Finished: Women in Love (Lawrence) Hmmm...not sure why this very probing, psychological book about the love between men and women is on so many top lists, but I am done with it. Now, only 3 more books on the top 100 list to read. :-) This is my 3rd Lawrence book, and I must say I liked the other two, The Rainbow and Sons and Lovers, more, though none of Lawrence's books make MY top 100 list. Women in Love is a sequel to The Rainbow and focuses on sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen. Living in early 1900's England, they both way over think what love and the relationship between a man and woman should be. Whoa. If you give that much thought to it, of course you can talk yourself out of it! Or, into it! Ursula, who already experienced both a lesbian affair and the love of a man in the first book, has now met the older Rupert Birkin, whose ideas on love are way out there. He practically disdains physical love, though he gives into it. He feels like there must be something more between a man and a woman, something that makes them both rather metaphysical or something. He wants that connection with Ursula. He wants to run around naked in the woods and forget the rest of society, lol. All she basically wants is for him to tell her he loves her. Don't get me wrong, she's a very complicated, deep thinker about it all too, but she basically just wants to be loved by him and, more importantly, be all that he needs. Of course, she's not all that he needs. There's a very intense scene between Rupert and his friend, Gerald Crich, where they get naked and wrestle on the floor for an extended period of time. Though they slough it off as men being sporty, they both feel an intimate attraction. Rupert even offers the idea of having a relationship to Gerald, but he pretends not to really understand what Rupert is talking about. Anyway, Gerald is another complicated one. He's the good-looking oldest son of a rich coal-mining family. As a youngster, he accidentally shot and killed his own brother. He has recently become very attracted to Ursula's younger sister, Gudrun. Again, both characters spend an exorbitant amount of time over-thinking their feelings for each other. When Gerald's father dies, he goes to Gudrun's house in the middle of the night and they have their first sexual experience. From there, they don't know how to act, but Gerald asks Gudrun if she'll go on an extended vacation to the Alps with him. Gerald thinks he's in love with Gudrun, but Gudrun wants more out of life than becoming a wife and mother. She seems to alternate between passionate love and hatred for Gerald. When they get to the mountains, Gudrun is so infatuated and in love with the beauty of it all that Gerald is jealous of her love for it. Meanwhile, Ursula and Rupert have traveled with them and they all have a few fun-filled days. Soon, though, Ursula and Rupert want to move on and explore other scenery. Gerald and Gudrun are left alone to mingle with the other inhabitants of the hotel. One in particular, Loerke, has peaked the interest of Gudrun. He is a fellow artist and though he is not at all attractive, Gudrun is attracted to his views on the world. She realizes she doesn't really love Gerald...not that she loves Loerke, but her rejection of Gerald leads him to try and strangle her. Gerald stops in his tracks when he realizes he doesn't really want her dead. He then wanders the slopes of the snowy mountains in despair until he lays down to sleep and freezes to death. Ursula and Rupert rush back to the retreat where Gudrun is in shock, but not really mourning a love lost. Rupert however, finally breaks down in tears and lets Ursula know that Gerald was the ideal man that he would have wanted a relationship with...that Ursula and Gerald together would have made his life complete. Ursual, but do you still love me? Rupert, yes, but I needed him too. Ursula and Rupert then accompany Gerald's body back to England while Gudrun decides to leave her future and destination wide open. The end. Really, a way too intricately analyzing book for me about how each of them felt about the other at any given moment! It took away from the pleasure of just reading the story. :-) So...on to book #97. Yay!

Finished: Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable aka The Trilogy (Beckett). I'm not at all entirely sure what I just read, especially the last 100 pages, but I'm pretty sure this was Samuel Beckett's big ode to what it must be like to be in the throes of death. Ugh. I have to say that out of the 295 books I've read in the past 2 years and 4 months, this trilogy comes in second to last...SECOND TO LAST! And yet, it is supposed to be one of the greatest works of fiction of all time! I just don't get it with some of these books. Are they supposed to be so difficultly profound that they are considered great fiction? The three separate books, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable were all combined into this trilogy intentionally I suppose. Molloy deals mostly with an old character named, Molloy, who appears to be speaking from his own room where he is about to die. He recounts an adventure where he wandered old and crippled through the countryside trying to find his mother. He kills another man he comes across. The second part of Molloy deals with Moran, the "secret agent" who is sent out to find Molloy. He ends up with much the same ailments as Molloy, also kills another man, and by the end of the book, I'm pretty sure we are to think Molloy and Moran are one and the same person. In Malone Dies, we are treated to the musings of Malone, who is now confined to his bed and dying. He can only reach things, like his daily soup bowl and his chamber pot, with his beloved stick. He also recounts the tail of another character Macmann...but I think they are all supposed to be the same person...Molloy, Moran, Malone, Macmann...hmm, definitely an M pattern here. Then, in The Unnamable, again we have a character babbling on about his surroundings. At first it sounds as if he may be in kind of a Danteish hell, as other characters kind of swirl around him as he is frozen in one spot. However, I think he is just the same character who is so close to death now that he is bedridden, comatose, and all the thoughts of existence that are in his head are just being regurgitated onto the pages of the book. I think he may be aware of other people standing around waiting for him to die. And, the last 6 or 7 pages of the book are one long run on sentence with the ending words being "....it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." I think it's all rather sad if you think about it, to be lingering long enough to have 400 pages of nightmarish thoughts, remembrances, and finally gibberish as one approaches death. :-( Anyway, this was just a step above Finnegan's Wake for me, in that at least you could, for the most part, understand what the words were saying. I can't tell you how glad I am to have this book off my list, and with a little sadness I can say that I will mostly likely NEVER pick up another book by Beckett again since the two of his I've read are in the bottom 3 all time of books I've read.

Bottom 10 I've read during this reading project, all, by the way, considered the absolute tops in fiction:

295. Finnegan's Wake (Joyce - you know why, total gibberish. Or should I say...gallop paper eix eix labba dabba excrement daisyloo peephole? That makes more sense than anything I read in the book.)
294. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable Trilogy (Beckett - death by nonsense.)
293. Waiting for Godot (Beckett - waiting for nothing)
292. The Trial (Kafka - I was able to read several of his others, but this one was so confusing and nearly unreadable.)
291. Lolita (Nabakov - Not for bad writing, but for the horrific subject material alone.)
290. Gulliver's Travels (Swift - Just couldn't stand this one, ugh.)
289. On The Road (Kerouac - Whiny, self-absorbed people who many consider heroic?)
288. The Tropic of Cancer (Miller - Just unpleasant subject material.)
287. Heart of Darkness (Conrad - Didn't get the pull of this "classic" ATALL.)
286. Tristam Shandy (Sterne - Maybe funny a few hundred years ago, but didn't do it for me today.)

Finished: The Invention of Wings (Monk Kidd) Book Club Book #5. A very good book about the real life southern sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimke who grew up in the early 1800's and became some of the first female abolitionists in the country. Growing up on a plantation in South Carolina, Sarah Grimke is "given" her own slave, a 10 year old girl named Handful, for her 11th birthday. Sarah immediately sneaks into her lawyer father's office that night and looks up the lingo for freeing a slave, and writes a letter freeing Handful! She finds the note torn in two and left outside her door the next morning. She assumes it is her rigid, extremely southern and set in her slaving ways, mother. Her father, though the typical patriarch and slave owner, has always let Sarah into his study to read his books, though he doesn't really take her aspirations to someday be a lawyer like him seriously. He saves those hopes for her brothers, and eventually scoffs at Sarah, dashing her hopes in front of everyone. :-( Anyway, it ends up being her father who has torn the note apart, so Sarah is forced to keep Handful as her slave. The story alternates between Sarah's viewpoint and Handful's. We hear the story of Handful's mother, Charlotte, also a slave on the plantation. Charlotte has a rich history and is an amazing seamstress. She has made a quilt  full of black triangles which represent the blackbirds from her own mother's Africa which represented the freedom to fly away. Charlotte also makes a "story" quilt, which has appliques on different squares showing her own history of being born and then put into slavery. Handful and Sarah spend so much time together that they become lifelong friends, and even though it is against the law, Sarah secretly teaches Handful how to read! When Sarah's father finds out, Handful is punished with a cruel lash and Sarah is punished by being forbidden any books whatsoever...her beloved books. They are all stripped from her room and she is banished from her father's study. As Sarah grows up, she is outspoken in her views and never embraces the typical southern belle behavior like her other sisters. She does end up with one suitor, who she falls for completely, but he ends up being a cad who was just trying to get into her skirts! Heartbroken, Sarah resolves that she'll never marry. When Sarah is 12 her mother has her last child, another little girl named Angelina. Sarah begs her mother to let her be her godmother. Her mother relents, and Sarah's anti-slavery viewpoint becomes prevalent in "Nina" as well. Meanwhile, Charlotte meets a free black man named Denmark Vesey who has "many wives". Charlotte becomes involved with him and becomes pregnant. Charlotte has saved money on the side from selling quilts that the "Missus" knows nothing about. She plans to someday buy her own and Handful's freedom. One day, though, with a pass into town to do the marketing, Charlotte doesn't return home. The Grimke's think she has run away, but she has actually being taken by a slave-trader. Handful mourns her mother's disappearance and even sneaks out and over to Denmark Vesey's to see if he knows anything, and he tells her the grim news that he thinks Charlotte has been taken and probably sold to another slave owner. Handful sees that Vesey has a secret list of many of the area slaves and plans a huge uprising! However, the authorities find out, and execute Denmark and his "lieutenants" by hanging, crushing the hopes of the slaves. There are so many cruelties that are shown against the slaves: the workhouse, where Handful's foot is crushed by a giant water wheel; the bridle like mouth contraption used as punishment; the tying of Charlotte's one leg by a belt to her neck as she's made to stand on the other leg for an hour; the horrible whippings; and, of course, the general degradation as they were treated as less important than the plantation animals. Sarah, unable to live on the plantation any more, leaves and goes north where she actually becomes a Quaker. The Quakers are anti-slavery, but they are also anti-women's authority, so Sarah is always butting heads against the elders as she'd like to speak out and become a minister. Nina, also less and less tolerant of her life, eventually joins Sarah in Pennsylvania and also converts to being a Quaker. The sisters become very involved in the abolitionist movement, even writing pamphlets. When their pamphlets are published, they are asked to tour the northeast speaking out to women about anti-slavery. Of course, they are shunned by their family, and even start rubbing their male associates the wrong way as the topics start to veer just as strongly towards women's rights as much as slave rights. Meanwhile, having run away from her current owner, Charlotte finally makes it home 14 years later, with Denmark's 13 year old daughter in tow. Handful is beside herself and embraces her now fragile mother. And, now she's got a sister...Sky. After Charlotte's passing, Handful is determined that she and Sky will run away and make it to the north where Sarah and Nina are...where there are free blacks. With Sarah's help in the end, Sarah, Handful and Sky all escape on a ship north, with Handful and Sky dressed in the mourning attire belonging to Missus and the little Missus (Sarah's sister Mary). A few years before Mr. Grimke had passed away, thus the mourning attire. And, that's where the book ends, but certainly not the history! The sisters were inspirational, as well as Charlotte, Handful, Sky and Denmark, but boy, it is just so hard to read about the horrors of slavery. I would have to say that Slavery and the Holocaust are the two most horrific blights on the humanity of mankind. And, the treatments and sexual mutilation of the women in Africa is worth being added to that list as well. :-( I hope we never forget, never.