Death Comes to Pemberly: So, apparently, does boredom (#11)

I don't generally read mysteries or crime novels. There's so much death, destruction and terror in the world that I generally avoid these genres in my reading choices -- and frankly, I've never really understood it as a form of entertainment. So, not surprisingly, I haven't read much by P.D. James, just one book whose name I can't remember. But I was pretty excited when I heard she'd written a mystery incorporating the characters from Pride and Prejudice -- I'm not a raving Jane Austen fan, but there's a reason that book's a classic.

Unfortunately, P.D. James' attempt to recapture the magic of Pride and Prejudice in her mystery Death Comes to Pemberly falls short. While all of the main Pride and Prejudice characters appear -- Darcy and Elizabeth, Georgiana, Wickham and Lydia, Jane and Bingley -- the relationships between them are very wooden. It appears that James was attempting to imitate Austen's style, and in that, I suppose, she succeed -- it's just that she succeeed at imitating the aloof style of Persuasion rather than the sparkling wit of Pride and Prejudice. The tone of Death Comes to Pemberly is pretty lifeless, and there's almost no development of the characters' inner lives -- Darcy and Elizabeth, for example, are happy because the text says so, not because you see any true warmth between them on the page.

Six years after the close of Pride and Prejudice, Dary and Elizabeth are living happily on their estate, Pemberly, with their two young sons. Life is apparently perfect. Elizabeth is preparing to throw a huge ball the next evening when her headstrong younger sister Lydia unexpectedly arrives, absolutely hysterical. She had been traveling with her husband, the ever-disgraced Wickham, and his friend, Captain Denny, preparing to crash the ball. But Wickham and Denny had gotten into an argument, and Denny had exited the carriage and headed into the dark woods. Wickham followed and then...gunshots. When Darcy and the members of his search party locate them, Wickham is standing over his friend's lifeless body, seemingly confessing to the murder. But, of course, it's never that simple in a mystery, and Darcy spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out who the real culprit is.

This quest involves a number of people that weren't in Pride and Prejudice, but James doesn't develop them enough for the reader to care, which makes the mystery pretty dull. We don't learn anything about Captain Denny so there's no emotional attachment to the crime; at the same time, Wickham (along with everyone else) has apparently not changed in the slightest in six years, so it's hard to care all that much about whether an unreformed scoundrel gets saved from the hangman's noose.

If you don't care about a novel's characters or plot, there's really not a lot to hang your hat on. In this case, you're probably just better off re-reading Pride and Prejudice. And then making up your own fan-fiction version about what happened after the happily-ever-after.

March: A grimmer vision of Little Women (#8)

When I was home in late May, I was excited to get a couple of books of out of the library that I can't get here, ending up with Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict (Laurie Viera Rigler) and Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, in addition to Geraldine Brooks' Pulitzer Prize-winning March. I'd had March on my to-read list for a couple of years, but I never got around to it. And when I was home, it was once again at the bottom of the pile; I started both of the other two, but as it turned out, I couldn't get into either -- Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict was un-fun fluff and the tone of Bel Canto, which seemed akin to reading a Woody Allen movie, put me off. So, after many years of good intentions, I finally started March.

March takes its title from the last name of the main character, the much-missed father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, imagining what his experience was like as a chaplain during the Civil War, the cause of his absence in Alcott's book. The novel starts out after a devastating battle, and basically, because of a chance encounter with a woman named Grace, a former slave, that he had met as a young man, he starts to remember his past. The book alternates between his reawakened memories and his present circumstances in the Union army, and March struggles to stay true to his family and his own highly held values while existing/surviving in his wartime reality.

March is an incredibly well-written book but I can't say that I loved it, mostly because I didn't like Mr. March all that much. Generally the main character in a novel -- the hero, if you will -- will learn something about themselves and the world, growing and changing in the process, but I don't think he did, not really. March is incredibly selfish from the start and enjoys playing the martyr, while not seeing the hardships he puts upon others, especially his family. I think this is what bothered me most about him, and the novel in general -- in Little Women, his wife Marmee and their daughters Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth miss him so much and have to make so many sacrifices in his absence, and it turns out, in this telling, that he's a selfish bastard who didn't really deserve it. He never honors the individuality of his wife or makes an effort to truly connect to or understand her. He’s so willing to help others, but never really his family; he always sacrifices them to the bigger cause, while they sacrifice themselves for him. And this never changes.

