Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Thistle

anne 3I’m sure most people know what Anne of Green Gables is about already, but just in case, this is the story of an orphan girl taken in by an older couple. She’s a bit wild and fanciful, but also eager to please. This is a long series and this particular book takes Anne up through her late teens.

I’ve had a prejudice against reading this book since I was little, because I thought it would be too much like what my cousin always termed “home-spun dresses in the fields” books. I finally decided to break that prejudice, though. As an adult, reading this was an okay experience, but nothing special. I can tell it’s the sort of book that has a lot more magic to it when you’re a child. The ironic thing is that I can also tell that had I read this as a child, I would have hated it, not loved it. So sadly, there really was no way for me ever to love this book or want to read more into the series. It’s certainly not bad and I didn’t mind reading it, but I’m well past the age to really relate with it now. I’m glad I read it, though, so that I’m not walking around with a blind prejudice, or really even with any prejudice at all anymore. I no longer dislike or feel scornful towards the book. I just don’t feel anything else really, either.

One interesting thing to note, though – I paid attention to Anne’s age progression from preteen to late teenager, particularly because of what I’ve noticed in other classic coming of age novels, and Anne does feel like she grows up. She feels far more naive than today’s teenagers, but of course that’s exactly what I’d expect from a poor, rural girl from her time period. Naivety is not the same thing as immaturity. Even though Anne was only 16-17 at the end of this book, she felt far older than the narrators in I Capture the Castle or Daddy Long Legs, both of whom are older than her. This again makes me wonder if there are cultural differences either in teens or in authors’ perception of teens from those time periods.

Posted in 2011, Children's, Prose | Tagged | Leave a comment

Bumped, by Megan McCafferty

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Thistle

bumpedIn the dystopian world of Bumped, a virus has destroyed people’s ability to reproduce after their late teens, so teen pregnancy has become a valuable commodity. Teens are getting pregnant as young as eleven. Stores sell “fun bumps” where you can wear different-sized pregnant bellies (with real moving parts to simulate fetal movement!). Slang is all pregnancy-oriented. Fast food is packed with pregnancy vitamins. And so on.

Sixteen-year-old Melody has contracted out to get pregnant for an infertile couple and is now just waiting for them to choose a father. Harmony is Melody’s identical twin sister. The two were separated at birth, and Harmony has been raised by a church community who believes pregnancy-for-profit is a sin and prefers instead to marry children off at age 13 in order for them to have children before they can’t. Melony knows nothing about this twin sister, and is surprised when Harmony shows up on her doorstep determined to get her to stop “pregging for profit.”

This was a fantastic book. I’ve been completely burned out on YA lately, especially YA dystopia, but I decided to make an exception for Bumped. I’m so glad I did. McCafferty took an idea that is frowned upon in our society (teen pregnancy) and made a world that treats it like its salvation. It shows just how strongly circumstance is attached to our ideas of right and wrong. Even the church world in this books believes it is okay for thirteen-year-olds to get pregnant – as long as they are married first. On both sides of the debate, it’s okay and even good for kids to get pregnant. The only difference in viewpoint is in how the kids should get pregnant. Kid pregnancy is an accepted practice by everyone.

This is a unique dystopia in that it doesn’t involve a hostile or overly-extended government. Most dystopias involve a people versus the government sort of dynamic, but Bumped was more of a corporate and cultural dystopia. The people in this world have made their own problems. There’s a lot to be said on the extension of the more extreme aspects of American commercialism here. It was really interesting to see a world that had brought itself to this place rather than being forced to it by gunpoint.

Another great thing about this book is that it doesn’t endeavor to explain the whole world to the reader up front. The characters use slang specific to their world, eat food filled with fertility or pregnancy vitamins, and go to stores that cater to pregnancy. It’s difficult to understand some of what’s happening and what the characters are saying until you’ve spent enough time with the culture to figure things out. There’s no huge info-dump for world-building. McCafferty finds ways to make things clear without the book or characters ever feeling unnatural. I was very impressed by that.

