Finished: Fall of Giants (Follett) The first book in an epic trilogy series about how members of five different families from England, Wales, Russia, Germany and the U.S. cross paths before, during and after the World War I years. This typically long Follet book was great, and a wonderful combination of history, politics and personal relationships. Edward "Fitz" Fitzherbert is an English nobleman who owns and lives on an estate in Wales, the land of which he licenses out to a company for the coal to be mined. Of course, the miners are the local, working-class, much poorer Welshman. Fitz is married to Russian princess, Bea, from the royal family. Her brother Andrei is a prince in Russia. Fitz's sister, Lady Maud, is 23, five years younger than Fitz, and far more liberal. She's all about speaking her mind, talking about politics, socializing with movers and shakers, and working towards the woman's right to vote in England. When Fitz throws a very important dinner party for the King of England, George V, he invites several important people to the party who become intregal players in the story. One of them is German nobleman, Walter Von Ulrich, a former classmate of Fitz's. Maud and Walter fall madly in love, but must keep their relationship a secret since neither Maud's brother, who controls all the money, or Walter's father, a bigwig in the German government would approve. Also at the party is American, Gus Dewar, a young, but super smart, Harvard educated junior advisor to President Woodrow Wilson. We are taken through the detailed events that led up to World War I, as Germany mobilized troops because Russia mobilized troops, etc. etc. Everyone blames everyone else. Walter would much rather see a peaceful solution than a war begin. He doesn't want to see a loss of life for a war that could be avoided. Mostly, though, he knows that war between Germany and England will keep him away from Maud. Fitz is all for going to war against Germany, who is bearing arms against France. Meanwhile, the Russian army, though huge, appears to be less organized and made up of so many uneducated peasants.

Speaking of Russia...we meet Grigori and Lev Peshkov, brothers who are in their young 20's who were orphaned as youngsters when first their father was executed by the father of Princess Bea and Prince Andrei for grazing his cows on the royal land! Grigori and Lev will never forget the haughty faces and attitude of Bea and Andrei as they watched Grigori and Lev's father be killed. Then, a few years later, their mother is shot down by the tsar's police as the people of Petrograd execute a peaceful march on the palace. Grigori grows up taking care of Lev, who in turn, grows up to be a charming lady's man who pretty much cares for no one but himself. He constantly gets in trouble, and just when Grigori has painstakingly saved enough money to sail to America where he can work and send for Lev, Lev commits a murder and begs Grigori to let HIM use the ticket in his place, promising he'll earn money and send for Grigori. Also, Lev leaves behind his pregnant girlfriend, who Grigori had met first and fallen in love with. Lev had charmed her into loving him instead. So, Grigori sends Lev to America and marries the girlfriend, Katrina, so she will have his army wages, and her child his name, before he is drafted into the Russian army to fight against the Germans.

Back in Wales, the Williams family consists of Ma, Da, Ethel and Billy. Ethel is twenty and works as a maid at the Fitzherbert estate. Billy is fifteen and has already been working in the mines for two years. Billy is called Billy Twice because his name is William Williams, lol. He's a really great, brave kid with loads of character, who is always shooting off his mouth to stand up for what is right, which does get him in a bit of trouble at times. Naturally, Fitz puts the moves on Ethel, and actually really falls for her. She falls for him as well and becomes pregnant. Of course, his wife, Princess Bea becomes pregnant at the same time. When Fitz breaks up with Ethel and tries to buy her off, very cheaply I might add, she plays hardball and makes him pay for a house for her in London, where she moves to have her child after being thrown out and disowned by her father. In London, Ethel works hard, has her son, Lloyd, and befriends Lady Maud, who comes down to the working class area at times to help the women and children and encourage them to stand up for women's rights.  Ethel does just that, and eventually becomes a huge voice in England's Labour Party.

As the war gets going, all of the main male players are involved: Fitz, Walter, Billy, Gus, and Grigori all end up fighting in various heartbreaking, futile battles...hoping for an end, but never seeing one. We get to see all their personalities, and to all their credit, each of them is very brave and smart during the war. Well, Fitz is not as smart, but he's certainly brave. Grigori finally leaves the Russian army, as many apparently did, and goes to join Lenin in the Russian revolution. He becomes instrumental in overthrowing the royals, only to end up in a regime that is an even worse dictatorship. Walter survives the five year war, but only sees Maud twice during those years. However, unbeknownst to their families, they are married right before the war and remain in love and faithful to each other through all those years. After the war, when Germany has lost and must concede so much, they live in much poorer circumstances than either was ever used to, since Fitz cuts off the money to Maud and Walter's progress in the German government is stagnated because he married an Englishwoman. They are happy, though, and by the story's end, have two young children. Ethel finally falls for political co-worker and by the end of the story, they have their own child as well, and are raising her nine year old son by Fitz. Fitz and Princess Bea have two sons, so an heir and a spare, which appears to be all Fitz wanted out of Bea. Billy makes it out alive and marries a friend of Ethel's who already has two children, and then they have two children of their own. Grigori raises Lev's child and then also has a daughter with Katerina. Lev, who ended up in America working for Russian mobster Joseph Vyalov, becomes Vyalov's chauffeure, but then impregnants his daughter, Olga and is forced to marry her. He loves working at his rich father-in-laws nightclubs, but he also loves the women still. When caught in an affair, Vyalov forces him to enlist in the U.S. army just as the U.S. is entering the war. Gus Deware also enlists in the military. Gus prooves to be very brave and survies the war and finds love afterwards. Lev, also survives the war, but is stationed over in Russia of all places. He allows himself to be captured by the Russians to he can meet up with his brother. He has actually saved enough money to send Grigori and his family back to America, but by now, Grigori wants to stay and be part of the Boshevik regime. Lev, doesnt' care to meet his son by Katrina, and tells Grigori he will head back to America. Grigori transports him back across the lines so he can do that. Lev ends up going back to Olga and their now four year old daughter, Daisy. He actually loves his daughter, but when it's discovered that he still has a mistress who also now has a son, he has a physical fight with his father-in-law who dies of a heart attack. As the story ends, Lev is taking over his father-in-law's business.

The entire book is very detailed and goes into the working class versus upper class struggles in England, and Russia. And, with a horrific foreshadowing, shows how the impoverishment of Germany after signing the peace treaty was one of the factors that led to Hitler coming into power with such ruthlessness, which we will see in the next book most likely. Since all of the main characters have children that are around the same age, I'm thinking book two of the trilogy will be the continuing story of them as well! :-)

Finished: One of Ours (Cather) This was the 1923 Pulitzer Prize winner, but I think I've liked other books of Willa Cather's more. It's the story of Claude Wheeler, a young man whose father is a successful Nebraska farmer, and whose mother is very religious. He is overshadowed by both his older and younger brothers, but mostly because he's unhappy with his life himself. He wants more out of life than just following in his father's farming footsteps. And, even though he's educated at college, he's not even happy with the college he attends. He envies almost every other person he meets...their ambitions, their families, their happiness, their talents. After Claude realizes that his fate is to run the family farm, he finally convinces a childhood sweetheart to marry him. He becomes disillusioned, however, when his wife is more interested in charity and mission work than in him. When she leaves for China to help her ailing missionary sister, Claude enlists in the army and heads for World War I in  Europe. His family has been following the war closely and he feels that maybe he will find purpose in his life after all by going to help fight the Germans. Claude DOES find purpose. He feels alive for the first time...but he still envies most of the other soldiers he meets. He becomes best friends with David Gerhardt, who was a former violinist. Claude is envious of David's musical talent and resents that he was never given the opportunity to learn something outside of farming. However, he still admires and respects his friends. Towards the end of the book, Claude's unit is sent to fight in a particularly bad location, in some trenches that had been occupied by the Germans. He has fallen in love with France and the people there, and thinks he will probably live here instead of going back home. He never gets the chance, though, as both he and David fight bravely and are both killed in action trying to keep the Germans from retaking the trench. I didn't become particularly attached to Claude since I didn't really relate to any of his angst. However, Willa Cather is a good writer, so I enjoyed the book somewhat...just not as much as a few of her others. :-)

Finished: The Secret Speech (Smith) The second book in the Child 44 trilogy with Leo Demidov, the former Russian intelligence officer, and his wife, Raisa, at the center of the action once again. In this story, three years have passed since Leo solved the serial killer mystery in Child 44. At the end of that book he and Raisa, unable to have children of their own, adopted the two daughters,  Zoya and Elena, of a man and wife who had been killed by a more sadistic Russian intelligence officer. Unfortunately for Leo, he had been present and under the command of that officer, and Zoya had witnessed the execution of her parents at the age of 11. She agreed to live with Raisa and Leo for Elena's sake, since it was better than the orphanage, but she harbored a deep hatred for Leo and officers like him in general. Three years later, when The Secret Speech opens, Zoya is 14 and still full of hatred, and Elena is 7. Khrushchev is now the leader of Russia instead of Stalin, and he puts out a document, a transcript of a speech he gives, deriding Stalin, and admitting Stalin's crimes and his barbaric techniques, including those of the Russian intelligence officers that tortured, maimed, killed and imprisoned so many Russian citizens. When this speech is made public, old intelligence officers begin being murdered by a clandestine resistance group. The group is led by a woman, Fraera, who has a huge bone to pick with Leo. Many years before, when Leo was first starting out in the ranks, he was assigned undercover to expose a priest, Lazar, who was still supporting the church, even though Stalin had made it a law that there would be no church. Leo, undercover as Maxim, became Lazar's pupil and nearly like a son to him and his wife. When he got the proof he needed that Lazar was breaking the law, Leo had him exposed and arrested, and sent to a gulag in the far north country. The wife, never forgiving Leo, ends up being Fraera, the lady who is leading the mercenary group! She kidnaps Zoya and Leo must pretend to be a prisoner being sent to the gulag to rescue Lazar and help him escape from prison before she will give Zoya back alive. Of course, Zoya actually likes and approves of Fraera's group and their tactics. They are attacking the very people who killed her parents! She becomes one of them, and even though Leo is successful in bringing Lazar back, an entire political story unfolds in which Leo and Raisa must then travel into Hungary to try and rescue the unwilling Zoya from the clutches of Fraera, who is busy helping ignite a revolution in Hungary. Meanwhile, Zoya falls in love with Malysh, the young teenage right-hand-man of Fraera, and together they actually plan to leave Fraera's group when she becomes too erratic. Feeling betrayed, Fraera locks Malysh and Zoya in with the captured Leo and Raisa as the Russian troops approach the hiding place of her and her followers to squash the revolution. The book is far more detailed and exciting than this brief synopsis! Leo, Raisa, Zoya and Malysh must make their way to safety, and Malysh is killed while pretty much saving the lives of the rest of them. :-( It's the second sad death, as Leo's good friend and associate Timur had been killed in the escapade to release Lazar from the gulag. At the end of the book, Zoya is reluctantly back with Leo, Raisa and Elena, but no so filled with hatred anymore. She saw the lengths that Leo and Raisa would go to to save her...and she saw the insanity of what Fraera was doing too. Anyway....I really enjoyed this book and will most definitely read the third installment.