He also doesn't get himself up from hardship. Since he feels that he's shamed himself (by not winning an unwinnable situation), he refuses to go home, saying his work is not done, that others died or were taken back as slaves because he was not "brave enough." But really, he's choosing the easier path, one where he doesn't have to tell the truth to those he loves, as well as giving into his fondness for playing the martyr. In the end, he's literally forced to go back to his family. Grace has to reject him for him to go home, and John Brooke has to physically bring him back, gripping his arm as they make their way to the house. He doesn’t choose it and he doesn’t change.

But most importantly, he never has to atone for his initial stifling and later betrayal of Marmee. This is why he doesn't want to go home -- if he stays away, he doesn't have to tell her about his entire past or reveal the untruths written in his letters. But in the end, he doesn't really have to say anything. Marmee figures it out for herself and basically just decides to understand after she realizes it’s hard to write the truth when she’s writing to the girls, and she wants to keep the family together. She learns something, but he doesn't.

I am really not sure why Geraldine Brooks chose to write Mr. March this way. He's fairly passive and ineffectual, making him a weak character as things happen to him, when he should really be the one instigating the events of the novel. My only guess is that she's trying to reflect the harsh realities of war -- he's broken by what he's seen and done, and that can't be fixed. I suppose in this novel, the main character did change, but instead of growing, he shrank, ultimately making March the protagonist, but not a hero.

The Diary of Anne Frank: A classic and yet not literature (#7)

Sex, drugs, tulips and Rembrandt: Those are the words I had always associated with Amsterdam, and not being much into prostitution, pot or the art of the Dutch Golden Age, I had never had the urge to visit. But then I had a very straight-laced friend who went there and absolutely loved it, and I began to reassess my position. I resolved to go, one day -- but it never came near the top 5 on my travel list, so there Amsterdam stayed, as a one-day-I'll-go trip, joining locales like India and China, places I seriously intend to get to, but someday. (And cue the Black Eyed Peas...)

Fast-forward about a decade: One day, someday, arrived. This past spring, during tulip season, we took a long weekend and journeyed to Amsterdam. Our goal was to see all the major sights, which included, of course, the Anne Frank House.

Like all good American schoolchildren, I read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was a kid, though I don't remember anything specific about the experience, just a generally favorable impression. So, I decided to read the book again. Now I realize why you should read it when you're a kid, and only when you're a kid: You can appreciate her experience without question. Because as an adult and a more critical reader, the diary presents some icky issues.

Anne Frank was German, but her family had moved to Holland when she was quite young to escape the Nazis' growing influence. Her father gifted her with the famous diary on her 13th birthday, in June 1942, shortly before the family went into hiding. She decides to call her diary Kitty -- she declares that it will be her one true friend, which she feels she doesn’t have. But for that, she seems to be a pretty carefree kid, and she doesn't hold much back in her writing. The family went into hiding in early July; they were shortly joined by another family, the van Pels (van Daan in the diary), and a dentist friend, Fritz Pfeffer (Albert Dussel). Anne spent the next two years chronicling their time in the Secret Annex. Her last diary entry comes on Aug. 1, 1944; the police came to arrest them three days later.

That description sounds very serious, and the situation  of course was very serious, but the truth is, the diary for the most part is not. In fact, as I was reading The Diary of Anne Frank, I couldn't help but think of the opening moments of the film Eat, Pray, Love. In voiceover, the character Elizabeth (Julia Roberts) says: "I have a friend, Deborah, a psychologist, who was asked by the city of Philadelphia if she could offer psychological counseling to a group of Cambodian refugees, boat people, who had recently arrived in the city. Deborah was daunted by the task. These Cambodians had suffered genocide, starvation, relatives murdered before their eyes, years in refugee camps, harrowing boat trips to the West…how could she relate to their suffering, how could she help these people? So guess what all these people wanted to talk about with my friend Deborah, the psychologist. It was all, I met this guy in the refugee camp, I thought he really loved me but when we got separated on the boat, he took up with my cousin, but now he says he really me, he keeps calling me, they’re married now – what should I do? I still love him. This is how we are."

And this is how the diary is.

