my books - Anne of Green Gables (1908) by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Oh, how I wish I had read this book (and undoubtedly the series) out loud to the kids (or at least the youngest) years ago.

I had never read Anne before last month. I simply didn't know.

If you are trying to place the style of this book, it is similar to the Little House on the Prairie series. It is that type of book. Anne is an orphan. She was not abandoned. Her parents died when she was small baby (epidemic). The story starts when she is 11.

Here is a bit of background (context section) from Sparknotes on Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942). It was interesting to note that she married at age 37 and had three children. Highly unusual for those days.



Wiki notes:

Anne of Green Gables (1908) is a bestselling novel by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery. Written as fiction for readers of all ages, since the mid-twentieth century, the literary classic has been considered a children's novel. It recounts the adventures of Anne Shirley, a young orphan girl sent to a middle-aged brother and sister who have a farm on Prince Edward Island, and who had intended to adopt a boy to help them. The novel recounts how Anne makes her way with the Cuthberts, in school and the town.

Since publication, Anne of Green Gables has sold more than 50 million copies, and has been translated into 20 languages. Numerous sequels were written by Montgomery, and since her death, another sequel has been published, as well as an authorized prequel. The original book is taught to students around the world.

It has been adapted as films, made for television movies, and animated and live-action television series. Plays and musicals have also been created, with productions annually in Canada since 1964 of the first musical production, which has toured in Canada, the United States, Europe and Japan. Others have been produced in Canada and the United States,

In writing the novel, Montgomery was inspired by notes she had made as a young girl, about a couple who were mistakenly sent an orphan girl instead of the boy they had requested, yet decided to keep her. She drew upon her own childhood experiences in rural Prince Edward Island. Montgomery used a photograph of Evelyn Nesbit, which she had clipped from New York’s Metropolitan Magazine and put on the wall of her bedroom, as the model for the face of Anne Shirley, the book's main character.

Montgomery also was inspired by the "formula Ann" orphan stories which were popular at the time and distinguished her character by her insistence on spelling her name as "Anne". She based other characters such as Gilbert Blythe, in part on people she knew. She said she wrote the novel in the twilight of the day, while sitting at her window and overlooking the fields of Cavendish.

As soon as I read those Wiki notes, my mind went to the poem (written in 1885) -

The Little Orphan Annie
by James Whitcomb Riley

Little Orphan Annie's come to my house to stay.
To wash the cups and saucers up and brush the crumbs away.
To shoo the chickens from the porch and dust the hearth and sweep,
and make the fire and bake the bread to earn her board and keep.
While all us other children, when the supper things is done,
we sit around the kitchen fire and has the mostest fun,
a listening to the witch tales that Annie tells about
and the goblins will get ya if ya don't watch out!

Once there was a little boy who wouldn't say his prayers,
and when he went to bed at night away up stairs,
his mammy heard him holler and his daddy heard him bawl,
and when they turned the covers down,
he wasn't there at all!
They searched him in the attic room
and cubby hole and press
and even up the chimney flu and every wheres, I guess,
but all they ever found of him was just his pants and round-abouts
and the goblins will get ya if ya don't watch out!!

Once there was a little girl who always laughed and grinned
and made fun of everyone, of all her blood and kin,
and once when there was company and old folks was there,
she mocked them and she shocked them and said, she didn't care.
And just as she turned on her heels and to go and run and hide,
there was two great big black things a standing by her side.
They snatched her through the ceiling fore she knew what shes about,
and the goblins will get ya if ya don't watch out!!

When the night is dark and scary,
and the moon is full and creatures are a flying and the wind goes Whoooooooooo,
you better mind your parents and your teachers fond and dear,
and cherish them that loves ya, and dry the orphans tears
and help the poor and needy ones that cluster all about,
or the goblins will get ya if ya don't watch out!!!

my books - East of Eden (1952) by John Steinbeck

Wiki writes:

Often described as Steinbeck's most ambitious novel, East of Eden brings to life the intricate details of two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, and their interwoven stories.

The novel was originally addressed to Steinbeck's young sons, Thom and John (then 6½ and 4½ respectively). Steinbeck wanted to describe the Salinas Valley for them in detail: the sights, sounds, smells, and colors.

The Hamilton family in the novel is said to be based on the real-life family of Samuel Hamilton, Steinbeck's maternal grandfather.

A young John Steinbeck also appears briefly in the novel as a minor character. According to his third and last wife, Elaine, he considered it his magnum opus – his greatest novel.

Steinbeck stated about East of Eden: "It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years." He further claimed: "I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this."

Does that almost bring a tear to your eye? It does mine.





This is my oldest's all time favorite book. It is a beloved book to him.

I read it specifically because he wanted me to read it (and it was darned well about time, I am 51 years old and college educated, Steinbeck is a Nobel Prize winning American author.).

I loved this book. It belongs to a lengthy list of really great books I have read. The book is deliciously long. It is a really, really good story.

In fact, I am not sure what my one favorite would be. I have read a lot of books I truly love. But the ONE? Not sure I can choose. Once upon a time it was Gone with the Wind. At other points it was Agatha Christie in general. At another time it was the Merlin Series by Mary Florence Elinor Stewart.   Oldest loves the the Stewart Merlin Series also. I am not sure either of the girls has ever read it.

I read East of Eden shortly after Grapes of Wrath. I think there were three books in between those two texts. As I got ready to start East of Eden I asked oldest if I needed to be forewarned (is Eden as sad as Grapes?).

He assured me that it was not as sad. I asked what it was about and he told me two brothers. Then I looked it up on Wiki and it reference two families. I actually think it is more accurate to say it is about a man who had a family (including a brother) and neighbors and friends.  At one point in the story, I thought oldest should have said - it is about a psychopath (antisocial personality disorder). Because that stood out to me in the book. I also saw a lot of history repeating itself.

The title of the book relates to the Garden of Eden and the story of Cain and Able. Not only can one see that story running through the book, but it also shows that story is running through human kind through the ages.

As I read, I was a little worry history was just going to keep repeating itself and no one was going to learn/change through the generations of families.

That is a topic that is hard for me. I feel very strongly about there being lines in the sand and learning and applying.

I almost called the oldest several times to ask if history just keeps repeating itself in the story. I didn't, he was in the midst of studying for very hard finals.

And honestly, I am not sure how he would have answered that question. I am not sure how I would answer that question now that I am done with the book. Human kind, families, are a complex issue.





For those of you who like older/classic movies, yes there was an East of Eden movie.

Wiki writes:

East of Eden is a 1955 film, directed by Elia Kazan, and loosely based on the second half of the novel of the same name by John Steinbeck.

The film stars Julie Harris, James Dean (in his first major screen role), and Raymond Massey. It also features Burl Ives, Richard Davalos and Jo Van Fleet, and was adapted by Paul Osborn and John Steinbeck.

Although set in early twentieth century Monterey, California, much of the film was actually shot on location in Mendocino, California. Some scenes were filmed in the Salinas Valley.

Of the three films in which James Dean played the male lead, this is the only one to have been released during his lifetime and the only one which Dean personally viewed in its entirety.

In 1995 Nonesuch Records issued an album of music from both "East of Eden" and "Rebel Without a Cause" - both written by Leonard Rosenman - played by the London Sinfonietta conducted by John Adams.

If you like context as much as I do, here it is (from Sparknotes) for Steinbeck (as author of East of Eden). This section does not give away the plot. At the end of the context section there is a review of Genesis and the story of Cain and Able.

my books - A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway

In a post a while ago, I wrote:

This (For Whom the Bell Tolls) was my second Hemingway book (read A Farewell to Arms last year and liked it too). His books have a very definite style. These first two were very much about men, but the men both had women they deeply loved.

I found A Farewell to Arms to be a bit choppy around the middle, but it is set during a war and war is muddled. Actually For Whom the Bell Tolls is set during war too. And it is much cleaner, more straight forward in its telling.


Here is The Big Read's Audio Radio show on Farewell to Arms.

That (above) was the grand total of my notes on Farewell (and apparently For Whom the Bell Tolls also) the first time I read it.

I read Farewell again last month.