Bumped comes out on April 26th, and I do have to warn you – it’s not a standalone novel. There will be a second book (one for each twin, I’ve heard), and Bumped does cut off right in what feels like the middle of the story. I read this on my iPad and had no idea that I was turning the last page when I turned it. I turned to the acknowledgements and couldn’t believe it was over. I wanted the second book NOW. It’s been a really long time since I felt like that about a series of any sort. This is one I definitely want to read the rest of! I have to know what happens to all these characters.

Posted in 2011, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

Posted on March 5, 2011 by Thistle

1colorp1Celie is fourteen the first time her father rapes her. She suffers through constant sexual abuse and two pregnancies. Not long after, she’s married off to an older widow because her father wants to start in with her younger sister, Nettie.

This is an amazing novel. Emotionally difficult to read, oh yes, but definitely worth it. I’m not even sure what I can say about it. This is one of those times when I just want to beg you to please, please read this book if you haven’t already. It’s been on my TBR for years now and I’m so glad I finally got to it.

I had no idea what to expect going in. I didn’t know there was rape and child abuse, I didn’t know there were strong GLBT elements, and I couldn’t tell, at any point in the story, whether the book was going to end on a sorrowful or hopeful note. Every moment was a new one of discovery, and I loved every page. I loved the statements on religion and spirituality, on love and family, on fate and will. It was perfect.

I really don’t know that I can say anything more. It’s one of those books that I loved so much that it rendered me incoherent. So I revert to begging: if you haven’t read this, please do!! It’s amazing!!

Posted in 2011, Adult, Prose | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Protected: Notes From Underground, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Thistle

This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

Posted in 2011, Adult, Prose | Tagged , | Enter your password to view comments.

Harry Potter et le Prisonnier d’Azkaban, by JK Rowling

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Thistle

HP3The adventures continue with the third installment of Harry Potter, once again in French. And the adventures have gotten so much better for me in many ways! After Chambre, I was pretty discouraged. It was a horrible translation and I felt like I’d reached a wall with my re-learning French. I’m happy to say that both of those things were far better with le Prisonnier d’Azkaban!

First, the translation: same person translating, but this one was so much better. There were only two or three sentences missing and only one felt like a mistake (ie the following sentence made no sense without the missing one). There were no characters who showed up randomly for a sentence, and everyone who was supposed to speak did so. I’m very happy about this, because like I said before, this is one of my two favorite books in the series and I hoped it would be a good translation. I really felt like this one got across the right atmosphere and everything. It was wonderful.

And then there was my reading itself. I finished this book only twelve days after I began it. Originally I had planned to read a chapter per day, but one day, I had a lot of time and was really, really tired after two days of severe insomnia, so I sat down and just let myself become immersed in this world. I read the last 250 or so pages in a single afternoon. In French! And to think – back at the beginning of this project, it took me half an hour to read five pages, looking up every few words. I never looked in the dictionary once in this reading. Sure, I came across words I didn’t know, but just like with a book in English, I figured them out from context (and from knowledge of the book) and I got along fine without my dictionary. Even better: on that day that I read about half the book, I realized that I was no longer translating the book into English in my head to understand it. I was reading the French and comprehending in French, no translation necessary. This is a huge step and I’m very excited about it. I’m still not sure I could speak or write well in French, but even as I’m writing this I can hear basically what the words would be in French, too. So major progress this time!

This gives me hope that one day I’ll be able to read other, non-memorized books in their original French. It’ll probably be awhile still, but at least I’m still going forward. That makes me happy and makes the whole project feel so much more useful and hopeful. I’m glad I decided to undertake it this year.