Finished: Main Street (Lewis) A book about a young woman in the early 1900's who longs to be accepted as an educated, evolved woman when she marries a small town Minnesota doctor and goes back to live with him in the set-in-its-ways, gossip-thriving town. Things only go downhill for Carol Kennicott as she realizes that no one in the town wants to make any changes for the better....no one wants to hear her ideas on improvement, much less on literature or art or music...no one appreciates her flair for fashion. Everyone expects her to be a good little doctor's wife to Will Kennicott, a good-old boy who likes to hunt and hang out with the guys too. I'll give it to Will, though, he perseveres throughout the story, even though he does some things I'm not thrilled with...but he does love Carol and tries his hardest towards the end to evolve. Carol, for her part, spends far too much time in her own head and worrying about what people think of her...and with good reason...the town is a cesspool of gossip and busybodies. When she finally takes their little son, Hugh, and goes to Washington D.C. to find her way in the working world, she does find the fulfilment she wanted...but she also finds that there are just as many cliques in the workplace as there are in good ol' Gopher Prairie. She spends over a year there, and when Will comes to visit, they reconnect and she realizes that Gopher Prairie might not be so bad. She eventually goes back, pregnant with their second child and settles down to small town life again, this time more confident in herself, but still not in love with the stagnation of a small town.

I've had this book on my reading periphery, and thought it might be more a picture of quaint life in a small town...and less of an emotional, stressful journey of this one woman. It was pretty well written, and kept me interested, but certainly wasn't a terribly compelling book that I just couldn't put down. I'm glad I finally read a Sinclair Lewis book though! He wasn't on the list of Top 100 authors I went through three years ago. :-)

Finished: Years of Grace (Barnes) Pulitzer Prize winner from 1931 about the life of Jane Ward, a Chicago girl, and her loves, losses and family, from 1891 to 1928. I'm not really sure this was a Pulitzer worthy book...a little bit too surface, not much depth, but maybe that's just a sign of the writing in that time period? Each section is labeled by what man had the biggest influence in her life...first Andre, her first love at 14, then Stephen, her husband of thirty years, and then Jimmy, her best friend's husband who she falls in love with, but sends away so as to do the proper thing and stay with her husband and children. The last section is labeled for her children, and is about her relationship with them mostly as young adults as she laments that their generation does things so much differently and watches them make decisions she wouldn't have made. When Jane and Andre fall in love as young teens, they declare they want to get married before he must move back to France. Their parents say no, and Jane's parents make Andre promise not to contact her until she's 21, four years later. Jane goes to Bryn Mawr and then back home to debut with her other girlfriends. She never forgets Andre, and as her 21st birthday approaches, she wonders if she'll hear from him and if they will feel the same for each other. Meanwhile, one of her best friend's cousins, Stephen Carver, has fallen madly in love with Jane as they've seen quite a bit of each other. He keeps proposing to her, but she tells him while she's very fond of him, she doesn't love him. When she finally gets a letter from Andre, she's thrilled, but he says that he's been given the opportunity of a lifetime to work for the next year in seclusion mentoring to a great sculptor in France. (Andre is an artist.) Jane feels betrayed and writes Andre a dismissive letter, saying they've both moved on and she's marrying Stephen. Then, pressured because the Spanish American War is about to take Stephen to Cuba, Jane does declare her love for him and marry him. Flash forward fifteen years and Jane is 36, still married to Stephen the dependable banker, with three children. She's bored and unhappy, but loyal to her family. She goes to visit her best friend from childhood, Agnes, in New York, and meets Agnes' restless, carefree husband, Jimmy. Jimmy moves to Chicago for a job and Jane's whole family sees alot of Jimmy and really likes him. Of course, Jane falls in love with Jimmy and Jimmy with Jane, but they don't take it further than a few kisses. Jimmy does beg Jane to leave her husband and children and go off to Europe with him. She is shocked that he'd think she would do such a thing, and ends things abruptly. She feels guilty for the rest of her life that she betrayed her husband and her best friend, but she still holds the love for Jimmy in her heart. Jimmy, distraught when Jane says no, signs up to fight in World War I, and is killed fairly quickly. Agnes never knows that Jimmy fell for Jane. Later, when Jane is watching her own grown children go through loves and losses, she's incredulous when her oldest daughter, Cicily, who is married with three children, falls for HER best friend's husband, who is married to Jane's husband's sister, and has children of his own. Their solution, rather than doing the right thing and breaking up two families, is to each divorce their spouses and marry each other. The whole book is very readable, but not very deep, and rather soap-operish. I kept thinking maybe I was reading a 1930's version of a Jackie Collins novel maybe? Anyway, another one down. Not sure I'll read all the Pulitzer Prize winners, but I'll keep plugging along. :-)

Finished: The Man in the High Castle (Dick) A pretty good page-turner about the world in 1962 as it would be if the Axis powers had won World War II instead of the Allies! The book follows several characters as they survive in either the German controlled east part of the former United States...or the Japan controlled Pacific states. Only in the Rocky Mountain states is there some semblance of the United States, but even that is controlled by the Reich. The book is set in San Francisco, where the Japanese are the elite, and the white people the menial workers. Hitler has since died of syphilis and German chancellor Bormann rules the Reich. The Germans have plugged up and drained the Mediterranean Sea, turning it into farmland, and have also managed to see to the genocide of almost all the Africans in Africa. One character is a German spy posing as a Swedish businessman who meets with the Japanese higher-ups in San Francisco to let them know that a certain faction of the Germans in power is planning to drop a bomb on the Japanese islands and wipe out their co-existing, cold-warring "allies". While the meeting between the German spy and the Japanese is taking place, Bormann dies, setting off an immediate political turmoil while Nazis Hermann Goring, Joseph Goebbels, and Reinhard Heydrich jockey to become the next leader. In a book within a book, an author, Hawthorne Abendsen, has written a novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is the fictional story of what the world would be like if the Allies had won the war and America and Great Britain thrived! This book is forbidden in the German controlled east, but many copies are floating around in the Pacific states. Many Americans read the book secretly and wish that history could have turned out that way. There are, of course, alot more details and in depth character stories, but I'm not going to do a total recap on this one. The book is really intriguing and scary at the same time. Imagine if it had really happened??

Finished: Lie Down In Darkness (Styron). One of the most depressing books I've read, but what should I have expected from the author who wrote Sophie's Choice? The book tells the story about the Loftis family, a 1940's fairly well-to-do, but very dysfunctional southern family. It opens with the father, Milton Loftis traveling to pick up the body of his 23 year old daughter, Peyton, who has committed suicide. Milton, a promising young lawyer and hopeful judge when married to Helen years before, has basically ruined his family by becoming an alcoholic. Milton and Peyton have always been exceptionally close, especially since first daughter, Maudie, was born with mental and physical disabilities, and Helen has devoted most of her time and emotion to Maudie. Milton has spoiled the beautiful Peyton terribly. Helen, resents the relationship between Milton and Peyton, and is pretty cold to Peyton all her life. Basically, it's just a sad story of two very selfish parents completely wrecking a young life. Peyton could have been a great human being, but she pretty much didn't stand a chance with her mother ignoring her in favor of Maudie, blaming her for anything that went wrong with Maudie, and her father doting on her, and at times even slathering all over her. We see flashbacks of their "family" life, and spend time in the present, seeing how each parent is dealing with Peyton's death. One of the last chapters is done from Peyton's stream of conscience viewpoint on the day that she desperately tries to reconnect with her own husband, Harry, who has left her because of her own drinking, sleeping around and otherwise outrageous behavior, and when failing to reconnect...commits suicide. Such a sad, tragic story. Sigh.

Finished: Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare) Though I looked forward to this rendition of their love story, I think this was one of the harder of Shakespeare's plays for me to grasp. I had to re-read things over a few times before I could comprehend what was being said, and sometimes I still didn't comprehend. One line I really liked, though..."To fear the worst oft cures the worse."  When I read The Odyssey, The Iliad and The Aeneid, it was so fascinating to read about the warriors Odysseus (Ulysses), Agamemnon, Aeneas, Achilles, Ajax, Hector, etal., from the different perspectives. I had no idea that Troilus and Cressida was mostly about these same characters!! As we know, Hector and Paris are the famous Trojan brothers, sons of Priam, who went to battle with the Greeks after Paris stole Helen away from her husband, King Menalaus, brother of King Agamemnon. Troilus is another of their brothers, and was supposedly a younger, fiercer, up-and-coming Hector clone. However, Troilus falls in love with Cressida, whose father Calchas is a Trojan priest who has defected from the Trojans and is now in good with the Greeks. Cressida also falls in love with Troilus, and they declare their love for each other, and consummate their love for one night only before Cressida is forced to be traded to the Greeks for a Trojan prisoner. Troilus is beside himself and worries that Cressida will fall to the charms of some Greek warrior. Meanwhile, the honorable Hector has called out the Greeks and says he will do one on one combat with their greatest warrior. Hector is hoping that Achilles will rise to the occasion, but Achilles' ego and pride have kept him in his tent, as he decides he is better resting on the laurels of his former conquests and greatness. He spends most of his time with his rumored loverboy, Patroclus. When Achilles refuses to rise to the challenge, the enormous Ajax says he will fight Hector. However, Hector and Ajax are cousins, and when they go to fight, Hector instead tells Ajax he doesn't want to fight his kin, but can't they embrace one another and dine together. Ulysses, Agamemnon and gang all welcome their rival warrior to dine with them for this one night only because they have a high respect for him. Achilles sizes Hector up and taunts him. Troilus takes this opportunity to go into the Greek camp with his brother and makes his way to where Diomedes, a Greek warrior is calling on Cressida. Troilus sees from the shadows that Cressida tries just a bit to resist, but then she flirts with Diomedes and tells him she will be his. She curses herself for betraying her love to Troilus, but then laments that this is the plight of the woman, to do what she must to survive and make the most of things. A devastated Troilus denounces Cressida and decides he will go into battle the next day with Hector and kill Diomedes. We don't really see too much of Paris or Helen, who this story usually centers around. The next day in battle, Hector is a beast, felling Greeks right and left...one of the casualties being Patroclus. This finally stirs a fire under Achilles and he vows to kill Hector. He confronts Hector at the end of the day, when Hector has put down his sword, and with the help of his minions, Achilles kills a defenseless Hector, and then ties him to the back of his horse and drags him around. :-( It's never clear whether or not Troilus kills Diomedes, but Troilus does come back from battle unharmed, and with everyone else, laments the death of Hector and vows to fight the Greeks until they are all obliterated. Shakespeare had his usual brilliant writing, which at times I could decipher. It was just for some reason harder for me this time. There were a few long speeches where I wasn't sure what was being alluded to, lol. That one line I enjoyed, was uttered by Cressida when she and Troilus were figuring out they loved each other, "To fear the worst oft cures the worse.".

Finished: Alice Adams (Tarkington) The 1922 Pulitzer Prize winner, Alice Adams was the second book by Booth Tarkington to win the prize. The first was in 1919, The Magnificent Ambersons, which I read back in November of 2012. Having read them both, I can definitely say that Tarkington is one of those writers with the knack for developing characters and describing a setting so well that the story takes the reader right there. The Magnificent Ambersons was much more complicated, with several generations of the Amberson family being explored. Alice Adams is just a simple story about a beautiful, lower-middle class young woman who is trying desperately to climb her way into the social elite and stay there. It's really rather sad how Alice is treated by most of the other town girls, simply because her father, Virgil Adams, has worked for the richest man in town, J.A. Lamb, for thirty years. J.A. Lamb isn't a bad guy. He's always been fair and Virgil Adams has the utmost respect for him. Many years back, though, Lamb had Virgil develop a formula for glue that would actually stick which Virgil did. Virgil, and more importantly, Virgil's wife, thought this would be Virgil's big ticket to making it rich and giving his children the status that their mother so longed for. However, Lamb got interested in other avenues and never went forward with the development of the glue. All these years later, when Alice is humiliated at the only dance she's invited to, she comes home sobbing...but not wanting her father, who has been sick, to hear. He does hear, though, and finally decides after years of nagging that he will do as his wife asked, take the glue formula, and start his own factory. When he sends Lamb a letter of resignation, Lamb is furious and opens his own factory, which will pretty much decimate Virgil's, thus, ruining him and his family. When Virgil confronts Lamb, Lamb actually has a heart and though he doesn't take Virgil back to work for him, he pays him enough to cover all his debt, including paying off his house, to buy Virgil's small factory, which Lamb doesn't really need. So....all of this drama is brought about by the mother nagging the father about Alice (and her brother) not having what all the other rich kids have. And, it comes from Alice having the attitude and giving off airs to everyone in town that she IS as well off as the other girls. When Alice meets the new rich boy in town, Arthur Russell, he is smitten with her personality and beauty, and he spends many evenings walking with her and talking on the porch. She begs him not to listen to what anyone in town has to say about her. She knows he'll find out how poor she is, and apparently, though never actually stated, that she was rather "fast" with the boys as a teenager. Anyway, Arthur inadvertently hears the talk, first about how Alice's father has stolen the glue formula from Lamb (which I suppose technically he did since he developed it while in Lamb's employ), and then about how Alice is a really pushy girl who resorts to fabrications. Arthur is very sad to hear this, but he can't unhear it. When he goes to the Adams house that evening for the first official dinner to be spent with Alice's parents, everything goes wrong and Arthur is so disconcerted anyway, that Alice realizes this will be the last time he comes courting. She basically created her own fate by willing it to be so and over-emphasizing to him that she didn't want him to listen to what anyone had to say about her, instead of just being herself and being truthful. It was her own true self that he was actually attracted to. In the end, after watching her father go through the business struggle he does and have a relapse of illness, Alice finally grows up a bit. She tells herself she'll quit trying to be someone she's not and she heads to the business company in town that trains young ladies to be secretaries and stenographers...a place she had detested and avoided all her young life.

It's not a bad story, or too terribly sad. I think the worst part for me was how society simply wouldn't even let Alice be a part of the rich girls...and...how terribly the mother nagged at her husband to get him to give up a secure job, the respect of his boss, and his own self-respect, to try and become rich like everyone else. Does this book have the meat and emotional content that All The Light We Cannot See, 2015 winner does? Nope. :-) But,  I definitely got hooked on the story as I was reading, and enjoyed the writing.

Finished: All The Light We Cannot See (Doerr) Mesmerizing, heartbreaking, deeply felt,  2015 Pulitzer Prize winner that took me completely away to the lives of the intelligent, intuitive, blind French girl, Marie-Laure, and the sensitive, compassionate, mechanically gifted German boy, Werner, as they forge their own paths through the horrors of World War II as Germany occupies, and the war decimates, the coastal town of Saint-Malo, France. The story goes back and forth both in time and between Marie-Laure and Werner, and all the characters who have huge impacts on their lives. In just a few short days I have grown very attached to a few of the characters, so richly depicted, given so many levels of humanity, so compassionate, yet so steeped in that basic instinct to just survive the atrocities, no matter which side they're on. I came to love Volkheimer and Frederick and Frau Elena and Etienne and Werner and Marie-Laure, each for their hearts and for the courage they displayed in the face of this world of war and suffering they were dropped into. Volkheimer "go find her"....Frederick "I will not throw the water"....Frau Elena "I'll go first". Sigh. Love them all! 

A favorite quote at the end: "And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father, and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might hary the sky in flocks like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs and pass out through the other side; the air, a library and a record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it. Every hour, she  thinks, someone for whom the war was a memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass, in the flowers, in songs."

I can't possibly do this book justice in a tiny recap, but will tell the gist of the story. 

Werner is an orphan who grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, in a small German orphanage run by Frau Elena...one of the rare, selfless, loving runners of orphanages depicted in fiction. Werner and Jutta's mother died long ago in childbirth, and their father, a couple of years back in the deep mines, which they still live near. Werner is super intelligent, and kind. He always finds a way to bring food back to the other children of the orphanage. He rigs up a working radio from an old broken radio that he finds and the children and Frau Elena are treated to nightly broadcasts of different music, etc. Werner and Jutta listen to the radio at all hours of the night, and are mesmerized by the broadcasts of a French man who talks about all manner of things...about the earth, the stars, the moon, history, music, math, etc. Werner is fascinated and dreams of becoming an engineer. By the time he is thirteen, he has caught the attention of a German officer whose radio he fixes, and Werner is sent to a school for young German boys which actually turns out to be a military training camp for the youth of Hitler. It was either this, or Werner would be sent, like all the poor fifteen year old boys, to work in the same mine his father died in within two years. Jutta is devastated to lose Werner, and furious with him when he destroys their radio before he leaves. He does not want Frau Elena or the children to be punished if the taboo radio is discovered. Werner is the smallest in his class of recruits, but always with the idea of going to work in Berlin at an electrical university in mind, he follows the lead of the other boys and does as he's told. He does not embrace the youth of Hitler rhetoric...he has a conscience and cannot understand the philosophies of the hearts of most of his compatriots, but he does not go against the flow either. We come to love his uber sensitive, bird-loving, roommate, Frederick, who DOES go against the flow, refusing one night to follow his commander's orders and throw a bucket of water on a near dead, already freezing prisoner of war that the boys are being made to taunt. Frederick ends up being taunted, brutally beaten and brain-damaged by some of the older boys, and sent home in disgrace. Werner feels guilty about Frederick for the rest of his short life, but there was nothing he could have done to stop them. As the war escalates, more and more German soldiers are needed, as Germany is now being defeated in Russia. Werner is now sixteen, and has brilliantly created a transceiver that can detect the exact whereabouts of another radio transmission. His commanding officer tells HIS commanding officer that Werner has lied about his age and that he's really eighteen and ready to go to war....so the tiny Werner is sent off to the front lines at sixteen and put under the command of the twenty year old, giant of a young man, Volkheimer. At school, everyone had been scared to death of Volkheimer, but he turns out to be very caring of the five men in his team...particularly Werner. He sees the potential of Werner, knows how extremely brilliant he is, and knows he could really make something of himself if he weren't being thrust into the war like they all were. 

