Finished: One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (Kesey) Ohhh, that evil Nurse Ratched, tormenting Billy Bibbit into killing himself. :-( This was a good book, but sad overall just reading about all the "crazies" in the mental hospital. Of course, I couldn't read the story at all without picturing Jack Nicholson's maniacal grin as Randle McMurphy...the inmate who faked insanity to get himself off of the road work detail and assigned to a "cushy" insane asylum. I never saw the movie, but saw enough clips from it to easily be able to insert Nicholson in the vivid imagery and shenanigans of the hospital ward. While McMurphy seems to be just out for himself, by the end it seems that he's grown to care about the other patients he hangs out with, Harding, Scanlon, the Chief, and Billy....so much so that rather than apologize to his determined nemesis, Nurse Ratched, and admit he's wrong, he knowingly lets himself be led to the Shock Shop where he receives electrode shock therapy. And, by the very end, his planned party to sneak in some booze and "girls", especially to help Billy loose his virginity and his stuttering, goes so awry that after Billy kills himself from the shame and verbal lashing by Nurse Ratched, McMurphy is carted off and isn't seen again until he's wheeled in on a gurney, having been lobotomized. :-( Sadly...the plan had worked, and Billy had gained some confidence being with the girl and introduced her without stuttering! Then, the evil Nurse Ratched, knowing exactly what Billy's mommy issues were, brought up his mother and how she would tell his mother the kind of girl he'd been with. This sent poor Billy off the deep end. The entire story is narrated by the Chief, a youngish Native American man from the Columbia River area in Oregon, where the story is set. He's got his own set of problems, but by the end of the story, McMurphy's outrageousness, outgoingness, and belief in the Chief have actually helped the Chief overcome his problems, for the most part, and he leaves the asylum for good.....after putting McMurphy out of his lobotomy misery by smothering him with a pillow. Yikes! Anyway, I'm not sure I'd put the book in my Top 100, but it was on Time's list of the Top 100, so I can check one more book off that list. :-) Also...I might just want to rent the movie!

Finished: Reconstructing Amelia (McCreight). Page-turner that makes a sad statement about current times for teenage kids....especially concerning peer pressure and cyber bullying. I'm on vacation right now, but will probably give a more detailed update later!

Finished: The House at Riverton (Morton). A good, page-turning book...my gift from our book club's Christmas book exchange! :-) The story of Grace, a ladies maid in a manor house in England before and after World War I. Of course, the book is full of secrets, but none that aren't pretty easy to figure out. When Grace first goes to work for the Hartford family, and their three children, David (17), Hannah (15) and Emmeline (11), she feels an instant connection with the children, who are very close siblings. She watches with envy as they interact and play their imaginary games that no on else can be a part of.... and mourns deeply with the girls after David is killed in WWI. It doesn't take long to figure out that Grace herself is the product of an affair between the children's father and her own mother, who was also a servant at the manor years ago. However, even though other servants, and even Frederick Hartford himself look at her intensely at times, it never comes out openly. Even Grace eventually figures it out, but by that time she is the personal ladies maid for Hannah, who is then married and unhappy. Grace would never jeopardize her relationship of trust with Hannah, and so never dares to mention what she knows. She just remains Hannah's maid for the rest of Hannah's life...which isn't too long in the grand scheme of things. All three Hartford children, plus Robbie, the young man who tears the sisters apart, are dead before they turn 22. Grace, however, lives into her nineties and tells the story as a flashback to her own grandson. Before she dies, she wants to admit to him who her father truly was, so she does so on tape. Along the way, we get to live her life with her vicariously through her telling of the story...and it's a really good one. :-)

