My Brother Sam is Dead

Mom, don't panic.  My brother Sam is not actually dead. Although, I will say, that might why I never read this book before.  I'm rather fond of my actual brother Sam, and so this one was easy to skip.  This is one of those books, however, that everyone (read: Vincent & Amanda) somehow assumes I read in school and I never did.

Let me pause here and say, this happens often (I had never read "Bridge to Terabithia" before I met Vincent, I still haven't read "Tuck Everlasting.")  I really can't figure out why.  It's NOT that I didn't read as a kid - you couldn't get me to put books down. (There were strict rules about when and if I could read at the table. Breakfast was fine. Dinner was out, unless there was a ball-game on that both mom & dad wanted to watch.)

And it isn't that I only read Baby Sitter's club books (although, I think those easily qualify as my first book-addiction).  I read fabulous books: "Charlotte's Web", "Trumpeter Swan", "Island of the Blue Dolphins", "From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler", "The Secret Garden", "A Little Princess"...okay, I need to stop.  I'm not sure how some books simply never came across my path.

So, back to the title book.  I liked it. Quite a bit.  I read it in one sitting (under a tree, on a college campus.  Somehow, being on school grounds felt correct for this book).  I appreciated that I actually didn't know until I read the postscript if the story was based on actual events or not. (I mean, I know that the Revolutionary War actually happened, but I didn't know if this particular story was true).  It seems, in keeping with the best historical fiction, the characters are inventions, the events, not so much.  I wish I had read this while I was studying the Revolutionary War in school.  We live so long after those events, and America is so firmly established as "THE UNITED STATES." It's easy to assume that everyone in the colonies wanted to be a sovereign nation and forget how ruthless & underhand the people who were rebelling were.

Given the title, it's no secret that Sam will die at some point in the book, and there is an interesting tension that builds as you wait for it to happen.  When it finally does, it was so much more upsetting that I expected it to be.  I was grateful that while this is a book aimed towards children studying the war for the first time, the emotions & realities of what day to day living must have been like were not terribly whitewashed.

Pages: 225
Time to read: about 2 hours
Thumbs up/Thumbs down: Up! (wish I had read it when I was 11 though)


Next up: ''Jayne Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte

Golden oldies & cheesy love

If I could make days last forever,

If words could make wishes come true,

I'd save every day like a treasure and then,

Again, I would spend them with you.

...I've looked around enough to know

That you're the one I want to go

Through time with...

~ Time in a Bottle, by Jim Croce

Quoting love song lyrics is about as cheesy and sappy as it gets.  

But you know, I think I'm okay with that.

I love you Vincent.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Well, thank goodness that's over with.

I'll preface the rest with "Spoilers" so if you a) haven't read it yet and b) stupidly put it on your very own "must read list" and c) want to be surprised, you can.

I knew, when I put this list together, that there were bound to be some books I didn't like, some stories that I didn't respond to.  I had a premonition that this might be one of them.  But every "best of" or "classic" list I looked included it. (When the subtitle is "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented" and is listed as a "classic tragedy" I really should have known better).

There is one, beautiful little respite about one third of the way through the book during which time Tess & Angel (yup, the "good" guy's name is Angel) are courting.  It's wonderfully written and perfectly captures that first stage of a relationship, when you suddenly find that your world isn't centered quite where you thought it was.

And then (on their wedding night) he finds out that she was raped. (maybe?  It's really the most vaguely written assault I've ever encountered.  Wikipedia  assures me that it is a rape, so I'll go with it).  And a week or so later, he leaves. He finally admits that she was "more sinned against than sinned" but that "the woman I have been loving is not you." (pg. 238 of the bantam classic in case you think I might be making it up.)

Did I mention this is all after he admitted to being "involved" with another woman before Tess?  But that's different.  Why? No clue.

It isn't even that all the characters in the story are really unpleasant.  Although they are.  Tess' father is a slob who expects other people to take care of him, her mother lives in her own world of ignorant bliss, Alec is, you know, a rapist, and Angel is a pompous ass (sorry mom) who can't handle it when his perfect bride turns out to be human.  And Tess.... she's weak, flighty, and blinded completely by her obsession over Angel.

But it isn't just the aggravation of the characters.  At the end of the day, it's the condescension of the narrator that sent me over the edge.   The narrator's prevailing attitude appears to be "it happens" and when Tess' infant son dies she should be able to just "get over it."  The outcome of Tess' life and every problem that comes about as a result of this incident appears, at least to the narrator, to be squarely Tess' fault.

