Finished: The Longest Journey (Forster) I went on a mini Forster kick (two books) and though this one wasn't as good as A Room With A View, it was still very well written and deep in content....almost too deep for me. :-) In any event, I did enjoy it. It's one of those books that is just making me sit here in a contemplative mood. The book is about a young man named Rickie, who we first meet at Cambridge with all his friends, his best friend being Ansell. They are discussing Philosophy, which is Ansell's major and life passion. Rickie, who is of average intelligence, doesn't always follow the conversation, but he and Ansell are the best of friends. Rickie's parents both died when he was young, leaving him to be raised by relatives. His Cambridge buddies are now more of a family than he's really ever had before. Rickie can remember his mother, who he idolized. She raised him on her own once his father left them. Rickie is not terribly attractive, and is lame in one foot, which causes him to limp. He doesn't really have the confidence to think much of himself, but wants desperately to just be a writer...writing about nature and how deeply humans and nature interact. Rickie and Ansell grow apart as a girl enters Rickie's life. Agnes, an old family friend, loses her beloved, the man she's engaged to, and soon after sets her sights on Rickie. She doesn't necessarily love him like she did her fiance, but she does care for him and....he comes from a very rich aunt...his father's last living sister. Agnes is greatly motivated by the thought that perhaps someday the money and estate will be left to Rickie, so she snags Rickie and marries him. Ansell, who thinks of Rickie marrying Agnes as a near death catastrophe, pretty much writes Rickie off and won't return his letters or come to visit. Agnes insists that Rickie forge a relationship with his aunt, and when they quarrel and Rickie leaves his aunt's estate, Agnes maintains a correspondence and friendship with the aunt. The quarrel is all about Rickie being forced to spend time with his aunt's ward, Stephen, a young man a couple of years younger than Rickie. Stephen has been raised by the aunt since he was a young boy when both of HIS parents died. Though raised as a gentleman, he's really spent more time out on the land with the laborers of the estate and acts more like the farmers, i.e., he comes off as being a lower social level. He can be outspoken and a bit brutish, and he's also good-looking and athletic. When the aunt sets Rickie and Stephen up to spend the day together, they don't get along well at all and end up going their separate ways. When Rickie comes home alone, the aunt is mad at them both and ends up spilling to Rickie that Stephen is actually his half-brother!! She won't tell him the details and regrets even saying anything afterwards. Rickie is furious and humiliated that his father had another son while married to his mother. After regretting her words, the aunt, Rickie and Agnes all make a pledge not to ever tell another soul that Stephen is actually Rickie's half brother. Of course, Agnes' motivation is that she doesn't want Stephen to have a claim on the aunt's estate or money. The aunt's motivation is that she's just a spiteful, controlling old woman (who we find out later in the book is only 59!!). They write these "old" people as so crotchety and she's only a year older than me, acckk! Anyway, Rickie's motivation is the humiliation he feels for his mother...yet Rickie is the only one who has a guilty conscience about it. He goes on with his life, becoming an assistant school-master with Agnes' older brother, Herbert, and he, Agnes and Herbert live at the school with the boys who attend. Agnes becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby girl who is more crippled than Rickie was, and she doesn't live for more than a few days. :-( This doesn't do much to help a pretty much already loveless marriage, and it sends Rickie into despair. He goes through the motions of his life, but isn't really living with happiness. Soon, both Ansell and Stephen come back into his life...but the two of them meet each other first! Ansell has come to town, but because they are both prideful, neither Rickie or Ansell will make the first move to see each other. Stephen comes bopping in at the house where Ansell is staying and tries to introduce himself to the stranger. Ansell, still being his aloof, philosophical self, doesn't respond to the "good morning", because he doesn't think it IS a good morning. Stephen gets into a tussle with Ansell for his rudeness and Ansell comes to like Stephen in those few minutes, because Stephen is just a real person exhibiting real human emotions with no misgivings. He finds out from Stephen that he's there to see his half-brother, Rickie!!! Stephen doesn't even know that Ansell knows Rickie, and Stephen is very excited to tell Rickie that he just found out he's his half-brother. He even shows Ansell the papers that prove the lineage. However, when Stephen goes over to see Rickie, he refuses to see him and instead Agnes confronts Stephen with her checkbook and asks how much money he has come to blackmail them for to keep quiet that he and Rickie are half-brothers. She tells Stephen that both she and Rickie have known for two years that they are half-brothers, as well as their aunt, and had promised never to tell. Stephen is completely taken aback and even those he's completely broke, refuses her money and quietly leaves the house. Ansell, who had finally decided to make the first move, was just coming into the house as Stephen was leaving. Rickie finally sees Ansell and goes to embrace him, but Ansell is more concerned about why that "young man" just left the house and whether or not he and Rickie talked. Ansell finally blurts out, don't you see?? That's your brother! When Rickie says he knows, Ansell can't believe that Stephen refused to see or even get to know his own brother. Rickie explains that he could never accept the son of the man who cheated on his beloved mother. That's when Ansell informs him that Stephen is Rickie's half-brother by his mother!!! Rickie has to be carried and put to bed at the realization that it was his mother and not his father who was the betrayer. (His father HAD been an ass who had all kinds of affairs first and his mother finally fell in love with Stephen's father and ran away with him, only to have Stephen's father drown after two weeks.) So, Rickie tries to find Stephen, but he has already gone. A few nights later, Stephen breaks into the house drunk and wants to confront Rickie. Rickie takes that as a sign that Stephen has come back to forgive him. It takes alot of convincing during the sober next morning, but he is just about to get Stephen to stay so they can get to know each other when Agnes interferes yet again and cries and screams that Stephen needs to go. Stephen heads out the door but he asks Rickie to leave these people behind and come with him...and he does!! Rickie and Stephen take refuge at Ansell's house! Rickie is estranged from his wife and starts his writing again, but as he used to do, fails when he submits his writings to be published. He's just not good enough. One day Rickie's aunt writes for him to come and visit her, so he does. Characteristic of Stephen, he hops on the train as well at the last minute and insists he'll stay out of the way since the aunt booted him out of her house for constantly being drunk and actually wanted to have him shipped to the colonies to work! Rickie only agrees to let Stephen come if he promises he won't drink, and he does. Rickie goes to see his aunt, who of course tries to convince him to go back to Agnes. When he explains to his aunt that he can't do that and he just wants to write, she actually doesn't argue with him. On his way to get Stephen at a neighbor's, Rickie is met by one of the laborers who tells Rickie that Stephen isn't at the neighbor's, but at the pub drinking! Rickie can't believe it, but then sees it for himself and can't believe that Stephen broke his promise to him not to drink. Rickie is standing on a bridge lamenting when the laborer comes by and asks him if he didn't see Stephen come by since he'd left the bar. At that moment, a slow moving train shows up on the train tracks and in it's shining light, they can see the drunk Stephen fallen and splayed over the train trackss. Rickie has time to get to Stephen and heave him aside, but no time to get himself off the track and he is killed. :-( The book ends with a sober and married Stephen putting finishing touches on some of Stephen's short stories to be published posthumously! He's got a wife and a very young little daughter. He's got the life that Stephen could never quite get for himself. He takes his little daughter out in a warm blanket to sleep under the stars like he used to do when he was a kid. He wants to teach her the good things in life. He kisses her head and we find out he's named his little daughter after his and Rickie's mother. And, that's the end. Such a sad, torturous life for Rickie, really, but I guess we're left with the hope of Stephen, his daughter and his future children. A very well written book, with lots of metaphors, particularly relating man and nature, that probably mostly went over my head...still a good book though. :-)

