Finished: Othello (Shakespeare). Great tragedy, great read! How sad these Shakespearean characters are that are so duped by villains like Iago; duped into believing their soul mates are unfaithful, spurring them on to kill their beloved ones. Arrghh! I loved Desdemona and felt so sorry for her in the end, especially because she loved Othello even with her dying breath! If the stubborn man had only listened to her and believed her! After Othello kills Desdemona for having an affair with his best friend, Cassio, (which she did not have), then he finds out the truth...that his servant Iago had set the whole thing up and led him to believe that his wife and friend were lovers. He beseeches the men who are witnesses to the confession and the final scene to speak of him as one who thought he was doing an honorable deed. Then, he kills himself. In his final speech when Othello utters the line,  "Then you must speak of one that loved not wisely, but too well."  it reminded me so much of these lyrics in the Eagles song Wasted Time...some of my favorite lyrics of theirs that take me back to high school:

The autumn leaves have got you thinking about the first time that you fell
You didn't love the boy too much, no, no, you just loved the boy too well.

Another of my favorite lines is one Josh has on a T-shirt that he got from his Shakespeare class he took in high school. (He loved that class!) The shirt says... "I will kill thee, And love thee after". I always thought this was supposed to be a kind of humorous statement, but now I know they are the words Othello uttered as he kissed Desdemona in her sleep right before he woke her to kill her.

And, of course, two of the famous phrases to come from Othello: "I will wear my heart upon my sleeve for daws to peck at." and "O, beware my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on."  Both were spoken by that scoundrel, Iago. And...now I know why Jafar's little feathered friend was named Iago in Disney's Aladdin!!!

Here's a passage that the Duke speaks early in the play when Desdemona's father has accused Othello of bewitching her in order to get her to marry him, because Desdemona ran off without telling her father she was going to marry. Othello and Desdemona both dispute this accusation vehemently and declare they are in love. The Duke believes them and encourages Desdemona's father not to hold a grudge:

Let me speak like yourself and lay a sentence
Which, as a grise or step, may help these lovers.
When remedies are past, the griefs are ended
By seeing the worst, which late on hopes depended.
To mourn a mischief that is past and gone
Is the next way to draw new mischief on.
What cannot be preserved when fortune takes,
Patience her injury a mock'ry makes.
The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief;
He robs himself that spends a bootless grief.

Love that passage!

Finished: The Tempest (Shakespeare). Ahh, Shakespeare. :-) It's always nice to get back to a little Shakespeare. Though, I can't say The Tempest was my favorite, I love Shakespeare, and I'm glad to have finally read it! I've heard references to Prospero before, and Miranda...so now I've read their story! I was inspired to read it by Kenneth Branagh quoting the play during last night's Olympics Opening Ceremony. The quote he used was actually spoken by one of the less likable characters in the play, Caliban, when he was plotting with two other miscreants to kill Prospero and take over the island. He was convincing his new "friends" not to be afraid of the island's mysterious voices and noises:

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.

I think the most famous quote I recognized from The Tempest was "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows."

I'm torn about whether I want to continue with Shakespeare and read Othello, or read a different book. Hmm....

Finished: Great Expectations (Dickens). LOVED this book! It's very surreal to have finished it as the London Olympics Opening Ceremony was coming on. The culminating action sequence in the book took place as a boat rowed along the Thames and I couldn't help but picture the shot of the Thames whenever they show London on television. Anyway....what a tale of rags to riches to humility. I really, really loved it. At first I didn't think I would be able to count Pip as a character I really liked, but the more I read and got to know him, the more I could see that he was just a very young human being with flaws, and, more importantly, he admitted his flaws, learned from his mistakes, regretted his actions, and made amends with his loved ones. I loved all of his relationships...except for the ones with his sister and Estella. Of course, they were the heartless women of the book, imho. The intricacies of the plot, and how different characters related kept me on my toes. It was one of those books that was hard to put down, but I've had alot going on, so I had to put it down. Couldn't wait to get back to it. :-) I thought to myself early on that it was too obvious that Miss Havisham was his benefactor...and something about the way the convict, Able Magwitch, talked to him when he was captured...I just knew he'd end up being Pip's benefactor that put him on his path to riches. I loved Pip's friendship with Herbert Pocket. And, I loved Joe, the husband of Pip's sister, who raised Pip like a son, and was the truest, most selfless friend he had. When Pip came into his riches and was ashamed of blacksmith Joe's "lowness", and consequently lost touch with him purposely, it broke my heart. For Joe to be the person who nursed Pip back to health after he lost all his wealth and almost his life, was such a testament to Joe's character! I haven't read a Dickens book in many years, so forgot what a wonderful writer he is! Of course, I have some favorite passages.

The teenager Pip tells a friend, Biddy, how he would have been satisfied to follow Joe into the business of the forge and settle for a simple life if he hadn't been informed by the lovely, rich Estella that he was low and common:

     "Instead of that," said I, plucking up more grass and chewing a blade or two, "see how I am going on. Dissatisfied, and uncomfortable, and---what would it signify to me, being coarse and common, if nobody had told me so?"
     Biddy turned her face suddenly towards mine, and looked far more attentively at me than she had looked at the sailing ships.
     "It was neither a very true nor a very polite thing to say," she remarked, directing her eyes to the ships again. "Who said it?"
     I was disconcerted, for I had broken away without quite seeing where I was going to. It was not to be shuffled off, now, however, and I answered, "The beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham's and she's more beautiful than anybody ever was, and I admire her dreadfully, and I want to be a gentleman on her account." Having made this lunatic confession, I began to throw my torn-up grass into the river, as if I had some thoughts of following it.
     "Do you want to be a gentleman to spite her or to gain her over?" Biddy quietly asked me, after a pause.
     "I don't know," I moodily answered.
     "Because, if it is to spite her," Biddy pursued, "I should think---but you know best---that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think---but you know best---she was not worth gaining over."
     Exactly what I myself had thought, many times. Exactly what was perfectly manifest to me at the moment. But how could I, a poor dazed village lad, avoid that wonderful inconsistency into which the best and wisest of men fall every day?

Mr. Jaggers, the lawyer who is sent to tell Pip of his new fortune, gives us the first glimpse of the book's title: :-)

     "I am instructed to communicate to him (Pip)," said Mr. Jaggers, throwing his finger at me sideways, "that he will come into a handsome property. Further, that it is the desire of the present possessor of that property that he be immediately removed from his present sphere of life and from this place, and be brought up as a gentleman---in a word, as a young fellow of great expectations."