About half way through reading this, I had a conversation with my mother-in-law about it.  After venting most of what I wrote above, she commented that she thought that the narrator's voice wasn't necessarily the author's voice.  She suggested that Hardy didn't necessarily agree with his narrator, but was using that voice to point out the tragedy that is a result of that way of thinking.  Maybe.  That would be the only possible redemption. And I understand that this was first published in 1891 at a time when rape was considered the woman's crime and this book was scandalous for even addressing the issue.  Maybe this is a story that I, as a woman living over a century after it takes place, simply cannot appreciate.

All that being said, if anyone out there pines for the "simpler time" when we were "close to the earth" and "knew right from wrong," please do me a favor and force yourself to read this.  Unless you were quite rich, white, and male, those "good old days" were brutal and heartless.  I'll take the right to shape my own future, thank you quite kindly.

Pages: 418
Pages I enjoyed: less than 50
Thumbs up/Thumbs down: Down.  Very down.


Next up: ''My Brother Sam is Dead" by James And Chris Collier

Call of the Wild

I'm not really a dog person.  We've tried, Vincent & I, on two different occasions to see if we might be able to be dog people.  We're not. (Actually, that's completely unfair - I am certainly not a dog person; Vincent very much is - he just happens to also be a cat person - and our cats just don't do dog).

"You keep those barking monsters away from us!"

I did, however, love this story.  I really loved how simply the story was told (Maybe it's because I just finished reading Austen, but I found London's "plain" direct style almost relaxing to read).

So confession.  I wrote this much of the blog last weekend and then ran out of things to say about it.  It was interesting.  I'm glad I read it.  Is there much original I can say about it?  I guess not.

Pages: 106
Most interesting concept: ancestral memory
Thumbs up/Thumbs down: Thumbs Up


Next up: Tess of the d'Urbervilles  

Emma

I must say, I'm really glad I liked this book. When Amanda looked at my list, this was one (of many) that she said "but you must have read that one?!?"

No.

To my slight embarrassment, I realized that the only Austen book I had read was "Pride & Prejudice" (which I absolutely love.)  I was surprised that for the first third of the book, I really didn't like Emma very much.  When the Jane Austen quote on the back of the book is "I'm going to take a heroine no one but myself is going to like very much," that's not exactly encouraging.

It struck me, while I was sitting in Borders reading it, that even though I never had read this, I knew this story.  And the arrogance of Mr. Elton was sounding eerily familiar.  As everyone except me probably realized, Clueless is based, almost beat for beat on the Austen book. That epiphany came hand in hand with Emma's first "humbling" and marked my turning point for me.

What can I say?  I'm a sucker for a big, romantic story where everyone who deserves to be happy is.  In what I've read of Austen, she doesn't have too many villains but I like how she handles her antagonists. Those characters who stand in the heroine's way tend to get a very simple comeuppance: they're left to be themselves.  I absolutely that Mr. Elton ends up with the vapid & universally disliked Augusta Hawkins. Meanwhile, Emma, Mr. Knightly, Harriet, even Mr. Churchill and Jane Fairfax grow and change throughout the story and earn their joy.

Pages: 438
Best music to listen to during reading: "Atonement" soundtrack
Thumbs up/Thumbs down: Big Thumbs Up


Next up: "Call of the Wild" by Jack London

The Time Machine

So, I cheated a bit - there a few novellas on the list, and I thought I would kick off with one of them.  I don't know exactly what I was expecting with "The Time Machine." That the science fiction genre owes much of it's existence to Wells is an understatement, and perhaps I thought this story would feel a bit more cliche than it did.

I enjoyed how simple the story was and how much was left to the imagination. I appreciated that the story didn't dwell on how the Time Machine works.   After the opening chapter "establishing" the philosophical/mathematical possibility of time travel, the Time Traveler, essentially says "Yes, I traveled forward tens of thousands of years, here's my story - I don't really care if you believe me or not." That it didn't dwell in the minutia of the mechanics of the technology was something I was grateful for (Not that I don't occasional love some technobabble, but stopping a story for a physics lecture isn't always good storytelling)

I also thought I knew the general arch of the story: man travels forward in time, discovers a time when man has split into 2 separate species, and the elite Eloi keep the down trodden Morlocks underground, forcing them to do all the work while they lounge in luxury.  I assumed the theme revolved around the evils of one group of people oppressing the other.  Actually, (this will come as no surprise to someone who has read the story), the Morlocks appear to have developed into quite the terror and regularly eat the simple Eloi (whom I'm convinced that Amanda's 2 1/2 year old son could beat in a debate).  The warning of the story seems to be "be careful that mankind doesn't get lazy and complacent with what we have achieved, lest we because beasts or children."