Finished: A Room With A View (Forster) Beautifully written classic that I truly enjoyed. The novels that I have read, written at the beginning of the 20th century, involving societal English characters rarely have happy endings, and rarely contain in their pages what you can see will most likely BE a happy ending, and this one did both. :-) In this book, young English woman, Lucy Honeychurch, goes abroad to Florence, Italy with her elder, matronly cousin, Charlotte, as a chaperone. From the first night as they stay at the pension (hotel), they meet an array of other British subjects who they become acquainted with, and involved with to varying degrees. Both Charlotte and Lucy befriend Mrs. Lavish, a free-spirited older woman who is out to explore Florence and write her great novel. Lucy befriends Mr. Emerson and his son, George. Mr. Emerson is also elderly, and very much a say-it-as-it-is person. He believes that feelings should be expressed with honesty, especially love. His son, who is in Lucy's age group, is much quieter and more serious. Charlotte rather shuns the duo because she finds the father too forward and vulgar...not proper enough...even though he magnanimously gives over their two rooms to Charlotte and Lucy because they were promised a room with a view, and he and his son were given those rooms. In any event, a few meet ups here and there and soon George is in love with Lucy, and though she has no idea what these feelings are, she is in love with him as well. When he dares to kiss her, her sensibilities are affronted. She's scared and confused and insists that she and Charlotte leave for Rome immediately. Though she has reservations about not telling George, they leave without telling him goodbye. Flash forward to the trip being over and Lucy is back in her small English town with her mother and brother. (Her father is deceased.) She is in the garden accepting a proposal of marriage from a sophisticated, snobbish young man named Cecil who she met in Rome. It's the third time he's proposed, as she's turned him down twice. She finally accepts, convincing herself she's in love with him. But, as an outsider looking in, we can see that he's really nothing more than a snob who will want to mold her into what he wants her to be. He can't wait to get her out of her provincial little town. (As my husband so aptly put it when I was explaining the character to him....think about Cal in the movie Titanic, the upper crust man who Rose was going to marry.) Anyway, it takes Lucy awhile to see Cecil's true persona. It certainly doesn't help that Mr. Emerson happens to let a nearby cottage, and that George spends many a day visiting him! As Lucy and George have a few meet ups like before, but this time with Cecil in tow, she's determined not to let George get to her, but he does. He finally kisses her again one day when Cecil isn't there and blurts out that he loves her and that Cecil is not capable of knowing her intimately, i.e., her heart and soul, and letting her be herself. Lucy sees that George is right, and she breaks off her engagement with Cecil, but refuses to let George be the cause. She books another trip to Greece and is about to go when she runs into Mr. Emerson the night before and he tells her how despondent George was, but how he told him he should never have confessed his feelings to an engaged woman. Anyway, Mr. Emerson ends up seeing in Lucy's face that she loves George as well, even though Lucy herself was just coming to realize it. She tells him that she's no longer engaged to marry Cecil. He talks a pretty talk to her and tells her to muster up the courage to face the scorn of her family and friends and go for love...so she does!! The story ends with Lucy and George, now married, a year from the time they met, staying in the same room with the view in their pension in Florence. :-) The book is so well written and lovely. I truly enjoyed it! I think I will probably read another Forster book next. Here's a snippet of dialogue from when Lucy's mother confronts her about being absolutely secretive about her breaking her engagement to Cecil until after she sails for Greece, i.e., she doesn't want George to find out and follow her!