After being led on for years by Miss Havisham that she has been his benefactor and that she planned for Pip and Estella, her adopted daughter, to eventually marry, Pip has discovered that Miss Havisham is not his benefactor at all. And, furthermore, that he will soon be poor again. Pip goes to Estella to tell her that he loves her and beg her not to marry a man who will mistreat her, who she doesn't love. Pip is rebuffed by Estella, but finally Miss Havisham is moved and shows she has a heart:

     "Estella," said I turning to her now, and trying to command my trembling voice, "You know I love you. You know that I have loved you long and dearly."
     She raised her eyes to my face on being thus addressed, and her fingers plied their work, and she looked at me with an unmoved countenance. I saw that Miss Havisham glanced from me to her and from her to me.
     "I should have said this sooner, but for my long mistake. It induced me to hope that Miss Havisham meant us for one another. While I thought you could not help yourself, as it were, I refrained from saying it. But I must say it now."
     Preserving her unmoved countenance, and with her fingers still going, Estella shook her head.
     "I know," said I, in answer to that action; "I know. I have no hope that I shall ever call you mine, Estella. I am ignorant what may become of me very soon, how poor I may be, or where I may go. Still, I love you. I have loved you ever since I first saw you in this house."
     Looking at me perfectly unmoved and with her fingers busy, she shook her head again.
     "It would have been cruel in Miss Havisham, horribly cruel, to practise on the susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me through all these years with vain hope and an idle pursuit, if she had reflected on the gravity of what she did. but I think she did not. I think that in the endurance of her own trial, she forgot mine, Estella."
     I saw Miss Havisham put her hand to her heart and hold it there, as she sat looking by turns at Estella and at me.
  
Pip continues to tell the cold-hearted Estella, that he loves her and will always love her, even though she doesn't return his feelings...because she can't. She's been raised to never give her heart to a man by Miss Havisham, who was left at the alter as a young woman:

     "Nonsense," she returned, "nonsense. This will pass in no time."
     "Never, Estella!"
     "You will get me out of your thoughts in a week."
     "Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since---on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London building are made are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!"

When Pip faces death from the cruel Orlick, all his transgressions and the way he has cut his loved ones out of his life flashes before him:

     My mind, with inconceivable rapidity, followed out all the consequences of such a death. Estella's father would believe I had deserted him, would be taken, would die accusing me; even Herbert would doubt me, when he compared the letter I had left for him with the fact that I had called at Miss Havisham's gate for only a moment; Joe and Biddy would never know what I had suffered, how true I had meant to be, what an agony I had passed through. The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible than death was the dread of being misremembered after death.

Love that last line!

Finished: The Complete Stories (Flannery O'Connor). A collection of short stories all about the South. Thirty-one short stories, over 500 pages, and well written, but many of them so much alike! Flannery O'Connor died in 1964, so though most of the stories weren't given a time frame, it seemed as if most of them took place between the late 1940's and the very early 1960's. It was so stark and alarming to hear characters in almost every one of the stories using the "n" word in their every day discussions. The word just flowed freely right out of their mouths. When I think of it, though, I shouldn't be so shocked. I was a youngster in the 1960's, growing up in Texas and spending so much time in small town Louisiana visiting my grandparents. That's sadly how so many people talked back then in the south. Not everyone did though. We would have had our hides tanned if we used that word! Anyway....I read so much genuine "southerness" in O'Connor's stories...however, I was really disturbed by her other dark, writing characteristic; almost all of her stories had very shocking scenes in them...most of them involving a sudden, unexpected death. Two of the most disturbing stories involved very young children (ages 5 or 6) committing suicide. The River just broke my heart, as did The Lame Shall Enter First.

The very first of the stories I read, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, had me going along all nice and humorous, or so I thought...and then, wham...a family with three small children is mercilessly slaughtered by an escaped convict, with the grandmother killed last. It was so shocking! I'd say my favorite of O'Connor's stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, dealt with a bus ride after integration had been established, and how the different white patrons on the bus reacted and thought to themselves when black people got on at different stops. There was one white young man who tried to get his mother to see that times had changed. He even purposely chose to sit by a black man and imagined all the ways he may shock his mother into reality and acceptance. The story culminates with the mother unknowingly insulting a black woman who is on the bus with her young three year old son. The white mother tries to give the boy a penny as they all get off at the last stop. The white son sees his mother reaching for her purse and is trying to warn her and stop her and tell her not to do it, but she ignores him and does it anyway. The black mother is so outraged that she smacks the white lady to the ground and huffs off. The white mother is in turn baffled and shocked by the behavior, and her son is mortified at his mother...until he notices her limping and slurring and flailing to the ground. He screams for help as she dies on the sidewalk! Ugghhh! Most of the stories had depressing endings or premises just like that. Oh, and I can't forget the story, Good Country People, about a traveling bible salesman that decides to seduce the 30 year old, prosthetic leg wearing, daughter of a lady he's trying to sell bibles too. The daughter is charmed by him and goes up into the hayloft with him, where he proceeds to steal her prosthesis, put it in his sales bag with his fake bibles, and run away! He steals her fake leg. Huh.

I put Flannery O'Connor on my list because she was highly recommended by many other authors and almost made the top 100 list of my authors. I'm glad I've done my due diligence by reading her stories, but I can't say that she was my favorite of writers. I'd take a Harper Lee and a To Kill A Mockingbird as my literature to represent the south over O'Connor, any day, hands down.

Finished: Light in August (Faulkner). A good book, but lots of tragic characters. Faulkner does tragic, honest characters as well as anyone. And by honest, I just mean truly human, flawed, and conflicted characters. I'm not sure I can put into words, but I feel very drawn to Faulkner's writing, even though it can be difficult to read...and it can wander off on tangents. It just seems very real to me, so I feel it in my bones. I guess that's the only way I can describe it. He says things like "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders." Things like that I have to read a few times to understand, but I can feel them with certainty even if I can't explain them in words. Then...I start applying those words to some experience of my own and he's got me. He's made me think and appreciate and know that he understands human nature to the core. At least, he writes like he does. Anyway, Light in August didn't move me the way The Sound and the Fury did, because I was very taken with Quentin Compton in that book. I didn't really feel as strongly about any of the characters in Light in August, though I was compelled to know what would happen to them. And...even when the book was finished, I wanted to know what ended up happening with Lena and Byron.