Meanwhile, we learn that Marie-Laure is the daughter of single father, Daniel LeBlanc, the locksmith and keeper of all keys at the Natural History Museum in Paris. At the age of six, Marie-Laure goes blind from inoperable cataracts. Her father, a talented craftsman, builds her a miniature, detailed replica of their neighborhood in Paris for her to study with her hands. Once he feels she is an expert, he takes her out every day and turns her about to mix her up and has her guide them home from wherever they are. She is very intelligent and curious and loves her father dearly. On every birthday her father creates for her an intricate puzzle box with a small prize inside. He is always amazed at how quickly she can figure out the mechanisms and find the secret compartment. Marie-Laure also loves going with her father to the museum every day. One day when she is eight years old, Marie-Laure hears the story of the Sea of Flames diamond...the very rare 133 carat, pear-shaped diamond that has been held in a vault in the museum for 196 years. The legend says that an earth goddess created the diamond for her lover, a sea god, and threw it into a river so it would float out to him. Instead, a prince found the diamond before it could go out to sea. The goddess was furious and put a curse on the diamond. Whoever possessed it would never die, but all his loved ones would suffer tragedy until the diamond was returned to the sea. Sure enough, the prince never died, but horrible tragedies did befall all his loved ones. Nearly two hundred years before the current date, someone had finally acquired the diamond and given it to the museum, who locked it away, not to be shown until 200 years had passed. Four years later, when Marie-Laure is twelve, it is getting to be time for the diamond to be on display, but at that moment in time, Germany has now begun attacking Paris and Hitler is determined to make all the art and jewel treasures his own. The curator of the museum has three pristine fakes made of the diamond. He keeps one fake at the museum, and then sends the other two fakes and the real diamond away with three museum workers he trusts....one of them, Marie-Laure's father. He doesn't tell any of them who holds the real diamond, so they will all guard their diamond as if it is the real thing. Because the city is being bombed, and it is has become so dangerous, Daniel takes the hidden diamond, his woodworking tools, and Marie-Laure and they flee to Saint-Malo, where Daniel's uncle Etienne, himself a World War I survivor, but one with PTSD demons, lives. They flee so fast that Marie-Laure cannot even bring her beloved braille book, Part 1 of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. When they reach Saint-Malo, they are greeted by Madame Manec, who has been with the family since Daniel's father and uncle were boys. Daniel's father and uncle had suffered through World War I together, with only Etienne surviving. He has not left the house, a beautiful, tall, thin, six story building, in years. He has, however, maintained a huge radio transmitter and receiver on the sixth floor which his own father had used to broadcast various educational talks. His father was the French man who Werner and Jutta had listened to as children!! Etienne also has his own huge collection of radios, transmitters and receivers in his fifth floor bedroom. He installs Daniel and Marie-Laure in the other fifth floor bedroom, where Marie-Laure's father proceeds to build her an exact replica of Saint-Malo. Etienne is thrilled to have his nephew and great-niece there, as is Madame Manec. They all suffer the pains of the German occupation together, going through rations, curfews, and the relinquishing of all firearms, and sadly, of all radios. They don't, however, relinquish the huge radio system on the sixth floor, and instead, Etienne and Marie-Laure move a huge wardrobe over in front of the little door leading up to the sixth floor, covering it. Etienne builds a secret, sliding door inside the wardrobe, the only access now to the sixth floor. 

One day, the nosy neighbor, who gets favors from the German soldiers for tattling on other people, turns Daniel LeBlanc in as a conspirator!! He tells the officers that he constantly sees him outside with a notebook, taking measurements. Of course, Daniel was just taking his measurements so he could build the replica for Marie-Laure. At the same time, Daniel receives a letter from the museum curator who tells him it is now safe and time to return back to Paris, keeping his package secure. Daniel debates to himself whether this is a sincere letter, and whether he should actually travel with the diamond. He does decide to travel, but leaves the diamond hidden back in the house. And it's a good thing, because he's arrested due to his neighbor! The police search him high and low, but he has nothing with him. He is thrown into a German prison anyway at the protest of the museum who lets Etienne and Marie-Laure know that Daniel has been imprisoned, and they will do their best to get him out. Marie-Laure is, of course, devastated. Her father manages to get a couple of letters to her before all communication is broken off. In one of them he tells her to think of what he used to make her for her birthday. He tells her he knows she will do the right thing, and tells her the answer is inside Etienne's house, inside Etienne's house. She doesn't understand the confusing letter for a few years to come. From the time she is twelve to the time she is sixteen, Marie-Laure grieves for her father, and hopes he will walk back through the door, but she goes on and makes a life with her great uncle, Etienne and Madame Manec. Madame Manec gets involved with a group of women who start transporting secret messages to the Allies about the German doings and weaponry in Saint-Malo. She convinces Etienne to climb out of his fearful shell and get involved again. He does so by broadcasting the numerical messages from his secret radio room on the sixth floor. It's a dangerous game they play, as Marie-Laure is the one who innocently taps her way to the bakery every day with her cane to retrieve their loaf of bread, inside which the tiny numerical message has been baked. However, when the tide starts to turn in the favor of the Allies, it is clear to them all that they are making a difference. It is also clear to the Germans who reassign Volkheimer's radio group, including Werner, from the retreating lines in Russia, to the French town of Saint-Malo, one of four towns they suspect of sending the illegal transmissions. If anyone can pinpoint the transmissions, it's the brilliant, and now truly eighteen year old, Werner. In his first act of humane defiance, though, Werner doesn't let on the first time he hears the transmission when it's nothing more than the French voice he used to listen to as a child! They are the same recordings, and he is stunned. After the recording finishes, he hears another French male voice rattle off some numbers, and then the transmission shuts down....but not before Werner is able to climb to the roof of the building where they are and figure out that the exact location of the transmission seems to be that very tall house in the distance. He does not tell Volkheimer that he has heard the transmissions, and the next day he goes on a lone mission to see exactly where the house is. He is shocked when a beautiful blind girl comes through the front door and he follows her as she makes her way to the bakery. 

Meanwhile, we have met a Lieutenant Von Rumpel who is pretty high up in the German military chain, whose sole duty is going about the various cities authenticating, then confiscating the art and jewel treasures for Hitler. Von Rumpel, though, is suffering from and treated for lymphoma. He gets sicker and sicker as his mission continues, and he becomes fixated, not with doing his duty, but with finding the Sea of the Flames diamond. He must have it in his hands. He believes the legend, and believes the diamond will heal him once and for all. He methodically makes his way, first to the museum, where he realizes that diamond is a fake, then to the person who crafted the three fakes, and then to each of the two diamonds that are fakes, before realizing that the real diamond is out there, and was given to the safekeeping of the museum locksmith. That's right! Marie-Laure's father had the real diamond! Von Rumpel makes his way to Saint-Malo, where he knows that only the locksmith's blind, sixteen year old daughter, along with her great uncle live. (Madame Manec has succumbed to pneumonia a few months before.) 

So, all the main players converge on Saint-Malo. Marie-Laure, who sometimes stops at a secret ocean grotto whose only entrance is a rusty gate under a roadway, the key of which has been entrusted to her by a friend of the baker's wife, likes to feel the tides lapping at her calves and feel the different shells and barnacles and snails on the walls and floor of the hideaway. She occasionally stops here after picking up her loaf of bread. One day, she is detained by Von Rumpel who quizzes her about what, if anything, her father may have left behind. She is so frightened, that even after Von Rumpel leaves, she locks herself in the grotto. Etienne, who has not left the house in years, gets so worried that he finally gets up the courage to go and look for her. Together, he and the baker's wife find her in the grotto and take her home. After that, Etienne decides it's too dangerous for Marie-Laure to be involved anymore. He will now make the daily trip to the bakery. One day, he arrested and thrown in the prison right here in Saint-Malo. Marie-Laure is all alone, and when she realizes her uncle is not coming back, she becomes frightened...especially when the bombing starts! She makes her way to the basement shelter, and when the bombing stops, goes upstairs to get her shoes and her coat. She shoves two cans of some food from the shelter in her pocket, along with the kitchen knife. She will make her way outside and try to get some help. While she is getting her things, she hears the little alarm bell on the third floor ring. She freezes. This is the bell that was set up by her uncle to let them know if someone entered their house. Knowing there is someone in the house, Marie-Laure grabs only the miniature of Etienne's house off of the town replica, shoves it in her pocket, and makes her way to the secret door of the wardrobe. Long ago she had figured out her father's letter. Her father had constructed the tiny replica of Etienne's house as a secret box, inside which he had hidden the diamond! Marie-Laure knows that she holds the Sea of the Flames, but she also knows the legend. She wonders if this is why their house is one of the only few left standing after all the bombings. She knows instinctively that this is what the German soldier who has tripped the bell wire has come for. 

Meanwhile, Volkheimer and Werner are trapped in the basement of the hotel that had been, until the most recent shelling, their headquarters for trying to find the illegal radio broadcasts. Hit hard by the American bombers, they are trapped beneath tons of rubble. Werner manages to fix their damaged radio and he tries desperately to find a transmission from someone somewhere. He knows that he and Werner will only survives a few days with no food, water and limited oxygen. 

Von Rumpel turns the house upside down looking for the diamond. He has figured out that it would be a part of the miniature town, and he sees the missing house in the replica. Had the girl taken it with her when she fled? His disease and the morphine he takes make him delirious. He remains in the house, forcing Marie-Laure to continue hiding out upstairs with only her two cans of food, but petrified to make any sound to get them open, lest the intruder hear her. She can hear him when he's in the room below her, rummaging around, but he never finds the trap door. Finally, one night when there is a mass of shelling, she manages to open one can with her knife and a brick, and deliriously eats the green beans within, and drinks the water they were canned in. She decides that she will begin broadcasting music and some of her great-grandfather's old recordings out on the radio system. What can it hurt? She's hoping that somewhere Etienne will hear it and know she is still alive and needs him. It's not Etienne that hears her, but Werner! He has finally fixed the radio and hears the broadcasts, and also puts the headphones on a severely dehydrated Volkheimer so he can hear too.  Volkheimer listens to the music and Werner listens as Marie-Laure reads a chapter at a time of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea...her beloved braille book, parts 1 and 2,  having been replaced by her Uncle Etienne on her sixteenth birthday. He falls in love with Marie-Laure over the air, and is horrified when, after reading the latest chapter, she utters, "help me, he's in the house, right beneath me, he's going to kill me." Volkheimer, in a last surge of strength, finally gets himself up and moves some pieces of broken wall, and shoves Werner behind them. He then takes one of their grenades, removes the clip and throws it at their stairwell that has them trapped with debris. Miraculously it clears a hole and neither of them are injured. Volkheimer gives Werner the one rifle they have between them and tells Werner, "go get her", and so he does. 

