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.