Posted in 2011, Children's, Prose | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

One Amazing Thing, by Chitra Divakaruni

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Thistle

oneamazingNine people are in a basement Visa office when an earthquake strikes and traps them inside. They are unable to escape as the basement slowly floods, and are short on food, water, and good air. Several of them have injuries, and no one trusts anyone else. In order to try to lessen some of the panic and tension while they wait to be rescued, one girl suggests they each tell a story from their lives.

At first when I opened this book, I worried that I would react as I’ve been reacting to most of the modern lit I’ve tried to read in the past couple months. I worried it would bore me and I’d put it down after twenty pages. I didn’t want to do that because I know Erin loved this book and I won it from her. I wanted to give it a real chance. Happily, I was engrossed in the story immediately. It was fast-paced, captivating, and interesting. I loved learning about each person’s life one by one, and in fact one of my only complaints is that the book didn’t go deep enough into each character! I wanted more. More depth, more emotion, more character.

At first I had some issues with the writing style, which would change from third to first person POV at intervals depending on the story being told, and the same with past and present tense. I would have preferred it to stay all in the same POV and tense, but after about halfway through the book, I honestly stopped noticing altogether, that was how interested I was in the story and characters. Each person was fascinating, though I was particularly enamoured with Malathi, Cameron, and Lily’s stories. Their experiences touched me the most.

The book’s end, though…it felt unfinished. I know it was meant to be ambiguous and meaningful and all that, but that didn’t work with this book for me. The book’s depth was more on par with commercial fiction than literary fiction, so I felt like a true ending would have been better for the story. I didn’t really feel like there was a lot to think about in literary terms, and so a very literary ending felt out of place, like there was just a chapter missing. That was frustrating and the only real major issue I had with the book. I didn’t hate the ending, though. I just felt a little unbalanced by it, much the same way I felt at the end of Will Grayson, Will Grayson (though of course it’s a very different type of book).

But over all, despite the ending, this was a very good book. I think Divakaruni did very well with the panic elements of the story, as well as the intimacy that grew between strangers who had been very hostile towards each other in the beginning. As the characters were forced by the rising water into smaller spaces, closer together, they form stronger bonds with each other. My favorite moment was when one of the characters realizes that people have secretly added to the food supply from their personal hidden stash. That moment filled me with hope. Whether or not they are rescued, this catastrophe (eventually) brought out the best in them all. That was a lovely thing to read.

Posted in 2011, Adult, Prose | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Thistle

infernoThe Inferno is the first in a trio of epic poems where Dante is led through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Virgil, the classical Roman poet, leads him through Hell, where Dante sees all the different ways that sinners are punished according to their crimes.

The Inferno can be read in two ways. First, and less important to me, is the fact that Dante wrote this book as a scathing attack on many of his enemies in Florence. Dante’s family was in a political feud with another segment of the family, and the feud went all the way up to the Pope and other high-ranked clergymen. Many of the people Dante meets in Hell are his political enemies, and he accuses them of a whole myriad of crimes and sins. Of course, I don’t know very much about history, especially not Italian and Catholic history around the year 1300, so most of the information I learned about all this came from the notes on the text, which I read after each of the 34 Cantos.

The second way to read this is as Dante’s feelings and assertions on the culpability of the soul and the weight of various moral/immoral acts. The Hell in this book is a Catholic Hell, with the punished acts those that the Catholic church considers sins (or at least considered sins at the time). Dante doesn’t just throw everyone into a lake of fire, though, like the title of the book might suggest. Instead, he introduces the idea of contrapasso, or punishment that repeats or furthers the crime. Each circle or pit of Hell has the sinners punished in a way that fits their crimes: the gluttons are chewed on, the diviners have their heads turned backwards, the schismatics are cut to pieces, etc. Many of the punishments are gruesome, and I can see why a book such as this one might frighten someone who believed in Hell and Catholic dogma in 1300 into behaving according to the church’s morality code!