As a piece of history and a record of what a certain group of people went through during World War II, Anne Frank's diary is irreplaceable. And yet, the diary is hardly at all about the war or the Secret Annex. Rather, it captures this unique moment in time of this young life. While it's well-written, as a piece of literature, it's not great -- it's childish. Which is not surprising as it's the innermost thoughts of a burgeoning teenager. In truth, Anne has a bit of an attitude, and I didn't find her to be terribly likeable. She's constantly complaining about being reprimanded, and she goes on and on about how she doesn't love her mother and how much she dislikes the van Daans and Dussel. The diary eventually shifts to her sexual awakening, which, being without any options, manifests as a growing attraction for Peter van Daan, who was a couple of years older than she was. As a teenger's diary, it's all fine, but it's hardly War and Peace.

But the thing is, Anne Frank's diary was never supposed to be literature -- and this is where it starts to get icky. Anne Frank wrote her diary for herself,  and it was obviously VERY personal; while she intended to publish something after the war, it wasn’t this. But she didn't survive the war to write the novel she intended; in the end, her father, the only survivor of the group, decided to publish her recovered diary. And it begs the question: Should we be reading it?

I don't know what the answer is.

Oh my, O magazine, say it ain't so!

I was flipping through the June issue of O magazine recently when I came across the most shocking error. And rest assured, it was shocking -- just you wait for it. It was in Martha Beck's monthly column, this one titled "Charting Your Course." The article is actually really interesting, which is why it's a shame that the introduction -- touching upon the journey of Odysseus -- completely blunders the tale. Oh, I told you it was shocking.

She opens the article with, "Odysseus just wanted to go to Ithaca. No, not the one in upstate New York -- the one in ancient Greece. He dreamed of it the whole seven years he spent trapped on the island of the nymph Calypso. Eventually the pitying gods ordered Calypso to free him, at which point he managed to build a boat and set out on what he hoped would be a brief and pleasant journey."

Okay, so far, so good. But then...

"Ha. At every turn, Odysseus' travels were filled with surprises. He conquered monsters at sea only to find worse ones waiting on land. He encountered seductions that sent him half mad with longing. Finally, in the land of the dead, he got clear directions from a seer who, oxymoronically enough, was blind."

But, er, umm...the thing is, when he's freed from Calypso's island, Odysseus pretty much is at the end of his journey. All the events listed in the article have already happened to him; at this point, all he's got to do is get through a little storm at sea and a mini-vacation with the Phaeacians. The reason for the mistake is obvious enough -- in terms of chapter order, Odysseus is first seen sitting on Calypso's island (in chapter 5) before running around on all his adventures (chapters 9-12), but books 5-12 don't follow chronological order. But I didn't expect to see such a mistake in a major magazine. It's nice to see the Odyssey mentioned, I suppose, but it's also kind of a :( for classic lit.

Jane Austen's Persuasion: Hilariously antiquated, odd ending (#34)

Be forewarned: I'm going to discuss the entire plot. Having said that, I don't think it's giving anything away - Persuasion is a classic romance, which means there's very little in the way of surprise. People fall in love, hooray! But not all that shocking.

I've only read two other Jane Austen novels - Northanger Abbey and of course Pride and Prejudice - and while I enjoyed both, I can't say that I subscribe to that particular Austen frenzy which has launched countless movies, tribute books, etc. But I've wanted to read Persuasion ever since I saw the movie The Jane Austen Book Club (based on a book; see what I mean?). They never really get around to discussing Persuasion because of an unexpected death but at one point, one of the older characters says, to paraphrase, that it's her favorite Austen book because the older heroine gets a second shot at love with a former flame. And I really liked that idea, that of an emotionally healing once all seemed lost.

And then I actually read Persuasion and found out that that "older" heroine is in fact only 27. And because Anne Elliot is so very, very ancient and was "persuaded" not to marry Captain Wentworth when she had the chance (because at the time he lacked prospect), she is of course doomed to be a spinster. "No: the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look..." (40). Again, SHE'S 27! From the perspective of 2011 and with sentences like this, it was a little hard to take Persuasion seriously.

So this tragic spinsterhood is where the novel starts. Anne is the second of three sisters and the daughter of a self-absorbed widowed spendthrift; according to the good family friend Lady Russell, she is the best of the lot. Her older (and gasp! still single) sister Elizabeth is too similar to their father while younger sister Mary, though married, is too flighty. Anne on the other hand is serious, thoughtful, and grounded. Because the family is living beyond its means, they're persuaded to rent out the manor and move to the English city of Bath. Their new tenants end up being Admiral Croft and his wife, and Mrs. Croft, by chance, is the sister of Captain Wentworth. This, in addition to a number of other coincidences, is how Wentworth and Anne end up in each other's lives again.