Lena is a young, pregnant, unmarried 20 year old who has walked for weeks from Alabama into Mississippi searching for the father of her child, who was supposed to send for her after he found work. Needless to say, the father hightailed it out of there, changed his name and never intended to send for Lena. Lena makes it to "Jefferson", Mississippi where she meets Byron working at the mill where she had hoped to find the baby's father. Byron is instantly taken by her and her circumstances. He knows the father, who calls himself Joe Brown, and knows that he's bootlegging, very shady, and up to no good. Byron takes Lena to a boarding house and tries to shelter her from the news. Meanwhile, Joe Brown has partnered up with another man named Joe Christmas. Joe Christmas is a mysterious man who has lived on the outskirts of town for three years, having an affair with a never-married older woman, Joanna.

The book spends a great deal of time on the history of Joe Christmas and his is one of those characters that breaks your heart from the beginning. He definitely grows up to be a product of his unloving upbringing. Joe Christmas is left at an orphanage as a baby (on Christmas day) by his grandfather because his grandfather is certain that his daughter was impregnated by a black man as she "whorishly" slept around. His daughter dies in childbirth, which he figures she deserves, and he dumps the baby off. He keeps an eye on him from afar for awhile, but when he hears the other orphanage children calling him "nigger, nigger", he feels validated and leaves him for good. Joe Christmas looks like an average white boy, though, so even though he spends his life thinking he's got black blood in him, it's never known for sure. He's adopted by a super-religious couple and has a hellish upbringing. All his experiences with women are disastrous and he's haunted by the feelings that he doesn't fit in with white society or black society.

Back to current times...when Joanna goes a bit religiously fanatical on Joe Christmas, it is implied that he kills her, starts to burn her house down and runs away. However, Joe Brown is the one found in the house drunk, stumbling around, and not wanting a rescuer to go upstairs to find the body of Joanna. It is never determined which of the two actually kills Joanna, but the minute Joe Brown announces to the sheriff that Joe Christmas is part black, Joe Christmas becomes the hunted one. He's captured, tries to escape, and is killed in the process. In all...a truly sucky life for Joe Christmas.

Joe Brown finally discovers that Lena is in town and his baby has been born. He is dragged to see her by a deputy. He hems and haws around, then climbs out a back window and hops a train, leaving her again. Byron is witness to all this, and has several times asked Lena to marry him. She keeps saying no, that she needs to find Lucas (Joe Brown's real name), and Byron keeps going back for more. It is implied at the end of the book that they finally end up together. I hope that's so. :-)

Meanwhile, there is an entirely separate storyline about a disgraced preacher named Gail Hightower. I wasn't so moved by his story, though Faulkner spends alot of his imagery on this character. Reverend Hightower is friends with Byron, and actually delivers Lena's baby. We also hear quite a bit about his lonely childhood and harsh upbringing. Everyone has their flaws, and their demons, and I guess they aren't too much different from most every day people....except for Joe Christmas. Most people probably don't have it as bad as he did. :-(

Here are a couple of passages, among many, that moved me.

Byron tries to convince Reverend Hightower to vouch that Joe Christmas did not kill Joanna:

     "What is it you want me to do? Shall I go plead guilty to the murder? Is that it?"
     Byron's face cracks with that grimace faint, fleeting, sardonic, wary, without mirth. "It's next to that, I reckon." Then his face sobers; it is quite grave. "It's a poor thing to ask. God knows I know that." He watches his slow hand where it moves, preoccupied and trivial, upon the desk top. "I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it's the good men that can't deny the bill when it comes around. They can't deny it for the reason that there aint any way to make them pay it, like a honest man that gambles. The bad men can deny it; that's why don't anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. But the good can't. Maybe it takes longer to pay for being good than for being bad. And it won't be like you haven't done it before, haven't already paid a bill like it once before. It oughtn't be so bad now as it was then."
     "Go on. Go on. What is it I am to do?"
     Byron watches his slow and ceaseless hand, musing. "He aint never admitted that he killed her. And all the evidence they got against him is Brown's word, which is next to none. You could say he was here with you that night. Every night when Brown said he watched him go up to the big house and go in it. Folks would believe you. They would believe that anyway. They would rather believe that about you than to believe that he lived with her like a husband and then killed her...."

When Byron has decided to leave town with Lena, he goes to the boarding house where he's lived for seven years to tell his landlady, but she's already packed his things up because she already knows he'll leave. This one made me smile:

     She was watching him. "You men," she said. "It aint a wonder womenfolks get impatient with you. You can't even know your own limits for devilment. Which aint more than I can measure on a pin, at that. I reckon if it wasn't for getting some woman mixed up in it to help you, you'd ever one of you be drug hollering into heaven before you was ten years old."

So, I think the next Faulkner I will tackle will be As I Lay Dying....but not for awhile. I'm going to let this one settle first.

Finished: The Death of Ivan Ilych (Tolstoy). Sad short story. Ivan Ilych is a successful judge in Russia. He's married with a son and daughter. Over the years he has led his life more and more for himself and desired to be more in the upper class and have nothing to do with people he considers beneath him. He becomes sick with a fatal illness and in his last few agonizing days asks God why is he dying and why so much pain? Certainly it can't be because "he lived a life he ought not to have lived"? He denies that idea every time it pops into his head. However, in the very last hour of his life, he comes to realize that he has NOT lived the life he ought to have lived. He asks for forgiveness and dies in peace. Sad and intense, but such good writing! There's another Tolstoy novella I want to read, but soon I'd really like to jump into War and Peace. :-)

Finished: Dracula (Stoker). Pretty good, suspenseful book. Until the end. Then, it was a little bit anticlimatic. I mean...I thought there would be this big confrontation between Dracula and Van Helsing and the rest of the vampire hunters in the end...but instead, the suspense was all about them getting to his coffin right before sunset, before he had a chance to come out and wreak havoc, and killing him as he laid there. Of course...there was plenty of other suspense throughout the book...especially hoping that Mina would end up reverting back to complete human after Dracula was killed! In all, a fun read. Another one recommended by daughter dearest! :-) An interesting little note...I didn't know Bram Stoker's real name was Abraham.

Finished: The Age of Innocence (Wharton). Good book! I enjoyed this book, and it was very well written. I was surprised to see that it's a Pulitzer Prize winner. I'm not sure it was that good for me, but it was such a good look at what society life must have been like in New York in the late 1800's. I vaguely remember seeing the movie years ago, but I tried hard not to let Daniel Day-Lewis or Michelle Pfeiffer or Winona Ryder pop into my head. They really didn't fit the character descriptions, so I just imagined on my own.