I can see how this story helped begin a new subset in fiction.  Wells paints a textured world while only exploring a very small part of it.  I'm not at all surprised that other writers read this and that it sparked.

Pages: 125
Favorite phrase: "hither & thither"
Thumbs up/Thumbs down: Thumbs up


Next up: "Emma" by Jane Austen

50 books

Happy New Year.

Personally, I'm not much a New Year's resolution girl. There are plenty of things I'd like to accomplish this year, and (I'm sure) dozens of things that I should set out to accomplish. Maybe I should resolve to clean the kitchen every night (blah) or the fabulously-typical "exercising more."

However.

After a wonderful, impromptu date night with Vincent on Monday, we wandered through a Barns & Nobel to walk off dinner. On the way to the graphic novel/comic section that's our regular first stop, we passed the "classic books" section - all those books that you really feel like you should have read, but haven't.

Or at least, I haven't.

Now, I had a pretty thorough "great books" eduction through the Torrey program at Biola. I've read all the Bible, Plato, Dante, lots of philosophers, and even some Tolstoy. But I haven't read Jane Eyre. Or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

So, that's my plan for this year. 50 "Classic" books that I've never read. Since it's my list, I weeded out some things I knew I'm not a fan of (sorry Dickens) and I'm sticking primarily to English novels (or at least, novels first written in English - with the exception, I think, of Phantom of the Opera...I'll let a little French in). No Tolstoy, no Dostoevsky, no Hugo (which is good, because I don't know that I could get through Crime & Punishment). I know they're classics too.....oh well.

So, here's my list. My goal is to post something (A review? Can one really "review" a classic anymore?) after I finish each. I don't know that I'll finish in a year. But maybe, I've already found my resolution for 2012.

• ''20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne
• ''A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain
• ''The Age of Innocence" by Edith Wharton
• ''Agnes Grey" by Anne Brontë
• ''Arabian Nights" by Anonymous
• ''Around the World in Eighty Days" by Jules Verne
• ''Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley
• ''The Call of Wild" by Jack London
• ''The Cather and Rye" by JD Salinger
• ''Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K Dick
• ''Emma " by Jane Austen
• ''The Enchanted Castle" by Edith Nesbit
• ''Five Children and It" by Edith Nesbit
• ''Frankenstein " by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
• ''Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift
• ''The House of Seven Gables" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• ''The Inheritance" by Louisa May Allcott
• ''The Invisible Man " by H. G. Wells
• ''Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë
• ''Journey to the Center of the Earth" by Jules Verne
• ''The Jungle Book" by Rudyard Kipling
• ''Lady Chatterley's Lover" by D. H. Lawrence
• ''The Last of Mohicans" by James Fenimore Cooper
• ''The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving
• ''Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott
• ''Mansfield Park" by Jane Austen
• ''Middlemarch " by George Eliot
• ''Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville
• ''My Brother Sam is Dead" by James And Chris Collier
• ''Nicholas Nickleby" by Charles Dickens
• ''Northanger Abbey" by Jane Austen
• ''Persuasion" by Jane Austen
• ''The Phantom of Opera" by Gaston Leroux
• ''The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde
• ''The Pilgrim's Progress" by John Bunyan
• ''The Prince and Pauper" by Mark Twain
• ''The Red Badge of Courage" by Stephen Crane
• ''The Return of Native" by Thomas Hardy
• ''Robinson Crusoe" by Daniel Defoe
• ''The Scarlet Pimpernel" by Baroness Emmuska Orczy
• ''Sense and Sensibility " by Jane Austen
• ''Tess of the d'Urbervilles " by Thomas Hardy
• ''The Time Machine" by H. G. Wells
• ''Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson
• ''Vanity Fair" by William Makepeace Thackeray
• ''The War of Worlds" by H. G. Wells
• ''The Way We Live Now" by Anthony Trollope
• ''White Fang" by Jack London
• ''The Wonderful Wizard of OZ" by L.Frank Baum
• ''Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë