Finished: Henry VIII (Shakespeare) I always love reading Shakespeare, but this one was harder for me to get interested in for some reason. Henry VIII was the son of Henry Tudor (the VII), who won the crown from Richard III. I really enjoyed reading all those Shakespeare "histories", so I'm not sure why this one didn't grab me. Surprisingly to me, it wasn't very much about his seven wives. As a matter of fact, we only meet two of them...his first one, Catherine of Aragon, and then the one he divorced Catherine for, Anne Boleyn. The story was more about how King Henry put so much trust in Cardinal Woolsey, only to find out that Woolsey was being duplicitous. Of course, he didn't find that out until after Woolsey had been responsible for the beheading of the beloved Duke of Buckingham. Anyway, by the end of the play, Anne Boleyn has given birth to Elizabeth and the future Queen has just been christened. Not my favorite, but I'm still glad to have read it! I always feel smarter, yet really dumb at the same time, after reading a Shakespeare play, lol.

Finished: A Daughter of the Land (Stratton-Porter) A fine, old book that belonged to my great-grandmother. It reminded me very much of a grown-up version of the Little House on the Prairie books with it's wholesome values and lesson-learning events. It tells the story of 18 year old Katherine "Kate" Bates, the youngest daughter of sixteen children, of a hardworking farming family in the late 1800's. All their lives the Bates children work the farm so that when each son reaches the age of 21 his father gives him 200 acres of the huge farm to go and get a bride and build a home of his own. Even the daughters work towards this goal, because being women, they won't need land of their own when they get married. (ugh) Instead, when the daughters turn 18 they are sent to Normal School, which is a weeks long program in the summer to teach them to become teachers. Kate, of course, is very headstrong and would love her own 200 acres. However, she's resigned to the way of the family and is at least excited to go and learn to become a teacher. Shockingly, her parents have other ideas. Since Kate is the youngest, they expect her to stay on at the farm indefinitely, continuing to help her mother run the house and do her share of the farming as well. Kate is understandably upset when her parents refuse all reason and begging. Kate takes matters into her own hands and goes to her oldest brother for a loan of the money required to go. Adam doesn't want to buck his father, but his feisty wife, the only sister-in-law worth a darn, gives her the money to go! And so Kate begins her life of adventures, including falling in love, spurning the love because he's illiterate and rich, refusing her father's job suggestion and therefore being banned from the family home forever, marrying a man who doesn't love her, having a set of twins, finally getting her "share" of her father's inheritance when he dies, investing all her money in a sawmill that is about to open and be profitable when her drunkard husband accidentally burns the whole thing down and dies in the process, raising her twins in near poverty, finally going back home to help her mother where she and her children both thrive on the farm, etc. etc. It was a good book that kept me reading...not really deep, but good enough. Oh, and Kate finally got land all her own when her mother died and left her and only her the original acreage of the homestead! No matter what, it was very surreal reading a book that my great-grandmother, and probably my grandmother, held in their very own hands!