Of course, this was another story about unrequited love. Newland Archer is a 30ish lawyer from a respectable New York family about to marry Mae Welland, a younger and innocent young lady from an equally respectable family. He appears to be head over heels in love with both her, and their way of living the perfect, respectable, New York, society life, complete with all its rules and expectations. Then, Mae's cousin, Ellen Olenska comes to town. She is 30ish and married to a Polish Count. It is an unhappy marriage and she has left him hoping for a divorce. The Archer and Welland circle of friends frown upon her unconventional "European" ways, but accept her as part of the Welland family. Newland forgets all about how much he loves Mae and falls completely for Ellen. They both admit their feelings, but never do more than kiss. Newland sticks to his duty and marries Mae. He can't get over Ellen, though. He considers Mae less insightful and more set in her ways. After two years of marriage, Ellen and Newland meet again. Newland decides he will leave Mae, break her heart, and face the scorn of his society family and friends to be with Ellen. However, after at first agreeing, Ellen suddenly leaves town for Europe. Just as Newland is about to confess to Mae how he feels about Ellen and follow her to Europe, Mae tells him she's pregnant with their first child. He stays with Mae and they have three children and many years together. Mae dies 24 years later and two years after that Newland's oldest son tells him that on her deathbed Mae told him that his father once gave up the one person who meant the world to him to keep his young family in tact. Newland realizes that Mae had some pretty good insight after all and knew all along that he loved Ellen. Newland's son convinces him to go to Paris with him, and in the process to see Ellen. Newland thinks it over, but prefers to live with his memories of the love instead and walks away.

I don't know....I still can't ever truly get into the stories where the guy is so willing to leave his wife or girlfriend for another woman so quickly (and vice versa). I don't romanticize that in my head or heart, so I found it hard to sympathize or feel the angst of Newland and Ellen. Just like I could never feel sorry for Anna Karenina and Vronsky. I wasn't nearly as revolted by Newland and Ellen, though, because they DID end up doing the right thing for the people they cared about. I did have some passages I particularly liked.

I like this one! :-) At the opera, Newland is unfazed when the opera singer sings Faust in Italian to the American audience:

She sang, of course, "M'ama!" and not "he loves me", since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clear understanding of English-speaking audiences. This seemed as natural to Newland Archer as all the other conventions of which his life was molded.

Newland reminisces about the pre-engagement sewing of his oats with an older woman:

The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through, and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the woman one loved and respected and those one enjoyed---and pitied. In this view they were sedulously abetted by their mothers, aunts and other elderly female relatives, who all shared Mrs. Archer's belief that when "such things happened" it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman. All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches.

And after Newland and Mae are married, Newland wants to take a "business" trip to Washington, but it's really to see Ellen. Mae's no dummy. She even tells him he should look up cousin Ellen.

     "The change will do you good," she said simply, when he had finished; "and you must be sure to go and see Ellen," she added, looking him straight in the eyes with her cloudless smile, and speaking in the tone she might have employed in urging him not to neglect some irksome family duty.
     It was the only word that passed between them on the subject; but in the code in which they had both been trained it meant: "Of course you understand that I know all that people have been saying about Ellen, and heartily sympathize with my family in their effort to get her to return to her husband. I also know that, for some reason you have not chosen to tell me, you have advised her against this course, which all the older men of the family, as well as our grandmother, agree in approving; and that it is owing to your encouragement that Ellen defies us all, and exposes herself to the kind of criticism of which Mr. Sillerton Jackson probably gave you this evening, the hint that has made you so irritable....Hints have indeed not been wanting; but since you appear unwilling to take them from others, I offer you this one myself, in the only form in which well-bred people of our kind can communicate unpleasant things to each other: by letting you understand that I know you mean to see Ellen when you are in Washington, and are perhaps going there expressly for that purpose; and that, since you are sure to see her, I wish you to do so with my full and explicit approval---and to take the opportunity of letting her know what the course of conduct you have encouraged her in is likely to lead to."
     Her hand was still on the key of the lamp when the last word of this mute message reached him.

Love that! Oh the things we wives can say to our husbands without speaking a word. :-)

Finished: A Doll's House (Ibsen) and You Never Can Tell (Shaw). Two good, fast-moving plays. A Doll's House was my third Ibsen play, and I must say I've found all three of his plays to be good and non-boring, but rather depressing at the end. In A Doll's House, the wife and mother of the play decides at the end of the play that she's been unhappy in her marriage and went from being a doll to her father, and pleasing him all the time...straight to being a doll for her husband. She decides to leave her husband and young children to find herself. I'm all for the notion that a mother needs to be happy with herself and do things for herself, as well as for her children and husband, but I'm not ok with the notion of a mother leaving her family to do it. Anyway...that play was a bit of a downer.

However...then I read Shaw's You Never Can Tell. What a delightful, fast-paced, witty play! The characters were all simply glorious...even the grouchy ones. All about family, and estranged family coming together by accident, and by circumstance. Instant love, and giddy irreverence, and an amazing waiter! This was exactly what I needed after reading so many depressing and/or intense books the last few weeks. It made me smile and made me wish the play was longer! Shaw is definitely two for two and I'll definitely be reading more of his work. :-)

Finished: Invisible Man (Ellison). Powerful, intense book. My brain is exhausted! My smart, beautiful daughter suggested this book because it was one of her favorite high school required reading books. I'm so glad I took her suggestion. What an intense book...very moving. I believe it affected me in the same way The Help did. The protagonist of the story, a black man, considers himself invisible to society, whether he sits back and does nothing, or gets involved in issues...he considers himself, his actions and his motivations unseen by both peers and those more influential people who lead him to believe they are trying to bring about change.

Invisible Man is the story of a young black man in the late 1940's who, upon graduating from high school and giving a fabulous speech, is invited to give his speech for an "important" group of white men. This is the first of many events where the naive, young man experiences both the lifting and dashing of his hopes during the same event. It's so sad. :-( When he arrives, so excited and proud, to give his speech...he is first thrust, blind-folded, into a fighting ring with nine other young black men and made to fight until the last man is standing. It is a humiliating challenge called the Battle Royal, where all the prominent white men of the community jeer and froth until there is a winner. All the young man can think of the entire time is "When am I going to give my speech?" After the Battle Royal is finished, he starts to leave, but is called back to change his clothes and finally give his speech. He does so, but is shown flagrant disrespect as most of the men talk and laugh through the entire speech. At the end, dejected, he begins to leave again. At that point the superintendent of schools, who had suggested he give the speech in the first place, gives him the gift of a shiny new brief case. Inside is a scholarship from the men to the "Negroe College". Thrilled with the opportunity, it's as if the degradation he had to face is supposed to be wiped clean.