If you are wondering why I reread Farewell, two reasons:
1. I have always wondered if I didn't like it simply because it was my first Hemingway and I didn't have my Hemingway chops (I have loved the Hemingway books I have read subsequently.)
2. I read All Quiet on the Western Front (also WWI) and wanted to compare.



On Farewell, Wiki notes:

A Farewell to Arms is a novel written by Ernest Hemingway set during the Italian campaign of World War I. The book, published in 1929, is a first-person account of American Frederic Henry, serving as a Lieutenant ("Tenente") in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The title is taken from a poem by 16th-century English dramatist George Peele.

A Farewell to Arms focuses on a romance between Henry and a British nurse, Catherine Barkley, against the backdrop of World War I, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations. The publication of this, Hemingway's bleakest novel, cemented his stature as a modern American writer, became his first best-seller, and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as "the premier American war novel from that debacle [World War I]".

The novel was first adapted to film in 1932, with further versions in the following decades.

Even though there was dirt and shrapnel and wounds and fear and displacement in Farewell, it is not the same level of war as All Quiet.

Farewell sort of reads as the Country Club version of war when compared to All Quiet.

My husband has read both of these books also. He commented Farewell reads like the Hollywood version of war. And All Quiet reads like real war.

Part of this is the fact that the main character in Farewell was sleeping in a bed and being fed and drinking (a lot) of alcohol during his version of the war. The main character in All Quiet was living in a trench (with dead bodies) and was pretty hungry.

These differences were probably due to the two different sides of the war represented AND the different rank/level of the two main characters.

And part of it is Hemingway's writing style.



There is The Iceberg Theory of Hemingway's writing:

Hemingway:

"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."

and  Wiki:

From reading Rudyard Kipling he absorbed the practice of shortening prose as much as it could take. Of the concept of omission, Hemingway wrote in "The Art of the Short Story": "You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood." By making invisible the structure of the story, he believed the author strengthened the piece of fiction and that the "quality of a piece could be judged by the quality of the material the author eliminated." His style added to the aesthetic: using "declarative sentences and direct representations of the visible world" with simple and plain language, Hemingway became "the most influential prose stylist in the twentieth century" according to biographer Meyers.

So, what did I think of Farewell to Arms, this second time through, on its own merit (not comparing to All Quiet on the Western Front)?

My impression, reading it the first time, a while back, was indeed because I was not used to Hemingway.

I loved For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, Old Man and the Sea when I went on to read each of them (after my first reading of Farewell).

And on the second reading, I loved Farewell too.

My favorite of the grouping is For Whom the Bell Tolls. That one is about the Spanish Civil War. No, I am not fond of war, but it is a truly great book.   My second favorite, The Sun also Rises, is about bull fights and drinking and carousing. As I said at the time - who would have guessed I would have loved that book - ?

I am very much a Hemingway girl.

I never would have known this if Hemingway books had not kept showing up on my to read lists. I would not have read the first one and then gone on to read the following three, on my own. I would not have understood that I needed to get my Hemingway Chops and learn how to read his style.

my books - All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues) (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque

Wiki notes:

All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues) is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the front.

The novel was first published in November and December 1928 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung and in book form in late January 1929.

The book and its sequel, The Road Back, were among the books banned and burned in Nazi Germany. It sold 2.5 million copies in twenty-five languages in its first eighteen months in print.

In 1930, the book was adapted as an Oscar-winning film of the same name, directed by Lewis Milestone.

In the spirit of warning me, we now have a tradition:

For Tess of the d'Urbervilles middle warned - it is a tragedy. Just when you think, this time it might work, this time things might be better for poor Tess - remember it is a t-r-a-g-e-d-y.

For Grapes of Wrath oldest said - it is sad. It starts out sad, it stays sad, it is just sad.

As I got ready to start All Quiet on the Western Front my husband said - it is war, war, war.



First of all, I would like to say this is a truly great book.

It is very well written.

Even though it is a translation, it is very easy to understand. The language is NOT stilted or awkward to me (but I will add I am very used to translations now, I have read a lot of them).

This book captures the essence of front line warfare.

There are only slight sections where one realizes the book is about the German side of WWI. The story is sideless, timeless.

It is one of those books that captures an era, but, yes, it is a timeless rendition of war.

Yes, there are gruesome parts. It is front line battle from a very nasty war. Some still say the nastiest war before mustard gas was made internationally illegal.

Like the other books listed above (Tess, Grapes) and Uncle Tom's Cabin which I would put in this same category, I did fine with it. I think because I was forewarned, I was okay all the way through the story.

I read it as a piece of history. I did not picture it happening to anyone I know. It did NOT give me nightmares or cause me to ruminate in any way. I thought about the book in the context of the book only.


On this topic, Sparknotes writes:

The overriding theme of All Quiet on the Western Front is the terrible brutality of war, which informs every scene in the novel. Whereas war novels before All Quiet on the Western Front tended to romanticize what war was like, emphasizing ideas such as glory, honor, patriotic duty, and adventure, All Quiet on the Western Front sets out to portray war as it was actually experienced, replacing the romantic picture of glory and heroism with a decidedly unromantic vision of fear, meaninglessness, and butchery. In many ways, World War I demanded this depiction more than any war before it—it completely altered mankind’s conception of military conflict with its catastrophic levels of carnage and violence, its battles that lasted for months, and its gruesome new technological advancements (e.g., machine guns, poison gas, trenches) that made killing easier and more impersonal than ever before. Remarque’s novel dramatizes these aspects of World War I and portrays the mind-numbing terror and savagery of war with a relentless focus on the physical and psychological damage that it occasions. At the end of the novel, almost every major character is dead, epitomizing the war’s devastating effect on the generation of young men who were forced to fight it.

If one read Catch-22 and took out all the Who's on First? farcical nonsense, it would be very similar to All Quiet. Two different wars, two different sides, but very similar viewpoints.

I also thought about the last episode of the television series Mash as I read. The statement of what war does to participants that was shown in Hawkeye's mental collapse. I was in college when that episode ran. I remember discussing it with an English professor who was shocked the series did not have a humorous, happy ending. I asked if he had been paying attention through all the episodes. Because like China Beach, I thought the writers held on to the futility and horrors of war on a consistent basis. I thought there a profound point to the ending episode of Mash.

As, I said, this was a most excellent book. Another one that I think should be read by all, even though it is not a very pleasant topic.

my books - Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005) by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Wiki notes:

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln is a book by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin published in 2005. The book is a biographical portrait of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and some of the men who served with him in his Cabinet from 1861 to 1865. Three of his Cabinet members had previously run against Lincoln in the 1860 election: Attorney General Edward Bates, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and Secretary of State William H. Seward. The book focuses on Lincoln's mostly successful attempts to reconcile conflicting personalities and political factions on the path to abolition and victory in the US Civil War.

While consulting on a Steven Spielberg project in 1999, Goodwin told Spielberg she was planning to write Team of Rivals, and Spielberg immediately told her he wanted the film rights. DreamWorks finalized the deal in 2001 and the film has been in pre-production since. Daniel Day-Lewis agreed to play Abraham Lincoln after Liam Neeson withdrew from the project in 2010 after being attached from the start; with Sally Field playing Mary Todd Lincoln. The screenplay was written by Tony Kushner. Filming began on October 17, 2011, and ended on December 19, 2011. The film will be released nationwide on November 16, 2012.

Yes, that is right, I read a contemporary (2005) book!
And it is a nonfiction book (to boot)!
But, yes, the topic is truly classic.


I read the book; have not yet seen the movie.
Oldest and husband saw it and said it was excellent.
The movie is much narrower in scope than the book.


This book was a daunting task, 36 discs/42 hours.  That is about 70 minutes per disc.

I tried to think of the longest book I have read recently. Bleak House (Dickens) came to mind. I looked it up and it was 29 discs at 33 hours.  

I tried to pace myself at two discs per day, 7 days a week. That is 140 minutes per day. Between driving, housework, waiting, shopping, I have 140 minutes most days. No, it didn't happen EVERY single day, because Thanksgiving was in there, but it did happen almost every day. And a couple days I had time for more than 2 discs. So, I finished in about 20 days.

That is a long time, for me, on the same book. But that is also pretty quick work for this volume. I ran into another woman who read it, and she said it took her three full weeks (also) of very concentrated effort. So she and I were pretty much at the same pace.



