbatical with another easier read for the week of July 3-9. The Hound of the Baskervilles is the third of four full-length Sherlock Holmes mystery novels written by Sir A. Conan Doyle, and it is quite delicious. Although I stated in my introductory post that I wouldn't be using audio books, I ended up listening to the last 3 chapters since I had lasik surgery during that week and couldn't read for a couple days afterwards. If you use audiobooks regularly, keep in mind that English speakers (including the readers of audiobooks) speak about 150 words per minute. If you read faster than that, reading to yourself is a more efficient use of your time unless you are doing something else while you listen to the book, in which case your concentration is divided and you will probably miss much of what the author is trying to say. That's not a problem when you're listening to an action-packed Sherlock Holmes mystery, but I personally would never try to listen to, for example, Dostoevsky as an audiobook. That said, very old works such as Beowulf were meant to be spoken aloud, and when I read Homer's Odyssey in 2012 (teaser!), I will definitely seek out an audio version at some point.

But, unlike Holmes, I digress.

One of my favorite aspects of this book was the setting. Dartmoor is a land of wind-swept moors, the remains of Bronze Age stone huts, rocky granite outcroppings (tors) and a menacing bog. It is the perfect location for a mystery in which a supernatural hound appears to fulfill an ancient family curse. Having read this book, I would love to wander through the region and take it all in.

The novel opens with Sir Charles Baskerville discovered dead among the yew trees on his estate. (Yew trees are often found in church cemeteries, and are a symbol of sadness.) It is quickly ascertained that Baskerville died of a heart attack, an event which has lent its name to "The Baskerville Effect", a statistical observation discovered in 2001 by researchers at UC San Diego. The Baskerville Effect states that mortality through heart attacks is increased by psychological stress.

The plot contains Conan Doyle's usual twists, turns, red herrings and Holmesian attention to detail. As in his other novels, Holmes' character is extremely well-developed while the other characters are less so, and at times even two-dimensional. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it allows Holmes' logical prowess, encyclopedic knowledge and attention to detail to take center stage.

Stats:
Always brings his top game: Sherlock Holmes
Esteemed colleague: Dr. Watson
Unfortunate victim of family curse: Sir Charles Baskerville
Next in line for the axe (or in this case, hound): Sir Henry Baskerville
Original suspect(s): can't tell you that
Actual villain: can't tell you that either
Perfect setting: Dartmoor
Is it supernatural, or flesh and blood?: the hound
Can anything good come from: Grimpen Bog
There was a lot of: weather, natural features, analysis of persons, telegrams
There should have been more: development of the villain's character
This book makes you want to: establish an ancestral home, live in a stone house in a wilderness area, pass on an excellent legacy to your descendants (or nieces and nephews), observe people more closely
This book makes you glad you don't have to: be pursued by a hound from hell (duh)

p.s. How could I forget to mention that the dreaded hound of the Baskervilles has its modern counterpart in Fahrenheit 451? What evil deeds bring on the curse of the mechanical hound? How does a person become part of that line of sinners pursued by Ray Bradbury's hound? I leave that for you to deduce, my esteemed colleague.

Second Quarter in Review

2011-07-14T14:58:00.000-07:00

The blog A Peculiar Influence was born out of a New Year's resolution I made to read a classic novel each week of 2011, and this post proves that I'm halfway done! The second quarter consisted of (from bottom to top) All Quiet on the Western Front, Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, Fahrenheit 451, Hard Times, Last of the Mohicans, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Grapes of Wrath, The Bell Jar, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Sense and Sensibility, Gulliver's Travels and Cranford. If you're a new reader of this blog and want to catch up, my introductory post is here and the first quarter in review can be found here. I originally decided to start the year by reading all the books on my shelf that I hadn't read yet. Of the 13 books pictured above, I only owned 2 on January 1, 2011; so my "to read" list didn't get much shorter this quarter, but as of now there are only 7 unread novels on my shelf so I should be caught up soon. A couple of the books in the photo (Madame Bovary and Cranford) are actually stunt doubles, Madame Bovary because I sold my copy right after reading it, and Cranford because I don't own a copy so I read it as an epub...which forces me to point out that the dreaded e-reader makes its first appearance this quarter.

Cranford

2011-07-14T12:59:00.000-07:00

Basing my opinion of Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell, purely on its cover, I hypothesized that it would be something between a Jane Austen and a George Eliot novel. In order to scientifically prove or disprove my hypothesis and not be guilty of flouting the old proverb's advice, it was necessary to read all of the pages. Which I did. The whole time I was reading, my mental commentary vascillated between "where's the plot?" and "this is the book I should have read last week!"
After reading some reviews and discussion online, I find I am not alone in noticing the lack of plot. Cranford lays out a series of mostly minor events taking place in the town of Cranford and involving a small circle of spinsters and widows. The beauty of this book lies in its character development. Elizabeth Gaskell was aware that she lived in a time of rapid social change, and she purposefully set down an account of daily life in a small town. The main characters in Cranford are fairly old women, whom Gaskell saw as "living hoards of family tradition and old custom". I loved Gaskell's little old ladies, with all their eccentricities and yet with mannerisms, habits, likes and dislikes that are not so far different from those of elderly people today. Some people find the elderly to be difficult to understand or get along with, but these ladies are downright hilarious. You've got to read the part about the cat that ate the lace.

Stats:
Main character: Miss Matty
Secondaries: Miss Matty's posse of old ladies. It's a tribute to Gaskell's storytelling that I was able to keep them all straight with ease.
Biggest plot twist: The feature you are looking for is not available in this book. Please make an alternative selection.
There was a lot of: hats, lace crocheting, card playing, ~~gossiping~~ conversing, calling cards, note writing, proper visiting protocol
There should have been more: chapters
This book makes you want to: visit little old ladies and grow up to be one...someday far in the future
This book makes you glad you don't have to: be a little old lady quite yet...

Gulliver's Travels

2011-07-14T12:26:00.000-07:00

I was feeling so refreshed after Sense and Sensibility that I decided another light-hearted choice was in order. Unfortunately, I thought Gulliver's Travels would fit the bill. A shipwrecked castaway lands in Lilliput, a land of tiny people. Plus, it's a satire of Robinson Crusoe-style travelogues. That's funny, right? Sure, for about twenty pages. After that, it's repetitive. And did I mention it's also a religious and political satire? That might be amusing, or at least illuminating, for someone who hasn't already analyzed the flaws of various political systems and the petty religious disagreements that plague societies. But for someone as bombastically fantastic as me, well... ha! I sound like Gulliver in Lilliput!
Okay, Jonathan Swift had a great idea. I do enjoy the fact that he lampoons pretty much everything, but it got old after a while. Also, Gulliver's development from an optimistic humanist into a pompous misanthrope (I stole that phrase because it's perfect) seemed unnecessarily cynical. There's a difference between accepting people with all their faults and assuming from the outset that every human is horribly degraded, although in 1726 that outlook was probably par for the Protestant course...and also par for the Irish course. Perhaps Swift (an Anglo-Irish protestant) can be excused due to his double dose of environmental pessimism.
My linguistics nerdiness also found the names of his imaginary countries to be irksome. All the words were English nonsense, following the phonological and morphological rules of English. It would have been more plausible had he created words inspired by other languages. While of these sounds more like a foreign country: Glubbdubbdribb or Ngokumbu? Brobdingnag or Zhao Shang? Luggnagg or Schnezitskoya? And I bet you can guess which continents would be likely to contain Ngokumbu, Zhao Shang and Schnezitskoya, respectively. Still, Swift's purpose was to lampoon his own culture and not others, so I can see why he would choose English-based names at the expense of realism. Actually, considering that he has Gulliver explore lands of minute humans, talking horses and flying islands, he obviously wasn't too concerned about realism in the first place. And lest you think I disapprove completely of all his invented words, I am quite grateful to Jonathan Swift for giving us English-speakers the word yahoo. English is known for its belief that it's impossible to have too many synonyms for one thing. I, for one, am especially emphatic that it is impossible for English to have too many synonyms for barbarian. On those days when your children are wilder than philistines, and such epithets as huns, savages, beasts, boors, and feral spawn have lost their magic, you can always resort to... yahoo.

Stats:
Hero: Gulliver
Anti-hero: Gulliver
Yes, it's all about: Gulliver
Why must there be so many descriptions of his: bathroom habits
The above is almost as bad as the descriptions of: the giants' bathroom habits
There was a lot of: nonsense, improbability, satire of minor political events from the 1720s which even history buffs are unlikely to remember today
There should have been more: merciless cutting by the editor
This book makes you want to: stop reading it
This book makes you glad you don't have to: read it again

Sense and Sensibility

2011-07-14T11:30:00.000-07:00

In mid-June (the 12th-18th, to be exact) I was starting to feel bogged down in my reading, and after reflecting upon my choices the last couple months, I decided that after the heavy seriousness of All Quiet on the Western Front, Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, Fahrenheit 451, Hard Times, Last of the Mohicans, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Grapes of Wrath, The Bell Jar, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, I needed something light and sparkling. Sense and Sensibility was like a lemon sorbet after two months of mutton chops. (Actually, I've never eaten a mutton chop, but it sounds heavy, doesn't it?)

In terms of characters, I encountered some similarities with Pride and Prejudice. There were the philanderer, the hysterical sister(s), the airhead mother, the absent (in mind or body) father, the mysterious but ultimately virtuous gentleman and the humorous secondary characters. The ending is quite balanced and satisfactory, with the rational sister finding a match based on love, and the emotional sister finding happiness with a level-headed man whom she had initially rejected for frivolous reasons.

I think most readers prefer Pride and Prejudice over Sense and Sensibility simply because the hero of the former, Mr. Darcy, is far more swoon-worthy than that of the latter. (Sorry, Colonel Barton) This is partially due to the differing slants of the novels. In S&S, Austen is contrasting the two sisters and exploring the differences between them. The various potential suitors are tools to draw out aspects of the sisters' characters and are not developed as fully. In P&P, Austen is comparing and contrasting Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, which obviously requires more development of Darcy's character. Another possible contribution to the differences in focus may lie in the fact that the first draft of S&S was written when Austen was only 19 (!), before she had experienced any romantic relationships, while the first draft of P&P was written two years later, after her relationship with Tom Lefroy.