 The story then continues with the young man in his junior year at the Negroe College. He has done well in his academics, is well-respected on campus, has represented the college on the debate team, and is among the elite students chosen to drive the visiting white benefactors of the school around during the benefactor weekend. His benefactor asks him to drive him around on some roads he's never seen before, and the young man (who is never named) naively drives him into the country where the benefactor sees the poverty of the black community around the college. He sees some people living in old slave quarters and insists on getting out to speak to them. The whole conversation so shocks him that he nearly passes out and asks to be given a drink of whiskey as soon as possible. The young man then takes him to the nearest establishment which is a bar frequented by old black vets who are mostly housed at the mental hospital. Various confrontations ensue, and the benefactor is driven to nearly passing out again. When the young man finally gets the benefactor back to the college, Dr. Bledsoe, the powerful, influential black president of the college is livid with him. In this explosive passage, you see just how far opposite these two characters are:

     "He was interested in the cabins, sir. He was surprised that there were any left."
     "So naturally you stopped." he said, bowing his head again.
     "Yes, sir."
     "Yes, and I suppose the cabin opened up and told him its life history and all the choice gossip?"
     I started to explain.
     "Boy!" he exploded. "Are you serious? Why were you out on the road in the first place? Weren't you behind the wheel?"
     "Yes, sir..."
     "Then haven't we bowed and scraped and begged and lied enough decent homes and drives for you to show him? Did you think that white man had to come a thousand miles--all the way from New York and Boston and Philadelphia just for you to show him a slum? Don't just stand there, say something!"
     "But I was only driving him, sir. I only stopped there after he ordered me to..."
     "Ordered you?" he said. "He ordered you. Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it's a habit with them. Why didn't you make an excuse? Couldn't you say they had sickness--smallpox--or picked another cabin? Why that Trueblood shack? My God, boy! You're black and living in the South--did you forget how to lie?"
     "Lie, sir? Lie to him, lie to a trustee, sir? Me?"
     He shook his head with a kind of anguish. "And me thinking I'd picked a boy with a brain," he said. "Didn't you know you were endangering the school?"
     "But I was only trying to please him..."
     "Please him? And here you are a junior in college! Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of education are you getting around here?  Who really told you to take him out there?" he said.
     "He did, sir. No one else."
     "Don't lie to me!"
     "That's the truth, sir."
     "I warn you now, who suggested it?"
     "I swear, sir. No one told me."
     "Nigger, this isn't the time to lie. I'm not a white man. Tell me the truth!"
     It was as though he'd struck me. I stared across the desk thinking. He call me that...
     "Answer me, boy!"
     That, I thought, noticing the throbbing vein that rose between his eyes, thinking, He called me that.
     He struck his desk. "College for Negroes! Boy, what do you know other than how to ruin an institution in half an hour that took over half a hundred years to build?"

The passage goes on and on, and is heartbreaking. The young man is expelled from the school by someone he'd so looked up to. The president could think only of how this incident would harm the school. One of the very people who was supposed to be lifting up a young, black man and helping him make the most of himself, completely disregarded the intentions of the original college founder when he saw his own mighty position and power among the white men possibly threatened. He tells the young man to go to work in New York...that he'll write him several letters of recommendation to other benefactors...and that perhaps when he's earned enough money, he can come back to school the next year to finish. Shocked and saddened, the young man has no choice but to go along with the plan. Arriving in Harlem, he sees the bright side of things and thinks perhaps his horizons will be broadened by working for a year for one of the benefactors before finishing his education. His hopes are once again dashed, though, when he is turned down by all the benefactors and finally discovers that the letters of recommendation were actually letters of condemnation. The president never wanted him back at the school again. I believe at this point I was as shocked and discouraged as the young man. (Though, I just KNEW those letters would be bad!)

Eventually the young man is taken under the wing of "The Brotherhood"...and organization run by rich white men who say they want there to be equality for all men, white, brown and black. They use the once again naive young man and his orating skills to stir the passions of the Harlem community. However, just when the community, both white and black, is coming together under the young man's leadership, they yank him out without a word and leave the Harlem community feeling betrayed and abandoned. After a breakdown of communication, riots ensue. Finally...finally, the young man sees that he was used by "The Brotherhood" and they never really saw him for who he was at all. They used him only as a tool for this master plan of, first, lifting Harlem high with hope, and then dashing the hope into despair. At the end of the book, just as in the beginning, the young man is now a black man who lives invisibly in a basement in Harlem....doing nothing and associating with no one. He has finally understood all the happened to him, though.

I know I didn't explain that very well, but that's the gist of it. I can't believe these deep-thinking, heartbreaking books that were my childrens' favorite required reading in high school....Invisible Man for Jenny Cate and Kite Runner for Josh. I believe they were highly more evolved and compassionate adults in the making than I ever was in high school!

Finished: Jude the Obscure (Hardy). Well, that was depressing! I really enjoyed Hardy's writing when I read The Mayor of Casterbridge, so I was looking forward to reading another. I still enjoyed the writing, but the entire story was just so down-trodden and sad. Not to mention the horrific tragedy that occurs towards the end. :-( I also feel so bad when the protagonist, Jude, who has such lofty goals to study hard and become educated....abandons those dreams after he continually gets waylaid and when he realizes that he'll never be allowed into the university to study.

Jude is a poor stone mason who yearns for knowledge, and to some day graduate from university and even become a church leader. He teaches himself many subjects, but he's never able to live up to his own standards. And, when he gives up his goals, first for one woman, then another, he's doomed from there on out. The first wife, Arabella, tricks him into marriage, makes his life miserable, and then leaves him within the first couple of years. He remains a married man, so when he runs into his cousin, Sue, and falls irreparably in love, there are too many blockades...he is still married, and she is his cousin. Not wanting to compromise her, even though she reciprocates his love, he encourages her to marry an older man. Of course....her marriage is unhappy. She leaves her husband for Jude. Jude and Sue live together out of wedlock. Even when both of their ex-spouses give them divorces, they are too wary of marriage to remarry each other. They adopt Jude's young son by Arabella (who he never knew about until she dumped him on Jude's doorstep at the age of 5 or 6). They proceed to "live in sin" and have two more children, with another on the way. Jude has completely given up all his religious beliefs and desires to teach in the church. Jude and Sue are shunned in every town they attempt to get work due to their unconventional living arrangement. Near poverty, one night young Jude (as they named the adopted son) hears Sue lamenting that perhaps it would sometimes be better if they were all no longer of this earth. Young Jude asks her about that, and rather than ease his mind, she discusses their hardships with him as if he were much older than he was. Feeling that his father and mother would be better off without the children to burden them, he hangs first his infant brother and toddler sister, and then himself. Sue, in her grief, miscarries their next baby. Sue decides that this is God's way of punishing her for her lifestyle. She goes and begs her first husband to take her back. She tells Jude that he should also go back to his first wife...that nothing will be right for either of them until they do. Sue then lives in a loveless marriage. Jude marries Arabella in a drunken stupor, but then dies of consumption (presumedly) at the age of 30. Acckkk...so depressing! :-(

I had read that there was a shocking scene in the book, and I think that was the one with the poor hanged children...very graphic. Not my favorite of books, but I think I still want to read more Hardy. I'll give Tess of the d'Urbervilles a try, I think...but not just yet.