What I find really interesting about the book, though, is that in many ways it’s a statement on free will and what we do with it. The church (or at least Dante’s interpretation of the church) believes that God gave each of us free will to make of our lives what we want, but that if we don’t use our free will to choose the right path, we will be punished accordingly. The punishments in The Inferno aren’t meant to just be cruel, but more to, as I said before, extend or personify the sin. The sinners feel the punishment because they have sinned. They feel their sin in this external fashion, rather than just receiving punishment. The punishments, personifying the sins themselves, grow more torturous through the journey.

On the surface, it might seem strange to see the order that Dante places the sins in. For instance, political corruption is considered far worse than murder in Dante’s Hell. But if you understand his ideas about free will and the balance of mind, body, and spirit, it starts to make more sense. In Canto XI, Virgil describes the partitioning of Hell:

Three dispositions counter to Heaven’s will
Incontinence, malice, and insane brutality

Hell is divided on these lines. In the beginning, the pre-Hell, is limbo, where the souls of those who refused to take sides reside. They are so low they aren’t even technically in Hell! While I’m not sure everyone would agree, my reading of this is that those who refused to choose and thus negated their free will didn’t deserve a place in the afterlife, even in Hell, and were instead forced into a non-existence for the rest of eternity. Once through the gates of Hell (“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”), the first circle is the only one unpunished. It’s a circle belonging to unbaptized babies and virtuous pagans, their only “punishment” a longing to be with God because they never had a chance to know in life. Beyond this first circle, Hell divides into the three categories outlined above.

Circles two through five are sins of incontinence. They are lesser sins, where the sinner is only guilty of letting his body take over his mind: lust, gluttony, spenders, hoarders, the wrathful and the sullen. Circles six and seven – seven split into three sections – are sins of violence, against others, self, nature, art, and God. Circles eight and nine deal with the most willful of sins: fraud and betrayal, each broken into multiple types. Sinners are brought to their appropriate level of punishment based on the worst of their sins, and that is why murder may seem a lesser evil than political corruption. Murder is punished in the first ring of Circle Seven, but we also meet murderers punished in later circles because of the willful way they murdered – through fraud or betrayal. The fraud or betrayal is a worse sin, according to Dante’s pen, than the murder itself.

I first read The Inferno way back my freshman year in college, and while I don’t know that I properly understood everything in it – not that I fully do now either! – I really loved the book. I was really happy that the volume I read this time was so well laid out. It’s a new (and wonderful) translation by Robert Pinsky, and each Canto has its own section in the back with notes. I took time to read those notes after every Canto and that really helped me to understand better. There was also a chart and map of Hell in the beginning section which helped. I’m hoping to read Purgatorio and Paradiso at some point in the future as I’ve never read those! If possible, I will read from this same translator.

Note: Originally read in Jan/Feb 1998.

Posted in 2011, Adult, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Thistle

captureSeventeen-year-old Cassandra lives in an old, broken-down castle with her family. They are very poor and live mostly off the charity of others, but their lives change when new neighbors move into their late landlord’s home next door. The book is written by Cassandra in a series of diary entries over about six months.

This was a fairly good book, though I didn’t love it the way many people seem to. The diary format has never really worked for me. I find it far too unrealistic and get distracted by that disbelief as I read. I Capture the Castle has the distinction of being the only book I’ve read written in diary format that I didn’t downright loathe, and I did manage to forget at times and read the prose as if it were normal narration instead of a falsified, unrealistic journal. I’m glad Smith was able to push me beyond that hang-up, because I enjoyed the story of this one.