I certainly found Sense and Sensibility enjoyable in its own right, with interesting plot devices and humorous characters, although overall I must side with the majority in preferring Pride and Prejudice.

Stats:

Two steps backward for feminism: Marianne

Finally, a girl who thinks: Elinor

Karma's gonna get you in the end: John Dashwood

Everything is okay ma'am, please put down the pocketbook: Mrs. Dashwood

Warning: Contains dry ice. Do not handle without protective gloves: Fanny Dashwood

Why, you evil toad of a man!: John Willoughby

Somebody please put codeine in her tea: Mrs. Jennings

And valium in hers: Mrs. Ferrars

Knight in shining...cravat?: Colonel Barton

There was a lot of: note writing, misunderstandings, descriptions of rooms, tiresome visitors, humorous situations, similarities with Pride and Prejudice

There should have been more: development of Colonel Barton and Edward Ferrars' characters

This book makes you want to: read more Jane Austen, visit interesting friends, make sure you're not an airhead

This book makes you glad you don't have to: adhere to proper 19th century English social conventions

For Whom the Bell Tolls

2011-06-19T21:17:00.000-07:00

Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls after spending time in Spain as a news correspondent in the Spanish Civil War. The main character, Robert Jordan, is a professor from Montana who volunteers in order to live out his political beliefs. It took me many chapters to get straight in my head who was fighting whom, in part because the Republicans form the political left and are supported by the USSR, which is opposite of what I, a 21st century North American, expect from Republicans. But the other reason-and this is critical-that it was difficult to differentiate between the two sides, is that Hemingway doesn't portray them as good vs. evil dualistic opposites. Neither side is right; neither side is wrong. At first they fight because they disagree politically, and eventually they continue to fight because they're already fighting. Whether taunting their enemies or facing their own deaths, characters from opposite sides act in similar ways. The Nationalists have better technology and more highly trained soldiers, but neither that nor the reader's knowledge that they eventually win the war makes them correct. We all know the saying that history is written by the winners, but Hemingway writes as a third person omniscient narrator who conveys his story before history has chosen a winner. Even though Robert Jordan fights for the guerilla resistance, the reader never gets the sense that they are more ethical or correct, or that the Nationalists are in any way morally inferior. Even the most villainous character, Pablo, is morally ambiguous and performs a few noble actions which shine in contrast with his frequent betrayal and violence. This leaves the reader with the message that, in war, neither side is right.
The entire novel takes place over the course of a few days, but by the end, Robert Jordan has encountered the transformative power of love and has discovered something to live for. I especially enjoyed Hemingway's decision to begin and end the novel with Robert Jordan lying on the pine needle floor of the forest. Despite his having come full circle positionally, at the novel's close Jordan feels his heart beating against the forest floor, while the novel's opening contains no such observation. During these few short days, Robert Jordan has begun to truly live.

Stats:
Wise old crone: Pilar
Judas: Pablo
Grudge match: Nationalists vs. Republicans
aka: Fascists vs. Communists
Object of Jordan's affection: Maria
Sense of place arises from: the forest, the soil, the earth
Best scene: El Sordo's last stand
Hemingway's odd pseudo-swearing: "I obscenity in your obscenity."
There was a lot of: hiding, planning, waiting, discussing,
There should have been more: discussion of characters' thoughts and beliefs
Jordan's thoughts on the transience of life: What we do not have is time. Tomorrow we must fight. To me that is nothing. Bu for the Maria and me it means that we must live all of our life in this time."
This book makes you want to: appreciate each day you have, be aware of the futility of war, have a life that you want to keep living
This book makes you glad you don't have to: engage in guerilla warfare, cook rabbit stew all the time, endure military bureaucracy, trust someone who isn't trustworthy

The Bell Jar

2011-06-12T18:50:00.000-07:00

Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, was first published in 1967. Its chronicling of Esther Greenwood's coming-of-age intentionally corresponds to Salinger's treatment of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. The novel's frank and detailed description of mental illness was unusual for its time, although it does have some similarities to more current novels such as Girl, Interrupted and The Virgin Suicides; however, their styles are less literary. Plath's talent for poetry was already recognized at the time of The Bell Jar's writing, and it comes through in her construction of prose as well.

So, is Esther Greenwood suffocating under a bell jar solely because of her mental illness, or is it partly due to her experience as a woman in the man's world of the 1950s? She resists learning the secretarial skill of shorthand because, "the trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men...I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters." Her observation that the other girls at her hotel "were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents... and they were all going to posh secretarial schools like Katy Gibbs, where they had to wear hats and stockings and gloves to class, or they had just graduated from places like Katy Gibbs and were secretaries to executives and junior executives and simply hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or other" shows society's expectations of women at that time, as well as Esther's opinion of those expectations. Esther doesn't want to get married and have children; she doesn't want to exist solely as a function of her husband, but her efforts to write and to establish an identity as a writer are repeatedly derailed by her mental illness.

Some reviews state that The Bell Jar is very dark and can be difficult to read because it takes the reader on a journey into deep depression, but even as a person who has experienced long term depression, I did not find that to be the case. Perhaps that is because reading a description that takes up a few chapters of a book is far less depressing than being stuck in the real deal for months on end. Personally, I found it interesting to peer into another mind and see its similarities to and differences from my own.

Finally, I have to point out that those girls working at the magazine in New York with their shoes and purses and dates, chasing after money and status, were at least as crazy as Esther and me. Maybe crazier.

Stats:
depressed writer: Esther Greenwood
creep she finally dumps: Buddy Willard
relationship with mother: complicated, unhappy
father: born in a manic-depressive hamlet in the black heart of Prussia (I love that line), now deceased
there was a lot of: being thwarted, inability to be the agent in one's own life, discordant relationships, superficiality, depression
there should have been more of: I would have liked to see the novel continue on to follow Esther as she becomes a writer, but it would have been more difficult to make a proper ending, and an epilogue would have been anticlimactic.
this book makes you want to: discover or revisit your life's goals, endure painful experiences knowing they lead to growth, allow all meaninglessness to fall away
this book makes you glad you don't have to: marry Buddy Willard or somebody like him, endure '50s style treatments for mental illness, eat 50s style meat and/or seafood salads

The Grapes of Wrath

2011-06-11T21:17:00.000-07:00

What can I say about a book that won its author the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature after first being banned and burned? Steinbeck was labeled a socialist and writer of communist propaganda, but now The Grapes of Wrath is required reading in many high schools and universities. Not only does he take the reader on a journey from "I" to "we", but he does so by winding through pages of vivid natural prose.

In Steinbeck's depiction of the farmers' connection to the earth, their sense of place and the horror of their forced separation from their homes, his kinship with Dickens (Hard Times) and Hardy (Tess of the d'Urbervilles) is apparent. We hear echoes of Dickens' labor uprisings in "The line between hunger and anger is a thin line," and Hardy's ache of modernism is manifest in "The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses." Steinbeck is a link in a chain that continues to the present in people like Indian environmental activist and proponent of alter-globalization Vandana Shiva.

Compare Steinbeck:
And at last the owner men came to the point. The tenant system won't work anymore. One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families. Pay him a wage and take all the crop. We have to do it. We don't like to do it. But the monster's sick. Something's happened to the monster...The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it...We can't depend on it. The bank – the monster – has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size

with Shiva:
The World Bank has historically used its clout to promote undemocratic processes ... They have pushed India to violate the laws of the tribals and the farmers, because once they settle on a certain line of investment, then no law that supports the democratic rights of the people can survive - if they finance a superhighway that highway gets built, if they finance a mining project, that project happens no matter who or what it destroys in the process.

Stats:
main characters: the Joad family, the land
oddly enlightened former preacher: Jim Casey
slow but steady: land tortoise
growing heavy for the vintage in the souls of the people: grapes of wrath
there was a lot of: dust, heat, loss, separation, hunger, illness, violence, people taking advantage of others, loyalty to friends and family
there should have been more: bacon, coffee (those poor people ate biscuits all the time)
this book makes you want to: make a family home that will last for generations, cultivate friendships and family relationships, see the wonder and beauty around you
this book makes you glad you don't have to: drive a thousand miles without knowing what's at the end of your journey, suffer from malnutrition, owe your soul to the company store

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

2011-06-05T22:14:00.000-07:00

Published in 1891, Tess is a nineteenth century novel that anticipates the twentieth century. Thomas Hardy is known for his portrayal of the ache of modernism and his ambivalence toward the Industrial Revolution. Hardy's description of the grain thresher at Flintcomb-Ash as an ominous monstrosity which severs humans from their rightful place in nature foreshadows Steinbeck's discussion of tractors in The Grapes of Wrath. This reminds us that the ache of modernism was not unique to those residents of nineteenth century Britain and America who watched their traditional ways of life being steadily ground down by mechanical progress. The unfortunate Okies of the dustbowl 1930's saw their farms repossessed and consolidated by banks in the name of efficiency, a plague currently sweeping through India as farmers and residents lose property to government seizure for construction of paved highways, despite the fact that only 0.7% of Indians are car owners.
    Some Westerners are now reconsidering whether a highly industrialized lifestyle truly brings the greatest happiness, as can be seen by the American back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s and its current echo in the 2010s, as well as the huge trend in DIY projects as people learn now to do everything from making cheese to cutting hair, just like Grandma did. For those interested in more extreme challenges, YouTube features many videos on how to fill your own cavities and do sutures (stitches). I don' t know if Thomas Hardy would have made his own soap, but he did create the idea of Wessex (southwest England) as a separate, cohesive geographical and political identity, and is thus indirectly responsible for the birth of the secessionist Wessex Regionalist Party. So take heart, aspiriing writers: you too may someday spawn minor political parties which garner 62 votes in a national election...but first please take steps to assure your notoriety by writing something controversial enough to be sold in brown paper bags and burned by a bishop
     But I digress. Back to Tess. Tess herself appears in many ways as a personification of nature; lovely, fertile and easily exploited. Tess is connected with the earth, soil and vegetation; she spends her life on farms and often appears in conjunction with animals (throughout the course of the novel she rides horses, tends chickens, works on a dairy farm and encounters wounded pheasants). She participates in land-based and pagan-influenced events such as harvest and May Day celebrations. Tess is nature, and she is spoiled by the son of a nouveau-riche merchant, which brings Sorrow (the name of their child) into the world.
     Besides presenting anti-industrial themes, Hardy explores the shortcomings of societal mores, particularly the sexual double standard which identifies Tess as a fallen woman despite the fact that she was a victim of force, while her attacker is not judged and suffers no loss of reputation, let alone legal consequences, for his actions. In fact, he eventually becomes a pietistic preacher, securing a place for his soul in heaven, while Tess stoically muses that she will likely suffer an afterlife of condemnation. Even Angel Clare, who is enough of a freethinker to reject the liturgical trappings of the state church, still spites Tess for her circumstances even though he himself had exhibited far looser moral behavior than she in the past. Unfortunately, Hardy's readers did not agree with his designation of Tess as a pure woman and begin to socially emancipate women. Rather, the 1890s saw more burnings of Hardy's books than of corsets.