I generally found Persuasion to be a little underdeveloped; perhaps it's not fair to compare it to Pride and Prejudice, but I thought it lacked the latter's zing and wit. (Having said that, it was published after Austen's death, so perhaps she hadn't truly finished it.) The main reason is that Anne and Captain Wentworth, the players in the novel's major love story, spend very little time together on the page. Before the novel opens, they've loved and lost one another; it's briefly mentioned that he was a "remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit, and brilliancy" and she was an "extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling" (16) and those qualities, combined with a boredom arising from country life, created love. We know that Anne still loves him and regrets being "persuaded" away from him, but we never really see why on the page. We never see the love or the kind of passion necessary to make their feelings last eight years, and it's weird.

Later, when life throws them together again, they still spend very little time interacting together, despite being together all the time. People love Pride and Prejudice because of the way Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy push and pull against each other, but Anne in Persuasion spends much more time in her head, regretting past decisions and convincing herself that Wentworth's feelings are long gone. There's very little spark on the page so it's hard to see why they love each other; you're just supposed to accept that they do because they say so.

The ending cracked me up, just because it was so totally random. While we know a number of characters are sailors - including Wentworth - it's sort of a minor detail. But then Austen ends on a total tangent; she says that Anne enjoys being a sailor's wife and then concludes that sailors' manners at home might be more valuable than their national defensive importance. I was like, what? So random. I mean, I know she's been making a social commentary throughout the novel, showing the sailors all as hard-working, upstanding, self-made citizens whose demeanor is in contrast to the remaining male characters, all self-important, lazy inheritors of fortune. But Persuasion is ultimately and mainly about the reuniting of Anne and Wentworth; theme is secondary (I hope).

Overall, I enjoyed Persuasion and once I got used to the language, found it to be a quick read. It could have been stronger but I still found it entertaining. Still, if you're new to Austen, I'd probably read Pride and Prejudice first - it's a classic for a reason.

Let's take the Entertainment Weekly book quiz

I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life blog on Google Reader and I noticed earlier today that they seem to have started an occasional feature called the EW Book Quiz. A book quiz - what fun! From what I could tell, they've only done three installments, with Jackie Collins, then Mindy Kaling, and most recently Gregory Maguire. The questions have been similar but not always the exact same.

I love quizzes like this - Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire springs to mind - and I thought we could play along. Leave your answers in the comments!

EW Book Quiz (with questions compiled from the three interviews):


1. What was your favorite book as a child? This is a really hard one because I had so many favorite books as a kid. But I'll have to go with a couple of Madeleine L'Engle books. I absolutely loved the Wrinkle in Time series which was full of vocabulary words I didn't know and made me feel smarter (kid-level astrophysics, yo!) and A Ring of Endless Light which convinced me that I could communicate with dolphins if I tried hard enough (and I tried once at Sea World in Orlando and felt like I was just inches of brain power away from success). My current favorite book for children is the awesome Pirate Soup.

2. What’s a book you come back to over and over? I don't usually read books more than once but I've read The Great Gatsby, Sleeping Tiger, and Eat, Pray, Love twice each because they give me the warm and fuzzies. I'm also pretty passionate about Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and even more, The Pilgrimage, and read them when I feel the need for some serious spiritual guidance and a jumpstarting of faith that everything will be alright.

3. Is there a book you’ve never read that, for whatever reason, you’ve pretended to have read? This hasn't happened since college when I was enrolled in a Russian lit class. We were reading Anna Karenina or War and Peace (can't even remember which) and my roommate stole my copy off my shelf and gave it to her best friend. When I went looking for it, she confessed but was pretty mean about it, saying that I wasn't using it so it was hers for the taking. So I had to pretend I was going to read it so that thieving bitch would give me my property back. Still haven't read either of them though War and Peace is on my revised list for the remainder of this year.

4. What’s a classic or much-hyped book that you’ve never quite understood the merits of? The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, and The Stranger. Omg how I hate those books. Even worse, because I changed high schools, I had to read The Scarlet Letter twice and The Stranger three times, absolute torture. As for modern-day books, pretty much any Oprah selection fits the bill.

