Finished: All The King's Men (Warren) Wow, a book I never in a million years thought would suck me in...being about a political icon from Lousiana...but it sure did. In fact, even though it's a Pulitzer Prize winning book, and in the top 100 of every single darn book list I had dug up, it was one of those books I had just decided I wasn't going to force myself to read. I'm so so glad I changed my mind. :-) This book was about so much more than "Luzianna" politics and Willie Stark, i.e. the thinly masked character based on the 1930's governor of Louisiana, Huey Long. This book was first, for me, whose father was a Northern Louisiana boy, about being enveloped by the whole feel of that state...or of that part of the state. I can't even describe it, but I could feel it...just remembering the long drives we would make from Texas up through the piney woods of Louisiana to see my grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins. Honestly, I read the entire book with the Louisiana accent completely embedded in my head, lol. Secondly, the book was more about life lessons, right and wrong, how a great man could be a scoundrel, but how it could all come from his heart, deep down, being in the right place, but his human nature being one of never taking no for an answer...no matter what the cost...and no matter who he had to bribe. I've never read a thing about Huey Long until two days ago when I read a bio to see who exactly I was reading about in this book. It seems as if he was loved by many and hated by many, but by gum, he certainly made a difference in Louisiana. In All The King's Men, Willie Stark makes his imprint on the poor people of the state as well, and on the other politicians too. He comes from humble and even naive beginnings. It is when he is actually used by the shady incumbent governor of the state...encouraged to run against him, that he actually gets a whole lot of reality thrown his way. He thinks he's loved and being encouraged because they think he can do good...when in reality, the incumbent governor just wants him to run so the people who are ready for a change, will split the vote between Willie Stark and the other guy running against the incumbent, thereby assuring the incumbent of a win. That is the turning point for Willie Start...when he realizes that he's got to turn to granite to make it in that world of politics. Third, the book is actually more about Willie Stark's right hand man, former reporter turned governor's confidant and do-everything man, Jack Burden. Jack is the narrator of the story and this book is actually more about Jack and his realizations, his growing up, and his self-evolving than Willie's. Jack is one of the few people who Willie trusts implicitly, and he's one of the few people who will tell Willie exactly how it is. We have some wonderful flashbacks into Jack's life growing up on the coast of Louisiana next to his childhood friends, Adam and Anne Stanton, who both play prominently in the story later down the line. And, we've got some great characters in the story who are so vividly described and meticulously written, that you feel as if you can look up and see them walking down that small-town Louisiana street...right up to the courthouse in the square in the middle of the town where the four busy streets surround it. Amazing the imagery of the book. Yes, Robert Penn Warren is very long-winded...over 600 pages worth, but I savored every word of it. Anyway, there are characters like Sadie Burke, Lucy Stark, Judge Irwin, Tiny Duffy, Sugar-Boy O'Sheean, and on and on. I'm not saying I'm in love with this book. It will take me awhile to digest it and figure out if it belongs in my favorites...but it is definitely a book that belongs on the top 100 list. There's massive heartbreak, there's humor, there's intensity, there's reminiscing, there's love, deep love, and there's hate, there's passion. I love many of the passages, so I will include a few below. I also had no idea that Robert Penn Warren was a three time Pulitzer Prize winner (two for poetry) until I read his bio.

When Willie and Jack go to Chicago on business, they are shown the town by a man named Josh Conklin. The little gem about "the real thing" is the kind of writing Penn did all over the book...little things you might not have thought of before, and he puts them into words:

Up there a fellow named Josh Conklin did us the town, and he was the man to do it, a big, burly fellow, with prematurely white hair and a red face and black, beetling eyebrows and a dress suit that fitted him like a corset and a trick apartment like a movie set and an address book an inch thick. He wasn't the real thing, but he sure was a good imitation of it, which is frequently better than the real thing, for the real thing can relax but the imitation can't afford to and has to spend all the time being just one cut more real than the real thing, with money no object.

This passage is from when Jack Burden's childhood mentor and father-figure, Judge Irwin, has declared that he will back Willie Stark's opponent in the upcoming election. Willie "the Boss" had counted on his support. He wants Jack to find something out in the upstanding, honorable, squeaky clean Judge's past that he can use to "convince" him to come back over to his side. I just love Willie's way with words:

    It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be), "There is always something."
    And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge."
    And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something." 

And, of course, Willie was right, and there was something...something that sent shock waves and repercussions reverberating through the rest of the book...affecting, in particular, Jack, Anne, Adam, Jack's mother, and Judge Irwin himself. And, when Jack finds out later in the book that his childhood sweetheart and love of his life, Anne, is actually having an affair with Willie, he just can't handle that and hops in his car and drives west all the way out to California for a few days:

I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go. It was just where I went.

