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