5. What is a book you would kill a bug with? Seems like Atlas Shrugged would be big enough to kill a mouse even.

6. What’s a favorite book that you’ve read for school? It's not a favorite per se but Julio Cortazar's freaky short story "Axolotl" has stayed with me since I read it in a college Spanish class. It's about a man who has a special moment with a salamander. I also gained a newfound appreciation for the merits of Dracula in a feminist Gothic lit class.

7. Which fictional character do you most identify with? I really have no answer for this; I don't usually connect with characteers this way. I like them often but I never feel like they're me - except maybe for Vicky Austen, the dolphin-loving heroine mentioned above.

Now it's your turn!

An Aside: Great Gatsby video game

Yes, there's a Great Gatsby video game that you can play on the Internet! In this supposedly original Nintendo game (Mediabistro doubts the "I found it at a yard sale" origin story), you take on the persona of Nick Carraway navigating his way through the world. The game starts out at one of Gatsby's parties, where Nick's goal is to dodge waiters (or take them out with his flying hat weapon) in an attempt to locate Gatsby.

A random Level Two, the Valley of Ashes, takes place on top of a train. I'm not quite sure what the ultimate point of The Great Gatsby game is - I couldn't get past the laser-shooting T.J. Eckleburg eyes to find out - but the game is quietly addicting, despite the annoying soundtrack.

Clearly I'm not the only one who feels this way. The game has garnered 126, 000 Facebook likes and 5,000+ tweets!

#24: King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, Roger Lancelyn Green

After The Odyssey, my students tackled about half of this King Arthur book. I think they liked it better, simply because they could understand it. It had been awhile since I had read any King Arthur, so I ended up reading the whole thing - it seemed like it would be hard to choose stories if I didn't know what the stories were, you know?

I don't much feel like delving into King Arthur - it is what it is, chivalry, damsels, evil knights, etc - but I will say that I didn't particularly enjoy this edition. Although the introduction makes it clear that these are in fact separate stories and that Green relied on different sources, the book as set up seems to be one continuous narrative. And as a result, the main characters switch personalities at the drop of a hat. In Book One, Arthur is the young king who leads England to its destined glory; he's nearly absent from Books Two and Three and then suddenly in Book Four, he's been transformed into an impotent monarch blindsided by his wife's infidelity. Lancelot flip-flops between faithful and faithless, sickened and set upon his path, depending on the story. And then Mordred - in one chapter, he's ashamed of his deviousness, but then later, he's described as being evil as his nature.

In addition, I didn't understand some of the story choices. Morgana le Fay, Arthur's usual nemesis, barely appears in this version. And then, even stranger, Green identifies Mordred as her son, instead of the commonly accepted son of Arthur and his half sister Morgawse (which then adds an interesting motivation, that of a bastard son fighting his father for his birthright). It was just weird.

#23: The Odyssey, Homer

Speaking of classics, I re-tackled this one in October. I hadn't read The Odyssey since ninth grade but since I was teaching it to ninth graders this year (ahhh, the circle of life), I needed to read it again. I remember liking it the first go-round but this time, I really recognized what a masterwork it is.

So, The Odyssey is an epic poem likely written between 800 B.C. and 700 B.C. about a Trojan War hero named Odysseus. He's brave, strong, and crafty, but he's also an Everyman, representing any individual's ability to be a hero should he/she so choose. Odysseus masterminds the Greeks' victory when he comes up with the idea for the Trojan Horse, but then the winning side pisses off the gods (lesson #1: Don't fuck with Athena) and the victors find that they're all doomed in their journeys home. Odysseus then makes several more mistakes in judgment, landing himself on Poseidon's bad side when he blinds his son, Polyphemus (lesson #2: Don't mess with a sea god when you have to sail home). As a result, Odysseus and his fleet get tossed around by the waves and as they go from port to port, either Odysseus or the crewmen make more mistakes until everyone is dead but Odysseus. Finally, ten years later and worn and torn, and with extensive help from a now-fond Athena, Odysseus makes it home to Ithaca only to find that he's presumed dead and all the eligible bachelors in the area have lodged themselves in his palace in an attempt to woo his wife and become king. Having learned from all of his rash mistakes, Odysseus bides his time and plots with his son until the book culminates in a Quentin Tarantino-style bloodbath in chapter 22. But then, happy ending, the family is reunited and the hero is restored to his rightful place. Fun!