Finished: A Death in the Family (Agee). Very intense, sad book, but so so good. The untimely death of a young husband and father leaves a family reeling, and every single thought and emotion is put down in words. Much of the story is told from the 6 year old son's perspective...and to just read how his little mind works through things, and how he feels about his father and his mother is so moving. Every character in the book is like that...the reader is always seeing exactly what's going on in their minds. The time frame is only a few days long, yet it takes over 300 pages to describe from the day before the accident to the day of the funeral. Here I was wondering how Agee could have such vivid knowledge of what the son was feeling, and I went and read his bio on Wikipedia. He lost his own father to an automobile accident when he was 6, so he knows. These are his vivid memories. Then, Agee himself died at the age of 45 after completing the book, but before it was published. When it was published, he won the Pulitzer Prize for it posthumously.

Agee's description of the sounds that locusts make on a summer night, when it has turned dusk and you're still playing outside, getting that last bit of daylight in, is so perfectly on the money! We called them cicadas in Texas, though. :-)

The noise of the locust is dry, and it seems not to be rasped or vibrated but urged from him as if through a small orifice by a breath that can never give out. Also there is never one locust but an illusion of at least a thousand. The noise of each locust is pitched in some classic locust range out of which none of them varies more than two full tones: and yet you seem to hear each locust discrete from all the rest, and there is a long, slow, pulse in their noise, like the scarcely defined arch of a long and high set bridge. They are all around in every tree, so that the noise seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, from the whole shell heaven, shivering in your flesh and teasing your eardrums, the boldest of all the sounds of night.

Six year old Rufus describes his ritual with his father of walking home after a movie and sitting down in a little field for some solitude together before they get back home:

He felt that sitting out here, his father was not lonely; or if he was, that he felt on good terms with the loneliness: that he was a homesick man, and that here on the rock, though he might be more homesick than ever, he was well. He knew that a very important part of his well-being came of staying a few minutes away from home, very quietly, in the dark, listening to the leaves if they moved, and looking at the stars; and that his own, Rufus' own presence, was fully as indispensable to this well-being. He knew that each of them knew of the other's well-being, and of the reasons for it, and knew how each depended on the other, how each meant more to the other, in this most important of all ways, than anyone or anything else in the world; and that the best of this well-being lay in this mutual knowledge, which was neither concealed nor revealed. He knew these things very distinctly, but not, of course, in any such way as we have of suggesting them in words.

Rufus sees his father for the last time, in the coffin:

   It was very long and dark; smooth like a boat; with bright handles. Half the top was open. There was a strange, sweet smell, so faint that it could scarcely be realized.
   Rufus had never known such stillness. Their little sounds, as they approached his father, vanished upon it like the infinitesimal whisperings of snow, falling upon open water.
   There was his head, his arms; suit: there he was.
   Rufus had never seen him so indifferent; and the instance he saw him, he knew that he would never see him otherwise. He had his look of faint impatience, the chin strained a little upward, as if he were concealing his objection to a collar which was too tight and too formal. And in this slight urgency of the chin; in the small trendings of a frown which stayed in the skin; in the arch of the nose; and in the still, strong mouth, there was a look of pride. But most of all, there was indifference; and through this indifference which held him in every particle of his being---an indifference which would have rejected them; have sent them away, except that it was too indifferent even to care whether they went or stayed---in this self-completedness which nothing could touch, there was something else, some other feeling which he gave, which there was no identifying even by feeling, for Rufus had never experienced this feeling before; there was perfected beauty.

Finished: Where Angels Fear to Tread (Forster). A short, pretty good book. This is one of those books I put on my "to read" list as I was going along reading all my top authors. Forster is the author of A Passage to India, and while reading about him, this book looked interesting. It was definitely sad, with characters who seemed a bit confusing and not very deep. And...there was a big surprise at the end as to a couple who you think will fall in love...even up until they embrace in the final moments, but her sudden exclamation leaves you a bit bewildered. :-)

Finished: Top 100 Authors! :-) I did it! I have now read at least one book, play or a few poems by each of the top 100 authors on my Top Authors List. I will put some favorites, least favorites, etc. on my blog. And now...I've got about 50 or 60 more books whose titles I've accumulated along the way that I just have to read. :-)

Of the authors in the Top 100 list, I read 87 new & repeat authors and did not repeat 13 authors that I'd already read. However, I read 19 authors who weren't in the Top 100 list along the way, so I've read 107 authors in 6 months (plus 2 days). :-) The 13 authors I didn't repeat, who I may revisit sometime are Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dante Alighieri (who I've always just called Dante), Tennessee Williams, Emily Dickinson, Dr. Suess, John Grisham, Edgar A. Poe, Steven King, Khalid Hosseini, Agatha Christie and James Joyce.