Her mother, who had also come to see the snobbery of Cecil and wasn't that upset that the engagement was broken off, says:

"You've got rid of Cecil---well and good, and I'm thankful he's gone, though I did feel angry for a minute. But why not announce it? Why this hushing up and tip-toeing?"

"It's only for a few days."

"But why at all?"

Lucy was silent. She was drifting away from her mother. It was quite easy to say, "Because George Emerson has been bothering me, and if he hears I've given up Cecil may begin again"---quite easy, and it had the incidental advantage of being true. But she could not say it. She disliked confidences, for they might lead to self-knowledge and to that king of terrors---Light. Ever since that last evening at Florence she had deemed it unwise to reveal her soul.

Finished: Commonwealth (Patchett) This was a really good book! Their stories slowly unfold as we follow the lives of the six children who are irrevocably affected when the father of four of the children and the mother of two of the children have an affair and break up two young families when they decide to leave their first families and marry. At first I thought this was going to come off as rather soap-operaish, but instead it was a compelling story about how the step-brothers and sisters stuck together, in varying degrees, throughout their lives, even after their offending parents divorced years later. Much of the story centers on the tragic death of the oldest son of the four siblings. The actual cause of his death comes to light in small steps, but we do know that all the other children were there when it happened, and decided as a unit, never to tell their parents what exactly happened. It's really nothing out of the ordinary, but just the guilt and imaginations of children from 9 to 14 thinking they would somehow be held accountable for a death that was purely unavoidable. I felt like I knew each of the children personally by the end of the book, when they were grown, and most of them with children of their own. Franny, the baby girl of the two-child family, is a thoughtful, complex, eager to please young lady who ends up falling in love with the much older writer who she has idolized for years, and he for her. It's been years since he had a best-selling book and with Franny as his beloved and his muse, he writes his next best-seller, a book called Commonwealth. The only problem is...it's the story of Franny's life, and that of the two families, and the six children, and the tragic death of Cal, the oldest son/brother/step-brother. What comes to light is one of the things the children had promised never to mention...the fact that when the six of them used to be together during the summer, left unsupervised by their irresponsible parents (the two that had the affair), the older kids would feed Cal's benadryl tablets to 8 year old, annoying little brother, Albie, to make him fall asleep so the rest of them could run off and go to the lake or wherever they wanted, without his tag-along, non-stop talking, annoyance. Of course, Cal had those benadryl tablets for a reason...because he had a life-threatening allergy. And, so when it came time for Cal to actually need the pills, he had none in his pocket to use. Naturally, all the kids felt guilty for the rest of their lives for allowing Cal to use his pills on Albie just for their convenience. And Albie, who becomes a near-arsonist teenager, never realizes what the other kids used to do to him until he reads the new best-seller. Albie confronts Franny, and her writer boyfriend, Leo, and Franny immediately apologizes. She didn't realize while telling Leo her life story that their intensely difficult and personal childhoods would be displayed for all to see. Needless to say, Leo and Franny discontinue their relationship. All of the surviving children do end up in happy marriages with their own children, except for the oldest daughter of the four-sibling group, Holly, who has found peace in her life by living at a Buddhist Zen retreat in Switzerland! That is really just a fraction of a recap in what is another good, well-written Patchett book!