There are so many thousands of things one could talk about with this book but most interesting, I thought, was the lingering question of whether or not Odysseus was truly a hero. For one, he's awfully whiny, especially when we first see him crying on Calypso's island. He also makes some morally questionable decisions and causes a lot of carnage (which perhaps the ancient Greeks didn't find so questionable) - is Odysseus really a hero if nearly everyone who meets him ends up dead? And perhaps most importantly, is Odysseus really a hero if he never has an original thought and takes all his direction from Athena and Zeus? In the end, he doesn't "win" by his own skill - the most important gods just like him better. I think you can see where I come down on this; my co-worker, on the other hand, argues that Odysseus is a hero simply because he keeps going. He's faced with seemingly insurmountable odds and death at every turn but the man keeps on trucking anyway. And I guess that's what makes him an Everyman and an inspiration.

It's even inspired me to read some of the classic classics this year. The Greek plays (ahem, Sophocles) killed my enthusiasm for these sorts of works in tenth grade, but I realize I may have left the canon a little abruptly. So at some point in 2011, I'm aiming to read The Iliad, Charlotte Higgins' It's All Greek to Me, and with some luck Metamorphosis and The Aeneid.

Oprah Chooses Dickens

Oprah recently selected Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations as her new book club picks. Clearly, I was so excited about this news a month ago that I didn't rush to post anything about it. Meh, Dickens. I've never read anything by him and I know it's a gaping hole in my literary education but...meh, I just can't get up the enthusiasm for it. I've previously attempted both of these books and never made it past page 5.

So why am I posting, you ask? One, because I posted about Freedom as her last pick and I'm trying to be more consistent with ye olde blog. But mostly because I ABSOLUTELY LOVE the cover design of the Oprah Dickens edition. I love it so much that I am considering buying it, despite the fact that I already have copies of both books...and no interest in actually reading them. (Apparently most people don't agree with me: USA Today reported that the new edition failed to crack the Top 50 on the bestseller list, theorizing that people already own these books or realize they can get them for a lot less or even for free on e-various readers.)

Apparently there's been quite a hubbub over the suitability of these classics for the average American reader. Hillary Kelly of The New Republic felt that Oprah is leading millions of the unwashed tribe astray by suggesting Dickens as a holiday hot-chocolate companion. Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College presents the counter-argument on his blog that any reading is always worth it; Beatrice.com calls Kelly's view profoundly elitist. I think all arguments have some merit - Dickens is probably not the right choice for this particular audience and I dislike the cattle mentality of Oprah's book club and yet...reading is good. So if you should choose to take up the gauntlet, I must point out that Oprah.com has posted a high school-esque reading guide to get you started.

#12-15: Books in Review

I've hit a crisis point with my blog. In fact, with my life. I don't know what I'm doing with it, what I want to do with it, or why I'm doing it and the basic lack of traffic depresses me (not that I started this for the traffic, but, well, it's depressing anyway). So, on the blog-front, I'm not sure if I'm going to continue on. I need to reevaluate before I drown in this existential muck.

But since I haven't totally decided what to do, I thought I'd at least note the books I've read in the last month, even if the noting is only in brief:

#12: The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
I had been considering teaching The Red Tent next year so I thought I would re-read the book and make sure it was what I remembered - which was fantastic. (This is one of the few books that I consistently recommend.) Based on just a few lines in the Bible, The Red Tent focuses on Dinah - the only daughter of Jacob - and her journey as she goes from beloved daughter to wife to widow and mother, and from Israel down into Egypt. It's an exceptional book but in the end, I realized, perhaps not the best choice for semi-innocent/awkward ninth graders. They will have to read The Joy Luck Club - another fantastic book about mothers/daughter and journeys - instead.

#13: Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster by Dana Thomas
I read about this book on Jezebel.com at least a year ago - at the same time I heard about Fashion Babylon - but it took me awhile to get around to it. This well-researched book is essentially about how, as fashion houses have moved from being owned by individual designers (often the company's namesake) to a few large companies, the shift in fashion has moved from quality and clothes to $$$. Thomas did an INCREDIBLE amount of research for this book, traveling to France to smell perfumes, Italy to visit designers, and China to visit factories (where a chunk of clothes are made, even if some houses rip out the labels and replace with "Made in Italy.") I was never one for spending thousands of dollars for a piece of clothing or a purse but if I was, I would certainly think again after reading this book. The only downside to Deluxe, really, was that it was published in 2007 - it's the kind of book that would benefit from an update. (And I'd totally read it again.)