So, these lists below will just be of the books I've read in 2012. For instance....Romeo and Juliet and Pride and Prejudice are among my all time favorites, but will not be on the favorites list because I didn't read them in this 2012 endeavor. :-)

Favorite Authors 2012
Alexander Dumas
George R. R. Martin
William Shakespeare
Jane Austen
Charlotte Bronte
Harper Lee
Honore de Balzac
William Faulkner
Kathryn Stockett
Harlan Coben
Oscar Wilde
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Moliere
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Thomas Hardy
George Eliot
Leo Tolstoy
George Bernard Shaw
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Alexander Pope

Favorite 2012 Books                                              
A Game of Thrones (series)
The Help
The Sound and the Fury
To Kill a Mockingbird
Jane Eyre
The Count of Monte Cristo
Catch-22
The Comedy of Errors
Eugenie Grandet
Hamlet
Northanger Abbey
The Brothers Karamazov
Middlemarch
Eugene Onegin

Favorite 2012 Plays
The Importance of Being Earnest
All My Sons
Heartbreak House
The School for Wives
Tartuffe
The Cherry Orchard
An Ideal Husband

Favorite 2012 Poems
She Walks in Beauty
Brown Penny
The Rape of the Lock
Merciless Beaute
Solitude
O Captain, O Captain
Tears, Idle Tears
Crossing the Bar
The Time I've Lost in Wooing
The Road Not Taken
Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening

Favorite 2012 Stream of Conscious Book
The Sound and the Fury

Favorite 2012 Dystopian Book
The Handmaid's Tale

Favorite 2012 Quest
The Odyssey

Favorite 2012 Wartime Books
Catch-22
A Farewell to Arms

Favorite 2012 Historical Book and Favorite Revenge Book
The Count of Monte Cristo

Favorite 2012 Period Books
The Help
Jane Eyre

Favorite 2012 Timeless Book and Favorite Moral Book
To Kill a Mockingbird

Favorite 2012 Parent
Atticus Finch

Favorite  2012 Fantasy Book
A Game of Thrones series

Favorite 2012 Twists at the End
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Tartuffe

Funniest 2012 Books and Plays
The Importance of Being Earnest
The Comedy of Errors
Catch-22

Favorite 2012 Couples
Kitty & Levin - Anna Karenina
Catherine & Henry - Northanger Abbey
Elizabeth-Jane & Donald - The Mayor of Casterbridge
Catelyn & Eddard - A Game of Thrones series
Dorothea & Will - Middlemarch
Valentine & Maximilien - The Count of Monte Cristo
Anne & Frederick - Persuasion

Favorite 2012 Male Characters
Eddard Stark - A Game of Thrones series
Edmond Dantes - The Count of Monte Cristo
Atticus Finch - To Kill a Mockingbird
Alexei Karamazov - The Brother's Karamazov
Konstantin "Kostya" Levin - Anna Karenina
Jon Snow - A Game of Thrones series
Hamlet - Hamlet
Aragorn - Lord of the Rings - Return of the King
Tyrion Lannister - A Game of Thrones series
Algernon Moncrieff - The Importance of Being Ernest

Favorite 2012 Female Characters
Jane Eyre - Jane Eyre
Aibileen Clark - The Help
Eugenie Grandet - Eugenie Grandet
Ekaterina "Kitty" Alexandrovna Levina - Anna Karenina
Anne Elliot - Persuasion
Dorothea Brooke - Middlemarch
Catherine Morland - Northanger Abbey
Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan - The Help
Lady Chiltern - An Ideal Husband
Jenny Fields - The World According to Garp

Favorite 2012 Kids/Teens
Jem Finch - To Kill a Mockingbird
Katniss Everdeen - The Hunger Games series
Quentin Compton - The Sound and the Fury
Arya Stark - A Game of Thrones series
Walt Garp - The World According to Garp
Harry Potter - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Most Gut Impact on Me 2012
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Sound and the Fury
The Help
The World According to Garp

Most Over-Rated 2012 Books and Plays
Moby-Dick
Lolita
To the Lighthouse
Wuthering Heights
In Cold Blood
Gulliver's Travels
Waiting for Godot
In Search of Lost Time (Part 1 - Swann's Way)
Heart of Darkness
On the Road
The Tropic of Cancer

Least Favorite 2012 Books and Plays
Lolita
Gulliver's Travels
On the Road
Tropic of Cancer
To the Lighthouse
Wuthering Heights
Waiting for Godot
Moby-Dick

Most Over-Rated 2012 Couples in Literature
Anna Karenina &Vronsky - Anna Karenina
Catherine & Heathcliff - Wuthering Heights

Least Favorite 2012 Couples
Anna Karenina & Vronsky - Anna Karenina
Catherine & Heathcliff - Wuthering Heights
Emma & Leon - Madame Bovary
Emma & Rodolphe - Madame Bovary
Isabella & John Thorpe (brother & sister) - Northanger Abbey
Jamie Lannister & Cersei Lannister Baratheon (brother & sister & eww) - A Game of Thrones

Least Favorite 2012 Females
Hilly Holbrook - The Help
Anna Karenina - Anna Karenina
Catherine Earnshaw - Wuthering Heights
Caroline Compson - The Sound and the Fury
Aunt Sarah Reed - Jane Eyre
Hedda Gabler - Hedda Gabler
Cersei Lannister Baratheon - A Game of Thrones series
Emma Bovary - Madame Bovary
Isabella Thorpe - Northanger Abbey

Least Favorite 2012 Males
Heathcliff - Wuthering Heights
Hindley Earnshaw - Wuthering Heights
King Claudius - Hamlet
Joffrey Baratheon - A Game of Thrones series
Theon Greyjoy - A Game of Thrones series
Humbert Humbert - Lolita
O'Brien - 1984 
Bob Ewel - To Kill a Mockingbird
Fernand Mondego - The Count of Monte Cristo
Dean Moriarty - On the Road

Least Favorite 2012 Kids/Teens
Jack Merridew - Lord of the Flies
Draco Malfoy - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Loonnnggggggest Reads 2012
Don Quixote
Moby-Dick
The Count of Monte Cristo
Middlemarch
The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Most Disgusting 2012
Lolita

Most Confusing 2012
The Crying of Lot 49

Weirdest But Couldn't Put it Down 2012
The Metamorphosis (Kafka)

Scariest 2012
Lord of the Flies
1984

Saddest 2012
The World According to Garp
A Storm of Swords (Game of Thrones)
The Sound and the Fury
Hamlet
Lord of the Flies
Eugene Onegin
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Grapes of Wrath
A Farewell to Arms

Hardest to Finish 2012
Gulliver's Travels
Tropic of Cancer
Moby-Dick

Why is This on High School Reading Lists? 2012
On The Road

Most Used Feminine Name 2012
Catherine

Most Used Masculine Name 2012
Charles

Most Used Names All in One Book (One Hundred Years of Solitude) 2012
Aureliano (male) - 22 times
Jose (male) - 4 times
Remedios (female) - 3 times
Arcadio (male) - 2 times
Amaranta (female) - 2 times

Favorite Animals 2012
The Direwolves - A Game of Thrones series
Buck - The Call of the Wild
Hedwig - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Aslin - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

Favorite Quotes 2012
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only once." - Jojen in A Dance With Dragons

