Finished: The Rainbow (Lawrence) Hmm...well, it was complicated, deep, a bit consternating...and now I'm done with it. :-) I'm not sure it belongs on the Top 100 list, but there it sits...and so I read it. Maybe I'm just not deep enough or smart enough? I don't know...I think it just isn't my kind of book. I was interested in the characters, as usual, but there was just far, far, far too much detailed inner turmoil and introspection for me. The story follows three generations of the Brangwen family in rural England. From Tom Brangwen, who falls for the Polish widow, Lydia, who has a young daughter, Anna, we see how quick people were to marry after just meeting another available person. Though, they had two more children together and remained married until their deaths, I never really got the sense they were madly in love. Tom did adore his step-daughter, Anna, though. Then, we follow the independent Anna as she falls for her step-cousin, Will, and marries him. Their relationship is volatile, and mostly sexual, and swings from dark to light to dark...but they stay married and have 9 children together! Anna comes to see that her "role" on earth, and one that she truly cherishes, is to have children and be a mother. Will always has his dark nature, and even alienates his oldest daughter Ursula, who grows up adoring him...but grows to hate him as he treats her cruelly due to his own inability to relate to people. Ursula, the first born of Will and Anna takes on the rest of the story as we watch her also very independent nature come to terms with her own powerful feelings about all things in nature, and then her own sexuality. She falls in love with Anton Skrebensky, but then also has a love affair with a woman. She is never ready to totally conform or give herself over to Anton to be married...yet she hates the independent life she carves out as a teacher. As the story ends, she's not at all fulfilled in her life, but she realizes that she's got a lot more of life to live and many more experiences to come that will define her being. All of the characters analyze their sexual desires and feelings towards their partners to death, and I think that's where the book lost me a bit. I can see where it would have been a bit scandalous in the early 1900's when it came out. And, of course, his sequel, Women in Love, which is the continuing story of Ursula and her sister, Gudrun, is also on the Top 100 list, so I'll probably be reading that at some point.

Finished: Pilgrim's Progress (Bunyan) A reaffirming story of what is means to walk the walk as the life of a Christian. The pilgrim in the story, literally named Christian, begins his journey towards accepting God's way and Jesus as his Savior, much to the dismay of his family and friends. From then on, the story becomes an allegory with all kinds of negative and positive attributes becoming people and places that Christian must encounter. With names like Faithful, Hopeful, Ignorant, Good Will, Giant Despair, Destruction, Vanity Fair, Hypocrisy, and on and on, Christian must face these cities, friends, and foes as he walks the "straight and narrow path" and journeys to pass through the "wicket gate" to get to the "Celestial Palace". Along the way he strays off the path a few times, and those are the times he faces the worst persecutions. The story is nicely written with bible verses written at the end of nearly every chapter. I spent the first half of the book with my bible open, looking up verses as I went, but it became too distracting and made the story not flow smoothly enough for me. Pilgrim's Progress is widely considered the second best book next to the Bible to own for a Christian. It certainly has some nice lessons, puts things in simple words, and even has nice explanations and positive lessons you are supposed to learn from the book all listed in the back. It got a little too preachy for me at times, but then at other times it was soul-refreshing to just read  and feel peaceful at the same time, knowing what the future does hold in the life hereafter for a Christian. :-)

Finished: Dark Places (Flynn) My third Gillian Flynn book. Not quite as good as the other two, but still a nice page-turner. And, it was really a story that made me sad at the poverty and tragedy of the Day family. Libby Day, the only surviving member of a family who is slaughtered one night, apparently by her 15 year old big brother, Ben, is living a meager existence physically and emotionally 25 years later when a group who believes her imprisoned brother to be innocent, wants her to recant the testimony she gave as a 7 year old which helped put Ben behind bars. The book goes back and forth between the viewpoints of current day Libby, 15 year old Ben, and their bedraggled mother. Every scenario you can come up with as a reader just leaves you sad at the poor circumstances of the divorced, single mother of four children, trying to keep the farm from being foreclosed on, trying to keep any kind of food in her children's bellies, trying to make ends meet....and really, as we see her personality unfold, realizing she's just not that great of a mom. Libby, the super-screwed up adult, does get to the bottom of things eventually. I spent the whole book thinking Ben actually DID do it, after reading all his chapters. He was also a messed up kid due to his familial circumstances...messed up with a wild older girl who was into devil-worship and was pregnant with his child. Yeah, a "dark" book as the title suggests. Off to read something lighter I think. :-)

Finished: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll) After having read that, I'm pretty sure I read that sometime in my childhood. A bizarre little dream story that I wouldn't put on the Top 100 list over the books Little House in the Big Woods or Charlotte's Web, but oh well. No need to recap it really...everyone knows it's about Alice going down the rabbit hole and having all her weird adventures with the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Turtle, the Griffin, the Duchess, and the Queen of Hearts! :-)

Finished: A Clockwork Orange (Burgess) Hmm. I'm not really sure what to think about this book. It was quite a trip though! Does it belong on the Top 100 list that has been staring me in the face for over 2 years? I'm not sure that it does. Even the author (in the preface) says that this is the least of his works he'd like to be known for, but known for it he is. It's some kind of cult classic, I suppose, that scares me to think that people who read this book actually sympathized and/or glorified the actions of the miscreant, violent, soulless 15-year old  Alex....the "protagonist"...the "anti-hero". Hmm, I say again. I don't think I've ever read such a violent book...though the horror of Lolita comes close to being as unsettling with the constant rape of a young girl by her mother's widowed husband. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex and his "droogs" (one of the made-up words of the nadsat, half-Russian, half-English, half-teenage babble language used throughout the book) roam the streets at night and attack innocent people...violently. (I had to have the urbandictionay.com open on my phone so I could look up words as I went along, and sure enough, most of them were there "from A Clockwork Orange", it would say.) They don't stop at beatings and theft, but continue on with brutal rapes. They get hopped up on drugs and live to be violent. Alex gets caught and sent to prison after an elderly woman dies from his behavior. After two years, so he's now only 17, he is sent to be the guinea pig in an experimental treatment by the government where he is forced to watch the most violent of films over and over, strapped down, and with his eyes forced open by clamps. Injected with a substance that makes him violently ill as he watches the films, his body is literally reprogrammed to reject all things violent...even violent thoughts, because he begins to get violently ill when he starts thinking those thoughts. In other words, he's not a morally changed person...but he's forced to adhere to a certain, simpering behavior to avoid becoming ill. What the doctors do at this facility is cruel and scary, and is a huge statement about the government forcing their own kind of violence. When Alex is released after two weeks of torture and deemed "cured", he tries to go home to his parents, but they have let out his room. He wanders the streets and is viciously beaten by two police officers who turn out to be one of his old "droogs", and one of their former droog enemies. Left out in the country after being beaten, Alex stumbles to a house where a kindly man takes him in and feeds him, etc. He recognizes Alex from his picture in the paper as the inmate who was treated and "cured" and released back into society. The man is pretty off his rocker himself and tells Alex he will become part of his group of people who is trying to stand up to the government. The group uses Alex by confining him in a room and causing him to relive some the music associated with his anti-violence treatment, causing Alex to jump out a window to take his own life rather than listen to any of it for a second more. The group of men stand around him. It was what they wanted....for Alex to die so they could blame the government for what they did to this boy. Alex doesn't die though. He is battered and broken, but he lives. And somehow the broken bones, head injury and/or the subsequent treatment at the hospital undo his "cure" and he's back to his violent tendencies. However, by the famously "left out" 21st chapter, which was included in the book I read, Alex is now 18 and tired of all the behavior. He decides he wants to change, lead a "normal" life...even maybe have a wife and son. Hmm, I still say. Oh, and the nice man who treated Alex kindly is one of Alex's former victims!! At the time of that particular piece of brutality, Alex and his droogs had on masks, so the man doesn't recognize him...but this was the home where they broke in, tore up this man's life's work...a novel in progress called "A Clockwork Orange", beat the man to a pulp, and all brutally raped his young wife. The man now lives alone, he tells Alex, because his young wife died of her injuries from a brutal rape and attack. Alex is taken aback and tries to hide who he is...but that all becomes a moot point since the man is now whacko and wants to just use Alex to get back at the government. Anyway....finally, I read it. I read it pretty fast, so it did hold my attention. I'm just still a bit unsettled to think this is a book in the Top 100.

Just a taste of the nadsat language used constantly in the book:

gulliver = head
listo = face
pretty polly = money
veshch = thing
horrorshow = good
oddy knocky = own (like on my own)
cally = shitty
rot = mouth
rooker = hand
smeck = laugh
tolchock = punch
malchicks = teenage boys
devotchkas = girls
glazzies = eyes
malenky = little
viddied = saw
zoobies = teeth

and this weirds me out because I can remember calling teeth "zoobies" in college, but I never knew why that was slang for teeth. Was is from this book? Hmmm.....