I have always been interested in Lincoln. I have visited (I think) all of his memorial sites in Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Washington DC. I would not say Lincoln is a hobby of mine.

But I probably read all the Lincoln books on the shelf when I was in 6th grade and read the whole biography/autobiography section of the school library. I think I remember reading Lincoln (1985) by Gore Vidal, but that book is actually historical fiction. 

I was a little worried Team of Rivals was going to read like a history text book. It does not read like a text. Yes there is a LOT of data in it. The book is written so all the data is interesting and there is a definite story. The data is woven well.

The first four discs alternate between introducing Edward Bates, Salmon P. Chase, William H. Seward, and Abraham Lincoln. This section of the book talks about all four of these families, how these men were raised, educated, wedded, established. There is a nice amount of information on these men's wives and children and households. The reader is given an interesting overview.

Lincoln's childhood is given as a very brief overview. More time is spent on his early adult years. And then the book really dives into his law practice, his start in politics, his presidential run and the presidency itself (which is all about the Civil War).

Slightly more information is given on Lincoln (vs the other three men on the team) as the book progresses. But not by much. The topic is the TEAM, not Lincoln as an individual.

I thought this was an excellent book. Even though there are a lot of characters and data, Goodwin did a good job in staying focused and writing an interwoven story.

I knew much of the Lincoln history. But I did not know most of the cabinet history.

Goodwin referenced her sources in a friendly, conversational way all the way through the book. An example is "in a letter to her father, Kate wrote . . .".

I also loved her asides to the modern reader. When she talked about Lincoln sleeping with his roommates, she explained how that was typical in that time frame and why she did not think there was anything sexual in it from their writings/records of the time. In other words, she knew that was where our minds were going to go, and she answered it.



PS -
My husband is going to listen to this book next. He has listened to a lot of other non-fiction that he really enjoyed. As I talked about this book (no spoiler worries in reading historical books!) as I read, he kept asking me what year? and I never knew. So, I think he reads with a historical calendar in mind, and obviously I do not. 

My books - The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck

Wiki notes:

The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. For it he won the annual National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for novels and it was cited prominently when he won the Nobel Prize in 1962.

Steinbeck is the oldest's favorite author.

I think East of Eden (1952) and Grapes of Wrath occupy spots one and two in his all time favorite books.

If you are trying to remember the other Steinbeck book I read earlier in the year, it was the novella Of Mice and Men (1937).

As soon as I have a little break in my book deadlines, I am going to read East of Eden. Honestly it is pretty ridiculous that I am 51, college educated, and have not read it.

Wiki notes:
The Grapes of Wrath is a 1940 drama film directed by John Ford. It was based on John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The screenplay was written by Nunnally Johnson and the executive producer was Darryl F. Zanuck.

Cast:
Henry Fonda as Tom Joad.
Henry Fonda as Tom Joad
Russell Simpson as Pa Joad
Jane Darwell as Ma Joad
John Carradine as Jim Casy, former preacher
Charley Grapewin as Grandpa William James Joad
Zeffie Tilbury as Grandma Joad
Frank Darien as Uncle John Joad
Dorris Bowdon as Rose-of-Sharon "Rosasharn" Rivers
O.Z. Whitehead as Al Joad
Frank Sully as Noah Joad
Darryl Hickman as Winfield Joad
Shirley Mills as Ruthie Joad
Eddie Quillan as Connie Rivers, husband of Rosasharn
John Qualen as Muley Graves, neighbor in Oklahoma
Roger Imhof as Mr. Thomas, ditch employer
Grant Mitchell as Manager of government camp
Charles D. Brown as Wilkie, boy lookout at dance
John Arledge as Davis, bulldozer driver
Ward Bond as Friendly Policeman, Bakersfield
Eddie Waller as Proprietor
Max Wagner as Guard
(Darryl Hickman is the last surviving cast member.)

I can 100% understand why this book, The Grapes of Wrath, won a Pulitzer.

Steinbeck captured an era. And it is a gut wrenching, no one wanted to talk about it, part of history. I wonder, without this book, if generations would understand why some of the laws (minimum wage, working conditions, child labor, etc) are so important.

I also wondered, as I read, how different things are for illegal, migrant workers and their families in the south/west today.

If you are not familiar with this part of history on Oklahoma and then in turn, California, the Context section from SparkNotes gives a very good, short overview without giving away the book.


I did have the "just get there already" sentiment through the middle of Grapes.

And at one point I thought - Mr. Steinbeck, did you feel you needed to clean house on your number of characters?

But those feelings were just for part of the middle, the story re-emerged (with a lot less characters!).

And I had a driveway moment for the last several chapters. I sort of cleared the decks, put my ear buds in, and listened all the way to the end.

I was (quite) startled at the abrupt ending.

But then as I thought about it, there was no way to slowly end it or wrap up the story lines. Their lives were sort of a never ending struggle. There wasn't going to be a magic solution or a nice tidy package.

I knew this was a sad story, oldest warned me.

It always amuses me that for many of things I read, at least one of my kids has read it. And honestly for these types of books, I like to KNOW before I start them. I am not saying I want a spoiler. I am saying I want to be told - sad, tragedy, really stupid people, etc.

And when I finished this book, oldest and I talked about it for a long time.

How great is that?


As I read, I thought of Uncle Tom's Cabin quite a bit. It is not the same story line, but the social context was there and both books were written to further social awareness, capture an era.

So, yes, very glad I read Grapes of Wrath. It was darned well about time for this one too.

I have been seeing parallels of the social issues all over the place and have noticed many references to the book just in the few weeks since I read it.

Isn't amazing how often that happens with a topic?

American Film Institutes (AFI) Movie Lists

Youngest has been watching movies by category and by actor. She worked her way through some of the musical section of DVD's at the library. This was things like Oklahoma, South Pacific, Singing in the Rain. In the past she has worked her way through much of Barbra Streisand. She loves Audrey Hepburn. Sometimes she works on an era like When Harry Met Sally, Pretty in Pink, etc. She doesn't work exclusively through a whole set. She does a bit here, a bit there. She has been working through the classic movies on Netflix.





I found these movie lists and thought you might enjoy them.

Most of the links below list 100 of the best movies under that theme.

The top actors list does not include movie titles, but looking for movies with those actors would be a whole additional list.

Very good project for winter.

I do not snack in front of the TV.

I only watch TV at night, as part of my settling down ritual, when I am done with food for the day.

Wikipedia

• 1998: AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies
• 1999: AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars
• 2000: AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs
• 2001: AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills
• 2002: AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions
• 2003: AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains
• 2004: AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs
• 2005: AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes
• 2005: AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores 
• 2006: AFI's 100 Years...100 Cheers
• 2006: AFI's Greatest Movie Musicals
• 2007: AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies 
• 2008: AFI's 10 Top 10

The year in front of the category does not mean the movies are from that year. It refers to the year the list was published. 

My books - The Age of Innocence (1920) Edith Wharton

The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton's 12th novel, which won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize.


Wiki notes:

The Age of Innocence centers on an upper-class couple's marriage. (Note: part one is pre marriage, part two is while they are married). Though the novel questions the assumptions and morals of 1870s' New York society, it never devolves into an outright condemnation of the institution. In fact, Wharton considered this novel an "apology" for her earlier, more brutal and critical novel, The House of Mirth. Not to be overlooked is Wharton's attention to detailing the charms and customs of the upper caste. The novel is lauded for its accurate portrayal of how the 19th-century East Coast American upper class lived, and this, combined with the social tragedy, earned Wharton a Pulitzer Prize — the first Pulitzer awarded to a woman. Edith Wharton was 58 years old at publication; she lived in that world, and saw it change dramatically by the end of World War I. The title is an ironic comment on the polished outward manners of New York society, when compared to its inward machinations.

 SparkNotes Context Section includes:

It is believed that the expression "keeping up with the Joneses" once specifically referred to Edith Jones Wharton's parents, who were known throughout New York for their lavish social gatherings.

I had a hard time getting into this book. Not sure why. I understood it. Just was not really invested in the first half. I had a couple thoughts that it might have been a bit to much like Emma or Room with a View. (Although I read Dracula  and another book after those two and immediately before The Age of Innocence.)