It’s a coming of age book, and deals with romances and intrigues and the workings of a family. Actually it reminded me quite a lot of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which is one of my favorite books and one I’ve read multiple times over the years. Both families are very poor, and their circumstances change through events outside their control. Both families are very tight-knit and close. Both Francie and Cassandra are writers and literary-minded. Both of their fathers are either unable to or refuse to provide for their families. It’s interesting, the fathers. Francie’s father Johnny tries and tries to provide, but has a major drinking problem he can’t overcome. Cassandra’s father, in my opinion, is simply lazy. He wrote a book years ago that got him money for awhile, and since then he’s never done anything else. He accepted years ago that he would never write again, but rather than get another job to provide for his family, he’s willing to let his late servant’s son provide for the family, as well as working in the castle for free, while Dad sits around reading detective novels all day long. I hated him with a passion for his laziness and refusal to take care of his family, while I only felt sorry for Johnny, who tried to provide but failed. At least he tried. Cassandra’s dad didn’t care enough and would have seen his family starve before he bothered to work. He was also very violent and emotionally unstable.

One of the big differences between the two books, and this is something I’ve noticed in several British coming-of-age classics, is the seeming age level of the narrator. Cassandra is seventeen for most of the book, and passes her eighteenth birthday, but she sounds no older than thirteen at any point in her story. I noticed that too in books such as Daddy Long Legs, which had a twenty-ish narrator who sounded twelve. I used to think that perhaps culture had just changed dramatically since those classic YA novels, or perhaps that authors simply had a very skewed perception of what teens were really like, because I can’t imagine any late teen being as young, naive, and silly as the narrators I tend to see in classic YA. But then I remembered A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and I started to wonder – perhaps it’s a cultural difference between the US and the UK instead (in classics, of course, not modern fiction)? Because Francie is eleven for most of her narration and she sounds far older than Cassandra. By the time Francie is fifteen, she sounds well into adulthood. She sounds exactly what I would expect from a pre-teen and teenager, and I wonder if that’s just because of a cultural difference, either in the way teens were in that time period, or the way authors perceived them.

I admit, the super-young-sounding narrator really bothers me, which I’m sure everyone could tell from when I read Daddy Long Legs. It was another obstacle I had to overcome in reading I Capture the Castle. But I found that if I thought of Cassandra as a young teen instead of a near-adult, I could tolerate the tone just fine. And since all the other characters treated her as if she were a little kid (only barely old enough to possibly attend a dinner party!), it felt okay to adjust my perception a little. It certainly helped me to enjoy the book more.

I know this sounds like I didn’t like the book much, but I did. All the obstacles that stood in the way of liking it were ones that I managed to overcome, and I did end up enjoying the story, especially the way it ended. Dodie Smith does an excellent job of sketching out the other characters, and I was particularly fond of Cassandra’s stepmom, Topaz. So often in books, the stepmom (or stepdad) ends up being a bad guy, but Topaz wasn’t like that. She was weird, yes, but that was just part of her character. She loved the three kids even though they weren’t hers, and she did what she could to provide for them. I think she really made the book for me.

Posted in 2011, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged | 2 Comments

Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Posted on February 20, 2011 by Thistle

aurora-leighNote: This review will contain spoilers both for this book and for Jane Eyre.

This epic poem tells the life of Aurora Leigh, whose parents died in her childhood and who was raised by her aunt. She is romantically pursued by her cousin Romney, who wants to devote his life to philanthropic causes and believes she should do the same with him, but she rejects him in spite of loving him. She instead wants to earn her own way as a poet, which he doesn’t consider a noble-enough profession. They go their separate ways, only to be brought back together every few years, which pains them both.

In many ways, Aurora Leigh is a retelling of Jane Eyre, except without a physical mad-woman in the attic, or two suitors. Instead, Romney represents both sets of Jane’s suitors – first as St. John with his philanthropy and cold proposition of marriage, and later, blinded in a fire that burns down his house (yes, I’m serious), humbled and honest and more emotional as Rochester. The thing that keeps these two apart, the “madwoman in the attic” so to speak, is in their different approaches to life and their inability to find a compromise. They both need to be humbled and lowered before they can be happy together. Aurora Leigh (the character) is unlike Jane Eyre in that she isn’t necessarily correct in all her actions from the beginning. She has a fantastic amount of pride, and while she perhaps was right to reject Romney’s stilted version of marriage in the beginning, she claims to have no feelings for him at all that aren’t just “cousinly.” She hides her feelings from the world and herself, but as the book goes on, her mask starts to crack. In the end, she can only openly admit her love because Romney admits to being blinded. In some ways, Aurora never does manage to overcome her pride.