#14: The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
I had also been considering Highsmith's classic for a spot on my students' syllabus next year and wanted to re-read it to make sure it was what I thought it was. I hadn't read The Talented Mr. Ripley since spring 1996, the semester I took a law/jurisprudence class on murder at my liberal arts college.

Since my upcoming class is focused on the heroic journey (starting with The Odyssey), I thought The Talented Mr. Ripley might be a nice, end-of-the-year book to look at what happens when the hero - who is on a classic quest, like Odysseus or a Knight of the Round Table - turns out to be the villian. Because Tom Ripley is absolutely the villian - he is a poseur who convinces a man named Mr. Greenleaf to send him to Italy to convince his son, Dickie Greenleaf, a man-about-town of independent means, to come back to America. But then Tom decides he wants to lead the kind of life that Dickie has, and is willing to do anything to get it.

On my first reading, I don't think I really saw how much Tom's paranoia contributes to the out-of-control spiraling of events - how there's what Dickie says/does and then how there's what Tom says Dickie says/does...which are probably two completely different things. It reminded me quite a bit of Revolutionary Road, a book I appreciate more and more as time goes on, in how you can't be certainly what April has said and done because most of her speech/actions are relayed by someone else.

In (not-so) short, The Talented Mr. Ripley is a fascinating book - both in the plotting and in the icky feeling you have as the reader that you kinda, sorta want Tom to get away with it. (Apparently Ms. Highsmith herself was quite the unlikable character/sociopath - before the end of the year, I'm hoping to dive into Joan Schenkar's The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith.)

#15: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
I have been quite the good employee this June; I also managed to read my students' assigned summer reading book, Hurston's classic, which I never had to read myself in school. I really loved this book - I don't think it's perfect (and apparently Hurston wrote the entire thing during a seven-week working trip to Haiti) but it's a captivating story about one woman's quest for self-awareness. I think Hurston had roped in me in by page 10, when she sets 16-year-old Janie's awakening under a blossoming pear tree. "She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her." If you haven't read Their Eyes Were Watching God, run to the bookstore now! Really, it's incredible. I'll probably come back to this one in the fall, as I go over it with my students - there's so much more to say.


Alright, so there you have it. Even if I am conflicted about all things blog, I am mighty pleased to point out that I have reached Book 15 at the halfway point of the year! I think I might actually reach the finish line this year. :)

#9: The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitgerald

Ah, The Great Gatsby...how I love it. Hopefully you love it, too.

F. Scott Fitzgerald finished this, his third novel, in 1925. Although the book is short, it's sort of an epic and dreamy novel about the goings-on of high society in Long Island. Narrator Nick Carraway rents a house in West Egg and finds that his mysterious neighbor Jay Gatsby throws lavish parties almost nightly. As it turns out, Gatsby has long harbored a love for Nick's cousin, Daisy, whom he'd romanced five years before in her hometown of Louisville just after returning from his service in World War I. But complicating the reconciliation is Daisy's husband, Tom Buchanan, who's having his own affair with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a mechanic. It all seems so glamorous and carefree until the illusion is painfully ripped away one night by an auto accident. Caught in the middle of it all is Nick, the innocent who has been thrust into this world that he doesn't totally belong to - and in the end, flees it.

For the accompanying image, I used the book cover that's actually on my Scribner classic edition, as it's the original cover. According to the introduction by Charles Scribner III, artist Francis Cugat had painted the cover before The Great Gatsby was even finished and Fitzgerald liked the image so much that he wrote it into the book. The melancholy eyes apparently belong to Daisy but for Fitzgerald, it triggered the addition of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, an eye doctor long since out of business whose billboard eyes stare out from the road between Long Island and New York City. The bottom part of the image is supposed to represent Manhattan's carnival-like atmosphere but the yellow burst always makes me think of the car accident, as it happens right under Dr. Eckleburg's watchful stare.

Anyway...wonderful book, no surprise it's a classic.