Finished: Flight Behavior (Kingsolver) Book Club Book #7. A deeply moving and well written book about the "miracle" of the sudden migration of millions of monarch butterflies to a little mountain farm in the Appalachians and the ramifications this event has on the people on the farm, the town folks, the scientists who come to study the migration, and mostly the young mother who first discovers the huge, fluttering field of orange. Dellarobia Turnbow is an unhappy, 28 year old mother of two small children, married to her high school sweetheart because they got pregnant. Even though they lost that baby, Dellarobia and her husband, Cub, stayed married and continued living in a small house built on the Appalachian sheep farm of his parents, Bear and Hester. When we first meet Dellarobia she is running away from her marriage...leaving it all behind, including five year old Preston and 18 month old Cordelia. She's headed up the mountain for a rendezvous with a younger man and plans to finally run away and leave behind the life she never wanted to be tied down to. Oh, she apparently loves her children, but it's hard for me to reconcile that when we first meet her completely prepared to ditch them. Anyway, on the way to her rendezvous, Dellarobia stumbles upon a valley of undulating orange...and not just a valley, but every branch of every tree seems to be covered with the mysterious orange hangings. She doesn't know what in the world it is, but she takes it to be a sign that she should not be doing what she's doing and she returns home. When she hears from her husband Cub that his father is thinking of cutting down all the woods above their house to pay for a near-defaulted balloon mortgage on the farm, she suggests that Cub needs to first go and see what is in those woods. After that, things happen pretty quickly with town folk, the preacher, the media and scientists all descending on the area. The orange mass is actually millions of monarch butterflies who have accidentally come to the Tennessee mountains for the winter, instead of to their natural migratory place, Mexico. Soon we meet Ovid Byron, the scientist who sets up camp in a trailer by Dellarobia and Cub's barn, and creates a lab to study the butterflies in a part of that barn. Dellarobia, some of the town folk, and the preacher...and even Dellarobia's very cold, businesslike mother-in-law, all feel that the trees should not be cut down. They feel that nature should not be messed with when God has brought this miracle to their backdoor. They are afraid that Bear will not listen to reason and will destroy the butterflies. Ovid, on the other hand, is more concerned with global warming and what could have possibly caused the butterflies, with hundreds of years of instinct and distinct migratory patterns to suddenly light here. His fears run deeper than cutting down the forest. He's afraid that the cold mountain winter will freeze all the butterflies and completely destroy the species. Though she never went to college, Dellarobia finally finds a subject to spark her intellect and her passion, and for the first time becomes a working mom as Ovid pays her to work every day in the lab and on the mountain. Little Preston is also very interested. He's only in Kindergarten, but smart as a whip and relishes the time that Ovid spends with him. Needless to say, Dellarobia falls for Ovid, or she thinks she does. I think mostly she just finds a fulfillment there of her self-worth that she doesn't find with Cub. Ovid is happily married, though, and never even aware of Dellarobia's feelings. He's only concerned with the butterflies and the significance of this huge event. In the end, Dellarobia and Preston do witness the coupling of a male and female butterfly, even after Ovid said they'd all frozen in the snow. It turns out, huge numbers of them did not freeze and end up flying away in a huge swarm at the very end of the book. But, also by the end of the book, Dellarobia has "found" herself and lets Cub know that she's never been happy. She has a conversation with Preston and tells him they are going to live in the next town with her best friend, Dovey, where there is a college that Dellarobia can attend, thanks to some strings pulled by Ovid. Poor Preston realizes the implications of them leaving his father behind, but as he does the whole story, takes it like a little man. I really don't think I can forgive Dellarobia for telling him all this the day before his birthday. Basically she sits him down to tell him three things: 1) before he was born there was another baby who would have been his older brother who died, 2) oh, but I've got a really great surprise for you for your birthday, you finally get a little computer phone, that we have to share, to look up all your science questions, and 3) but yeah, also we're moving away to live with Dovey and leaving your dad here on the farm. Don't worry, you and Cordie will get to see him. You'll be just like the butterflies migrating back and forth. Huh. I just can't say that Dellarobia is one of my favorite characters a story has ever been written about, but I do have some pangs of sympathy for her. I can't imagine being born and raised in a world so cut off from most of the outside world and having your future be laid out for you with practically no choice. Well, they did make that teenage sex choice, but that stupidity is not singular to a small town Appalachian girl. Oh well. In all, it was a very well written book with lots of wonderful phrases. And, it was deeply moving, probably in a different way for me that it was intended.

Here are a couple of memorable quotes:

They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

And the next one, which really resonated with me. Lately I've myself been kind of mourning the lost knowledge of my dad and brother. I mean, there are so many questions I'd like to ask them that I'll never know the answer to. Sigh. Here's the quote:

As a child she'd never thought to ask, and now she would never know. So much knowledge died with a person.

Finished: Cancer Ward (Solzhenitsyn) A moving, well written book about a group of men in a Russian cancer ward in the 1950's. Having a husband who has battled the insidious disease, who still gets scans and oncology appointments every 9 months after 13 years, this look into the deepest fears and feelings of the patients really resounded in me. I can't quite put it into words, but I felt deeply for each of the sick characters as their personal stories unfolded. A while back I asked my son, who has his masters in Russian History and is currently pursuing his PhD in the same field, who his favorite Russian author was. I was totally expecting him to say Tolstoy or Dostoevsky...but instead he said, hmm, probably Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn's life mirrored pretty closely the main character of Cancer Ward, Oleg Kostoglotov...both had been exiled in their own countries when the political tides had shifted...and both had cancer. Solzhenitsyn beat his cancer and died in his 80's. We leave Oleg at the end of the book at only age 34, but with many cancer treatments under his belt....but pretty understandably NOT having totally beat cancer yet...heading back to his exile camp. I guess it's a sign of a pretty good book when you keep thinking about fictional characters when the book is done and you want at least one more chapter to wrap things up. I kept flipping the last page back and forth thinking there must be more. Anyway, the book is also sprinkled with lots of political statements, as most of those Russian books are, but they didn't overshadow the personal stories of all the patients, most of whom were pretty doomed. So many were very young...two with legs amputated...one 45 year old with a wife and four children who is eventually "cured" and released, but with the doctors really telling themselves, he'll be back. Oh, and that's another thing...they never tell a patient he's got cancer. They only say things like lymphoma, melanoma, carcinoma, etc. Of course, those are cancers...but they avoid the "c" word. We also meet the super compassionate doctors and nurses. The two main oncology and radiology doctors are women! One of them develops a very close relationship with Oleg, which they almost carry to the point of considering a future together...but in the end when he's discharged from the hospital, Oleg doesn't meet her as they planned. He realizes that he can't drag Vera back to his exile camp, away from her career, and towards a future with a man with nothing to his name and most likely no ability to procreate after his intense treatments. It was sad. :-( The other female doctor, the clinic leader, who has dedicated her life to the clinic and her patients, ends up sick herself by the end of the book with cancer of all things. Years and years of breathing in the radiation has mostly likely done her in as well. Anyway, I'm kind of just writing down a jumbling of thoughts. This is definitely one of those books that will resonate in me for awhile, but one I'm so glad I read!