LiteraryBender

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Finished: Rabbit, Run (Updike). Why? Why is this book among the top ranked books on all the lists I've researched?? I'm so disgusted with the main character that I can't even think straight. Never have I come across a more narcissistic, whiny, unsympathetic, despicable character as Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. I don't even want to write about him. How were there three sequels to this book? The entire series is wildly popular, at least in the literary world. Was it a bunch of men who voted for two of these books to win the Pulitzer?? Do they somehow see the 26 year old Rabbit (who walked out on his pregnant wife and 2 year old son without a word, goes to live with a prostitute, impregnates the prostitute, propositions his only friend the preacher's wife, goes back to his wife when she goes into labor, decides to "stick it out", spends about two seconds in awe of his new baby daughter before he selfishly begs his wife to have sex again only nine days after the birth, FIXES HIS PRE-ALCOHOLIC WIFE, WHO HAD GIVEN UP ALCOHOL AND WAS TRYING HER BEST TO FIX HER FAULT IN THE MARRIAGE, A DRINK SO SHE'LL "LOOSEN UP AND HAVE SEX", walks out on his wife when she won't have sex, stays away all night and most of the next day while his wife spirals into a drinking stupor and accidentally drowns their new baby daughter, shows up at the funeral and expects sympathy) as a hero?? As someone they'd like to emulate? I absolutely do not get it at all. I couldn't believe where the book was actually going as the wife was filling up the tub in her stupor. I couldn't believe the baby would die, but she did. So tragic. :-( And then for Rabbit to still take none of the blame?? And, then to read afterwards that he and his wife stay married throughout the next three sequels for over 30 years for more and more crap like this, including a 2 year old son who grows up to be a drug addict...well no wonder!

One of the most over-rated books I've read, truly. Did I keep reading and was there actual good writing in the book? Sure. However, I would never put this book among the top 100 books on any list. I cannot condone, feel compassion for, or try to "get" Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Blech!

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Favorite Books & Plays

To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee) ~ Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) ~ Pride and Prejudice (Austen) ~ The Sound and The Fury (Faulkner) ~ The Help (Socket) ~ A Game of Thrones Series (Martin) ~ Outlander Series (Gabaldon) ~ The Great Believers (Makkai) ~ Little House in the Big Woods Series (Ingalls Wilder) ~ The Thornbirds (McCullough) ~ 11/22/63 (King) ~ A Separate Peace (Knowles) ~ All The Light We Cannot See (Doerr) ~ August Osage County (Letts) ~ Bear Town (Backman) ~ Beloved (Morrison) ~ Charlotte's Web (White) ~ Damnation Spring (Davidson) ~ David Copperfield (Dickens) ~ Emma (Austen) ~ Eugenie Grandet (Balzac) ~ Gone With The Wind (Mitchell) ~ Goodnight Moon (Wise Brown) ~ Heartbreak House (Shaw) ~ I, Claudius (Graves) ~ Jurassic Park (Crichton) ~ Le Pere Goriot (Balzac) ~ Lonesome Dove (McMurtry) ~ Pillars of the Earth (Follet) ~ Northanger Abbey (Austen) ~ Run (Patchett) ~ Tell No One (Coben) ~ The Book Thief (Zusak) ~ The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (Mackesy) ~ The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare) ~The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas) ~ The Firm (Grisham) ~ The Giver (Lowry) ~ The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde) ~ The Kiterunner (Hosseini) ~The Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy) ~ The Snow Child (Ivey) ~ Two Bad Ants (Van Allsburg) ~ War and Peace (Tolstoy) ~ Wild (Stayed) ~ Words in Deep Blue (Crowley)

Favorite Book & Play Quotes

"This disease has magnified all our mistakes. Some stupid thing you did when you were nineteen, the one time you weren't careful and it turns out that was the most important day of your life." - Yale in The Great Believers

"Did my heart love till now? Forswear it sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night." - Romeo in Romeo and Juliet

"Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, which mannerly devotion shows in this; for saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, and palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss." - Juliet in Romeo and Juliet

"I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine." - Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice

"It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion, to be secure of judging properly at first." - Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice

"To the uneducated an A is just three sticks." - Eeyore in Pooh's Little Instruction Book

"If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect." - Levin in Anna Karenina

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only once." - Jojen in A Dance With Dragons

"Melancholy is the nurse of frenzy." - Messenger in The Taming of the Shrew

"You know nothing Jon Snow." - Ygritte in A Storm of Swords

"You have to study and learn so you can make up your own mind about history and everything else, but you can't make up an empty mind." - Headmaster in Angela's Ashes

"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go." - King Claudius in Hamlet

"If you love the maid, bend thoughts and wits to achieve her." - Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew

"Before I can live with other folks, I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience." - Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird

"Really, Mr. Collins, you puzzle me exceedingly. If what I have hitherto said can appear to you in the form of encouragement, I know not how to express my refusal in such a way as may convince you of its being one." - Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice

"Hey, Boo." - Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird

"For your brother and my sister no sooner met but they looked, no sooner looked but they loved, no sooner loved but they sighed, no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason, no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage, which they will climb incontinent, or else be incontinent before marriage. They are in the very wrath of love, and they will together. Clubs cannot part them." - Rosalind in As You Like It

"Two of all the fairest stars in all the heaven, having some business, do entreat her eyes to twinkle in their spheres till they return." - Romeo in Romeo and Juliet

"My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart, concealing it, will break." - Kate in The Taming of the Shrew

"You expect me to account for opinions which you choose to call mine, but which I have never acknowledged." - Mr. Darcyin Pride and Prejudice

"Give every man thine ear, but few they voice." - Polonius in Hamlet

"The power of doing anything with quickness is always much prized by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance." - Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice

"Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpes of something sublime." - Levin in Anna Karenina

"Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?" -Winnie the Pooh in Winnie the Pooh

"It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excrutiatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it." - Quentin in The Sound and the Fury

"The very essence of romance is uncertainty." - AlgernonMoncrieff in The Importance of Being Earnest

"We are possessed by the noblest ideals, but only on condition that they be attained by themselves, that they fall on our plate from the sky, and, above all, gratuitously, gratuitously, so that we pay nothing for them." - IppolitKirillovitch in The Brothers Karamazov

"O day untowardly turned!" - Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing

"My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite." -Juliet in Romeo and Juliet

"The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night." - Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise

Mrs. Prism: "Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us." Cecily: "Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn't possibly have happened." - in The Importance of Being Earnest

"He made me love him without looking at me." - Jane in Jane Eyre

"An advantage this, a strengthener of love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal. Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power which no subsequent connections can supply." - from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

"There is so little to remember of anyone--an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long." - from Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson

"The jokers who settled this place. The Germans and the Dutch and the Irish. Who was the asshole who saw this flat hot nothing and planted his flag? I mean, we f_cked the Indians for this?" - Barbara in August Osage County

"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." - Professor Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

"The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young." - Lord Henry in The Portrait of Dorian Gray

"He had, in fact, though his sisters were now doing all they could for him, by calling him 'poor Richard,' been nothing better than a thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable Dick Musgrove, who had never done anything to entitle himself to more than the abbreviation of his name, living or dead." -from Persuasion by Jane Austen

"The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible than death was the dread of being misremembered after death." - Pip in Great Expectations

"To mourn a mischief that is past and gone, is the next way to draw new mischief on." - The Duke in Othello

"Certainly it was ordained as a scourge upon the pride of human wisdom, That the wisest of us all should thus outwit ourselves, and eternally forego our purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them". - Tristam Shandy in The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman.

"Why, what wasp-stung and impatient fool art thou, to break into this woman's mood, tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own!" - Henry Percy in Henry IV Part One

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother. " - King Henry in Henry V

"To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation." - Pi in Life of Pi

"The difference between a flower girl and a lady is not how she behaves, but how she is treated." - Eliza Dolittle inPygmalion

"It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone." - Hawley in The Winter of Our Discontent

"The wisdom of your father is admitted; The wise may be outrun, but not outwitted." - Pandarus in Troilus and Criseyde

"I'm surprised at you, Scarlett, for sprouting a conscience this late in life. Opportunists like you shouldn't have them."

"What is an oppor--what did you call it?"

"A person who takes advantage of opportunities."

"Is that wrong?"

"It has always been held in disrepute--especially by those who had the same opportunities and didn't take them." -Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind

"I pray for God to crush me, break me up into little pieces and start all over again." - Joe Pitt in Angels in America Part One.

"There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose." - Mrs. Strong in David Copperfield.

"O momentary grace of mortal men, which we more hunt for than the grace of God!" - Hastings in Richard the III by William Shakespeare

"A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!" - King Richard in Richard the III by William Shakespeare

"I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. Today, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then--how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder branded themselves as things eternal." - Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca

"T.S. Eliot" - Wintergreen in Catch-22

"Leave the word. It is not clean." - Messenger in Oedipus the King

"In the crucial moments of life our minds fasten upon the locality where joys or sorrows overwhelm us." - from Eugenie Grandet

"Your head is empty, the hours slip away. From your chair you wander through the countries of your mind, and your thoughts, threading themselves into the fiction, play about with the details or rush along the track of the plot. You melt into the characters; it seems as if your own heart is beating under their skin." - Leon Dupuis in Madame Bovary

"In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again." - Jim Burden in My Antonia

"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement." - Iris Chase in The Blind Assassin

"As a child she'd never thought to ask, and now she would never know. So much knowledge died with a person." - Dellarobia Turnbow in Flight Behavior

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. - from A Room With A View by E.M. Forster.

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Wednesday, March 13, 2013

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