By this time, Marie-Laure has become so dehydrated and disoriented herself, that she decides she'll just play some of the musical broadcasts full blast and let the German solider come and find her. She'll wait at the top of the trap door with her knife. Just as she can hear that Von Rumpel has finally found the trap door inside the wardrobe, the little alarm bell tinkles again! Neither of them know who, but we know that Werner has entered the house. Of course, Werner prevails and kills Von Rumpel. He lets Marie-Laure know that he is a friend...that he has heard her broadcasts...that he listened to the older broadcasts as a child. They have to wait until noon the next day, when the Americans have called a scheduled seize fire so the citizens of Saint-Malo can retreat, before Werner can help Marie-Laure to safety. In the meantime, they eat the last can together...it's peaches! They talk, and Werner looks through a bird book, reminding him of Frederick. He asks if he can take a page. They spend the night in the shelter, and talk about their childhoods, their loved ones. The next day, Werner puts some of Etienne's clothes over his German uniform and makes his way with Marie-Laure. She forces him to take a detour first, though, and she take shim to the grotto. She opens the gate with they key that was given her, and wades into the lapping tides. She sets the little wooden house in the water, and begs Werner to tell her whether it's going out with the water. He tells her it is. She closes the gate back up, and they make their way to where Werner sees a string of citizens leaving town. He tells her she's safer now going on her own rather than with him and he points her in the right direction. She wants him to go with her, but he thinks it won't be safe for her. She thanks him and presses something into his hand...the grotto key. He watches her until she's safely with the others, and then he makes his way back, where he is captured and taken by the Americans to a prison camp that has been set up. Marie-Laure is soon found and embraced by the baker's wife, and then even more happily, Etienne has been released from the prison and is reunited with her. They decide to make their way to Paris to live where Marie-Laure had lived with her father, where they can continue to make inquiries about what has become of him. Sadly, her father's fate is never known to them. I think he might have been the prisoner they were throwing water on. :-( Werner, gets very ill with fever at the prison camp. His only possessions are his knapsack, inside which is the small wooden house that Marie-Laure had put in the tides and the small, treasured notebook that he scribbled all his questions, dreams, and mechanical drawings in as a child. Jutta had sent him his old book on one of the last correspondences he'd had from her. In the delirium of his fever, eighteen year old Werner gets up from his cot in the camp hospital and wanders towards the border of the camp. As an American soldier is yelling for him to stop, Werner steps on a land mine left by his own German army and is blown to pieces. oh my God, this made me so sad. :-( :-(  I wanted Werner and Marie-Laure to be reunited again one day! Such a tragic, tragic loss. 

We flash to thirty years later and Volkheimer lives alone in an apartment. He's a TV antennae repairman. He gets a package in the mail from the veteran's service and an attached letter. It's Werner's old knapsack, inside the notebook and some little wooden house. Volkheimer makes a day long trip to see Werner's sister, Jutta, who now has her own little six year old boy, Max, who appears to be a miniature Werner. He spends some heartwarming time with little Max, and he tells Jutta that all he knows about the little house is that Werner must have gotten it in Saint-Malo, where he thinks Werner may have fallen in love with a girl. Volkheimer then leaves, and Jutta spends some emotional time looking through the notebook, which she remembers dearly from their childhood. Jutta makes the emotional trip to Saint-Malo and ends up talking with the son of the baker's wife, who had known Marie-Laure so well. He tells her that is a replica of her house, the blind girl's house. He tells Jutta what he knows of Marie-Laure's whereabouts, and Jutta heads to the Museum of Natural History in Paris, where Marie-Laure now works. She has a doctorate in the study of mollusks and snails. 

When Jutta and Marie-Laure meet, all the memories of the German boy who saved her life come rushing back to Marie-Laure. Jutta tells her, again, that she and her brother listened to the recordings when they were little, and Jutta gives Marie-Laure the wooden house. Marie-Laure is visibly moved. Did he go back for it? Did he not leave it in the tides? Jutta says it's time for her to go, and leaves Marie-Laure with her thoughts, but not before Marie-Laure gets Jutta's address so she can send her the very old vinyl record, the only one that survived the bombings...one made of the recordings Jutta and Werner listened to as children in the orphanage. When alone, Marie-Laure opens the box, and out falls the key that opened the rusty gate to the grotto. So, Werner went back for the house and left the diamond where Marie-Laure wanted it. Sigh. He just wanted her house. 

Truly, this was a really great book. The World War II books that explore the horrific affects that the war had on innocent children and families always get at my heart. I'm not sure where, but this book is going to definitely go on my favorites list! 

Finished: Bleak House (Dickens) A very long, but typically good Dickens book...his scathing commentary on lawyers, courts, and the entire 1800's English judicial system as told through one huge generations-old lawsuit, Jarndyce vs Jarndyce. and through the eyes of several characters, including a selfless heroine who for once gets a :::gasp::: happy ending!  The book is far too long and has far too many characters to do a total recap. The lawsuit involves an old will and just who exactly the benefactors are supposed to be. While it grinds on through the legal system, and becomes nothing more than a joke to most of the lawyers, and a devastating albatross of faux-hope for many of the "benefactors", lives are ruined along the way as people become consumed with getting an outcome. One of the people listed in the lawsuit, John Jarndyce, is a man in his fifties who has long since washed his hands of the lawsuit and lived fairly well off at his estate, Bleak House. Bleak...so named because both his father and his father before him wasted their lives away in the Jarndyce vs Jarndyce suit, eventually succumbing earlier than they should have. John, determined to escape that fate, becomes the benefactor to two young orphan cousins, 19 year old Richard and 17 year old Ada, who are named in the lawsuit. Richard holds out hope that they will eventually settle, and is sadly never able to stick to any of the many careers he tries, eventually becoming so obsessed with the lawsuit that he alienates John Jarndyce, goes into terrible debt, and dies in his early twenties. This is not before he and Ada fall madly in love (as many 1800's English cousins apparently did) and married. Before Richard's downfall, John Jarndyce brings a lovely young lady of about 20, who happens to be an orphan herself, Esther Summerson, to Bleak House. Esther is a caring, selfless, pretty young woman who has been brought up by her cruel aunt...who never even tells her that she's her aunt! She is kept away from other people, and eventually sent to be educated at a girl's school. What we soon find out is that Esther is really the daughter of Lady Dedlock, a rich woman married to the older Sir Leicester Dedlock. Having had a relationship with a man she loved before she was married, Lady Dedlock gave birth to a daughter who she was told (by her sister) had died. Then, the man she loved was also presumed dead at sea. Lady Dedlock thought it would shame her sister and her family for the baby to be known to the world, so she lies to her sister about her stillbirth, hides the baby away and raises her like she's a maid. Esther, however, is a veritable Cinderella in terms of gentleness and kindness. When John Jarndyce comes to know of her after her aunt dies, he sends for Esther to come and be the companion to his ward, Ada. Ada, also a very sweet, beautiful girl, and Esther become as close as sisters. Many twisty, turny relationships and happenings occur between several characters, ranging from the poorest of the poor, to the terribly shady, awful lawyers, to an ex-military man who has never settled down, to his ex-military friend who is happily married with three children and making an ok living as a musician. Some particularly memorable characters: George Rouncewell, the aforementioned military man who is one of the good guys; Mr. Snagsby, another good guy who runs a law stationary business; Jo, the poorest of the poor boy who lives on the street and is treated so kindly by George, Mr. Snagsby and Esther before finally dying; Mr. Tulkinghorn, the sinister, intimidating, blackmailing lawyer, loyal only to Sir Dedlock, who holds Lady Dedlock's secret over her head and leads several people to become suspects in his eventual murder; Inspector Bucket, the wily detective that you at first think will be sinister, but turns out to be a good person who does the right thing in all instances; the Bagnet family, Mr., Mrs. and three kids, who are dear friends of George Rouncewell and are one of the few pictures of family happiness in the book; and Allan Woodcourt, a gifted young doctor and another one of the good, selfless guys, who falls in love with Esther, and she with him. When Esther's face is disfigured after surviving a deadly illness, she assumes that Allan could not possibly love her, but only pity her. Of course, in the end...after doing countless good deeds together for so many people, they get their happy ending and are married, and have two daughters of their own. :-) There are countless other characters in the book, and at times it's hard to keep track of them all, but Dickens ends up weaving them all into either the Jarndyce vs Jarndyce story, or into the underlying more personal story about Lady Dedlock's secret. When Lady Dedlock finds out that her daughter did live and that she's in fact, Esther, they have a heartwarming reunion...but then a just as heart wrenching goodbye, as Lady Dedlock begs Esther for both their sakes to keep the secret. She doesn't want to bring shame to her husband or to make things hard for her daughter, who has found a good place with John Jarndyce. Once Sir Dedlock does finally find out the secret, though, he begs Inspector Bucket to find his wife, who has left what seems to be a goodbye suicide note, and tell her that he loves her and holds nothing against her for what happened before they knew each other! Alas, when Inspector Bucket, Esther and Allan find Lady Dedlock after searching all night, they do sadly find her dead. :-(  That left me with a dreaded feeling that Esther wouldn't get a happy ending at all, which was why I was so glad when Allan finally declared his love for her, and she for him. :-) So glad I finally read this long book, which has been sitting on my shelf, intimidating me for awhile, lol. He may be wordy, and use lots of literary and historical references, and write probably way over my head, but I have enjoyed reading all the Dickens books I've read!

I might start slowly reading all the Pulitzer Prize winners for Fiction, mixed in with my reading of the list of books I'm still working on. Here are the Pulitzer Prize winners I've read so far, all of which I've read these past nearly four years during this project, except for The Old Man and the Sea:

1918  His Family - Ernest Poole
1919  The Magnificent Ambersons - Booth Tarkington
1921  The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
1928  The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
1932  The Good Earth - Pearl S. Buck
1937  Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
1939  The Yearling - Marjorie Rawlings
1940  The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
1947  All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
1953  The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
1955  A Fable - William Faulkner
1958  A Death in the Family - James Agee
1961  To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
1981  A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
1983  The Color Purple - Alice Walker
1988  Beloved - Toni Morrison
1992  A Thousand Acres - Jane Smiley
1998  American Pastoral - Philip Roth
2007  The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Finished: His Family (Poole) The book that received the first ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1918. It's a pretty good book, but a bit cut and dried, if that's a good way to describe it. The story is about Roger Gale, a widower approaching sixty, with three grown daughters, all living in New York in the early 1910's. Upon her death, Roger's wife had begged him to remain involved in his daughter's lives, and he has. Roger, having grown up on a family farm in New Hampshire, is often deep in his thoughts about the quick-changing, "modern" New York. He wonders if his daughters will change along with the city. His oldest, Edith, is married with four children and one on the way. Her primary motivation is being a mother and wife and taking care of her little family. She's very judgemental about any woman who doesn't want to follow the path of being a mother and wife. His second daughter, Deborah, is a teacher/administrator who works tirelessly in the tenements of the city where people from all nationalities have settled in America. She runs a school for the mostly poor population and has grand ideas about an education being more about helping these families face life than teaching the kids math, etc. She is, in essence, about helping ALL the children, and not just her own children. She isn't married, but has a suitor, Dr. Allan Baird, who would love to marry her. He does not expect her to give up being the independent, hard-working woman she is, but he thinks they can do it all together. The third daughter is Laura. She's the spoiled, self-centered socialite of the family. She never has a regard for anyone but herself. She marries a rich young man, and declares she will never have children. When World War I hits, Roger Gale's finances are stretched to the limit, as he's trying to support himself, Deborah, and now Edith and her five children because Edith's husband has been killed in an automobile accident. Times are tough, and while Laura and her war-profiteering husband are getting richer and richer, Roger wouldn't dream of asking them for money, so the rest of them suffer. Eventually, after alot of sacrifice, Roger's business begins to take an upward swing again. He decides to settle Edith and her children on his New Hampshire farm, and this is fine with both her and her oldest son, who wants to make a go at farming. He's written off Laura because after two years of marriage, Laura cheats on her husband with his Italian war-profiteering partner, and gets a divorce and marries the partner, moving to Rome. Roger is mostly worried about Deborah, because she has worked so hard and witnessed so much poverty of the school children that she keeps declining Allan's proposal of marriage, even though she loves him. Finally, Roger goes to his own doctor one day and finds out that he's got an illness and only about a year to live. He lays down the law to Deborah and tells her she's being dumb to not take Allan into her life and have a child of her own if that's what she wants because when he dies, she'll be all alone. She takes this to heart and she and Allan are married. Deborah does get to keep doing her work, but she becomes pregnant and has a very difficult childbirth where both she and the baby almost die. It is precarious for awhile, but they both make it through. Finally, when the baby is thriving and all is going better, then Roger starts his own decline in health. Each of his daughters comes to visit him in his waning hours, even Laura, who has scoured the city to find her father's beloved antique ring collection that he had to sell the first year of the war. Her only selfless act of the book. As the book ends, Roger is drifting off over the mountains to his loved ones who have gone before him. I think this was a pretty good book, but the author referred alot to the New England no-nonsense demeanor of the people in the northeast, and I kind of feel like that's the way he wrote the book...without much emotion. Anyway, I guess it was pretty good, but I'd love to know what other books were up for the Pulitzer that year! :-)

Finished: Marathon Man (Goldman) Wow, a really great, page-turning book! I can't believe there were three one-two punches not too far into the book that I didn't see coming at all! :-) As the book opens, it's the 1970's in New York, and two very old men get into their version of a road rage battle which ends in the tragic death of both of them. One of the men is in the witness protection program and is the father of Nazi Auschwitz torturer, Christian Szell, apparently second to only Mengele himself in his sadistic ways. Szell lives, hidden, in Paraguay, and whenever he needs more money for his reclusive, yet lavish, lifestyle, his father goes to the bank and cashes in a few of the millions of dollars worth of stolen diamonds that Szell smuggled from Germany and keeps in a safety deposit box in New York. Through several clandestine couriers and messengers, the money from the sale of the diamonds is put safely in Szell's hands.

:::there will be spoilers, so don't read this if you want to read the book:::

In another world all his own lives Thomas "Babe" Levy. He's a brilliant, Jewish graduate student who is working on his PhD at Columbia University in history. He is incredibly unattractive and his one hobby is long-distance running. He often fantasizes that he's racing a marathon with current world-renowned marathon runners. He has a brother Henry "Doc" Levy, who is ten years older who works in the oil business. Together, the two of them are the only two left in their family, as their mother died when they were young....and then, the tragedy that Babe can't get over....his father committed suicide when Babe was ten, because he had been falsely accused of being a communist by Joe McCarthy, and could never shake the stigma. Babe, never good with women, actually meets a beautiful Swiss woman named Elsa and falls in love with her, and she with him. He writes to Doc to let him know how happy he is and asks him to come to town and meet her. Meanwhile, we have a snippet of Elsa on the phone to someone named Erhard to whom she indicates it will be easy to make Levy fall in love with her. :-(

In a third world, we meet an American agent, Scylla, who works for "The Division", which is apparently even more super secret and covert than the CIA. Scylla is known in the business for his lethal hands. When he travels to Paris for his next job, he is attacked at night in the park by another known lethal associate, Chen. Chen has obviously been hired by someone to do away with Scylla, but why? Scylla makes quick work of Chen and gets ready for his appointment the next morning. When his reliable contact doesn't make the appointment the next day, Scylla heads to his apartment expecting to find him dead....the only thing that would keep the contact from meeting him. Scylla enters the apartment and finds him sleeping. He realizes right then that the contact didn't make the appointment because he expected Scylla not to be there, i.e., he knew about Scylla's appointment with extinction the night before. Scylla gets what information he can from his contact, and them kills him. The only piece of information that seems worthwhile? That Szell's father had been killed in an automobile accident in New York. Scylla ponders the information and then starts thinking about his lover, Janie, back home. They've been together for five years and maybe it's time he gets out of the business and they make a home in London.

Back in New York, Szell has made his way there for a short trip to try and figure out how to get his hands on his diamonds after his father's death. He is the second signer on the safety deposit box, but he's paranoid and wonders if the police or some other government agency will somehow know and be waiting to arrest him. Also, Babe and Elsa meet Doc, who has come to visit, for dinner at a fancy restaurant. Doc takes the hour or so to size Elsa up and finally gets out of her that she's German, not Swiss. She leaves, upset, and Babe is furious with his big brother. Doc tells Babe that Elsa is using him, probably for a U.S. citizenship and that there's no way a girl that beautiful is on the up and up with the likes of his homely, brilliant, awkward brother. Furious, Babe leaves the dinner in pursuit of Elsa. Elsewhere, in Central Park, Scylla is skulking in the bushes. He's apparently called a meeting with Szell! Before he can get to the gist of the meeting, Scylla realizes he's once again been double-crossed and Szell slices him from the pubic bone to the chest and leaves him to die. Knowing he's dying, Scylla gets up and decides he won't die right there. Meanwhile, Babe, unsuccessful in finding Elsa, has headed back to his apartment in hopes that she'll call. She finally calls hims, but he hangs up quickly when his brother suddenly appears in the doorway terribly injured. He's been cut from pubic bone to chest! His brother, Doc, is Scylla!!! (This was my first one-two punch.)

A devastated Babe holds Doc (Scylla) in his arms as he dies. Soon, the police are going through his apartment as Babe sits in shock. Then, a more formal looking man in a suit comes in and seems to take over. The police bow to his wishes when he says their department will take care of it now. Once alone, he introduces himself to Babe as Peter Janeway, with the Division. He tells Babe he can call him Janie. Gasp!!! (My second one-two punch!) Scylla's lover Janie is a man!

Janeway explains to Babe that Doc was, in fact, a spy for the U.S. who had a dangerous job...and that he and Scylla were close friends. He asks Babe to tell him anything Scylla might have said as he died, but Babe insists he said nothing. He tells Babe he'll keep him safe, but tells him to stay in his apartment until he can get that arranged in the morning. Babe, still in shock, agrees. He feels relatively safe because he's actually a master marksman with the pistol that belonged to his father. He keeps it loaded at all times. When younger he had hoped to use it to exact revenge for his father's suicide, but then Joe McCarthy died. Of course...Babe is NOT safe in his apartment. Two thugs, Karl and Erhard (the guy Elsa called) kidnap Babe before he can get to his gun and take him to meet face to face with Szell himself!!! Szell, of all things, before the war, was a dentist. He uses his dentist tools and drills to torture Babe mercilessly. He insists on knowing information that Babe simply doesn't have. When he's tortured him almost to death, Szell tells Karl and Erhard to take him to another room...that they'll dispose of him later because he obviously knows nothing. Hearing this, Babe is too weak to escape on his own...but then Janeway appears!! He kills Karl and then Erhard and whisks Babe away in his car. He wants to know everything that happened, and so does Babe! Babe insists on knowing the truth, so Janeway finally tells him that his brother Doc (Scylla) was a courier for Szell, sanctioned by the government? Anyway, Szell would take the diamonds from America to Europe to the contact (the one who was sleeping), who would then convert them to cash. For some reason, when his father was accidentally killed, Szell felt as if Scylla would double-cross him on the next transaction and try to take the diamonds, so Szell ordered the first failed hit on Scylla. Having failed, Szell ordered another hit....but Janeway didn't think he'd come to America. However, when Janeway tells Babe that Szell used to be a dentist, Babe cries out that Szell IS in America, because it was a dentist who was torturing him! Janeway asks Babe to try his hardest to remember if Scylla uttered anything to him at all when he was dying, but Babe still insists that he didn't. As they pull to a stop, Babe realizes that Janeway has brought him back to where he was being held captive, and there stand Karl and Erhard, alive!!! (Third one-two punch.) Janeway pushes Babe out of the car and tells the other guys that he truly doesn't know anything. Gasp! Janeway is working for Szell!!! omg, I didn't see that one coming either.

So...the whole rescue of Babe was a ruse to see if Janeway could get anything out of him. Szell instructs the three to kill Babe since he's of no use, and then he leaves. Babe's survival instincts kick in and while Janeway, Erhard and Karl are arguing, Babe puts his marathon man skills to use and takes off running. He outruns them all and is able to get retrieve his gun from his apartment without being caught by the thugs. He also, mistakenly as we now know, calls Elsa to meet him at 6:00 am at the drug store. :-( Elsa comes and, acting like she has his welfare at heart, drives him to this secluded lake house of a friend to rest. Once they get there, though, Babe (remember he's brilliant?)...he turns his gun on Elsa and tells her he knows she must be in on the whole scheme. She tries to deny it at first, but then admits it. He say he knows the others will be coming soon and she says yes. When Erhard, Karl and Janeway come, Babe is very disappointed that Szell isn't there. He really wants to kill the man who killed his brother. The others think that Babe is just this meek nerdy guy and don't take the fact that he has a gun seriously. They never dream he could be a good shot! He kills them all, and before killing her, gets Elsa to tell him where Szell is. Szell is at the bank in Manhattan, retrieving his diamonds!!

