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.