Stats:
A pure woman: Tess Durbeyfield
Vaudeville-esque villain: Alec d'Urberville
Free-thinking prude (oxymoron?): Angel Clare
Dour Calvinist preacher: James Clare
19th century groupies: Izz, Retty and Marion
Setting which is practically a character: Wessex
Unappetizing vegetable: swedes (rutabagas)
There was a lot of: descriptions of nature and its wildness and pagan-ness, moustache-twirling villainry, pietist ethics, unfortunate circumstances for the heroine
There should have been more of: rational thinking by Angel
This book makes you want to: milk a cow, build connections within a small community, visit Stonehenge at sunrise
This book makes you glad you don't have to: live as a woman in the 19th century, walk 30 miles to your new job, dig up frozen rutabagas all winter

p.s. I read this book three weeks ago, and followed it with The Grapes of Wrath and The Bell Jar. This week is For Whom the Bell Tolls. On deck: Bleak House, East of Eden and The Brothers Karamazov; not necessarily in that order.

Last of the Mohicans

2011-05-22T21:10:00.000-07:00

This is the second (in order of publication) of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, following The Pioneers, which I read in March. Once again, I embarked upon a mental portage for the first 300 pages, after which the plot sped up somewhat, but although I patiently awaited some of the thoughtful, even philosophical musings encountered near the end of The Pioneers, I was ultimately disappointed. Don't get me wrong, as a plot-based historical novel Mohicans can hold the reader's interest, but it lacked the depth of Cooper's earlier volume. There are three more novels in the Leatherstocking Tales, and I am interested to see which precedent they will follow. I know I will be reading The Prairie at some point this year, as it is already in my possession, but The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder will likely wait until next year.

The plot of the novel differs noticeably from that of the 1992 film, so if you've seen the movie but haven't read the book, don't worry, I'm not mixing up the sisters....not that it would be difficult to do so when both characters are one-dimensional stereotypes of 19th century women. Speaking of which, let's talk about Cora. One piece of information that is fairly important in the novel but omitted from the movie is the fact that Cora is one-quarter black (but technically not African-American, as her mother was from the Caribbean). Why would the screenwriter (or casting director? whoever) skip over this? Probably because it is implied as a reason for Magua's attraction for her as well as for her more strong-willed and intense temperament. This then begs the question of why it would be problematic for Magua to be attracted to her due to her racial origins. To the 21st century reader it seems obvious that individuals have varying levels of attraction to people of different ethnicities. Part of the difficulty lies in the stereotypical representation of Magua as a sly, sneaky, violent and deceptive Indian. To put it bluntly, in Cooper's world, the villain of inferior race, when presented with two women, chooses the one who is also of inferior race. So you can see why Hollywood wasn't going to touch that with a ten-foot canoe paddle.

     Now, before you get the idea that I think Cooper is a racist pig, I must state that I stand by my previous opinion of him as quite advanced for his time in his ideas of race and culture. Let's look at Uncas, for example. If Magua is the sly, sneaky Indian and Chingachgook is the stoic noble savage, Uncas is an admirable and courageous hero whose depiction rises above ethnic stereotype. Hawkeye and Cora point out at different times that Uncas' behavior is commendable. Hawkeye comments that Uncas is pretty awesome for an Indian (my paraphrase) *sigh*, while Cora states that anyone who observed Uncas' actions would forget the color of his skin. Cooper then portrays the other characters as being uncomfortable with Cora's statement, which would have indeed been a historically accurate response. Cora (and Cooper) were ahead of their time.

    Related but not identical to Cooper's exploration of interracial relationships is his portrayal of culture conflict. Heyward represents the soldier ideal in American culture, while David Gamut is the Calvinist Protestant and Hawkeye is the frontiersman. These three men clash with each other throughout the novel, so how can such an internally discordant culture, one which can't even agree with itself, be expected to instantly enter civil discourse with not just one completely foreign Native American tribe, but many? Thus, Cooper makes his point more clearly than would have been possible had he permitted less conflict among the male American characters.

     Cooper further sets out issues of cultural conflict through his use of several names to refer to one person, tribe or place. To name something or someone is to assert dominance over that person or thing, and the fact that each group had their own names for other groups/people is used as a device by Cooper to signify the struggle between them. Nathaniel Bumppo calls himself Natty but is also known as Hawkeye by the Mohicans and La Longue Carabine by the French and Huron. The Iroquois are alternately Maquas and Mingoes, the Delaware are the Leni-Lenape, Chingachgook is Le Gros Serpent and Magua is Sly Fox. Even Lake Horican is also Lake George and Le Lac du St. Sacrament. Uncas originally carries the title Last of the Mohicans because he was the last born of his tribe, but after his death, his father, Chingachgook becomes Last of the Mohicans. Symbolically, Chingachgook represents not only the last of his tribe, but the last of all Indian culture, ultimately destroyed by the coming of the Europeans and their settlement of the frontier.

Stats:
Heroes: Uncas, Hawkeye
Villain: Magua
More sappy prairie women: Cora and Alice, but especially Alice
Over sensationalized: Indian massacre
Under explored: character of Hawkeye...but I do have 3 more volumes to go so I'll let it slide
There was a lot of: dialogue, tracking, descriptions of nature, hiking through the forest
There should have been more: comic relief. I think Cooper was trying with David Gamut, but I personally don't find much humor in strict Calvinists...
This book makes you want to: appreciate the alien beauty of the wilderness, appreciate the alien beauty of a person you don't understand (hmm...think Cooper chose his setting to correspond with his themes?)
This book makes you glad you don't have to: faint regularly as proof of your XX chromosomes, engage in hand-to-hand combat as proof of your XY chromosomes, rely on a guide who is trying to trick you, be the last living member of your tribe

Hard Times

2011-05-18T10:04:00.000-07:00

You know how in the good old days shiny new factories fairly employed industrious workers? Yeah, neither does Charles Dickens. Hard Times is a critique against utilitarianism, laissez-faire capitalism, and the idea that the most prosperous are also the most moral. Dickens presents characters like Gradgrind, a factory superintendent who cares only for facts, figures and statistics. As a utilitarian, he forbids his children the experiences of imagination and humankindness, driving them to ruin. Gradgrind's friend Bounderby is a materialist merchant who believes that his success as a businessman is somehow due to his moral superiority over the working-class people he employs. Ironically, the only character who displays imagination and warm-heartedness is Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a traveling circus performer.

Sweatshops: Old news? urban legend? fact of life?

Hard TImes takes place in Coketown, a fictional city resembling industrial Manchester or Preston. Dickens' opinion of factory labor was certainly influenced by his childhood experience pasting labels onto bottles in a shoe polish factory. In the 21st century, child labor and harsh working conditions haven't been abolished, they have merely been removed to distant locations. Is this a necessary fact of industrialism? Is it necessary to capitalism? Can industrialism be separated from capitalism? Some critics in Dickens' time, including George Bernard Shaw, disagreed with him, calling Hard Times an example of "sullen socialism" and a revolt against the industrial order. Others, such as George Orwell and John Ruskin, praised the novel. I advise you not to venture an opinion until you have read it. Whether you agree or disagree with Dickens' conclusions, you may be surprised at the grotesque portrayal of capitalism.

Stats:
Themes: fact vs. fancy; honesty; officiousness and bureaucracy; utilitarianism
Cold, calculating factory superintendent: Thomas Gradgrind
Unfortunate victim of imagination-ectomy: Louisa Gradgrind
Fully human despite (because of?) inefficient upbringing: Sissy Jupe
Pompous blowhard you love to hate: Josiah Bounderby
Working class man with higher moral character than his employer: Stephen Blackpool
There was a lot of: immovable social stratification, facts, boasting, lying, spying, secret reflection, regret, bad guys who didn't get their just desserts
There should have been more: views into Louisa's thoughts, development of the character of Sissy's father
This book makes you glad you don't have to: work in a textile mill, fear being blacklisted by the union, think all aspects of human experience can be quantified
This book makes you want to: pay attention to where your purchases come from, remind stressed friends that climbing the corporate ladder or improving their material lifestyle doesn't increase satisfaction or make them more successful (and somehow better?) people

Fahrenheit 451

2011-05-08T21:14:00.000-07:00

Having read 1984, Animal Farm and Brave New World, I steeled myself for another bleak dystopia, but Ray Bradbury surprised me with a happy ending. Perhaps it is more of a commentary on my outlook than on the novel that I considered the destruction of civilization by atomic bombs to be a happy ending... I will qualify that by pointing out that it is not the destruction of civilization in general, but the destruction of that civilization, which garnered my approval.
A society built on destruction and violence, one which forbids critical thought and medicates humans with entertainment, sounds unfortunately familiar. Fahrenheit 451's ubiquitous seashells which distract and pacify their wearers while cutting them off from other people are an obvious parallel to the earbuds and headphones worn by many. Current Western governments don't normally censor, edit or forbid certain books, let alone books in general, but society often does the job itself. Publishers delete or change portions of older books that are now considered offensive, as the recent fate of Huckleberry Finn demonstrates. Over time, larger segments of the work are removed until the current incarnation scarcely resembles the original. Indeed, a case of classic irony occurred in the 1990s when high school students wrote to Ray Bradbury telling him that the version of Fahrenheit 451 they were reading in school had been censored in over 70 places.
So what's the problem with removing the swear words from Fahrenheit 451 or the "n" word from Huckleberry Finn? This is exactly what Ray Bradbury predicted; each subgroup of society deletes the portion it finds offensive, until there is nothing left. This is particularly troubling when references to offensive parts of history are removed; eventually we may be left with a revisionist history. Obviously the "n" word is offensive; so is slavery and the mistreatment of black people (or any group). Why not also remove references to slavery from Huck Finn, and from any other book that children may come across? I disagree with this in part because in not knowing anything about that era of history, people step closer to repeating it, and later historical events also become meaningless or nonsensical when their causal link has been deleted. Again, Bradbury points this out near the end of the novel. Human society is like a phoenix, consuming itself and then rising from the ashes time after time, in part because it doesn't learn from its mistakes. So if you're in a tizzy about the end of the Mayan calendar on 12-21-2012, the coming of Ragnarok, the setting of the fifth sun or the end of the Kali Yuga, don't worry. It's not the end of the world.