I felt sorry for Romney for much of this book. It wasn’t just the comparisons to Rochester, which is a connection I didn’t even make until the end of the book when I found out his house burned down and he was blind. I felt sorry for him because he kept trying every way he knew how to make the world better, to do good, and his work is continually thrown in his face. I also felt like, once rejected by the person he really loved, he wanted very much to move on (for both their sakes) and find someone with whom he could be comfortable, but every time he tries, the relationships fall apart. First there is Marian, a low-class runaway girl abused by her parents, that he takes in and cares for. Does he love her? Perhaps not – his heart belongs to Aurora – but he cares for her and is good to her. Still, she runs away, her love for him poisoned by a rival. That rival, Lady Waldemar, then becomes his second bride-to-be. She and Romney are friends, but he doesn’t know of the horrible things she did to Marian to get rid of her. He only discovers them after Lady Waldemar leaves him when he is blinded.

Nothing he tries works out. His house is burned down by the people he is trying to help, and everyone he loves or tries to love leaves him. In Jane Eyre, I felt like Rochester was blinded and burned, losing all his possessions, in order to be lowered to an equal status with Jane, while Jane is at the same time elevated to independence. I felt like those things needed to happen for the two to be together. But with Romney, he was already a good person and while I may not agree with all his ideas on philanthropy, I don’t feel like he did anything wrong. He was at least trying to do good. It was only after he gave up helping others altogether, while Aurora got wealthy and famous from her writing, that they were able to finally be with each other. The message of the book is very mixed and I’m not sure I agree with it.

Now I will say that my ability to read and understand poetry is not very developed, and it’s possible there’s a lot in here that I misread. I know much of the book went over my head. Elizabeth Barrett Browning uses a lot of archaic language and refers to books I’ve never even heard of, so adding that to the fact that this was written in verse means I probably only understood half of what was going on. I really loved the book and thought it was beautifully written, but I still haven’t sorted through all the things it made me think. It’s one of those books that I imagine I’ll have to read multiple times before I can really fully understand my thoughts on it. It’s also one of those books I would love to hear read aloud.

This is my second book by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, after Sonnets From the Portuguese (one of my favorites of last year). I still like Sonnets better, but I’m glad I finally attempted this one after Jason’s been trying to get me to read it for over a decade.

Posted in 2011, Adult, Poetry | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Complete Stories, by Zora Neale Hurston

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Thistle

zoraThis is the third short story collection I’ve read for my personal short story project this year, and by far the best. The other two (by Nabokov and Chopin) have both been sort of middle of the road sorts of collections, but this one was excellent. I opened it up and read the first story, “John Redding Goes to Sea,” and thought, Now THIS is what a short story should be!! Most of the rest of the collection followed in the same vein.

Zola Neale Hurston was a master writer. She continues to impress me every time I read her and I’m so glad my librarian friend DL introduced me to her back in 2007. This collection, which contains 26 stories, was fairly even. They were of course mostly written in her same oral-language tradition. There were a few stories that I skimmed or skipped, because they were written in Harlem slang which I could not for the life of me understand. There was a glossary, but I was having to look up every other word and I just didn’t have the energy to keep doing that. There were also several stories that were excerpts from novels, so I only skimmed those. I’d either read the novel or want to read the novel, so I preferred to wait.

Favorite stories include: John Redding Goes to Sea, Drenched in Light, Sweat, Uncle Monday, The Guilded Six-Bits, High John De Conquer, and The Conscience of the Court.

Posted in 2011, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | Leave a comment