Finished: The Idiot (Dostoevsky). A good but intense, typically long-winded story about a Russian "prince". The prince in this story is Mishkin, who is a 25ish year old Russian orphan who has spent many years at a private Swiss sanatorium for his "illness". Other than epilepsy, I'm not sure what his illness really is except that he's very innocent, naive, trusting, truthful and all around believes the best in people. Not even knowing that he's inherited money, he leaves Switzerland to go and rediscover Russia, where he meets up with all sorts of characters who have a huge impact on his young life. He falls in love with two different women who end up being his undoing emotionally, as well as physically. He thinks he's made friends in society, but most of the people think of him as a simpleton or idiot. In actuality, he's a very deep-thinking person who expresses his thoughts with no filter whatsoever...hence, he is really more of a social idiot, than an intellectual one. He is instantly smitten with the beautiful, yet tragic, "fallen woman" Nastasya Filoppovna, who in turn, is instantly smitten with Mishkin due to his outright honesty and kind regard for her with no ulterior motives. However, Nastasya Filoppovna is fiercely loved by Rogozhin, a rich young Russian heir who happens to be the first person Mishkin meets on the train back to Russia, and ironically ends up being the last person who Mishkin has any intelligible conversation with before he goes back to the sanatorium at the end of the story pretty much out of his wits. The relationship between Mishkin and Rogozhin is one of love/hate, respect/jealousy and absolute need for the other's approval, it seems. After Nastasya Filoppovna runs off with Rogozhin, thinking she's not good enough for Mishkin, Mishkin then falls in love with the youngest daughter of his next acquaintances, the Epanchin family. The beautiful Aglaia is also smitten with Mishkin, but is spoiled and willful, and wants to string him along in typical female games of which he knows nothing. The genuine Mishkin falls prey to her machinations, as well as those of Nastasya Filoppovna; Lebedev, a dishonest character who latches himself to the rich nobles; Ippolit, a consumptive, manipulative teenage boy who plays with people's emotions; Gavril, an angry "middle" class young man who will do almost anything to crack into the upper classes, including nearly marrying both Nastasya AND Aglaia; and several others. There are so many characters in this book, all with complicated names...and most of them concerned primarily with their own personal motives. I was sad to see poor Mishkin at the end regress even further than he apparently ever had been to begin with, not even recognizing people who came to visit him in the end. Sigh. I might be done with Russian literature for awhile, though. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy go off on tangents, creating looonnnnggg conversations between characters that allow them to spout their political and religious views, and I tend to glaze over during those parts. I'd much rather just keep reading the dialogue between the characters that moves the story along or that develops the relationships between the characters. However, I can't deny that Dostoevsky is one of the great writers and I was only frustrated with the tangents because his story kept me wanting more! :-)

Finished: For Whom The Bell Tolls (Hemingway) I'm ashamed to say I never really thought about that line from Donne's poem, and what it means, until I read this Hemingway classic! What a good book. Not exactly my cup of tea...reading about war and all that it entails, but such a good book in that you get to know, achingly well, each character of this story. That always makes me invest more when I grow to care about what happens to the characters! Many say that For Whom The Bell Tolls is Hemingway's greatest work, but I think I still give the slight edge to A Farewell to Arms. This story is about an American, Robert Jordan, who is fighting for the Republic during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930's. He's simply a university Spanish teacher who decides to go to Spain to immerse himself in the language and the culture, and his ideals lead him to become a bridge bomber for the fight against the Fascists. The entire story is built around Robert Jordan journeying behind enemy lines to the remote location of the bridge he is supposed to blow up with his wise, invaluable old guide, Anselmo. While up in the hills among the independent guerrillas who are fighting the war their own way, he becomes involved with Pablo's "band" of misfits....among them Pablo's wife, and the true backbone leader of the band, Pilar. Among the misfits are Agustin, Andres, Fernando, and the beautiful, but emotionally damaged Maria. Maria is a young woman who the band rescued from a town attacked by the Fascists. She had watched her family killed before her eyes, and then had her hair cut off, her head shaved, and then survived the repeated rapes by several men before she was rescued. When Robert first lays eyes on her, and she on him, there is an instant connection. Though they only have three days and nights together before the bridge is blown, those days and nights become a lifetime to Robert and he finally realizes what there is to live for with someone to love. The true tragedy of war is on full display as the mountain guerrillas who Robert leaves to be lookouts don't realize the magnitude of all the artillery coming into play. The bridge is to be blown as a surprise attack, but it becomes clear to Robert that the enemy knows about the "surprise" and is ready to turn its own ambush on the fighters for the Republic. Sticking to his orders to blow the bridge, though, Robert and the band perform their duty. Sadly, Anselmo is lost in the explosion, as well as a few others. Pablo, Pilar and Maria make it to safety, out of range of the retaliating tank after the bridge explosion, but Robert's horse is cut down with him on it. Robert's leg is severely broken and he realizes he must stay behind. He forces Maria to go with Pablo and Pilar, declaring that as long as she lives, wherever she goes, he will be with her...that she will be keeping him alive. Then, though going in and out of consciousness, he readies himself to get at least an enemy officer or two as they come up the hill after them, thus giving Maria and the others more time to get away. It is so sad to read the realizations of Robert, and his commanding officers (when the narrative goes over to them), that the entire surprise attack will most likely be for naught and most of the men will be killed. There is such brilliant description in Hemingway's words that you even get to know a minor character who is just as scared and fighting his battle, but on the other side. In all, a very good book. Gosh, I wish I could write like that! I wouldn't be writing about war, but to be able to convey such images and feelings...that would be so nice. :-) Needless to say, this one was yet another book with a sad ending...though we never do see the actual ending of Robert Jordan. The book ends just as Robert has his gun sites on an approaching officer. Sigh.