Finished: Home (Coben) Will Harlan Coben ever write a book that I can take days savoring instead of reading cover to cover in one day?? Sigh, I love my Harlan Coben books! In this book, he brings back Myron Bolitar and his trusty sidekick, Win! I've missed these characters!! In the story, Win has been gone for a year, tracking the people who kidnapped two six year old boys, one of them his cousin's son, Rhys, ten years before. He's finally got a lead, and thinks he has found one of the boys in London. It turns out to be Patrick, the boy who was with his cousin's son that day. Win calls on Myron, and all the usual gang, to help him figure out where Rhys is, and if he's even still alive. All kinds of twists happen as, at first, they don't even think sixteen year old who returned home is truly Patrick, but an imposter. When it turns out to actually be him, his parents refuse to let him speak to the parents of Rhys so he can try and help with what happened to Rhys. What ends up happening in the end, is a surprise, but not a happy one. Turns out Rhys has been dead all along and Patrick, tragically, but accidentally shot him as a six year old. The entire kidnapping was then fabricated by Patrick's parents so that their son wouldn't be scarred and they themselves wouldn't be jailed for having a gun. This is, of course, a very simplistic recap, but same old, good, good, good Harlan Coben! :-)

Finished: The Red Pony (John Steinbeck) Well, what did I really expect from a book by John Steinbeck about a red pony?? Did I think the pony was going to frolic and live happily ever after with his young boy owner? Or, did I think the pony was likely to go the way of many of the tortured, dust bowl characters of his bleak, The Grapes of Wrath? No matter what I expected, Steinbeck is still an amazing writer that just puts things good or bad, right there matter-of-factly in your face. The Red Pony is actually a book with four different parts. I think each of the parts may have been a separate short story, but they're all about a 9 year old farm boy named Jody, his parents, and their ranch hand, Buck. We just see the day to day workings of what was expected of a farm boy in the early 1900's, on a ranch in Salinas, California. His mother works her hands to the bone, and his father does the same. Both are no-nonsense, and the father is very strict. In the first chapter, Jody's father gets him a beautiful red pony. He tells Jody he must take care of him diligently, and at the same time do all his steady chores, and keep going to school. Since Buck is the horse expert, he will be there to guide Jody, but Jody will do the work. So, every day for almost a year Jody feeds, brushes, waters, lunges, etc., his red pony. Finally, about a month before Thanksgiving, Jody's proud father tells him that by Thanksgiving he'll be able to try riding the pony. Jody and Buck begin working on getting the pony used to a saddle. Jody, of course, grows to love the pony and the pony loves Jody. Naturally, a few days before Thanksgiving a storm is brewing. Jody is going to put the pony in the barn before he goes to school, but Buck tells him not to worry about it. He says he'll put him in if it starts storming, and besides, a little rain never hurt a horse. Sigh. Of course, it downpours and the pony is out in the rain all day. Buck is out working himself on some fence or something and never gets back to put the pony in. The next couple of weeks are spent trying to save the beautiful red pony who gets very, very sick. :-( Then, the red pony is near death and he breaks from the barn and goes to a field to die. Jody runs after the pony but when he gets there, a huge vulture is already sitting on his head eating his eye. The pony is dead. :-( So, that's where I almost stopped reading the book because why go on? Seriously, it was heartbreaking. The next three stories, though, were just more stories about Jody and his family. They didn't really go in order. The second one was about a visitor who came to the farm, an old man, who had lived near there in his childhood years and wanted to die near there. He steals one of their horses, who is also very, very old, and rides off into the mountains, presumably to die. The third story does take place after the red pony dies. It has been a few months and Jody's father tells him that if he takes responsibility for their mare, that he'll pay the $5 needed to breed her and then Jody can have and raise the colt! Jody is ecstatic, and again counts on Buck to help him out. It takes almost an entire year, but finally the mare is ready to give birth. But, of course, something is wrong. The colt is turned the wrong way and will kill both itself and the mare during the birth if Buck doesn't do something. Determined not to let this colt die, and more determined not to disappoint Jody again, Buck whacks the mare on the head with a shovel to kill her and cuts her open to get the colt out. Jody watches the whole thing in stunned silence until Buck puts the slimy baby colt in his arms. That's the end of that story, so we don't even get to see Jody raise the colt. The last story is about Jody's grandfather who comes to visit; his mother's father. His grandfather is famous for telling the same stories about how he and the other settlers went west to discover new territory and how they fought the Indians along the way. The grandfather overhears Jody's father complaining about how he always retells the same stories over and over and he ends up leaving sooner than he planned....but not before telling Jody that there wasn't anything else to discover anyway because the westward travelers got all the way to the ocean before they were forced to stop and make their lives there. So...that's it. Just a little bit of depressing Steinbeck, lol. The last story reminded me of my mom and how I would get impatient when she would tell the same stories over and over. Now I'd love for mom to be here to tell one of her stories. Hindsight is always such a cruel thing. ok, ready to read something more upbeat!!