So....Babe heads to the bank and finds Szell as he's coming out. Szell the great torturer is such a little wuss with a gun pointed at him. It's truly pathetic. Anyway, Babe takes Szell to some secluded bushes in a park and shoots him...several times. At the end, a young police officer shows up and realizes that Babe shot the dead man who is lying there. Babe says he'll go with the police officer as soon as he's done skimming all of the millions of dollars worth of diamonds into the reservoir like stones. That's the end of the book! I really enjoyed reading this book, and being surprised at so many twists and turns! Believe it or not, with this long recap, I didn't even get everything in! :-) As I was reading, I kept hoping there would be a sequel to the book, but then when it ended in Szell's death, I realized there probably wasn't one. Glad I finally read this one! :-)

Finished: To Kill A Mockingbird (Lee). "Hey, Boo." One of the best lines in the book and I can't possibly articulate why, but if you've read it you know why. :-) So, I finished To Kill A Mockingbrid (again) and I stand by my feelings that it's my number one book that I've read. My top three are all pretty close, but this one just stands out. Anyway...I can see now after re-reading it that the new Harper Lee book that I just read was never intended to be published by Ms. Lee and it's just a shame that it was, imho. All is well in my literary world, though, after spending some time with the true Atticus, Scout, Jem, Miss Maudie, Calpurnia, Dill and the not so mysterious after all, Boo Radley.

Finished: Go Set A Watchman (Lee) I'm so very torn and confused about this sequel/prequel/rumored springboard/disillusioner of To Kill A Mockingbird, but what an amazing writer Harper Lee is. Sigh. I'm very much so still trying to take in everything I've just read, but the gist of the story is that twenty-six year old Scout Finch goes home to Maycomb for her biannual, two week vacation from her current home and work place in New York City and gets slapped in the face, both literally and figuratively, with her father's about face in regards to Civil Rights. And the father we're talking about is, of course, the epitome of all good men, Atticus Finch. It's a life-shattering moment for Scout, who now goes by her given name, Jean Louise, when she witnesses both her beloved father, and her nearly betrothed, longtime best friend and love, Henry, at a citizen's counsel meeting that opposes the recent creation of the NAACP and all it stands for. When the guest speaker gets up and spews the most vile, racist remarks about the lowly "niggers" and her father does nothing but sit and listen, Scout is devastated. Everything she knows, all her morals, her inherent "color blindness", her compassion towards fellow human beings, she has learned from her father from the day she was born. Rather than leaving town, she does confront Atticus, and he tries to explain his reasoning to her, but she tears him to pieces verbally. I don't know that I fully understand his reasoning, even for a white man in 1960's Alabama. I mean...he's the one who defended the innocent black man who was accused of raping the white girl! He's the one who said equality for all! Who would have thought that he did it because it was the right thing to do because the man, not the black man, but the man was innocent? He didn't do it because the defendant was black, he did it in spite of the defendant being black. Anyway, he tries to explain to Scout that the NAACP shouldn't be swooping down in southern states and trying to change things so fast...that the black people aren't ready themselves for such a drastic change, aren't educated enough, are still children in their social growth. He tries to explain that the black people are the majority of the population in many towns and that they'd be suddenly thrust into running towns, etc. without the proper idea at all of how to do it. He wasn't against equality for all, but he thought it needed to work about slowly? I just don't know. Anyway, Scout rails against him and heads for home. Her father's brother, Uncle Jack, slaps some sense into her when she's packed up and ready to leave Maycomb forever. He says, congratulations, you just grew up. Your father and I were waiting for the day when you would finally realize that you have your own conscience. All your life you've taken on Atticus' conscience as your own. And now, you've finally realized that your father isn't perfect, and you disagree with him to the core on this important issue...you've finally grown up. I don't know. I'm still reeling a bit myself at this change in Atticus, so that's about all I'm going to say about the book. I'm not sure if I believe that this was the first draft of To Kill A Mockingbird, as is touted by some...and that it took major rewrites (obviously) to this manuscript before To Kill A Mockingbird was born. There are just too many differences to me. It's an entirely different story. And another thing...Jem Finch is dead. Scout's beloved big brother and protector, another of my favorite characters has been dead for two years when the story takes up. He was 28 and suffered the same heart condition his own mother did, who died when the kids were so little. That was so, so sad for me. :-( I think I might go re-read To Kill A Mockingbird now and pretend this one doesn't exist? Still....such great writing. What a terrible shame that Harper Lee didn't write so much more in her lifetime!

Finished: Written In My Own Heart's Blood (Gabaldon) Book #8 of the Outlander series was one I could hardly put down....but it is the last book that is currently out, meaning now I've got to wait possibly another three or four years for the next book! It becomes a contest of patience...just like waiting for the next Game of Thrones book. Agghh! I'm so happy that this Outlander book didn't end with any major cliffhangers...no one in peril or distress. :-) Even though the American Revolution is ongoing, and Jamie and Claire were both heavily involved in this book, Jamie has resigned his commission as a General in the Continental Army and taken Claire and most of the rest of his family back to Fraser's Ridge to live their lives as peacefully as possible, and rebuild their house that burned down before they left the ridge. Jamie is no coward, and fought valiantly in the battle, nearly losing Claire in the process, as she was shot while doctoring wounded soldiers. They are still going strong as ever. Young Ian falls in love with Quaker Rachel Hunter and they are finally married and have just had their baby son when the book ends. Ian and Rachel have moved back to the ridge with Jamie and Claire. Ian's wolf dog, Rollo, finally died of natural causes, which was very sad. :-(  Ian's mother, and Jamie's sister, Jenny, having come to America with Jamie after her husband Ian died, is now happily ensconced in their lives, relishing in her time spent with her youngest son after so many years, and in being a Granny to the children of Fergus and Marsali. Fergus and Marsali are raising their four young children, and still in the dangerous business of printing their newspaper and pamphlets in the war-heightened city of Philadelphia. Towards the end of the book, their print shop and home is burned down and their youngest son, Henri-Christian dies in the melee. It's so very, very sad and the entire family is devastated by his loss. Fergus and Marsali take Jamie's printer, which has been shipped from Scotland and safely stored away and begin anew in Charleston. John Grey and his brother Hal are also in the mix. They are both still officers in the British army and spend their later time in the book trying to find Hal's captured son, Ben and Ben's new wife and son. At the beginning of the book, though, John tells Jamie that he married his wife (to keep her safe of course) but that he also bedded her. This brings a fury in Jamie and he beats John up and leaves him to some Continental army soldiers. Jamie's conscience bothers him later, as he worries whether his former dear friend may be hanged, but he's relieved to eventually see that John escaped and is back with family. Sadly, their friendship will probably never be the same. Hal's daughter, Dottie, is also a factor in the story, as she has fallen in love with Rachel's Quaker brother, the doctor, Denzell. They also get married, finally with her father's blessing, and are expecting their first child at the end of the book. And then...there's William...Jamie's son, the Duke of Ellesemere, who doesn't know he's Jamie's son...who was raised by John, and who is also a young officer in the British army. We get quite a bit of his story, as we see that his morals, honor and personality are very much a lovely combination of both his fathers. When he finds out that Jamie is his real father, though, by basically coming face to face with him, he's feels heartbroken and betrayed by all and spends most of the last part of the book struggling with his emotions and identity. Towards the end of the book, he does go to Jamie for help in rescuing a young prostitute who he was trying to help, and Jamie does so without hesitation. I think William is beginning to see that Jamie is an honorable man. He asks about his mother and what their relationship was when he was conceived. But then, William tells Jamie he's going away and he doesn't know where. I guess that's the one loose end left at the end of this book, but you just know he'll be back in future books. :-) Also, there are a couple of bad guys during the war, Richardson being the main one, who look as if they will play a part in political stories to come for the family. Meanwhile, back on the ranch, as the author titles one of her sections... Roger, Bree, Jemmy and Mandy had been living pretty happily in 1980 in Lallybroch in Scotland when nine year old Jemmy was kidnapped by Rob Campbell, a coworker of Bree's who read one of Roger's private time-traveling letters to his kids AND a letter from Jamie to Roger and Bree indicating where some old Jacobite gold was hidden...with only Jamie and Jem knowing the whereabouts. So, Rob kidnaps Jemmy and lets Roger and Bree think he's taken Jemmy back through the stones to the past. In reality he has stayed in 1980, but Roger doesn't know this and heads back through the stones! Because he's thinking of Jem as he goes, he actually ends up 30 years earlier than he wants to be because his own father, who Jem is named after, was a missing WWI pilot who had gone through the stones and never returned. Because Jem isn't actually in the past, the stones take Roger to the Jeremiah who IS! So, Roger meets his father and he meets a young Jenny at Lallybroch, and Jamie's father Brian. He also meets a young Dougal McKenzie and Geilis! Meanwhile, Bree is left in 1980 fighting off Rob who has now tried to rape her. Jemmy has smartly figured his way out of the hydraulic tunnel where Rob hid him, but Bree, Jem and Mandy are in constant danger now in Scotland. Bree heads to America to meet with her mother's old friend, Joe Abernathy, the only other person who knows they time travel. Bree knows that Roger will stay in the past looking for Jem forever, not realizing he never went...so, because of that, and because they are in constant danger, she makes preparations and decides to take her kids and travel back to Roger. After they have a lovely family reunion, they then decide to travel in time to where Jamie and Claire are. At the end of the book, while Jamie and Claire are standing at the site of what will be their new home on the ridge, they see four people coming up the trail and after a few minutes realize that it's Bree, Roger, Jem and Mandy! They fly down the path towards them, and that's the end of the story for now. So....sigh...now I wait like the rest of the people who have already read all the Outlander books!