Stats:
Slightly sinister guy who is reborn as a good guy: Guy Montag
Main villain: not Beatty....not tv...but society itself in its desire to be placated, entertained, anything to avoid occasional unhappiness
Guide who introduces main character to his quest: Clarisse McClellan
Weapons of mass sedation: television, radio with earbuds, (what would Bradbury say about FarmVille?!)
There was a lot of: burning, lights, heat, hiding things, mentally vacuous people, mechanical/electronic things that resemble insects, mention of specific banned authors and books
There should have been more of: I would have liked Montag to read more books and have his thought life develop more before he was forced into his final life-changing dilemma, even though it would have slowed down the plot
This book makes you want to: read more books, explore books that have been censored at various times, unplug the tv, spend time in nature and with other people
This book makes you glad you don't have to: live superficially just because everybody else does, run for your life from a creepy mechanical hound, undergo therapy to recall from your subconscious the entire text of a book you read which has since been destroyed

Madame Bovary

2011-05-04T21:04:00.000-07:00

I spent the week of April 17-23 in rural France with Emma Bovary, who unfortunately did not receive the psychological help which would have so greatly benefited her. If you have a friend who is exhibiting Bovary-like symptoms, such as lounging all day in a silk dressing gown while reading Danielle Steele novels and maxing out credit cards on boutique.com, I beg you to stage an intervention. I recommended that Emma get herself an education and a sense-of-entitlement-ectomy immediately, but she refused to comply. Charles told me quite seriously that such a surgical procedure would be dangerous, as it could disturb the spleen. I complimented his mental vacuity, at which he became choked up and said, "Aw shucks" (direct quote).

     Upon my return home, I was initially relieved to get away from the unpleasant situation in the Bovary household. However, an unsettling awareness soon crept upon me. Emma Bovary is everywhere. Gustave Flaubert, that terrible genius, took the flaws which occasionally arise in nearly every western individual and fashioned them into a formidable literary character. You know that guy down the street with the average job and the really expensive car (and wristwatch, and tv)? Conspicuous consumption. Madame Bovary. How about the girl who always tells you how perfect her boyfriend is, even though you get a little confused because it's a different boyfriend every month? Emotional insecurity and romantic idealization. Madame Bovary. That friend who is always bored because everything is so cliche, so unoriginal, so beneath him, and he really deserves something better? Ennui plus sense of entitlement. Madame Bovary. And how about that thing I just spent the entire paragraph doing: pointing the finger at everyone but myself? You know it. Madame Bovary! Now that you're depressed to the point of eating arsenic directly from the jar, remember that there was no escape for Emma because she chose to isolate herself and wallow in self-pity. When we see a little of Madame Bovary in ourselves, we can make the opposite choice and perform the sometimes painful -ectomy.

     Whether you think Emma's dissatisfaction with life was caused by anomie, ennui, acedia, boredom or general malaise, the result is her melodramatic refusal to integrate herself into her social reality, followed by a descent into manic dysfunctionality complete with fainting spells, (not so) secret infidelities, massive debt and arsenic. Oh, Emma! Flaubert's talent shines in his creation of a masterpiece novel which is built on these incredibly banal characters and a rather boring but realistic plot. It's as though he were competing in an Iron Author competition in which the announcer states, "For characters you have a stupid doctor, his spoiled and dissatisfied wife, a scheming pharmacist and a greedy moneylender. The plot: their deluded, self-satisfied daily lives. You have five years to finish...Go!" And so he went. The result was this scathing commentary on the bourgeoisie which Flaubert so detested. In lauding Flaubert for his realism and his influence on later authors, I offer you the words of James Wood in How Fiction Works:

      Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is
       almost too familiar to be visible. We hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling of brilliant detail; that it
       privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw,
       like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even
       at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You
       can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert.

Stats:
Country bumpkin: Charles Bovary
Archetypal fool: Emma Bovary
Swindler: Monsieur Lheureux
Dangerous liaisons: Rodolphe and Leon
Two-faced saboteur and enabler: Monsieur Homais
There was a lot of: spending money, fainting, pouting, wishful thinking, cheating (financial and marital)
There should have been more: descriptions of food and eating. Come on, this is France! Couldn't she have bought some fancy cheese once in a while?
This book makes you want to: live an examined life, clearly label all household poisons and store them on a shelf away from the sugar
This book makes you glad you don't have to: stare into an empty abyss of meaningless years stretching before you...then shrug and pick up a haute couture magazine

Jane Eyre

2011-04-29T21:56:00.000-07:00

Yes, this is another one of those books that it seemed everyone but me has read. Since it's around 450 pages, I wasn't sure if I could finish it in a week, but I managed to join the ranks of the initiated. (Note: I read this the week of April 10-16. Once again, I'm abreast of the reading, behind on the blog) I was familiar with the plot from listening to other people's discussions, but I had purposefully avoided watching any of the films or miniseries until after I had read the book.
Jane Eyre was not unique in having attained a measure of familiarity in my mind; I was already familiar with the plots of most of the classic novels I have read thus far in 2011 for the reason mentioned above: these are well-known books and I've heard other people discussing them. But each week upon choosing and reading a novel, I am surprised that the aforementioned discussions revolved solely around the major plot events or characters (Wasn't Mr. X creepy? I think Ms. Y should have chosen Suitor 2 instead of Suitor 1. There were too many minor characters.) without touching on the themes of the books. Silas Marner isn't just about the love of an old man for an orphan; it's about betrayal, redemption, suspicion, greed, alchemy and love (among other things). The Pioneers isn't only about a small village and its wild and wandering hero; it's about the tension between wilderness and civilization (social and psychological as well as geographical), justice, intercultural relations, land ownership and environmental conservation. Should I have been surprised that Jane Eyre is more than a gothic romance? And why do people seem to forget the themes of books but remember the plots?
Jane Eyre is indeed partly autobiographical, with many of the characters and places paralleling those of Charlotte Brontë's own experience. The novel is known for its exploration of class and gender relations, but it also addresses religion, God, morality, forgiveness, and the relationship (or lack thereof) between those ideas. Themes of fear, the supernatural and madness place the novel firmly in the gothic or gothic romance category. Having read Wuthering Heights a few months ago, I can see similarities between Emily's and Charlotte's styles, themes and characters. I can also say with certainty that the next time Jane Eyre comes up in conversation, I will think not only of the memorable characters, but also of the themes exemplified through the characters' thoughts and actions.

Stats:
Byronic anti-hero (mandatory in gothic novels): Edward Rochester
Hypocritical pietist: Mr. Brocklehurst
Victim of consumption (also mandatory in gothic novels): Helen Burns
Madwoman in the attic: Bertha Mason
The guy who wrecks the wedding: Richard Mason
Devout-in-all-the-wrong-ways Calvinist: St. John Rivers
Lower class governess who survives the odyssey into selfhood: Jane Eyre
There was a lot of: fire, allusions to burning, mysterious bumps in the night, miserable living conditions, secrets, people trying to guilt Jane into bending to their will
There should have been more: lucky breaks for Jane...but that wouldn't have made a very good bildungsroman, now would it?
This book makes you want to: give an orphan a better life, observe others more keenly, learn to draw, put on a couple sweaters and eat a big dinner, rethink society's definition of mental illness and its treatment of people in that category
This book makes you glad you don't have to: dodge books thrown by hateful cousins, interact only with a narrow stratum of society, travel long distances by coach, narrowly escape bigamy

All Quiet on the Western Front

2011-04-10T20:24:00.000-07:00

Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, was a German WWI veteran who wrote honestly about war, drawing on his own experience in the trenches. He was conscripted at age 18 and spent six weeks on the Western Front before being wounded. Remarque documented with great clarity the details of WWI as the world had never yet seen or heard them. All Quiet on the Western Front was banned in Poland for being pro-German, and also (ironically?) in Nazi Germany for its negative portrayal of war. This novel realistically portrays the conditions under which soldiers lived and fought, circumstances which led to their personal, intellectual and emotional undoing.

The prose is spare, constantly moving the action forward, allowing the characters no time for reflection, for reflection is a luxury not to be found when all one's energies must be concentrated on the task of staying alive, preserving a life from which all meaning has been stripped, from which all future has been wrenched, from which all hope has been snuffed, life itself finally becoming a means to an end, a welcome end in the silence of death. That's the ultimate message in the ironic title: there is no quiet to be found in the front lines of war, not as long as life persists. Paul Baumer finds no solace outside of death.

All Quiet on the Western Front can even be considered dystopian; after all, can you think of a more bleak and miserable existence than that of a soldier on the front lines of a brutal early 20th-century-style war, fighting for the losing side? This was the complete opposite of utopia, and the story is even more powerful because it is essentially REAL. Many war novels glorify conflict (or at least winning), and hail as heroes those who risk their lives to save or help a fellow soldier, without asking why the "hero" was forced to come to another's aid in the first place. The entire war theater remains in the background, unquestioned, continuing to requisition young people from both sides and grind them against each other into oblivion. Not so for Remarque, who manages through narrative to question the very setting of the novel.