LOVED the second half.

Truly treasured the last several chapters.


The protagonist is a man. So that made it different than Emma and a Room with a View. 

I thought about men in general as I read this book.

Men who are stand up men, and men who are not.

Men who are loyal to their children and the mother of their children, and men who are not.

I also thought of the men who jump from woman to woman.

I also thought of breeding/class and education.

I thought of whether you marry a boyfriend or a husband. 

I thought of looking at the whole picture of your life and the stability and foundation of your family.

My books - Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker (1 of 2)

The Context Section for SparkNotes about Dracula is sort of gruesome. Here are the (non-gruesome) sections of interest to me:

Bram Stoker was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1847. The son of a civil servant, Stoker was a sickly child. Stoker’s mother, a charity worker and writer, spent a good deal of time entertaining her son with fantastic tales. Stoker went on to study math at Trinity College and graduated in 1867, at which time he joined the Irish civil service. He also worked as a freelance journalist and drama critic, which enabled him to meet the legendary stage actor Henry Irving. The two men became lifelong friends, and Stoker managed Irving’s theater from 1878 until Irving’s death in 1905. Stoker married an aspiring actress, Florence Balcombe, and the couple had one son, Noel, who was born in 1879. Stoker moved to London in order to oversee Irving’s theater, and he fell into the city’s literary circles, which included figures such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

and

Stoker also relies heavily on the conventions of Gothic fiction, a genre that was extremely popular in the early nineteenth century. Gothic fiction traditionally includes elements such as gloomy castles, sublime landscapes, and innocent maidens threatened by ineffable evil. Stoker modernizes this tradition in his novel, however, moving from the conventional setting of Dracula’s ruined castle into the bustle of modern England. As Stoker portrays the collision of two disparate worlds—the count’s ancient Transylvania and the protagonist’s modern London—he lays bare many of the anxieties that characterized his age: the repercussions of scientific advancement, the consequences of abandoning traditional beliefs, and the dangers of female sexuality. To this day, Dracula remains a fascinating study of popular attitudes toward sex, religion, and science at the end of the nineteenth century.

Note that while there are stakes pounded in hearts and a head stuffed with garlic and the like, I did not find this a particularly gruesome book. The (full) SparkNotes entry was actually more gruesome than the book.

Never in a zillion years would I have guessed the author of Dracula was Irish.

My husband, middle and I have all read Dracula. My husband and I read it recently for one of our book review groups. Middle read it several years ago, in French. She suspects she missed a lot of the nuance of the story, because she was translating as she went. I have heard it said that one has to think in the language to really get it.

My husband and I loved this book.

It is yet another example of a story I did not think I would enjoy and it would have been on the bottom of my stack if it had not been assigned.

Most excellent writing, plot, characters, tale.

When I finished it, I could have turned around and listened to the whole thing again and picked up nuance that I missed the first time.

A very rich read.

My books - A Room with a View (1908) by E. M. Forster

If you are trying to remember, E.M. Forester's works include:
Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
The Longest Journey (1907)
A Room with a View (1908)
Howards End (1910)
A Passage to India (1924)
Maurice (written in 1913–14, published posthumously in 1971)

Prior to A Room with a View, I had only read A Passage to India which I loved.


Here is the Context Section from SparkNotes on A Room with a View if you like just a bit of time/place/background on your authors like I do.


I suspect that if I had read this book directly after Catch 22, I would have liked it more. Room with a View would have been like a breath of fresh air. I would have enjoyed it more.

The way that my book schedule stacked up, I read Room with a View directly after Emma. Maybe it sort of paled in comparison. Maybe the two books are too much alike and i got tired of it. For whatever reason, A Room with a View was just okay in my mind.

Middle and my husband read  Room with a View also. And neither was a big fan.

I am not sure if it is too simple. Or too much a sort of convoluted romance or what. There aren't any heaving bosoms or bare chested men, it is not a modern romance novel.


Wikipedia noted:

A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the repressed culture of Edwardian era England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century.

That is a very accurate way of explaining it.


If you are wondering about the Edwardian Era (like I did), Wikipedia goes on to write:

The Edwardian era or Edwardian period in the United Kingdom is the period covering the reign of King Edward VII, 1901 to 1910.

The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 and the succession of her son Edward marked the end of the Victorian era. While Victoria had shunned society, Edward was the leader of a fashionable elite that set a style influenced by the art and fashions of Continental Europe—perhaps because of the King's fondness for travel. The era was marked by significant shifts in politics as sections of society that had been largely excluded from wielding power in the past, such as common labourers and women, became increasingly politicised.[1]

The Edwardian period is sometimes extended beyond Edward's death in 1910 to include the years up to the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912, the start of World War I in 1914, the end of hostilities with Germany in 1918, or the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

When my group met to discuss this group, pretty much everyone had ambivalent feelings. The vast majority of the group had read the book. Almost no one hated it. But, no one thought it was the best read of our year. A couple people had been unable to get past the first section. This first part, like many English Author books, sort of sets up the rest of the book. We all agreed that the first part was just sort of "to be gotten through" by all.

The more we discussed A Room with a View, the more I came to appreciate it.

My books - Emma (1815) by Jane Austen (1 of 2 posts today)

“Ah! There is nothing like staying home for real comfort.” 
Jane Austen

I had just finished Emma when this post mentioning Pride and Prejudice caught my eye.

What stayed with me (from that post) was the concept of knowing one is happy without feeling outright happy at key points in our lives. It is a short but interesting post on happiness.



Yes, Emma was a reread for me.

My husband and I had both read this book for college, the same instructor in fact. This was a flamboyant professor who professed his love for Emma at every opportunity. If Helen ever had him, she will remember immediately. We all graduated in 1983, so it was at least 30 years ago we read this book. As I read, bits and pieces of the plot came back to me. My husband had no memory of the details of the book and even needed a character list to keep everyone straight as he first listened. I think there were about 23 on that list.

Husband did not care for Emma 30 years ago. And honestly he did not care for it now either. 30 years ago he thought he did not like it because the professor was so over the moon about it that no book could have lived up to expectations.

Now he did not care for it because he felt all the characters talked too much. He was actually surprised I liked it.

I went into Emma just after finishing Catch 22, so Emma was very welcomed at that point. In Cold Blood might have been very welcomed at that point.



I remembered liking Emma 30 years ago.

I thought I would not like it the second time around.

I thought knowing the general outcome of the book (in advance) was going to ruin it for me.

It did not.

Laura mentioned (long ago in a comment) that as a literature major in college, there was a design of study that revealed the plot of books in advance so the writing style/composition could be analysed as one read. So, the professor told them the general plot of the book before they read it for class. And then as they read, they analyzed the author's process/style.

I had this experience with Emma. I think I noticed a lot more because I knew what was coming. I enjoyed the process. I think I might have liked it better the second time around, I enjoyed/caught the nuances more.



I have read all of Jane Austen's books. I have read Pride and Prejudice and now Emma twice as I had read them long ago and then reread when they came up on recent book review group lists.

If I had not already read all of them, I would be suggesting the other titles for book group reading lists. I would want to have read them all.

I love her books, our girls love her books. Oldest has read at least Pride and Prejudice (for a class) and loved it too.



There is a woman in one of my book review groups who always talks about the subtle humor in books. She will mark certain passages in books, read them aloud to the group, and talk about the subtle humor. She is really helping me in my reading as I am catching the subtle inferences of authors more readily. I think - there is a Chris moment - each time I hit one. It has really helped me grow in my reading. I had that experience (a lot) while reading Emma this second time. And I kept thinking - wonder if Chris will mention that one - before I remembered I was reading it for my other reading group - Chris will not be there.



I think Jane Austen is a good example of subtle. These are not merely 'girl books', these are social context books (in my opinion).


Context Section from SparkNotes:

Jane Austen, whom some critics consider England’s best novelist, was born in 1775 in Steventon, England. The seventh of eight children, Austen lived with her parents for her entire life, first in Steventon and later in Bath, Southampton, and Chawton. Her father was the parish rector in Steventon, and, though not wealthy, her family was well connected and well educated. Austen briefly attended boarding school in Reading but received the majority of her education at home. According to rumor, she had a brief love affair when she was twenty-five, but it did not lead to a marriage proposal. Two years later she accepted and then quickly rejected a proposal. She remained unmarried for the rest of her life. Austen died in 1817, at age forty-one, of Addison’s disease.