#7: The Man Who was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton

I've had this book sitting on my shelf for some time; a long time, in fact, as it was recommended to me last summer. But I won't be passing the recommendation along. It was interesting -- Chesterton uses some imaginative imagery, but it's very much written in 1908-style (the year it was penned) and it's a bit like talking to you great-great aunt...for hours.

The premise of the book is fantastic: A young detective infiltrates a secret society of anarchists, each one who's taken the name of a day of the week. The detective becomes Thursday and has to unravel the big plot. But the book is really just this philosophical meditation and I figured out the twist - at least, I think it was supposed to be a twist - pretty easily.

But I have to praise such lines as these: "He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape." I love it, it just captures the image of the person so randomly and so uniquely.

The best part though, was the book itself. The physical book, I mean. The one I have from the library is a worn-out volume from 1958, and some past reader kindly left notes in it to help future comprehension. But even better, she clearly didn't love the book either and thoughtfully changed/crossed out certain lines. It made me laugh pretty hard. At the bottom of one page, she added this piece of dialogue "Now, do you see how "sneeky" girls can be? Next time let's watch our step!" And no, I did not misspell "sneaky" or add the quotes.

Next up: Curious about whether I would still like the books from my childhood, I picked up Lois Duncan's Killing Mr. Griffin.

#10: The Children of Hurin, JRR Tolkien

I'm not sure how I feel about this book. Like all of Tolkien's books, it was engaging and well-written, and his son, Christopher, did a stellar job of keeping Tolkien's vision entact while (most likely) eliminating the family tree references that bog down some of the other works. On the other hand, The Children of Hurin is totally depessing, the protagonist is too arrogant to be likeable, and the novel as a whole could have been strengthened by a link to, say, The Hobbit and/or The Lord of the Rings, since it's the history of Middle Earth in an earlier period -- I didn't really see (or worse, feel) how the devastation of these earlier wars between men/elves and Morgoth led to the later, greater showdown, but that element could have givn the novel a real power.

This posthumous book clearly mimics the classic dramas of say, Sophocles and Euripides (and that may be an automatic turnoff for some), but strangely it lacks the chorus wrap-up at the end that helps the readers feel fulfilled with some sort of moral, even if everything else has gone to hell.

But still, I liked it. I looked forward to coming home and cracking it open. So go figure...

#20: Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

One quote sums up this novel:

"'She's fainted or dead,' I thought: 'so much the better. Far better she should be dead, than lingering a burden and misery-maker to all about her.'"

While I liked Wuthering Heights, in that trashy "my father's in love with my cousin/wife's dead mother" way, I understand why schoolchildren across America want to tear out their hair when this book is assigned. Why is this book a classic? I think it failed in two of the major tenets of good literature: None of the characters are particularly likeable, and Bronte resorts to "Deus ex Machina" tactics to both create and finish out the story.

On likeability: The above quote says it all. Catherine Earnshaw is a pain in the ass. Heathcliff is demonic. So why should we care that their love has been thwarted? Both of them were so cruel to the people around them that frankly, in the world of literary justice, you are rooting for them to fail. Which means that the real appeal of the book becomes the trash angle, once you cease to care about the protagonists.

On Deus ex Machina:The format of the book was strange, and quite contrived. Bronte resorts to telling a story within a story -- the lodger wants to know why Heathcliff is so crabby and Catherine Linton so aloof but distressed, and Nelly, the faithful houseservant, spills all. Once the story-within-the-story catches up to the present, the lodger, Mr. Lockwood, leaves Thrushcross Grange. When he returns some time later, the story suddenly resolves itself -- lo and behold, Heathcliff, formerly the picture of health, has suddenly died and now those who are left -- Catherine Linton and Hareton Earnshaw (cousins, it should be noted) can live happily ever after in their bucolic wonderland. I suppose it helped that Heathcliff was tormented by ghosts, starving himself and wandering the moors at all hours, but his death was pretty darn convenient. Without it, god knows how long that book would have gone on!

Having said all this, I think the book could be better on a second read. If you knew what was going to happen -- especially that Heathcliff believed Catherine's ghost is tormenting him, it might explain his behavior better, and his decline. But that's just a hypothesis -- not sure I can handle another read at this point...

Anyway, next up, and sure to be quicker to get through: The Secret History of the Pink Carnation by Lauren Willig