Stats:
Main character: Paul Baumer
Loyal friends: die one by one
Jarring turning point: Returning home on leave, Paul realizes he'd rather be back at the Front than with his family. In giving up anything that he had to live for or come home to, he chooses his own fate.
Horrors: gas, amputation, tanks, barbed wire, rats, hand-to-hand combat
This book makes you glad you don't have to: be drafted
This book makes you want to: send copies of it to people who should read it (I'll leave that open to your interpretation)
Quote: "Ah Mother, Mother! How can it be that I must part from you? Who else is there that has any claim on me but you? Here I sit and there you are lying; we have so much to say, and we shall never say it."

First Quarter in Review

2011-04-10T18:29:00.000-07:00

We're three months into 2011, and here's the proof! From bottom to top, these are the novels I read and blogged about from January through March: Wuthering Heights, The Three Musketeers, The Scarlet Letter, Treasure Island, Oliver Twist, Pride and Prejudice, Silas Marner, Crime and Punishment, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Great Expectations, The Pioneers, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Mrs. Dalloway.

And, for those who are interested, I have acquired these books in three different ways: gift (do I need to explain that one?), thrift (bought it secondhand) or swift (the speed with which I forked over the cash-in person or online-when buying a brand new book). From bottom to top: gift, thrift, thrift, swift, swift, gift, thrift, thrift, thrift, swift, gift, thrift, thrift. All of those works were already on my shelf when I began this blog on January 1, 2011, except the top two, which I picked up recently.

Mrs. Dalloway

2011-04-10T17:41:00.000-07:00

Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness novel follows Clarissa Dalloway through one day of her life, in which she prepares for and hosts a party. The reader enters into the thoughts of Clarissa and of several other characters, most of whom come in contact with Mrs. Dalloway at some point during the day, but a couple whom she never meets. Why does Woolf deem it necessary to show the reader not only Clarissa Dalloway's thoughts and actions, but also those of several others? She reveals her premise through Clarissa's musings as remembered by Peter Walsh: "She felt herself everywhere; not 'here, here, here,'...She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them, even the places." In order to paint a complete portrait of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf must show the reader how Clarissa acts and sees herself, but the reader must also examine Clarissa's relationships with others. The resulting novel is a composite view, a mosaic which, when viewed from a distance, reveals an intricate design. The same can be said of any individual's life; upon closer examination a web of relationships reveals itself.

Throughout the novel, Clarissa is contrasted with Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked WWI hero who suffers from mental illness, and in many ways Septimus serves as Clarissa's alter-ego or double. The two never meet, but Septimus' eventual suicide is mentioned during Mrs. Dalloway's party. Woolf criticizes the treatment of mental illness and demonstrates how it can only be interpreted through cultural norms, thus combining her criticism of issues surrounding mental illness with her criticism of social structures. Both Virginia Woolf and her character Septimus struggled with bipolar disorder, and Woolf joins other writers such as Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen whose achievements are rooted in psychological distress.

In the end, the reader is left to decide whether Mrs. Dalloway is a shallow socialite, an everywoman trapped by social structures and gender expectations, or perhaps an alternative of mosaic-like complexity.

Stats:
Main character: Clarissa Dalloway
Other characters: are windows through which to view Clarissa
There was a lot of: walking, thinking, remembering
There should have been more of: I could wish for more dialogue, but it would jar the reader out of the characters' thoughts, so Woolf was right to leave it out
This book makes you want to: read the minds of twenty people who have a certain acquaintance in common, in order to build a more complete picture of that person.
This book makes you glad you don't have to: hear the unending stream of another's thoughts. Woolf was right to confine the novel to a single day.

(Final note: I read this book the week of March 27-April 2. I am a week behind on my blog but am keeping up with my reading.)

One Hundred Years of Solitude

2011-04-04T19:56:00.000-07:00

"Our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude." -Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech

Don't worry if you had to read that quote a couple of times; you're just preparing yourself for the experience of reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. The translation is well done and not difficult to follow, but the plot is very circular and at times you will have the feeling that you are re-reading a paragraph or page, only to realize that your deja vu stems from a very similar section earlier in the book. The translation is smooth and easy to read, but the storyline repeats itself and sometimes you feel like you have already read a certain section, but then realize that you are actually remembering a previous section that was strangely similar. That is one of Garcia Marquez' points: even if history doesn't repeat itself exactly, it is certainly a series of variations on a theme. I am not extremely familiar with Colombian history, so I had to peruse a couple articles online in order to understand how Garcia Marquez structures the history of the fictional town of Macondo as a metaphor for the history of Colombia.

The story follows the birth, development and death of the town of Macondo as seen through the eyes of seven generations of the Buendia family. Purposefully repetitive plot devices include members of each generation having the same names as their various ancestors, as well as the same personality tendencies and similar character flaws. There is also a slightly disturbing (to me) recurrence of familial marriage and romantic relationships: cousins marry cousins, nephews marry aunts, adopted brother marries adopted sister. Garcia Marquez did not go so far as to pair a parent with a child or two siblings with each other (not to my recollection anyway...there were seven generations and only about six different first names, so it was difficult to keep them straight. I should have sketched a family tree at the beginning and added to it throughout the novel. The Wikipedia article also includes a family tree that I could have used as a cheat sheet.) The Buendia family represents the Colombian aristocracy and embodies many of its distasteful elements, which of course would include aristocratic people only marrying within their socially approved group. Perhaps Garcia Marquez takes this cliquish habit to an extreme in order to make a point. Selfishness and solitude (not solitude in general, which is necessary for human development, but in the sense of refusing to engage in any real relationships) are other vices that the Buendia family must reckon with. Interpreting the author's social and historical commentary isn't always easy, and this is one of those books that one could read five times and come away with a different understanding of it each time.

What is magical realism and how does One Hundred Years exemplify it? Butterflies follow a man everywhere. It rains for four years without stopping. A patriarch is tied to a tree in the courtyard after going insane. An orphan carries the bones of her parents in a bag. When milk in a cooking pot turns to worms, it signifies a man's death. A dead man smells of gunpowder, even after being enclosed in a concrete vault. Women live to be 150 years old, maybe more (they tend to lose track after that). Songbirds won't stay in the town; they all migrate elsewhere. Military men massacre a crowd of hundreds and send the bodies out of town on a train, but nobody remembers it afterwards. This is different from fantasy in that a realistic setting and plot are laid out, and then magical elements are inserted in a matter-of-fact way, with no attempt to explain or justify them. Just as an author feels no need to justify the idea that a field can be planted in May and harvested in August (it's part of the natural order, everyone accepts this as fact), the author of magical realism presents fantastic elements as though they are part of the normal schema. In fantasy, the author will explain strange happenings as being the result of spells, other dimensions, communication with a parallel world, etc. In magical realism, it's just there. It's obvious. This style makes for a dreamlike, even psychedelic, reading experience. It seems that this style is most strongly associated with Latin American authors, and there are a plethora of articles written on why that is (or isn't) so. Feel free to google for your further reading enjoyment.

Stats:
Endlessly recyclable first names: Jose Arcadio, Aureliano, Remedios, Amaranta, Ursula
Endlessly recyclable themes: selfishness, insanity, illness, obsession, wandering, jealousy, intra-family marriage
There was a lot of: see above, then multiply times seven
There should have been more of: Garcia Marquez thoroughly explored his themes. However, I prefer a little more dialogue and a little less stream of consciousness.
This book makes you want to: hire an exterminator, clean the house, break your family's unhealthy tendencies, hide money in humorous locations, forgive and forget, build real relationships
This book makes you glad you don't have to: marry your cousin, work for a banana company, participate in a revolution (I hope you don't, anyway), relive the mistakes of past generations

The Pioneers: The Sources of the Susquehanna; a Descriptive Tale

2011-03-20T19:16:00.000-07:00

Yes, that's the entire title, and I chose to use it to distinguish this novel from O Pioneers!, which might have come to your mind if I had only written The Pioneers. This book is the first published (fourth chronologically) of the Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper, and it sold 3,500 copies before noon on the day it was published (1823). Most famous of the Leatherstocking Tales is the second chronologically, The Last of the Mohicans, which is sometimes called >adopt reverent tone< THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL. (Incidentally, this should remove a weight from the minds of all you aspiring American writers, in that, since Cooper has already written the great American novel, you don't have to!) I have chosen to read all five of them this year, and I was undecided whether to read them in order of chronology or of publication, until someone suggested doing the latter in order to more easily follow Cooper's development as a writer. That appealed to me, so down I sat with The Pioneers.

Egads. After about 300 pages, I was considering greasing my eyeballs to allow them to slide over the text more quickly. It was, how you say, le boring. And then, somewhere around page 325 (I'm guessing), the clouds parted, the sun beamed down, the birds sang and somebody smacked Cooper upside the head and said, "Get going!!" Well. After that the plot took off galloping and didn't stop until a finish that crammed in everything. Instead of spreading out the literary goodness over the entire novel, Cooper was rather stingy at the beginning, and then piled it on at the end. Seriously, in approximately the last 100 pages, you will find SPOILERS AHEAD>>> entrapment, poaching, a weaponized stand off, a trial, a jailbreak, a wildfire, rescue of damsel in distress (twice), the death of a noble chief, appearance of a long lost friend/relative, revelation of a character's true identity, confession of true love, proposal and marriage, burial and romantic epitaphs, poetic speeches about death, the afterlife, wilderness, civilization, law and justice, and finally the hero walks off into the sunset.
END SPOILERS

Now, before you think Cooper a tired cliche for having his hero walk off into the sunset, let me point out that The Pioneers was the first novel to contain such an exit. Far from cliche, this was original and very romantic (in the original sense of the word). Also romantic is the continuous tension between wilderness and settlement. Cooper addresses issues of environmental stewardship, conservation and use, and is possibly the first novelist to do so. He also pointedly demonstrates the difference between justice and law, and the fact that the law exists to serve itself (or possibly power). He devises a surprisingly universalist hero for an American in 1823, as can be seen in Hawkeye's statement that, although whites want to be buried facing east and Indians want to be buried facing west, after death they will meet in the land of the just.

Despite being far ahead of his time in many ways, there are other areas in which Cooper has not shed the conventional prejudices of his day. The portrayal of black slaves and freedmen as childlike is similar to or slightly worse than that of Mark Twain's Huck Finn (written a generation later than the Leatherstocking Tales). Expect to see the "N" word in the first few chapters, used by black people as often as by whites. That said, Cooper was the first American novelist to include African American characters at all, so even his stereotypical portrayal was a milestone. As for women, they are virtuous but mentally vacuous, occasionally fainting and getting into dangerous predicaments from which they require rescuing. Their main functions are as daughters, servants and wives, but not mothers, interestingly. (Both mothers are dead). A contemporary critic wrote of Cooper: "the women he draws from one model don't vary / All sappy as maples and flat as a prairie." Despite these shortcomings, Cooper's portrayal of Native Americans is varied and complicated. He succeeds, through the course of the Leatherstocking Tales, in creating contrasts between some Native characters that are noble and heroic and others with few redeeming qualities. In this, he demonstrates his view of Native Americans as a large group with certain tendencies, but comprised of individuals with different characters. In other words, they have the dignity and depth of any other human culture group.

As a short aside, I must question whether Cooper was a genius. You see, he was enrolled at Yale at age 13, but was expelled after a dangerous prank that involved him blowing up another student's door. Another less dangerous prank consisted of training a donkey to sit in a professor's chair. That certainly looks like the work of a genius to me. ;)

Stats:
ponderously annoying semi-main character: Judge Marmaduke
maple and prairie female: Elizabeth
ethnic stereotypes: the German guy, the French guy, the black guy, the English guy
hero: Hawkeye, aka Leatherstocking, aka Nathaniel Bumpo, aka Natty Bumpo
comrade of aforementioned hero: Chingachgook (also of The Last of the Mohicans fame)
there was a lot of : trees, wildlife, use and misuse of said trees and wildlife
there should have been more of: women with brains...or at least personalities...
this book makes you want to: preserve some unspoiled wilderness, treat people right, get away from stupid people
this book makes you glad you don't have to: be a woman or ethnic minority in 1823

Edit: I read and reviewed The Last of the Mohicans in May.

Great Expectations

2011-03-20T17:30:00.000-07:00

I read Great Expectations during the week of March 6-13. This was the second Dickens novel of the year, following Oliver Twist by about a month. From conversations with friends, I have come to see this as a "love it or hate it" book. I went into the week thinking I wouldn't care for it, possibly because I tried to read it when I was eight and couldn't understand it (go figure), but I was pleasantly surprised.

Great Expectations chronicles the coming of age of Pip (Philip Pirrip). Without giving away too much of the plot, I can say that it's a rags to riches to rags tale. In the end Pip has discovered that all his initial grand pursuits in life didn't satisfy him, and he appears to be content to live a simple life that is rich in friendship. In the end, all of the actions that he undertook in selfishness have come to nothing, and the one good deed that he did for love of another is the only one that endures to bear fruit. The character of Pip undergoes definite transformation as he matures and struggles with issues of personal growth, social class and crime; this is a true bildungsroman. Some of the characters are a bit one-dimensional, but I was glad to see Dickens in fine form as he develops comic caricatures in the members of the Pocket family. Dickens also has a piercing way of describing the world through the eyes of a child, and there is a definite sense of place as he locates the action in two very different settings: London and the Marshes.

Stats:
main character: Pip
gentle giant: Joe Gargery
crazy old lady: Miss Havisham
unattainable object of affection: Estella
funny folk: the Pocket family
place as character: the marshes
there was a lot of: secrets, discontent, jealousy, affection
there should have been more of: descriptions of hearty country fare...because if I can't eat a pound of cheese and a slab of bacon every day, reading about other people eating them is the next best thing
this book makes you want to: get an education, know who your real friends are, make your way in the world, have a definite sense of "home" to come back to
this book makes you glad you don't have to: endure face-to-face abuse from a higher social class, sneak an escaped convict out of the country in the dead of night, lie ill with an inexplicable 19th century "fever" (seriously, was that the only diagnosis at the time?)

Elementary, my dear Watson.

2011-03-20T16:46:00.000-07:00

Okay, he must have said that in one of the other books, because he didn't say it in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I read this book the week of February 27-March 5. Obviously I'm behind in my blog posts, but I'm keeping up with my reading. Forgive the likely choppiness of this entry, as I'm trying to catch up.

This book is the third of nine in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series. (There are four novels and five collections of short stories.) Unlike some series', however, these books can be read out of order without undue confusion on the part of the reader. Holmes and Watson are, of course, classic and familiar characters. Conan Doyle's series isn't written in a very literary style, nor do we see a lot of character development, but Sherlock Holmes (based on Conan Doyle's professor, Joshua Bell) was such a singular and unprecedented character that the series immediately attracted attention. Holmes' hyper-rational, observant, logical, scientific approach to reasoning was (and still is) a great inspiration for the discipline of forensics.

I leave you with an observation from Holmes himself: "Data! Data! Data! I can't make bricks without clay!"

Crime and Punishment

2011-03-05T10:02:00.000-08:00

Although I read this book last week (Feb 20-26), I postponed its blog entry because I wanted to first finish reading A Concise History of the Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes, as I will explain below.

     Published in 1866, Crime and Punishment follows the St. Petersburg student Raskolnikov as he contemplates, commits, regrets and finally confesses a major crime. The novel is psychological in nature, following Raskolnikov's mental struggle, devolution and evolution. Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment after his release from a labor camp in Siberia, where he had spent five years because of his liberal political ideas. While serving his sentence, his political and religious ideas underwent major changes as he became disillusioned with contemporary Western philosophical movements, and Crime and Punishment is written from his new perspective as a Slavophile and a devout Orthodox. Raskolnikov's dreadful actions are intended as an example of nihilism taken to its logical conclusion, yet the radical thinkers of Dostoevsky's day scorned the idea that Raskolnikov had anything in common with them. Russian nihilism (adhered to by Raskolnikov) encouraged the creation of an élite of superior individuals who are not subject to the morals or laws of society; in fact, they must rise above these restrictions in order to create a new and superior social order. Throughout the novel, Raskolnikov wonders if he, like Napoleon, is one of these so-called superior individuals. He tests his theory by committing a murder near the beginning of the novel, and the rest of the book chronicles his mental anguish and withdrawal from society. The nihilists and other radical thinkers of the day rejected this portrayal, saying that murder simply for the sake of murder was unrelated to their theories.

Unfortunately, Dostoevsky's foresight was proven true by the actions of the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution, specifically the Red Terror. The Bolsheviks, like the fictional Raskolnikov and his hero Napoleon, believed that they were superior individuals undertaking the creation of a new social order by whatever methods necessary. During the Red Terror, millions of innocent people were slaughtered. This was not capital punishment as a result of supposed (or even fabricated) crimes; it was death for the sake of death. Zinoviev, one of the top Soviet officials during the revolution, stated in September 1918, "We must carry with us [into the future] 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia's inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated." N.V. Krylenko, official of the Commissariat of Justice added, "We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more."   During this time, mass executions were to be used as a tool to subjugate the unwilling masses while the Bolsheviks, who knew what was best for Russia and for the world, created their utopia. Well, Raskolnikov, I'll see your Napoleon and raise you a Lenin.

Dostoevsky writes as a third-person omnisicient narrator in this novel, which was innovative at the time. His penetrating psychological analysis and character development also set him apart as a novelist. I considered following Crime and Punishment with The Brothers Karamazov, but the latter is much longer and I have a few library books to finish this week as well. That said, The Brothers Karamazov will be making an appearance on this blog within the next month or so.

Stats:
Tortured idealist student with no life experience (Lenin, I'm looking at you!): Raskolnikov
Best friend you don't deserve: Razumikhin
Moron: Luzhin
Mary Magdalene without the insanity: Sonya
Strong-willed sister:Dunya
Quotable quote: People are happy who have no need of locks. (Raskolnikov)
Okay, one more: If you weren't a fool, a common fool...if you were an original instead of a translation...you'd come round to meet me instead of wearing out your boots in the street. (Razumikhin)
There was a lot of: mental anguish, fever, poverty-filled streets, illness, thinking, failed attempts at thinking
There should have been more: I don't know, flowers and butterflies? It's called Crime and Punishment, for crying out loud.
This book makes you glad you don't have to: answer all the world's big questions
This book makes you want to: answer all the world's big questions   (See, you can drive yourself insane without even killing anybody first)

Silas Marner by George Eliot

2011-02-19T20:13:00.000-08:00

George Eliot is the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, a 19th century British author of poetry and seven novels. In addition to Silas Marner, I had heard of The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, but hadn't read any of them before this week. I chose this one over the others because...it was sitting on my shelf. Same reason climbers scale mountains, right?...with the slight difference that I was able to accomplish this while sitting in an armchair by the fire. (I think I got the better deal.)

Silas Marner is set in the British Midlands during the Industrial Revolution and could be a reaction to it, in that it portrays some of the negative effects of the Industrial Revolution. Eliot herself rejected organized religion as an adult, and this novel also offers a critique of religion. Knowing this, one might be tempted to think of Silas Marner as a stern, dour, finger-wagging critique of the negative aspects of the author's society, but such is not the case. George Eliot excelled both at realism in her depiction of rural society in 19th century England and at sketching excellent character portraits. Throughout the novel, the development of the main characters can be seen as Eliot skillfully brings out the tension between circumstance and character. At first it seems like a simple moral tale (good characters get a happy ending, bad ones get their just desserts), but throughout the novel ethics are unhinged from religion, which makes for a very interesting treatment.

Stats:

Most conflicted man: Godfrey Cass
Most transformed character: Silas Marner
Alchemical child: Eppie
Featured religious denominations: Calvinism, low church Anglicanism
There was a lot of: greed, gossip, deception, religious behavior, renewal
There should have been more: um...none of the above?
This book makes you want to: live a simple life, value people for who they are
This book makes you glad you don't have to: walk miles in the slush, spend your life in suspicion of all that lies outside your small town, live surrounded by aforementioned suspicious people (at least I hope you don't)

Pride and Prejudice

2011-02-15T19:50:00.000-08:00

Alas, the poor blog languisheth. I finished Pride and Prejudice five days ago, and am well into the next one on my list, but I haven't had a chance to compose an entry until now. I know you're all dying to know my opinion.

Although I have seen several film versions of this Jane Austen classic, at last I have taken the opportunity to read the book itself. The film versions do justice to the plot and dialogue, but there is much in the structure of the novel that can't adequately be captured on film. The first part of the book takes place mainly as a series of performances in the public sphere, but Darcy's letter to Elizabeth is a clear divide, after which the plot and character development take place mainly through letters and internal musing. This contrast between writing styles parallels the plot development, which begins with the characters' first impressions of each other and interactions with each other, and then moves to a more thoughtful section in which the characters must reassess, and sometimes completely deconstruct, their initial opinions of each other.

There are libraries full of scholarly analyses of Austen's work, and of this novel in particular, which I cannot summarize. I can merely touch on the book's relationship to its context and historical setting. The work itself is set during the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, which are only implied in this novel in the movements of troops and garrisons from one English town to another. War and political issues are never mentioned. Pride and Prejudice was also written after Mary Wollstonecraft had become well-known as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and Austen's main character Elizabeth, while not feminist in the current sense, certainly has views about the education and role of women, views which conflict with those of her society. (Darcy agrees with Elizabeth on many points.) The novel is set among the landed gentry of 19th century England, and addresses issues of class, inheritance, perception and identity. All this, woven into a most delicious love story.

Stats:
Best catch: Mr. Darcy
Guy you want to slap: Mr. Collins
Biggest airhead: Lydia...no, Mrs. Bennet...no, Lydia...no, Mrs. Bennet...no...
There was a lot of: dancing, walking, conversing, analyzing others' behavior
This book makes you want to: write letters, walk in the countryside, play the piano on a quiet evening
This book makes you glad you don't have to: fawn over those in higher social classes, become "accomplished" in frivolous amusements (women), walk three miles to your neighbor's house

Oliver Twist

2011-02-06T16:49:00.000-08:00

Dear Mr. Dickens,

     I am writing to wish you well on the occasion of your 199th birthday. Those who share your birthdate, February 7, are fortunate indeed to be in the company of both a master storyteller and a proponent of social reform. Despite your desire to forget the miseries of your childhood, beginning with your father's stay in debtor's prison and continuing through your devastating employment in the shoe polish factory, your readers are aware that without such experiences you may not have been able to so accurately portray the plight of the lower classes of London. By your own admission, you were a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy", echoes of which can be found in both Oliver Twist and David Copperfield.
     I understand that Oliver Twist in particular was intended to shed light on the great London waif crisis. Indeed it did, with the public being so shocked by your descriptions of crime and squalor that the slum Jacob's Island was cleared as a result. But Oliver, now, Oliver himself was conceived in irony, was he not? The subtitle of Oliver Twist: the parish boy's progress alerts the reader that this work stands in contrast to John Bunyan's well-known The Pilgrim's Progress. Bunyan's main character finds himself journeying toward heaven, while your unfortunate Oliver, by dint of circumstance and societal structure, finds himself dragged into a living hell. Even Oliver's surname, "Twist", darkly foreshadows his likely demise at the end of a hangman's noose, a common fate for pickpockets, thieves and criminals on the streets of London. Several characters who observed the ragged child predicted, "He'll hang." The fact that an orphan's homelessness and pennilessness would cause any child to steal for his bread was apparently lost on the judges and magistrates who handed down sentences in those days.
     As for Nancy, it was too late for her, wasn't it? Surely you saw her in the young women of Urania Cottage, the prostitutes and thieves whom you found in prisons and workhouses and invited to the Cottage where they learned to read, write and re-enter society. This was one of the first halfway houses for women on record, and the 100 women who were rehabilitated there bore witness to your sense of justice.
    Of course, there is one final character in Oliver Twist that I must mention. She appears in beauty and in squalor, and though you describe her in detail, Oliver Twist alone is not enough to paint a complete picture of her. She lives in all your other works as well: singing, mourning, lounging, sprinting, bustling, resting, pining, laughing, blooming, dying. She is London, and you knew her like a lover.
     And so, Mr. Dickens, I congratulate you on another year. Although you've spent it in the ground, your words have been read by thousands of people over the last 365 days, and so you've spent it in our hearts and minds as well. Happy birthday.

Treasure Island: In Which Stevenson Singlehandedly Creates Our Perception of Pirates

2011-01-31T20:26:00.000-08:00

Everyone knows that Treasure Island is about pirates. And everyone knows what I mean by pirates: parrots on the shoulders of treacherous one-legged sailors, an old map with a red "X" to mark the secret location of the buried treasure, schooners, mutinies, maroonings, tropical islands, scalawags with names like Black Dog and Billy Bones, shipwrecks, muskets and cutlasses, the black spot, pieces of eight, rum, rum and more rum, even the guy with the red stocking cap who climbs the rigging with a knife in his teeth. Guess what? Robert Louis Stevenson made it all up.

Birth of a Subgenre
Before Treasure Island, none of the above ideas were specifically connected with pirates in the popular imagination. The birth of the novel can be traced to the day Stevenson's stepson painted a map of an island, and Stevenson, looking over his shoulder, was intrigued enough to make up a story on the spot. Within 15 days he wrote 15 chapters. The remainder of the book was finished later that year, Stevenson having been interrupted in the middle by a prolonged illness. Stevenson based his ambiguous one-legged mutineer and sea-cook Long John Silver, one of the most well-known literary characters of all time, on his friend, William Ernest Henley, who had lost his leg to tuberculosis. If Henley's name sounds familiar, it's because he's the author of the poem "Invictus" (you may know its oft-quoted lines, "I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul", penned shortly after Henley lost his leg). The personality and determination that shine through in "Invictus" have also been captured in Stevenson's portrayal of Silver.

The story garnered little attention when it was first serialized in a magazine, but when published as a book, it gained instant popularity. Without Stevenson, we'd be missing an entire segment of halloween costumes, kids' books, films, themed birthday parties, niche seafood restaurants and amusement park rides. There would likely be no Talk Like A Pirate Day, nor would Facebook provide the language option "English (pirate)". Would not our world be a little less merry and whimsical without Captain Jack Sparrow? (Can't say I'd miss Captain Feathersword of The Wiggles though....) These items are shallow in themselves, but the world of adventurous and imaginative play in which children engage while drawing on this cultural legacy is quite valuable.

The book itself is, of course, an excellent adventure novel. It's a classic coming-of-age tale intended for a juvenile audience, although it differs significantly from more recent children's works in its frequent descriptions of enthusiastic rum guzzling. Must be a pirate thing... The plot contains enough twists to interest adults, and the morally complex character of Long John Silver is also unusual in children's literature. At 250 pages, you could read it aloud to your grade-schooler in a week. In fact, I think I'll do just that, even though I read it to myself last week. It's that good.

Stats:
Favorite character: Long John Silver
Guy you want to slap: Squire Trelawney
There was a lot of: piratical elements...as mentioned above
There should have been more: dangerous island creatures. I'm thinking a big snake would have intensified the savage wilderness feel of the island.
Conflicts existed between: civility and savagery, truthfulness and deception, drunkenness and sobriety, loyalty and disloyalty
Eccentricity I'd most like to emulate: Dr. Livesey carrying a piece of parmesan cheese with him in a snuff box.

The Scarlet Letter: A Romance

2011-01-23T10:25:00.000-08:00

Wait... "A Romance"?
Yes, that is the subtitle Nathaniel Hawthorne gives to his magnum opus. I know what you're thinking: "A romance among the Puritans? This is going to be about as grotesque as a Russian luau." Now, before you go complaining that I'm insulting Russians, let me point out that I thoroughly enjoy their food, music, novels, ballet, folk tales, fur hats and Faberge eggs. I just don't see them as embodying the aloha spirit. In the same way, the plain, somber, gray-clothed Puritans aren't the first people who come to mind when you want to read about a vibrant and undying loooove. >insert googly eyes here< Perhaps this is why The Scarlet Letter sat on my shelf for 12 years with nary a peek from me. I thought it would be dour and depressing, what with all the "Sinner!" and "Evildoer!" finger pointing.

That is where I was wrong. I humbly repent, in the most literary way possible. I will admit that I suffered through the first half, as did the main characters. That section focused a lot on Hester's de facto shunning by the community, which was very puritanical (how fitting, I know), and the plot came across as heavy-handed with overly repetitive allusions. But the book in its entirety turned out to be a very interesting exploration of many themes, including sin, legalism and guilt.

SPOILER ALERT! SPOILERS AHEAD!
In the latter half, we see how Hester's development as a human has taken her far beyond the Puritan settlement. To couch it in Puritan terms, although they view her as an outcast and sinner, she has become more Christlike than any of them. The minister, however, is still wracked with guilt and we see the contrast between how these two people have dealt with their unacceptable behavior. We also see Chillingworth develop from a husband wronged into the worst sinner in the community.

Conclusion
I recommend this book for anyone who is interested in a discussion of social and religious themes. The plot moves slowly but there is character development, albeit from the narrator's point of view. What I mean by this is that there isn't a lot of dialogue or monologue coming from the characters. The narrator explains what the characters are thinking, feeling and doing. Don't give up on the book if you find it initially distasteful, either. After chapter viii, you will not be bludgeoned repeatedly with the community's view of Hester. (Not as much, anyway) It is also intriguing to read this book in view of Hawthorne's internal conflict between his Puritan ancestry and his distaste for that religious sect. Although he disapproved of his gloomy ancestors' religious persuasion, he felt a real connection to the town of Salem and a strong sense of his place in New England. This comes through in the novel's end, as the protagonist eventually returns to the town of Salem despite her treatment by its inhabitants. We can imagine that Hawthorne would have done the same thing.

Stats:
Best contrast: between the marketplace and the forest
Most conflicted character: Dimmesdale
Most surreal character: Pearl
Favorite short quote: "It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society." [There are a few excellent sections which are too long to feature here.]
This book makes you want to: wander contemplatively through the forest, meet the author
This book makes you glad you don't have to: endure legalistic piety, sew your own clothes
Sense of place: 9 out of 10

One for all, all for one!

2011-01-15T19:31:00.000-08:00

I know, you've all been dying to read my illustrious opinion of The Three Musketeers. I shall now elaborate: I present, for your reading enjoyment, my Saturday Evening Post! *groan*
     Moving along...Dumas has certainly earned his reputation as one of the greatest novelists of all time. (I can't complain about Lord Sudley's translation either, although it's not the most recent.) D'Artagnan was dashing; Athos, inscrutable; Porthos, hilarious; Aramis, kind of a pansy. I certainly did not expect to laugh so hard or so often while reading The Three Musketeers, but Dumas pokes fun at human weaknesses and tendencies in a most delicious manner. He was also very good at mixing plot-driven action with dialogue passages.
   Regarding the differences between the children's abridged version and THE REAL DEAL, the kids' version did a good job of portraying the characters and their personalities, and it didn't dumb down the plot in terms of addressing human issues like jealousy, revenge, manipulation, ambition and courtly love...but it left out the entire siege of La Rochelle! Several subplots and minor adventures were also cut, surely to shorten the story, but I suppose the siege was dropped because the editors decided that the underlying religious conflict is beyond a child's understanding (and the siege wouldn't make sense without it). Let's face it, the intricate theological arguments driving the Huguenot/French Catholic conflict cannot be summed up by "eenie meenie minie moe, papal authority's gotta go" or "one fish, two fish, sacramental eucharist". Dumas doesn't give much background or explanation before presenting the siege. He rightly assumed that his audience was familiar with the religious and political situation of the time, but if you don't know popes from puritans, a five minute rendezvous with Lady Wikipedia will give you enough info to properly enjoy this novel.
     I highly recommend The Three Musketeers to anyone who likes plot-driven novels. We see many conventional plot devices in the first half of the novel, but in the second half, the single character of Milady takes over and drives the plot in a very unconventional way. Although the characters are not one-dimensional, we do not see much of their internal struggles or dialogues, and at the end of the book the characters themselves seem mostly unchanged by their experiences. Perhaps Dumas believes that people remain fundamentally unchanged by their environments. Perhaps he just likes to spin a tale.

Stats:
Favorite character: Athos
Femme fatale: Milady de Winter
Guy you want to slap: Monsieur Bonacieux
Bad guy who wasn't bad enough: Count Rochefort
Funniest scene: the breakfast bet. or Athos locked in the cellar. or D'Artagnan's would-be duel with Athos. or Porthos' dinner with the Coquenards. or Aramis' dialogue with the Jesuit and the priest...
There was a lot of: food, wine, women, swordplay, melodrama, Catholicism (Dumas, he's so French)
There should have been more: positive strong female characters (to balance the negative strong female character)
This book makes you glad you don't have to: wear tights, faint when surprised (women), carry a purse (men), duel everyone who smirks at you, flog a servant, hide in a convent, flatter the royal family, be branded for a felony, retrieve jewels from the English
This book makes you want to: insult people thoroughly, send secret letters, order monogrammed handkerchiefs, spend your significant other's money (hey, they're good for it!), gamble until you've won your opponent's horse, avenge somebody

Heavy on the intrigue

2011-01-09T17:07:00.000-08:00

This week I'll be galloping through Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I must point out that I read an abridged children's classics version of this book... repeatedly... from about the ages of 6-8. My brothers and I would cut out paper swords, fashion makeshift cloaks from scarves and march down the hall shouting, "One for all and all for one!" That said, the glaring fact that my childhood abridged version was about 60 pages, while the novel itself is 630 (this translation, anyway), proves that I have not, in fact, read this book! Also, in an unfortunate example of phonics-gone-wrong, my 6-yr-old self understood the main character's name to be Dee-ART-again....but I have long since redeemed myself, having a undertaken a couple semesters of self-directed French study as penance. Nevertheless, I shall only ever read this book in translation, as my pronunciation of French is still quite brutal, and the only result of my acquaintance with Dumas' original text would certainly be the regrettable murder of a classic novel. This week, I look forward to comparing the plot differences between my old childhood favorite (read: bowdlerized) version and THE REAL DEAL. I also look forward to a long tale of historical intrigue and romance spun by a master storyteller.

P.S. Don't worry, Kurt. I won't make you be Porthos this time.

Dreams are true while they last...

2011-01-06T20:40:00.000-08:00

...and do we not live in dreams? -Alfred Lord Tennyson

This novel struck me as a very interior work, easily read as a dream in which the dreamer's inner struggles are personified. To begin with, I was fascinated that the entire setting of Wuthering Heights was like that of a dream state; by this I mean that the world of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange was self-contained. Just like a dreamer doesn't wonder how the dream began or how s/he got there, in this novel the the characters unquestioningly accept the strange circumstances of their lives and do not appear to look beyond the geographical boundaries of the moors. Even the city of London, mentioned a couple times, appears vague, distant and surreal.

Pardon me; you dropped your superego.
For some reason I had misguided expectations of the main romantic relationship in this novel, namely, more love and less hate. Usually when fictional characters exhibit love, it changes them in some way, or causes them to choose more altruistic actions in order to benefit the object of their love. Catherine's infantilism and Heathcliff's jealous violence run contrary to my expectations in that area. Despite their supposed eternal love for each other, they destroy each other. This adds to the eerie, surreal quality of the novel.

SPOILER ALERT: The paragraph below discusses key plot lines and events.

Apocalyptic Fantasy
I think Brontë's decision to carry the plot through the second generation of the two families was critical, but I know a lot of film versions end their portrayal with Catherine's death. I don't know why filmmakers would choose to focus only on Cathy's and Heathcliff's unrequited love, because I found Heathcliff's manner of death and the redemption (intellectual, moral and social) of Hareton Earnshaw to be key plot elements. In fact, the transformation of Hareton by Cathy Linton adds to the fantastical mood of the novel, as it contains a strong "Beauty and the Beast" element. The final romance between Hareton and Cathy brings with it not a happy resolution to an unhappy story, but rather the peaceful yet shaky new beginning that comes after an apocalyptic end. The theme of devolution before evolution lies heavily across the final pages of Wuthering Heights.

Interpretation
So is Cathy forced to choose between nature and culture? Between id and superego? Between altruism and selfishness? Between her construction of Edgar and her construction of Heathcliff? Or simply between Edgar and Heathcliff? This ambiguity of interpretation is part of what causes readers to return to this book. Every time it is reread, the reader sees something new.
Brava, Ms. Brontë.

Stats:
Favorite character: Hareton Earnshaw
Most annoying character: Catherine Earnshaw
Character that started out annoying but mostly redeemed himself: Edgar Linton
Favorite quote: "But there's this difference: one is gold put to the use of paving-stones, and the other is tin polished to ape a service of silver." (chapter 21)
Oddest moment: Isabella Linton making lumpy porridge
Sense of place: 10 out of 10
There was a lot of : bad weather, doorways, windows, high walls, locks
There should have been more: bad weather, deja vu, dialogue between Catherine and Heathcliff
Descriptive passages: 9 out of 10 for quality, but I wish there had been more of them

1801-I have just returned from a visit to my landlord...

2011-01-01T20:03:00.000-08:00

...the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. Thus we are introduced to the glowering antihero Heathcliff of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. I received this book for Christmas, and waited until today to crack it open so that it could be my first book of 2011. If you have most recently been reading current pop fiction, it will take a few pages to get used to Bronte's vocab and sentence structure, which is no surprise considering that she wrote this in1847. The occasional puzzling out of a strange word is worth the effort though...because in chapter 15 Heathcliff is bitten by a radioactive spider and develops super powers! Just kidding.

Thus concludes the first of two entries on Wuthering Heights. I plan to post two entries per week, one when I start reading a new book, and one when I've finished reading it. The latter entry could include my reaction to or interaction with the book in question. This blog is not going to be a series of literary critiques (I'm not qualified) or book reviews (I'm not interested). So if you're a high school sophomore in search of plunderable material for that 2 page report Mrs. Rusten wanted yesterday, you can just move along now. (But definitely include the part about Heathcliff's superpowers.)

Check back on Friday to see how I fared a week of wandering the windswept moors and unhappy homes of Yorkshire.

New Year, New Me? Not Hardly.

2010-12-30T10:02:00.000-08:00

That's right. 2011 will be more of the same. Every year people say they'll make more time for their families, for exercise, for taking up a new hobby, organizing the house, learning Japanese or saving the world...and every year, they spend most of their free time doing the things they really enjoy. So let's face the facts: I, like you, will be doing more of what I like to do. For me, that's reading. This year, I'm narrowing my focus. There are far too many classic books in my "unread" pile, so here are my rules for 2011. Well, for the part of 2011 that this blog will address.

1. All classics, all the time.
If you're not sure what is meant by classic lit, Wikipedia has a decent discussion of it. Why classics? Italo Calvino has a few good reasons, which have been gleaned from his essay and put into list form here. I don't have a particular list of books I'll be working from. And sure, I'll continue to read nonfiction and maybe some pop fiction, but they won't make it into the blog. Maybe this will follow a different theme for 2012 (apocalyptic literature, perhaps? ha.)

2. Nothing I've already read.
One purpose of this exercise is for me to experience new works. So alas, I bid goodbye to my old friends for the time being. And if I do happen to slip out one evening to meet The Scarlet Pimpernel or Jean Valjean, you just won't hear about it on this blog.

3. A classic a week.
This is the part of the plan that causes me the most trepidation, but pacing oneself generally yields the best results. After all, I could read straight nonfiction for a couple months, then skim Jane Austen: The Complete Novels just so I could check off some numbers, but that would defeat my purpose of spending a year exploring and enjoying (some of) the classics. My intent is for this blog to document a leisurely stroll, not the occasional literary sprint. Due to the seven-day time constraint, I probably won't be choosing War and Peace or other extremely long works. Maybe another year I'll do a tome a month.

4. No audio books.
I have a hard time concentrating on audio books when I'm not in the car. If I didn't, I'd use them. That said, if I am the victim of a horrible auto accident and find myself in traction for 2 months, I reserve the right to use audio books. Maybe even War and Peace.