Austen began writing stories at a very young age and completed her first novel in her early twenties. However, she did not publish until 1811, when Sense and Sensibility appeared anonymously, -followed by Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814). Emma, which appeared in 1816, was the last novel published -during Austen’s lifetime. (Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appeared posthumously.)

Austen’s novels received little critical or popular recognition during her lifetime, and her identity as a novelist was not revealed until after her death. As admired as Austen’s novels later became, critics have had a difficult time placing them within literary history. She is known for her gently satirical portraits of village life and of the rituals of courtship and marriage, but she wrote during the Romantic period, when most major writers were concerned with a very different set of interests and values. Romantic poets confronted the hopes and failures of the French Revolution and formulated new literary values centered on individual freedom, passion, and intensity. In comparison, Austen’s detailed examination of the rules of decorum that govern social relationships, and her insistence that reason and moderation are necessary checks on feeling, make her seem out of step with the literary times. One way to understand Austen’s place in literary history is to think of her as part of the earlier eighteenth century, the Age of Reason, when literature was associated with wit, poise, and propriety. Her novels certainly belong to an eighteenth-century genre, the comedy of manners, which examines the behavior of men and women of a single social class.

Rather than dismiss Austen as a writer who shuns the artistic and political movements of her time, it is perhaps more useful to think of her as an early feminist. Critics have pointed out that the Romantics, who were almost exclusively male, offered a poor model of literary fulfillment for the ambitious woman of the time. While male writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron possessed the freedom to promote their own individuality through wide travel and sexual and military adventurism, women were largely denied these freedoms. For women, the penalty for sexual freedom was social ostracism, poverty, and worse. In Sense and Sensibility, Austen describes explicitly the danger that cultivating emotion posed for women of her time.

In this social context, Austen’s commitment to reason and moderation can be seen as feminist and progressive rather than conservative. The intelligence and resourcefulness of her heroines stand in constant contrast to the limits of the constricted world of courtship and marriage defining their sphere of action. While reading Emma it is interesting to consider to what extent Austen accepts or questions the idea that marriage represents a woman’s maturity and fulfillment.

Some consider Emma Austen’s best and most representative novel. It is also her longest novel, and by many accounts, her most difficult. Long praised for its rich domestic realism, Emma also presents puzzling questions: how can a character as intelligent as Emma be wrong so often? When does Austen expect us to sympathize with Emma, and when does she expect us to criticize her? Is the ending as genuinely happy as it is presented to be, or does Austen subtly inject a note of subversive irony into it? That these questions are on some level unanswerable ensures that Emma will be read again and again.

If you are wondering about my husband - he kept with the book, and liked it well enough by the end (he said the second half was better), but it certainly will never be a favorite. And he is not itching to read another Austen.

He watched Emma with Gwyneth Paltow. He loved the movie. He thought it was very funny and well done.

A couple people in the group watched the BBC version of Emma (there are at least two and the more recent one is better in my opinion).


After the meeting the facilitator and I were talking -
The facilitator of the group is male, heterosexual, youngish, and very well read. He had never read any of Austen's work before Emma. And he loved it. He said he had to read it at a much slower pace and really think to catch the humor.

I told him I think that is one advantage I have in listening to the books. The pace for reading out loud/listening is MUCH slower than the pace for reading text. Much slower (I read very quickly). By listening, I am forced to a yoga like state of reading. My iPod has a feature where I can adjust the pace (slow, normal, fast, very fast).

I usually listen on normal.

I have a book I am just starting (Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton)  where there is something off about the reader. It is a volunteer reader through USF Lit2Go. Normally their readers are very good. I am going to try a slower pace to see if that helps. If not, no harm in buying from Audible sometime (I watch the sales), as it was a free download from USF Lit2Go.

I also have Siddhartha (1922) by Herman Hesse with a dreadful reader. This was a very inexpensive (maybe $2) download from Audible. I bought it before I understood the importance of listening to a sample of the reader's style before downloading. There was a reason it was on sale! If I end up rebuying a different version, no harm. But I am going to try a slower pace to see if that helps the very speedy reader sound.

My books - Catch-22 (1961) Joseph Heller. (1 of 2)

Context Section from SparkNotes:

"Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn in 1923. He served as an Air Force bombardier in World War II and enjoyed a long career as a writer and a teacher. His best-selling books include Something Happened, Good as Gold, Picture This, God Knows, and Closing Time, but his first novel, Catch-22, remains his most famous and acclaimed work. He died of a heart attack in December 1999.

"Heller wrote Catch-22 while working at a New York City marketing firm producing ad copy. The novel draws heavily on his Air Force experience and presents a war story that is at once hilarious, grotesque, cynical, and stirring. The novel generated a great deal of controversy upon its initial publication in 1961. Critics tended either to adore it or despise it, and those who hated it did so for the same reasons as the critics who loved it. Over time, Catch-22 has become one of the defining novels of the twentieth century. It presents an utterly unsentimental vision of war, stripping all romantic pretenses away from combat, replacing visions of glory and honor with a kind of nightmarish comedy of violence, bureaucracy, and paradoxical madness. This kind of irony has come to be expected of war novels since the Vietnam War, but in the wake of World War II, which most Americans believed was a just and heroic war, Catch-22 was shocking. It proved almost prophetic about both the Vietnam War, a conflict that began a few years after the novel was originally published, and the sense of disillusionment about the military that many Americans experienced during this conflict.

"Unlike other antiromantic war novels, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Catch-22 relies heavily on humor to convey the insanity of war, presenting the horrible meaninglessness of armed conflict through a kind of desperate absurdity rather than through graphic depictions of suffering and violence. Catch-22 also distinguishes itself from other antiromantic war novels through its core values: the story of Yossarian, the protagonist, is ultimately not one of despair but one of hope. He believes that the positive urge to live and to be free can redeem the individual from the dehumanizing machinery of war. The novel is told as a series of loosely related, tangential stories in no particular chronological order. The narrative that emerges from this structural tangle upholds the value of the individual in the face of the impersonal, collective military mass; at every stage it mocks insincerity and hypocrisy, even when such values appear triumphant.

"Despite its World War II setting, Catch-22 is often thought of as a signature novel of the 1960s and 1970s. It was during those decades that American youth truly began to question authority. Hippies, university protests, and the civil rights movement all marked the 1960s as a decade of revolution, and Heller’s novel fit in perfectly with the spirit of the times. In fact, Heller once said, “I wasn’t interested in the war in Catch-22. I was interested in the personal relationships in bureaucratic authority.” Whether Heller was using the war to comment on authority or using bureaucracy as a statement about the war, it is clear that Catch-22 is more than just a war novel. It is also a novel about the moral choices that every person must make when faced with a system of authority whose rules are both immoral and illogical."

This book was published the year I was born. I did not read it in college. I suspect that it was standard reading for college students in the 60's and 70's. I was in college in the 80's.

This was a tough book to read. There is some gore, but honestly not a lot. And that is not what made it tough. It was the absurdity that was hard (for me). In the beginning it reminded me a lot of the humor/absurdity of The Confederacy of Dunces. The topics are not at all the same. Catch-22 is sort of that old "Who's on first?" routine gone to war.

My husband had read it (on his own, not in college) and actually loved it. But he told me (as soon as I started complaining about it) that I was probably not going to like it (all the way to the end).

To be very honest, I had to make myself stay with it through disc 6 (there were 15 discs, so well over 15 hours).

Then at disc 7 (almost half way) I ran into people who had read it in college and they all told me to stick with it.

They did not tell me I would love it, they told me it was an important novel that they were surprised I had not read in college.

And I ran into people who never finished it because they couldn't stick with it.

At that point it was exactly like it is at the half way point of a hard exercise class. Am I going to walk out when the real benefit is just about to start? When I could be DONE (with a feeling of accomplishment rather than defeat which does not feel good to me)? Not likely.

The second half the book was easier (for me) to read/listen than the first. I think there was slightly less of the "who's on first?" shtick going although it remained loyal to the absurdity of war all the way to the end.