And, on his trip West, Jack relives in his mind his childhood with Anne and Adam and we see that instant when Adam's kid sister, who always tagged along with them wherever they went, ended up becoming the girl who stole Jack's heart. It is several pages long, but there was just one little snippet of passage I really loved. It was so vivid I could see every emotion:

And little girls sit on hassocks and lean their cheeks pensively against the dear father's knee while his hand toys with the silken locks and his voice reads beautiful words. That was Anne Stanton. And little girls are fraidy-cats and try the surf with one toe that first day in spring, and when the surf makes a surprising leap and splashes their thighs with the tingle and cold they squeal and jump up and down on thin little legs like stilts. That was Anne Stanton. Little girls get a smudge of soot on the end of the nose when they roast wieners over the campfire and you---for you are a big boy and don't get soot on your nose---point your finger and sing, "Dirty-Face, Dirty-Face, you are so dirty you are a disgrace!" And then one day when you sing it, the little girl doesn't say a thing back the way she always had, but turns her big eyes on  you, out of the thin little smooth face, and her lips quiver an instant so that you think she might cry even though she is too big for that now, and as the eyes keep fixed on you, the grin dries up on your face and you turn quickly away and pretend to be getting some more wood. That was Anne Stanton. 

Oh my, I just loved that description. :-) So....yes, I would say I'm so very glad that I read this book which I avoided for so long!

Finished: Fear Nothing (Gardner) Another good page-turner by one of my favorite contemporary "who-done-it" authors. :-) This time I actually pegged who I thought it would be, and I was wrong! The story is about two sisters who come from an evil serial killer father. One of the sisters was only a year old when the father was found and died in the police raid. She had been pretty sheltered from the horror, and was adopted by a kind doctor and grew up to be a respected psychiatrist herself. The other sister was four when the father was found, and she had already been subjected to endless horrors and tortures herself. She ended up killing someone by the time she was 14, and has been incarcerated for life for years and years. The story starts with a serial killer who is now replicating the awful modus operandi of the infamous father. The sisters must work together in their own warped way...along with Gardner's recurring main novel character, female detective, D. D. Warren, to unravel the mystery and catch the killer. As I said...another great page-turner, which made my treadmill walking go by faster than ever. :-)

Finished: Our Town (Wilder) So many feelings evoked with so few words...great play! The simple story of small town life in the early 1900's during three different small slices of time with the same people. Act One, the Webbs and the Gibbs are next door neighbors with two kids each. Both George Gibbs and Emily Webb are sixteen and friends. Act Two, high school graduation day and George and Emily are in love and it's also their wedding day. Act Three, funeral time...nine years later. Emily has died giving birth to their second child. A few flashbacks are thrown in so we see exactly when George and Emily decided they are meant to be together. The scenery and props are bare minimum. The words bring the power and emotions. It's as if you live each one of the Acts with them. Truly, how can Wilder say so much with so little? While someone like James has to use over 400 pages to, quite frankly, not give me nearly as clear a picture of those moments in life?? Sure would love to see this acted out on the stage. In the meantime, this has prompted me to Google "Top 100 Plays" to see what comes up. I know that all of Shakespeare's works are plays, but a couple of his show up on book lists. Lordy, you have to be specific. I Googled "Top 100 Plays" and the third entry was baseball plays. Really?? Anyway, a fast, but meaningful read, Our Town. :-)