Finished: An Echo In the Bone (Gabaldon) Outlander book #7! Only one more book to go until I've read them all and then have to wait (I hope not like the Game of Thrones wait) for the book being currently written. :-) In this continuing saga of Claire and Jamie, the couple moves from Fraser's Ridge and right into the heart of the Revolutionary War. Well, not the heart, as in Boston...but they certainly feel the affects of war as Jamie fights for the rebels in North Carolina and Claire continues to put her medical skills to use. Roger and Brianna have taken their children back through the stones to 1980 to get the heart surgery for little Amanda. They buy the now ancient Lallybroch, and in a prearranged twist, keep in touch with Jamie and Claire's adventures through a series of letters that Jamie and Claire have entrusted to the Royal Bank of Scotland, to be given to Roger and Brianna two hundred years later! There's a bit of adventure in 1980 as William Buccleigh McKenzie, Roger's great, great, great, etc. grandfather is propelled through the stones and shows up on their doorstep wanting to go back. And, there's a questionable man who Brianna works with, Rob Campbell, who kidnaps Jem in the attempt to get Roger and Claire to tell him the location of the stolen gold that belonged to Jocasta, Jamie's aunt. Thinking that Rob has taken Jem through the stones, Roger and Buc go back themselves. That's exactly what Rob wanted Roger to think. In actuality, he stayed in 1980 and it leaves him free to intimidate Brianna. Back in the 1770's, Ian has fallen in love with Quaker, Rachel Hunter, and she with him. Will their love be allowed, or will Arch Bug get to Rachel to exact his revenge on Ian?? Jamie makes good his promise to Jenny, finally, as he, Claire and Ian take a ship to Scotland. Jamie wants to pick up his old printing press and take it back to the Americas to continue fighting the war with words and not weapons. While there, they take Ian back to Lallybroch where they discover, much to their shock and heartbreak that big Ian is dying from consumption. It's so sad as they are barely there in time to each spend some quality time with Ian before he dies. Jamie and Ian have been like brothers since childhood, and I think this is the first time in seven books that I had tears in my eyes. :-( While in Scotland, Claire gets an urgent message from Marsali back in Philadelphia that her youngest, Henri-Christian, is in dire need of her help as a surgeon. And, big Ian tells his son, young Ian to head back to America with Claire before he dies to tell Rachel he loves her. So, Claire and young Ian head back to America before Jamie. After Ian dies, Jenny decides to leave Lallybroch and go back to America with Jamie. They book passage on one ship, and Jamie writes Claire of their imminent departure. However, when they get there to take the ship, it has left the day before! Furious, Jamie finagles passage for himself and Jenny on another ship. Tragically, the original ship sinks with no survivors, so Claire is devastated to be notified that Jamie has died at sea! What's more...she's about to be arrested for passing rebel materials, so Lord John Grey, who is also mourning Jamie, tells Claire that her only form of protection is to marry him immediately. They marry, and actually have sex once in their extreme grief and loneliness. Well, sure enough, about a month later, Jamie finally makes it to Philadelphia and Claire falls into his arms, in disbelief that he is alive. He is also being chased by the British militia that is still in control of the town, and while fleeing Lord John's home runs smack dab into his son, William, who is his spitting image. William is horrified to see with his own eyes that he's actually not the Duke of Ellesmere, but in fact, the son of a Scottish ex-prisoner. We end the book with William storming out, John telling Jamie that he has had carnal knowledge of his wife, with Rachel and Ian admitting their love for one another, with Rollo happily looking on, and with wee Jem stuck in the dark tunnel where Rob has stashed him.

Finished: A Confederacy of Dunces (Toole) Finally read this Pulitzer Prize winner that has been called "an epic comedy" and "one of the funniest books ever written", and while I did laugh out loud a few times, I was not blown away by the book....and in particular found the main character, Ignatious J. Reilly anything BUT funny. Maybe I'm just not deep enough? I don't get it! While the entire book was full of characters that could literally be called a confederacy of dunces, being set in New Orleans and being chock full of idiotic characters, I found Ignatious, the 30 year old educated, but jobless, obese, unpleasant, paranoid, argumentative man who still lived with his mother, who he continuously verbally abused, to be more on the sadly mentally ill side than the light-hearted and/or bumbling humorous side. Anyway...the writing and dialogue of the characters was nicely done. I could just hear the New Orleans, Louisiana accents in the various characters. I think my favorite character was the very abused Officer Mancuso, the policeman who was just always trying to do his job, yet always being ridiculed by his Sargent, and was constantly demoted into demeaning situations until he finally saved the day and became a hero! Anyway...glad I finally read the book, but I think I may be lacking a funny bone or something?

Finished: Atonement (McEwan) Sadness, wretched, unfair, sadness abounds! Can I really put a thirteen year old girl on my Least Favorite Literary Characters list? Yes, yes I can. I remember seeing this movie a few years ago, and being very disturbed by it...but not so utterly moved. This is definitely a case of the book being better. The book delves so deeply into the extremely fantastical and narcissistic mind of thirteen year old Briony Tallis, that we know her every thought as she selfishly, and usually heartlessly, makes every event that she witnesses between two people an inflated story in her mind, with herself usually as some kind of victim or hero. The Tallis family is one of great wealth in 1935 England, and they live on a huge estate. The father is never home, and the mother is often in bed suffering from migraines. Briony's older sister, Cecilia, is ten years older than she is, and her brother, Leon, two years older than Cecilia. Robbie, who is Cecilia's age, is the son of the house maid. After being abandoned by his father at a young age, he has grown up on the estate with his mom and been generously educated by the Tallis father. He's been close to Cecilia and Leon since early childhood, but as our story opens, it's quite clear that the now twenty-three year olds, Cecilia and Robbie, though putting on a good front of bickering, are actually quite in love with each other. They just haven't quite realized it themselves yet. On the eve before Robbie is to leave the estate and go on to medical school (again to be generously paid for by Cecilia's father), Briony mistakenly identifies Robbie as the person she saw raping her visiting cousin, Lola and all their lives change for the much, much worse. :-( Briony never actually SEES Robbie attacking Lola, but just sees a male form get up from her in the dark and walk off. She just WANTS it so badly to be Robbie because she has created this story in her mind that Robbie is a sexual maniac and she must save her own sister from him! This wild tale in her head comes from two sources...a note and a library scene. Robbie types a note to Cecilia declaring his feelings for her, planning to give it to her that night at the family dinner. He gets nervous and frustrated re-reading the note, though, and types at the end something about wanting her cunt, 24 hours a day...or something like that. Of course, he rips that out of the machine never planning for it to see the light of day. Instead, he hand writes his true feelings in the real note and plans to give that to her. In a rush to get to dinner, though, he accidentally put the wrong note in the envelope!!!!!!!!!!! And then, he sees Briony on the way to dinner and thinks it would be great if Cecilia saw his declaration before he gets there, so he asks Briony to take her the note! Aggghhh! Of course, the little brat reads the note! And, even though she doesn't know what the word means, she know that it's a vulgar sexual reference and she becomes determined right there that Robbie is a maniac and she must protect Cecilia from him, who will heap thanks and praise on her later. Robbie realizes too late that he put the wrong note in the envelope and almost doesn't go to the house....but it's a good thing he does, because Cecilia pulls him into the library and they declare their love for each other and start kissing, and going further, standing up against the library books, until they are actually making love! And who should hear unusual noises from the library?? Of course, Briony. So, Briony walks in on them and immediately thinks that Robbie is accosting her sister. She doesn't scream for help or anything, though. She just stands there and watches. When Cecilia runs out, she has no idea what Briony's thoughts are. Later in the evening when cousin Lola's twin brothers decide to run away from their visit, and everyone goes out to look for them on the pitch black, vast grounds. That is when Briony comes across Lola being raped and even though she doesn't see his face, she just KNOWS that it's Robbie. :-( When she rushes to comfort Lola, rather than letting Lola say who it was, Briony declares that she saw him and she knows it was Robbie. Of course, Lola knows better...she knows it was actually Leon's friend who came home with him from London. :-( We all know it...but not Briony. She wants so badly for Robbie to be guilty that she identifies him to the police and doesn't change her story. Lola never corrects her because she fancies herself in love with Leon's rapist friend. :::shudder::: Robbie, who was about to go to medical school, is instead tried, convicted and imprisoned. :-( At least Cecilia doesn't believe a word of Briony's story, though everyone else in the family turns on Robbie...even the Tallis father who has supported him and believed in him all those years. Fast forward five years and Robbie has been released from prison as long as he goes straight into the military to fight in the now raging war against Germany. Cecilia has completely cut her awful family off from her life and become a nurse in London. She has never stopped believing in Robbie and written back and forth to him the whole time he was in prison. They have declared their love for each other, and their intention to be together after the war...but they only get one brief afternoon together before he's shipped off to training camp and then the war. They manage to share just one kiss, but he carries that kiss with him, and all her letters through the war. The next section of the book is all about Robbie marching in retreat from the Germans with two war companions, making his way back to the coast of France where so many of the English servicemen are now waiting for ships to come and take them home. The scenes and bombings and hysteria he goes through are horrific! And, he does the entire march to the shore with a piece of shrapnel manifesting itself in his side. At the same time, we see that Briony is now eighteen and a nurse in London. She is baptized very quickly in the art of wartime nursing as the first casualties role in. She has written to her sister and hopes to meet with her. She wants to apologize and tell her she was wrong...after all these years. She never explains how she figured out she was wrong, or if she just knew all along. Briony also receives a letter from her father informing her that Lola and Marshall (Leon's rapist friend) are getting married in London that next week. Briony takes the day off from the hospital and attends the wedding, intending to stand up and say Marshall was the real rapist when the priest asks if there is anyone with an objection, but she's too cowardly to do it. She walks to Cecilia's apartment after that and is happily shocked to see Robbie there as well. They are both furious with her. She apologizes for what she did years ago and swears to write a formal letter to both their family and to the authorities clearing Robbie's name. They don't have any loving sisterly moments, but Cecilia and Robbie walk her back to her train station and say goodbye. Briony signs off at the end of that chapter with her initials, and says that the aforementioned writing was the truth of the story....her atonement, for her actions that derailed the lives of Robbie and Cecilia. The story then moves to when Briony is seventy-seven years old and she's an acclaimed authoress. She is going into a museum in London when she espies the very wealthy Lola and Marshall, still married, but themselves quite old now. She avoids running into them, but as we hear her thoughts again, she explains to the reader that while she did write the truth of the rape matter in her story, she has yet to be able to publish it because of litigation factors. As long as the rich, powerful and litigation-happy Lola and Marshall are alive, she can never accuse Marshall of the horrific rape and clear Robbie's name. No publisher will touch it. What's more....she was a coward all those years ago at the wedding...and a coward right afterwards. She never went to her sister's apartment to face her. Robbie had never been there. He'd died of septicemia from his shrapnel wound while waiting for the ship on the shore in France. :-( And, Cecilia had been killed two months later in a bombing in London. :-( They had never seen each other again after their one afternoon kiss when Robbie left for training. :-( Briony made up the part about Robbie being back to see Cecilia, figuring readers would rather have somewhat of a happy ending, rather than the sad truth. Sigh...so, so very sad. All because a selfish, stupid, little girl, who was certainly old enough to know better in my opinion, wouldn't see beyond herself and tell the truth! This was a very well written book, and has obviously evoked emotion in me...but I don't think I can put it on a favorite list, because it's so tragic. :-(