To be honest, I listened to half, took a time out to listen to Treasure Island for a book review meeting, and then finished the second half. So, Catch-22 was in my life for almost three weeks.  Certainly not as long as war impacts people's lives, but long enough for me.

I would have enjoyed it more (my first read) if it was part of the curriculum  for a college class.

Yes, in the end, now that it is done, I am glad I read it.

No, I would not read it a second time. If it were assigned for another reading group, I would refresh my brain with SparkNotes and happily go discuss it.

My books - Treasure Island (1883) by Robert Louis Stevenson (1 of 2 posts)

This is an interesting side note: when I was looking at house plans, for our current house, about 12 years ago, one of the house plan books I checked out from the library was by Robert L. Stevenson. When I raised an eyebrow to the librarian at the checkout desk, she said - yes, it is the same one. When I looked on biography websites last week, writing this post, I could not find that book listed. Nor any references to R.L. Stevenson house architecture.

I sent a note to my local library asking about the book, here is the response I got:

Hello,
Unfortunately, there is nothing by this description in our catalog anymore.
The following titles are owned by other libraries in the U.S.:
Homes of character, illustrating one hundred designs Robert L Stevenson
 &
Portfolio of homes designed Robert L Stevenson
I'm unsure if it's the same Robert Louis Stevenson though.
Both titles list the birth year as 1883, while the Treasure Island author's birth year was 1850.

So the librarian 12 years ago made an assumption. I followed right along, because it didn't occur to me to check the birth dates either, I just looked at the name.





TODAY'S POST ON TREASURE ISLAND:


Wikipedia notes:

"Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, narrating a tale of "buccaneers and buried gold". First published as a book on May 23, 1883, it was originally serialized in the children's magazine Young Folks between 1881–82 under the title Treasure Island or, the mutiny of the Hispaniola with Stevenson adopting the pseudonym Captain George North. With Jim Hawkins as the main character in the story.

"Traditionally considered a coming-of-age story, Treasure Island is an adventure tale known for its atmosphere, characters and action, and also as a wry commentary on the ambiguity of morality — as seen in Long John Silver — unusual for children's literature now and then. It is one of the most frequently dramatized of all novels. The influence of Treasure Island on popular perceptions of pirates is enormous, including treasure maps marked with an "X", schooners, the Black Spot, tropical islands, and one-legged seamen carrying parrots on their shoulders.[1]"

My husband and I started listening to this book on the same day. He came home from work and said - I bet you love this one.

And I did.

I had never read it before last month. Not sure how I missed it.

And if I had read it, I would have read it out loud to my kids. They would have loved it too.

One thing I loved (from the point of view of reading it to kids) is that the first sentence, from the point of view of Jim, tells the reader Jim/the main character is going to be okay:
"SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow Inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof."

Frankly, there are a lot of people who die in this book. I would still read it to a child who really loves stories (as long as they were not prone to fear and could enjoy the story). But I would make sure to point out that first sentence so they were not scared for Jim through the whole story.




It is one of those books which might make a better listen than a read, because the speech is pretty wonderful. The version I listened to was from USFLit2Go off iTunes. The reader was really great. I could hear him turning the pages of the book, which added to the whole experience.

Oldest listens to an individual who does his own podcasts of Sherlock Holmes. So this is just a lay person who has taken this on as a project. I think he is working his way through (podcasting) the complete works. And every once in a while, you can hear the guy's cat meow. Sort of priceless.

There were several people at our book review group who said they wished they had listened to this book as they thought it would be a better read in audio format. They were not saying they didn't like the book, almost everyone LOVED it, but they thought it would have been better as a listen.

The group facilitator is always surprised that all the women in the group LOVE what he thinks of as boy books. He does not mean male books. He means juvenile fiction action books.

I was not surprised I loved it. But I (too) was surprised at some of the women (in the group) who loved it.

I have started listing all the characters (from that month's book) on the huge dry erase board at our discussion group. I write the name and then something very short that will trigger our memories (Ben Gunn - marooned 3 years). It allows for much better discussion as it is easier to remember all the names. And it also insures that we talk about all the characters. Treasure Island is not very long, a super fast read at 7 CD's/7 hours, but I thought I was going to run out of board, lots of characters.

We had a great discussion. One other thing that our facilitator always says - he does not have to keep track of every nuance as he reads, because one of us (in the group) will be sure to bring IT up (whatever it is in a particular book). This group has a lot of detailed readers (I am one of them). And we have a couple former English Lit high school teachers who actually taught some of these books. My other group does too. Those former Lit teachers add a lot to the mix.

My books - The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway

Okay, I knew nothing at all about this book before I started.

(It is my fourth Hemingway, so I did know it was going to be a man's book of sorts.)

And honestly, if someone had said to me - it is about trout fishing, getting 'tight' (drunk), fighting, and the bullfights in Spain - I would have probably passed it by with nary a thought. Or at least moved it to the very bottom of my to read list.

I loved this book.

I loved every word of this book.

I am quite a Hemingway girl at this point.

I can't explain it, because the components of the book do not seem appealing when they are typed out like that - booze, fighting, fishing, bullfights. And I do not gravitate toward men nor their stories. But there you are, I loved it.

My first Hemingway (was my least favorite Hemingway, but still a very good book) was Farewell to Arms. I was going to say Farewell to Arms was an earlier book (1929) and he was just getting started, but it was actually written after The Sun Also Rises (1926). If you are trying to remember, my other Hemingway reads were For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1951).

The Sun Also Rises version I listened to was read by William Hurt (2006). He was most excellent. And I wondered if they chose him because of his The Big Chill (1983) character/Nick who was (character in The Sun Also Rises was too) impotent from a war injury. I caught that immediately. His voice and reading style were extremely well matched to the book.

It ended all too soon.


Here is the link to the SparkNotes Context section for this book. It does a good job of explaining the key points of Hemingway's life and when the books/Pulitzer/Nobel fit into this time frame.

One thing missing from the context section is his children. Hemingway was married four times. His three sons came from his first two marriages. The three granddaughters that we know (Joan, Margot, Mariel) all came from his oldest son, John, who married Byra. Here is a family tree that lists the other two sons and the rest of his grand kids.

My books - Pudd'nhead Wilson

On Puddn'head Wilson, Wikipedia notes:

"Pudd'nhead Wilson is a novel by Mark Twain. It was serialized in The Century Magazine (1893–4), before being published as a novel in 1894."

First, I would like to say Pudd'nhead Wilson was NOT a slave. I was surprised when I started the book. There are slaves in the story, but Wilson is not one of them.

Second, I would like to say that Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn do not make any appearances. Nor does Jim. Totally different stories.

Third, the concept of being "sold down the river" presented itself in Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom's Cabin and appeared in Pudd'nhead also. Slaves in the northern part of the southern states (in general) had much easier lives than the plantation slaves of the deep south. The fear of having oneself or family members sold to the deep south  is easily understood and a reoccurring theme. Puddn'head Wilson is a much lighter story than Uncle Tom's Cabin (absolutely no worries for me), but is considered to be one of Twain's darker stories.

Fourth, the first thing I looked up when I finished Pudd'nhead Wilson was fingerprints.



Fingerprints are part of the Pudd'nhead Wilson story. They are introduced very early in the story, I am giving nothing away. Understanding of fingerprints, shows Pudd'nhead Wilson to be scientifically based. We don't normally think of Twain's work as being scientifically leading.

There was a note at the end of the audible version of Pudd'nhead Wilson talking about fingerprints and Galton and Twain.

Galton's book came out just a year before Puddin'head was published.

On Galton and fingerprints, Wikipedia notes:

"In a Royal Institution paper in 1888 and three books (Finger Prints, 1892; Decipherment of Blurred Finger Prints, 1893; and Fingerprint Directories, 1895)[30] Galton estimated the probability of two persons having the same fingerprint and studied the heritability and racial differences in fingerprints. He wrote about the technique (inadvertently sparking a controversy between Herschel and Faulds that was to last until 1917), identifying common pattern in fingerprints and devising a classification system that survives to this day.

"The method of identifying criminals by their fingerprints had been introduced in the 1860s by Sir William James Herschel in India, and their potential use in forensic work was first proposed by Dr Henry Faulds in 1880, but Galton was the first to place the study on a scientific footing, which assisted its acceptance by the courts (Bulmer 2003, p. 35). Galton pointed out that there were specific types of fingerprint patterns. He described and classified them into eight broad categories. 1: plain arch, 2: tented arch, 3: simple loop, 4: central pocket loop, 5: double loop, 6: lateral pocket loop, 7: plain whorl, and 8: accidental.[31]"

And while the fingerprint part of the story is in Twain's contemporary life (1893), Twain sets his stories in the time before the civil war (1861-1865).

A paragraph in SparkNotes Context section talks about Twain's story timelines:
"Curiously, his works are all set before the Civil War, in the years when Twain himself was a boy. Perhaps this is because he wanted to write about what he knew from his own childhood; or perhaps he set his works in the past because he sought not a description of the present but a look at its causes or alternatives--what could have been, had things been a little bit different."

The full SparkNotes Context Section is here and does not give away anything about the story.


I do not think of myself as a Twain girl, but I have to tell you I LOVED this story. I knew nothing about it before I started and no one at my house had read it. As I read, I was never sure where the story was going. I enjoyed the story-ness of it.

It was a very quick read at 7 CD's and just under 7 hours.

I started Pudd'nhead simply because it was on my to read list and was the right length. I try to time my book review group listens so I finish them just before the group meets (so it is fresh in my mind). I needed something short to fill in a space after one title and before I started an assigned reading.



As I read this book, I tried to remember a passage I read or heard quoted long ago. I have a feeling it might have been Oprah related. I think it was a letter written by a white northern woman commenting on seeing slave children who looked exactly like the children of the master. In other words, the slave children and the master's children were half brothers and sisters. I think the letter specifically talked about seeing the master's children sitting at the dinner table and the slave children waiting at table, and their faces looking exactly alike, and no one thinking anything of it. Ring any bells for anyone?



Oldest, youngest and I are Trekkies at heart. We do not dress up and go to conventions, but we love all the Star Trek movies and shows. All three of us have seen all of it, several times each. We have a special place in our heart for Twain, because his persona appears in a couple episodes of The Next Generation and it was very well done.

Art in a tiny box

Not only is Jennette very clever herself, 
she also finds clever things.

All things Gretchen

Gretchen's New Book has hit the shelves.

Here is Gretchen's Appearance Listing. If she happens to hit your city, I think she would be a fun speaker. If you attend one, please leave a note and let me know. 

My Books - The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald. 108/56

When I found The Big Read website, The Great Gatsby had an audio show.

But then when I went to paste in the link. I discovered I had never written about this book.

I think I read it in early 2011 before I was writing my regular reviews. I suspect I read it for my long standing book group and then attended the meeting where it was discussed. That was many books ago, but I remember the book and the story vividly. So it was easy to write this post today.




When I started reading this book, it was familiar. So I wondered it I had read it in school.

It is very odd, but I have no memory of the books I read FOR high school. No mental list. I can't even come up with one title. The only title I remember from college is 100 Years of Solitude, which I have mentioned before, and did not appreciate at the time.

If you are trying to remember the movie, "The Great Gatsby is a 1974 romantic drama film distributed by Newdon Productions and Paramount Pictures. It was directed by Jack Clayton and produced by David Merrick, from a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel of the same name."

Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby
Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan
Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan
Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway
Karen Black as Myrtle Wilson
Scott Wilson as George Wilson
Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker
Edward Herrmann as Ewing Klipspringer
Howard Da Silva as Meyer Wolfsheim
Kathryn Leigh Scott as Catherine
Regina Baff as Miss Baedecker
Vincent Schiavelli as Thin Man
Roberts Blossom as Mr. Gatz
Beth Porter as Mrs. McKee
Patsy Kensit as Pammy Buchanan

About the novel, Wikipedia writes:

"The Great Gatsby is a novel by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book takes place from spring to autumn 1922, during a prosperous time in the United States known as the Roaring Twenties, which lasted from 1920 until the Wall Street Crash of 1929."

"Between 1920 and 1933, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, commonly known as Prohibition, completely banned the sale and manufacturing of all alcoholic beverages: distilled spirits, beer, and wine. The ban made millionaires out of bootleggers, who smuggled alcohol into the U.S.. The setting of the novel contributed greatly to its popularity following its early release, but the book did not receive widespread attention until after Fitzgerald's death in 1940, when republishings in 1945 and 1953 quickly found a wide readership. Today the book is widely regarded as a "Great American Novel" and a literary classic. The Modern Library named it the second best English-language novel of the 20th Century.[1]"

The Context section from SparkNotes writes:

"Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, and named after his ancestor Francis Scott Key, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Fitzgerald was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. Though an intelligent child, he did poorly in school and was sent to a New Jersey boarding school in 1911. Despite being a mediocre student there, he managed to enroll at Princeton in 1913. Academic troubles and apathy plagued him throughout his time at college, and he never graduated, instead enlisting in the army in 1917, as World War I neared its end.

"Fitzgerald became a second lieutenant, and was stationed at Camp Sheridan, in Montgomery, Alabama. There he met and fell in love with a wild seventeen-year-old beauty named Zelda Sayre. Zelda finally agreed to marry him, but her overpowering desire for wealth, fun, and leisure led her to delay their wedding until he could prove a success. With the publication of This Side of Paradise in 1920, Fitzgerald became a literary sensation, earning enough money and fame to convince Zelda to marry him.

"Many of these events from Fitzgerald’s early life appear in his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Like Fitzgerald, Nick Carraway is a thoughtful young man from Minnesota, educated at an Ivy League school (in Nick’s case, Yale), who moves to New York after the war. Also similar to Fitzgerald is Jay Gatsby, a sensitive young man who idolizes wealth and luxury and who falls in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a military camp in the South.

"Having become a celebrity, Fitzgerald fell into a wild, reckless life-style of parties and decadence, while desperately trying to please Zelda by writing to earn money. Similarly, Gatsby amasses a great deal of wealth at a relatively young age, and devotes himself to acquiring possessions and throwing parties that he believes will enable him to win Daisy’s love. As the giddiness of the Roaring Twenties dissolved into the bleakness of the Great Depression, however, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled alcoholism, which hampered his writing. He published Tender Is the Night in 1934, and sold short stories to The Saturday Evening Post to support his lavish lifestyle. In 1937, he left for Hollywood to write screenplays, and in 1940, while working on his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four.

"Fitzgerald was the most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed “the Jazz Age.” Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest literary documents of this period, in which the American economy soared, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity to the nation. Prohibition, the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1919), made millionaires out of bootleggers, and an underground culture of revelry sprang up. Sprawling private parties managed to elude police notice, and “speakeasies”—secret clubs that sold liquor—thrived. The chaos and violence of World War I left America in a state of shock, and the generation that fought the war turned to wild and extravagant living to compensate. The staid conservatism and timeworn values of the previous decade were turned on their ear, as money, opulence, and exuberance became the order of the day.

"Like Nick in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald found this new lifestyle seductive and exciting, and, like Gatsby, he had always idolized the very rich. Now he found himself in an era in which unrestrained materialism set the tone of society, particularly in the large cities of the East. Even so, like Nick, Fitzgerald saw through the glitter of the Jazz Age to the moral emptiness and hypocrisy beneath, and part of him longed for this absent moral center. In many ways, The Great Gatsby represents Fitzgerald’s attempt to confront his conflicting feelings about the Jazz Age. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald was driven by his love for a woman who symbolized everything he wanted, even as she led him toward everything he despised."

The Great Gatsby is a very simple read in comparison to many classic books.

There is a definite plot line and the author jumps right in.  It is well written and easy to understand.

It is not my all time favorite book, but is a very good story. One that I think every (well read) American should probably have read. So, yes, I agree with it being listed on most of the 100 book lists.

I think it stands up well to the test of time and conveys the essence of an era.

I do not think any of my kids have read it. So, I am not sure it is still read in schools. I think once upon a time, it was.

In audio format, The Great Gatsby is 4 cd's at 4 3/4 hours, so an excellent book for a short trip or a long time in a waiting room.

If you are trying to think of the other title, by F. Scott Fitzgerald that I mentioned recently, it was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

My books - The Maltese Falcon. 107/56

This link takes you directly to The Big Read's radio show about the Maltese Falcon. It was most excellent discussion. I appreciated the book more fully after listing to the podcast (these podcasts are 1/2 hour and are extremely well done).  This book is not on SparkNotes, so finding it on The Big Read was a special treat.


I thought I had read The Maltese Falcon before, but after reading it this time, I am pretty sure I did not. I also do not think I ever saw the movie

The Maltese Falcon is a 1941 Warner Bros. film directed by John Huston, the film stars Humphrey Bogart as private investigator Sam Spade; Mary Astor as his femme fatale client; Gladys George; Peter Lorre; and Sydney Greenstreet in his film debut. The film was Huston's directorial debut and was nominated for three Academy Awards. 

But I have a vague memory of seeing The Black Bird and really enjoying it (even though it got terrible reviews). It came out in 1975 and I would have been 14. I might have been a lot like middle, who never saw a movie she did not like, at that age.


Of the novel, The Maltese Falcon, Wikipedia writes:

"The Maltese Falcon is a 1930 detective novel by Dashiell Hammett, originally serialized in the magazine Black Mask. The story has been adapted several times for the cinema. The main character, Sam Spade, appears only in this novel and in three lesser known short stories, yet is widely cited as the crystallizing figure in the development of the hard-boiled private detective genre – Raymond Chandler's character Philip Marlowe, for instance, was strongly influenced by Hammett's Spade. Spade was a departure from Hammett's nameless detective, The Continental Op. Sam Spade combined several features of previous detectives, most notably his cold detachment, keen eye for detail, and unflinching determination to achieve his own justice."

"In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Maltese Falcon 56th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century."

I expected to LOVE this book, because I like mysteries. Most of these books, I go in with no expectations at all. I usually do not know what the topic is and often nothing about the author. So, I suspect my expectations set me up a bit. As I mentioned above, I appreciated the book more after listening to the podcast.

I read this book for one of my discussion groups. And in the discussion we realized that those who read it with no expectations or even expecting to dislike it, really liked this book. Those of us who love mysteries, spy, detective type books and started in expecting to love it, were sort of disappointed.

So, low expectations liked it a lot, high expectations were sort of ambivalent in the end.

It was not a bad book, by any means, I enjoyed it. I agree it belongs on the 100 books lists because of its historical context. And the book/Sam Spade is referenced constantly in other works. When something is mentioned that often, it is nice to have read it and understand the significance.

The writing style is very different. I think I read somewhere that the pace is unusual for a modern reader (2000's). It is not difficult to understand, the style just sets it in the 1930's distinctly. So, maybe it was very modern and very American for the 1930's.

And even though I do not think I have ever seen the movie, I pictured Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre all the way through my listen.

My books - Gulliver's Travels 100/56

Wikipedia notes:
"Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), is a novel by Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift (also known as Dean Swift[1]) that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre. It is Swift's best known full-length work, and a classic of English literature.

 "The book became popular as soon as it was (fully) published (John Gay wrote in a 1726 letter to Swift that "It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery"[2]); since then, it has never been out of print."




Yes, I knew who Gulliver was and knew of the Lilliputians, but I had not read the book and have never seen more than a clip of a movie.

As I was getting ready to start the book, I had a moment's pause if this was a book I should have read to my kids. (Like did I miss the boat?) So, I started the book with that viewpoint. I thought it was a family story and I wondered - should I have read it to the kids?

My kids LOVED The Borrowers Series. I am sure that is why I wondered about Gulliver. I read (out loud) the whole Borrowers set twice, once when the oldest was little and once when the youngest was little. I suspect middle probably listened both times, but only remembers the second time. 

I honestly was not totally impressed with the first part of Gulliver (Lilliputians).

As I was reading, I thought - this is going to be a l-o-n-g book.

So,  I was very (pleasantly) surprised to discover there was a next section. I stopped and consulted Wikipedia and learned Gulliver actually has four sections:

The parts of Gulliver's Travels are
Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput
4 May 1699 — 13 April 1702
Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag
20 June 1702 — 3 June 1706
Part III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan
5 August 1706 — 16 April 1710
Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms
7 September 1710 – 2 July 1715

I did not know about all these parts before I started. I thought the whole book was Lilliputians. As soon as it flipped over to section two, I was happier. The story flowed better for me from that point forward.

So, I liked the second section of the book much better, but found parts a little odd.

Gulliver straddling the nipple of a very large naked woman when he was Lilliputian small for example.

In current day reading, I thought - eeew. And actually in the book, Gulliver thought eeew too.

So, at this point in my reading, I wondered -  would that have been haha funny in its day or what - ? Is this a kids' book or an adult book?

There are parts like that here and there. The whole book is definitely not constantly like that. Those tiny sections made me think it was actually an adult book and not meant to be read to children. And when the book was made into family movies in modern time, those bits were excluded (I assume, as I said, I never actually saw the movies).

And in addition to the naked lady/nipple kind of stuff, there were sections where it was sort of a lecture and not a story.

And those raised questions for me too - what am I actually reading?



Luckily, there was a SparkNotes file for Gulliver. I stopped and referenced it half way through the second section of Gulliver.

From what SparkNotes included in the Context Section, there were even more of these types of references (naked lady/nipple) in the original version of Gulliver's Travels which have been edited out of the book in newer editions through the years.

And as for the lecture type sections, I understood better after reading the file.

Here are the SparkNotes passages I found most interesting:

"Gulliver’s Travels was a controversial work when it was first published in 1726. In fact, it was not until almost ten years after its first printing that the book appeared with the entire text that Swift had originally intended it to have. Ever since, editors have excised many of the passages, particularly the more caustic ones dealing with bodily functions. Even without those passages, however, Gulliver’s Travels serves as a biting satire, and Swift ensures that it is both humorous and critical, constantly attacking British and European society through its descriptions of imaginary countries. . . Gulliver’s Travels is about a specific set of political conflicts, but if it were nothing more than that it would long ago have been forgotten. The staying power of the work comes from its depiction of the human condition and its often despairing, but occasionally hopeful, sketch of the possibilities for humanity to rein in its baser instincts."

Here is the whole SparkNotes Context Section.

So, with all that in mind, what did I think of this book?

Honestly, over all, not my favorite.

But there were many sections I genuinely liked a great deal.

I think a huge part of my problem is I was expecting another Borrowers.

And it is so not (for me).

I am glad I read it, because the book is so widely know and referenced.

I am very glad I read SparkNotes when I did, so I at least understood the context of what I was reading.

I wouldn't read it again (myself) and certainly would not read it to kids.

For kids, it is better to just see the movie. Youngest says she loved the movie and the horses were her favorite.


I think a college philosophy/history/literature class including Gulliver would be most interesting.

I am sure there is a huge amount of historical and social context that went (totally) over my head. But as I read, I did not have the sense I didn't understand. I understood the story. I understood the lecture type sections. I am just saying the context/history behind/nuance probably went over my head.

On CD this book was 10 discs/12 hours. So, a fairly quick read (that is a 2-4 day book for me depending on my schedule).


And if you have children in your life, read them the whole Borrowers Series (in order) because it is most wonderful and will help them develop more sophisticated reading palates.


PS -
Youngest (and middle I think) have seen the (Gulliver) movie. My husband thought he had read the book, but when I questioned him about the odd stuff, he did not remember any of that, so maybe he just saw the movie. So I did have a chance to sort of discuss the book as I listened.

What everyone is reading is common conversation at our house. We talk about everyone's books. On the books I am reading, where some of my family have already read them, they are all very good at asking - where are you now? Or what has happened so far? and then only talking about the previous part of the book without giving away upcoming sections.



PPS -
Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe that was first published in 1719. If you remember, I loved that book. When I was finished with Gulliver, one of the first things I did was look to see when Crusoe was published. Answer - They are within ten years of each other. While I loved all of Crusoe and merely liked parts of Gulliver, I could see a similarity in the words and style. I did not find either book difficult (1700's language) to understand. I also listened to the first half of Don Quixote (1600's).  I had to teach myself to sit with it, but once I learned how to listen, I enjoyed that book very much. (And yes I am still kicking myself over missing great discussion on Gilgamesh and Beowulf earlier in the month because I was such a weenie over it.).