Finished: The Ambassadors (James) Lordy Henry James is wordy! I had forgotten how cumbersome he is to read when I decided on this, which is supposed to be his "best" work; and, it was...a very good book...just so very complicated to read! If you were to take the conversations out of the book, which to me were the imperative movers of the action in this story, they'd probably take up about 40 pages, at the most, of the over 400 page book. I would have definitely loved more of the conversations between the main characters rather than the in depth supposings and wonderings and personal discoveries we got from the rambling thoughts of the main character, sigh. As it is, I'm really glad to have read the book and only wish that there had been a more definitive ending as well. The Ambassadors, set in the early 1900's, is about reserved, possibly stodgy, 55 year old New Englander, Lambert Strether, who travels from America to Paris to retrieve the wayward son of his "fiance", Mrs. Newsome. Her twenty-something son, Chadwick, or Chad as we know him, has been over in Paris for three years now and she thinks it's time he comes home and takes over the responsibility of his deceased father's wealthy firm. She and her daughter, Sarah, are terribly concerned that Chad has become a reckless, irresponsible, caddish man who is associating with all manner of people beneath them in Paris. In particular, they are worried that a lowlife woman has put her hooks in Chad and that he has fallen under her spell and is daily, hourly, by the minute, becoming more and more depraved. They want him home. Strether, with no real job or income of his own, other than putting his name on a magazine that Mrs. Newsome owns, is their perfect mouthpiece to go and convince Chad that he needs to come home. However, the minute that Strether steps off the ship in France, he is overwhelmed with the beauty, and the life of the place. He does go to find Chad, and expecting a sarcastic "ass" of a young man, he finds a matured, mannerly, polite, friendly, very likable young man in his place. Chad has grown up, and for the better. Chad's friends are also just as charming, and Strether at once finds the entire environment intoxicating and liberating to his own weary soul. Strether is soon introduced to the Mademoiselle Jeanne de Vionnet, and assumes the young girl is the one who has stolen Chad's heart and kept him in Paris. However, it is really Jeanne's mother, Marie de Vionnet...the married, yet separated from her husband, woman who has taken Chad under her wing and made him the man he is. She is in love with Chad and he with her. Marie equally charms Strether to the point that he begins to think it would be better for Chad to stay in Paris. Chad, however, resigns himself to going home and is ready to break his ties with Marie. He knows there's really no future with her since he can never marry her. However it becomes Strether who convinces him to take more time there. Truly, Strether just wants more time there for himself, I believe. In a cathartic speech to one of Chad's young friends, Bilham, Strether expresses the importance of living while you can and doing so in one's youth, as the young men are. Strether thinks back to getting married at a very young age, and then losing both his beloved young wife and young son early in the marriage. After that, he never went out and enjoyed life, and here he is 55 years old. For the first time in decades he is feeling, seeing, breathing life. Of course, it helps that he met the lovely Maria Gostrey on the ship over to Paris, and she becomes his sort of tour guide around Paris. She falls for him, and he struggles with wondering if he truly has feelings for Mrs. Newsome at all since he both falls for Miss Gostrey and comes to be so charmed by Chad's love, Marie de Vionnet. In any event...when Strether fails to produce the desired results, Mrs. Newsome stops communicating with him and sends her married daughter and her husband over to seal the deal. Chad shows them all a wonderful time, but the daughter doesn't budge. She's disgusted by his life in Paris and says he needs to come home immediately. Chad says he will do whatever Strether recommends, which puts the entire thing on Strether's shoulders. And Strether, coming to understand the depths of the feelings and intimacy between Chad and Maria, declares to Chad that he would be a "beast" to leave Maria and go home. Chad, however, seems to possibly be not quite as attached as Madame de Vionnet, so though we don't ever find out the decision he makes (stay or go)...ugh!!...we get the feeling that he will eventually head on back to take over the company. Meanwhile, Strether decides to sail back to America as well, and give up the sure love of Maria Gostrey to head for the uncertain relationship that may or may not remain with Mrs. Newsome. I would really have liked a little epilogue that summed it all up so I'd know how everyone ended up! It was refreshing that there really wasn't an evil character in this book. And, there was no catastrophic death or sad ending to the book. It was just a very involved character analysis of a few good people and the situations they got themselves into. In all, a very good book. :-)

Just a smidgen of poetry...

Every so often I have to reread some of my favorites, which I did tonight:

Brown Penny by William Butler Yeats
She Walks In Beauty by Lord Byron
Merciless Beauty by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Good Morrow by John Donne
At The Mid Hour of Night by Thomas Moore
The Time I've Lost in Wooing by Thomas Moore
Daybreak by Stephen Spender
Crossing the Bar by Lord Alfred Tennyson
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman
Tears, Idle Tears by Lord Alfred Tennyson
Solitude by Lord Byron

and a few new ones I hadn't read before:

The Old Woman by Joseph Campbell
The Moon Is In The Marshes by Joseph Campbell
The Dancer by Joseph Campbell
Night-Piece by Joseph Campbell

Song by Francis Stuart
Ireland by Francis Stuart
Words May Lose Meaning by L.A.G. Strong
Two Generations by L.A.G. Strong

A Dedication to My Wife by T.S. Eliot
To ___ by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Finished: The Illusion of Separateness (Van Booy). Book Club Book #3. A really good book, fast read, about the power of how random acts can unite people in ways in which they have no idea they're connected. The books starts in 2010 with the elderly Martin, who was born in France during WWII. He works at a retirement home in California now and on this particular day, the home is welcoming a new resident, the very elderly, Mr. Hugo. Mr. Hugo actually fought in WWII, and has had half of his head/face blown off. He survived the horrific injury, though, and went on to live a long life. As Mr. Hugo enters the reception party in his honor, he suddenly collapses and dies. :-( Martin is the only one to get to him and he comforts Mr. Hugo as he slips from this earth. The books jumps around in time and goes back to France to where Martin is about 7 years old and the only child of his parents who run a successful bakery. On this day, Martin's parents finally tell him that he was adopted. He was put into his mother's arms by a frantic young man during WWII, and in a scene that we find out more about later, the mother runs with the baby to safety, in through the back door of the bakery, where she meets and falls in love with Martin's father! Martin grows up to be a compassionate child, often taking spare bakery items to the homeless in the park. When Martin's mother is approached by a government official to be rewarded for being instrumental in the "resistance" movement during the war, she declines being put in the spotlight, and the small family, which now includes a sister for Martin, moves to California and opens a bakery there. Meanwhile, we also get the story of young American pilot, John Bray, who is spending one last evening with his young wife, Harriet, before going off to fight in WWII. He takes a picture of her on Coney Island, and carries it off with him to war. Flash forward to the 2000's again and young friends, Sebastian and Hayley find an old downed WWII airplane deep in the woods of Sebastian's father's farm. Within the cockpit, they find the picture of Harriet and wonder what happened to all the airplane occupants. Back to John Bray in WWII and we get his tale of being the only survivor after the plane crash, and how he makes his way through occupied France (for several months), and with the help of many strangers, finally makes it to safety. At one point, he comes upon a field of dead German soldiers and as he trips, he falls down upon a soldier that is moving. John shoves his pistol in the German's mouth and holds it there for the longest time, before realizing he just can't kill a human being in cold blood. When he removes the pistol, the frightened German soldier shares his food with him. After eating the meager rations, both John and the German soldier get up and go their separate ways. The German soldier is Mr. Hugo!!! In his elderly years, Mr. Hugo has finally remembered being a part of Hitler's youth, and part of the German army...but when he was shot in the face and head, he had no remembrance of that and wasn't dressed as any kind of soldier. Doctors just found a copy of a thick Victor Hugo paperback in his pocket, and not even thinking he'd survive his injury, they called him Victor Hugo. However, Mr. Hugo DID survive and bits and pieces of his memory came back to him...a life he hated with an abusive father who made him enlist in the German army AND who one night fed him rabbit stew for dinner, and then laughingly told Victor (or "A" as he was called in the flashback) to go and check on his beloved pet rabbit. Yes, the evil father had killed, cooked, and fed Mr. Hugo his pet rabbit. :-(  Anyway, back to WWII, after the incident in the field, where John Bray and Mr. Hugo went their separate ways in the French countryside, Mr. Hugo came upon a burning farm house with a dead woman laying outside. Rushing into the house to salvage what food might be there, Mr. Hugo finds a baby boy in a crib! He grabs some clothes, food, and extra men's clothes from the closet, and rushes out with the baby. Ditching his German uniform, Mr. Hugo decides he will start over with this orphan baby and be a good father to him. He also grabs one book on his way out the door so he can learn to read in French...the Victor Hugo paperback. Meanwhile, back in the 2000's, we meet Amelia who is 27 and has been blind all her life. She works at the New York Museum of Modern Art arranging exhibits and field trips for the seeing impaired. She still lives with her parents in the rich Hamptons. It turns out her grandfather is John Bray! Yes, John survived his WWII ordeal and made it home to his beloved young wife, Harriet, Amelia's grandmother, who has been deceased for a few years now. Amelia is putting together an exhibit at the MoMA about WWII and has been collecting pictures (which interns describe to her) and other memorabilia for the collection. She tells her grandfather about the exhibit in the last conversation she has with him before he suddenly passes away of old age. She tells him how she's going to call it the Illusion of Separateness, because, after all, as singular and lonely as some of the dramatic pictures seem, no one is really alone when they think they are....all these memories and events are so intertwined. On a side note...John Bray had been successful after the war creating a lighter weight material for war airplanes, and had made millions, most of which he'd given away. Amelia, who has been lonely all her life and just wanted someone to love her, finally does fall in love with Phillip. Anyway, in their last conversation, Amelia tells her grandfather about how she's going to include a picture in the exhibit sent to her by a couple in France, Sebastian and Hayley...a picture of a beautiful young woman on Coney Island that was found by the couple in a downed airplane. John Bray doesn't make the connection that the picture is the one of Harriet, but we the readers do. As a matter of fact, none of the principal characters ever really come to understand their deep-rooted connections, and how maybe altering just one simple action could have kept those connections from coming into being. So, back to Mr. Hugo....as he makes his way into a French town with the baby boy, he tries to avoid the German soldiers who are coming to occupy the town. In a freakish event, he comes upon a crowd that is gathered and having a good laugh at a man and his trick dog. As the crowd is laughing and being entertained, the German police come up to disperse the crowd and kick the dog aside, killing it on impact. The crowd gets angry. For some reason, the officers aim their guns at Mr. Hugo, so he shoves the baby into the arms of a nearby seventeen year old girl, Anne-Lise, to keep him from harm. Anne-Lise, though, recognizes the offending officer as the one who killed her own brother earlier in the year. She grabs a gun and shoots him twice in the chest! As the officers scramble to fire on the now running Anne-Lise, they hit Mr. Hugo instead and blow off half of his face/head. :-( Anne-Lise escapes in an alley and is the young woman who bursts into the bakery for safety. Yes, the baby is Martin! So, Mr. Hugo saves Martin as a baby, and Martin is there to comfort Mr. Hugo during his last moments on earth...neither knowing of their connection. After Mr. Hugo goes through the long recovery process, he spends several years in the hospital, he works as a janitor at a retirement home, and he even spends some homeless years in France...where a kind young son of a baker brings the homeless men extra pastries....once again...an unknown connection with Martin! In his 60's, Mr. Hugo is finally working consistently and living next door to a single mom with a 7 year old boy named Danny. Mr. Hugo and Danny become very close for the two years they live there, spending lots of time together. When Mr. Hugo realizes that Danny is having trouble reading in school, he painstakingly takes it upon himself to start at the very basics, teaching Danny first how to make each letter of the alphabet, then how to make them into words, etc. After a couple of years, Danny and his mother move away when she marries a Scottish man. It isn't until years later when a dying friend of Danny's encourages him to get back in touch with people that meant alot to him that Danny reaches out to find Mr. Hugo. Danny is now a movie director in Hollywood, and he feels great gratitude towards the old man who taught him to read. Mr. Hugo is very old when Danny finally finds him, writes him a heartfelt letter, and asks him to move near him in California. It is Danny who has arranged for Mr. Hugo to come to the nice retirement home. Sadly, as we know, Mr. Hugo doesn't really live any length of time there before dying, but at least he made that connection back with Danny who he adored. My only wish for the book was that somehow Mr. Hugo and Martin would also connect. Sigh. Anyway....a really good book! :-)