"Before I can live with other folks, I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience." - Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird

"It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excrutiatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it." - Quentin in The Sound and the Fury

"O day untowardly turned!" - Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing

Mrs. Prism: "Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us." Cecily: "Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn't possibly have happened." - in The Importance of Being Earnest

"T.S. Eliot" - Wintergreen in Catch-22

"He had, in fact, though his sisters were now doing all they could for him, by calling him 'poor Richard,' been nothing better than a thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable Dick Musgrove, who had never done anything to entitle himself to more than the abbreviation of his name, living or dead." - from Persuasion by Jane Austen

Finished: Go Tell It On The Mountain (Baldwin). A powerful book! Lord have mercy. No really, the characters say that alot in this book, Lord have mercy. I feel like I've been in a very emotional, powerful church for the last several hours as I read this book with its prose, sermons and scriptures all mixed into one tale. It's a book about religion, believing, not believing, racism, hatred, sin, redemption, uncertainty, pain and individual spirituality. It's a book about those who are hypocrites while claiming to be in the midst of God's eyes, and those who are pure of soul long before accepting God's eyes to watch over them. My heart always breaks when children are involved, especially when they're degraded or abused or in such poor circumstances that they resort to means that will only hurt their lives. I was happy that 14 year old John finally came to accept Jesus in his life, but could see at the end of the book that he was still going to have an uphill battle staying on that path...especially with a preacher step-father who so obviously still detested him. A very  moving book, for sure. Of the predominantly African American books I've read, though, I think The Help still moved me the absolute most. And to think...that is the book that got me to start searching for more good, classic books to read. :-)

Finished: The World According to Garp (Irving). Good book, but so heartbreaking. :-( I guess John Irving really stood by T.S. Garp's own saying, "In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases." So many of the characters died! I should have known when he had his first little book within a book and so many characters died, that we would soon lose a main character...that it would be Garp's 5 year old son was so, so sad. I am still processing this book, because I did like it. I just didn't like the tragedy. I remember seeing the movie years ago, and I honestly must have blocked out all the deaths, truly. I can picture Glenn Close as Jenny, Robin Williams as the grown up Garp, and the amazing John Lithgow as Roberta...so that's how they were pictured in my mind as I read the book. I'm not sure if I like that or not, but there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

I loved Jenny Fields, Garp's mother. She was so independent, and caring, and completely did her own thing at a time when it wasn't heard of for a woman. I wasn't so crazy about her son, Garp...but I understood his need to be so fiercely protective of his children...even if he was very culpable in little Walt's death, and the severe injury of his 10 year old, Duncan. He was fanatical about people not speeding through the neighborhood, and wandered the streets at night if Duncan was spending the night at someone's house just to check up on him and make sure he was safe. Why did he possibly think it was ok and safe to turn off his car lights, throw the car into neutral and glide 30 miles an hour down his long, winding driveway to his garage at night?? Both Garp and his wife had extra-marital flings, and in the process of saying goodbye to her last fling, Garp's wife, Helen, bit off three-quarters of his penis. It served him right because he rather forced her to perform this final "goodbye" act as they sat in his car. How did they know that Garp would come pulling into the dark driveway with his lights off, the young sons becoming flying torpedoes when the family car slammed into the lover's car? How did Garp know the lover's car would be in the dark driveway? Helen was supposed to dump the guy over the phone. Tragic, tragic. Not for penis guy, though. He didn't care about anyone but himself. Sadly for him, they had to remove the last one-quarter of his penis because of infection. Anyway....Irving is a good writer. It doesn't even dawn on the reader until the next chapter when they are all recuperating at Jenny's house that they haven't mentioned little Walt in a while. You hear the gory details about how Duncan lost his eye...but nothing about Walt. Then, Garp and Helen finally break down together talking about how much they miss him. It made me cry. :-( And...from there, other characters die before their time. I'm still processing, like I said.

I liked some of the early descriptions of Jenny after she finished high school and decided to become a nurse instead of going to college like her parents wanted and preparing herself to find a husband. This passage was heartbreaking to me as well. I sure hope I haven't done anything like this to my kids, but who knows how kids interpret things when you come to expect the best from them because they've always give you the best??

She felt detached from her family, and thought it strange how they had lavished so much attention on her, as a child, and then at some appointed, prearranged time they seemed to stop the flow of affection and begin the expectations---as if, for a brief phase, you were expected to absorb love (and get enough), and then, for a much longer and more serious phase, you were expected to fulfill certain obligations.

I like this description of Jenny's privileged childhood.

As a child she had never seen the dirty dishes; in fact, when the maids cleared the table, Jenny was sure they were throwing the dishes away (it was some time before she even was allowed in the kitchen). And when the milk truck brought the bottles every morning, for a while Jenny thought that the truck brought the day's dishes too---the sound, that glassy clatter and bang, being so like the sound of the maids in the closed kitchen, doing whatever they did to the dishes.

I can't possibly quote anything from Walt's death. I'm not sure if I'll read more Irving, but I feel slightly compelled to...maybe to look for something happier?

Finished: Tropic of Cancer (Miller). I just don't get these books that were supposed to be so great that are just stream of conscious vomitus from the minds of human beings who just were not willing to put the effort in to congeal with society. I don't see why they have to consider themselves "artists" who are far more intelligent than the average human being, and therefore they must shun that status quo, and in the meantime bash America, and live in near poverty and squalor because of their misguided principles and selfish desires. I just don't get it. I guess there is another level of brain that I just don't have, because I don't enjoy this kind of book at all. It's not even the blatant, and most times crude, sexual content of Miller's book that is bothersome. It was actually some of the easiest, most straightforward stuff to understand. It's his ramblings about anything and everything; about his blatant preference to live in poverty and hunger as a struggling writer in Paris rather than have anything to do with America. Was he considered a "deep thinker" who was brilliant enough to postulate about all his theories of mankind, God, materialism, etc? Newsflash...there were lots of "deep thinkers" who didn't run off to 1930's Paris and extol the virtues of the underbelly life they chose over working hard to succeed in America. Of course, the author IS the narrator, and this story is very autobiographical, apparently, so that leaves me little respect for him. And....he DID end up back in the United  States working, finally settling in California and dying there. How about that, hmm. Maybe I'm just the wrong age? Maybe this stuff was considered biblical for people of a different era because no one had ever cut free from the mold and just rambled about their life experiences, good, bad and ugly, in print before? I just don't know! Anyway, I'm so glad to be done with this book.

The only line I'll reference:

I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write.

Well, duh, that was obvious!