Finished: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey) Ohhh, that evil Nurse Ratched, tormenting Billy Bibbit into killing himself. :-( This was a good book, but sad overall just reading about all the "crazies" in the mental hospital. Of course, I couldn't read the story at all without picturing Jack Nicholson's maniacal grin as Randle McMurphy...the inmate who faked insanity to get himself off of the road work detail and assigned to a "cushy" insane asylum. I never saw the movie, but saw enough clips from it to easily be able to insert Nicholson in the vivid imagery and shenanigans of the hospital ward. While McMurphy seems to be just out for himself, by the end it seems that he's grown to care about the other patients he hangs out with, Harding, Scanlon, the Chief, and Billy....so much so that rather than apologize to his determined nemesis, Nurse Ratched, and admit he's wrong, he knowingly lets himself be led to the Shock Shop where he receives electrode shock therapy. And, by the very end, his planned party to sneak in some booze and "girls", especially to help Billy loose his virginity and his stuttering, goes so awry that after Billy kills himself from the shame and verbal lashing by Nurse Ratched, McMurphy is carted off and isn't seen again until he's wheeled in on a gurney, having been lobotomized. :-( Sadly...the plan had worked, and Billy had gained some confidence being with the girl and introduced her without stuttering! Then, the evil Nurse Ratched, knowing exactly what Billy's mommy issues were, brought up his mother and how she would tell his mother the kind of girl he'd been with. This sent poor Billy off the deep end. The entire story is narrated by the Chief, a youngish Native American man from the Columbia River area in Oregon, where the story is set. He's got his own set of problems, but by the end of the story, McMurphy's outrageousness, outgoingness, and belief in the Chief have actually helped the Chief overcome his problems, for the most part, and he leaves the asylum for good.....after putting McMurphy out of his lobotomy misery by smothering him with a pillow. Yikes! Anyway, I'm not sure I'd put the book in my Top 100, but it was on Time's list of the Top 100, so I can check one more book off that list. :-) Also...I might just want to rent the movie!