Finished: The Yearling (Rawlings). Loved this Pulitzer Prize winning book! Of course, it's pretty much a given that when a book is named after an animal, that animal will probably not be alive by the end of the book. :-( That's how it was with The Yearling, but oh my, the story that led up to it was told so well! It was fascinating to read the story of young Jody Baxter who was growing up right here off the St. John's River in central Florida, near where I live. Rawlings' descriptions of the vegetation, trees, swamps, animals...were all so real. In what I assume to be the late 1800's, Jody Baxter is growing up on a patch of scrubby farmland with his mother and father, Ora and Penny (an old nickname of his father's). He's a 12 year old only child, and he's very close to his father. He learns all the ways of making a living in the wild, hunting, farming, tracking, etc. His father is truly an upstanding person of high moral character and only hunts those things necessary for the family to eat, and doesn't hunt for sport. He tries to hunt only male deer and not females so he won't leave any young ones motherless. Jody, loves his strict mother, and his more forgiving father, who knows what it's like to be a twelve year old boy with wanderlust for the land. Jody also longs for a pet of his own, and one day when his father is bit by a rattlesnake, his dream comes true in a roundabout way. His father immediately shoots a doe and cuts out her liver, then cuts his own arm, and uses the deer liver to suck out as much poison as he can! Sadly, the doe had just given birth and a baby fawn is laying near. Jody's main concern is to get his father back to the farm and get a doctor there. Luckily, Penny survives, but he's down and out for quite awhile. One of the rough-and-tumble neighbors, Buck Forrester, comes to the farm for over a week and does all the manual labor that Penny usually does. Meanwhile, Jody remembers the fawn and goes back to find it in the forest. Of course, the fawn, named Flag by Jody's best friend, Fodder-wing Forrester, becomes Jody's constant, inseparable companion. He is even allowed in the house, much to his mother's dismay, and sleeps with Jody in his room. The story moves on with all the ups and downs of the two families trying to make their living off the land. There's the tracking, and finally the killing, of the mean old bear, Slewfoot, who has killed the Baxter and Forrester livestock for years. There's the hunting of the wolves, who also come to attack the animals. There's the surviving of what seems to me was probably a hurricane, which devastates the surroundings, ruins the crops, and kills all kinds of wild animals. And, there's the sad death of Fodder-wing. Fodder-wing had been born a bit deformed, and took ill in his youth, and died. Both families were, of course, shaken. Then, just as I think I'm going to get through the whole story with Flag still alive and kicking, the reality sets in. Nearly a year has passed since Jody rescued Flag, and Flag adores Jody, and vice versa. However, Flag is now a yearling and likes to run off into the woods for a bit, always coming home. He's too big to stay in the house now, because when he does, he gets into everything, knocking precious food all about, etc. After Jody and Penny spend long, grueling hours planting the peas and corn, when the first little heads of the corn plants start to pop up, one night, Flag gets into the corn field and eats most of the corn!! Ma is beside herself and wants to get rid of the fawn then and there. Penny instructs Jody to work day and night to build a fence around the corn field as high as he can reach. Unfortunately, Penny has just pulled what appears to be a hernia, and has taken to bed. Jody replants all the corn by himself and gets to work on the fence...but it is of no use. Flag jumps the fence and once again destroys a large portion of the corn. Jody is devastated when his father tells him that he'll have to kill Flag. He would never be able to run him off, because Flag knows where "home" is. They can't tie Flag up at night, because he struggles so much that he starts to hurt himself. And, mostly, they can't afford to lose their livelihood and the food for their bellies because of the deer. Jody is heartbroken and can't bring himself to obey his father. As Flag once again gets into the garden, Jody's mother comes out the door with a gun and shoots the yearling. She's not a good shot, though, and only wounds him. In such a sad scene, Penny tells Jody that he simply must be a man and go put Flag out of his misery. Jody does as he's told, his last look into Flag's eyes being one of trust, yet confusion. :-( After killing Flag, Jody attempts to run away and is gone for several days, where he ends up nearly starving to death. After at first hating his parents, and especially his father, who he feels like betrayed him, he comes to see what going hungry would be like and he resignedly heads for home. His mother has gone to trade some chickens for more corn seed with the Forresters, but his father is there and so happy to see him. He thought for sure something had happened to him. He tells Jody that he's no longer a yearling himself, but a man, and Jody hugs and forgives his father. It's such a sad, sad tale. I do love Penny Baxter though. Throughout the whole book he says and does such wise things, and diffuses many hot situations. I think I'll put a few of my favorite quotes below.

Here's one from Penny: "Ain't it a treat, to have a woman [who] reads your mind and then agrees with it."

Love that! :-)

Another from Grandma Hutto, a neighbor and friend: "A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one."

And, again from Grandma Hutto when her son Oliver is home from his seafaring life after many months, but is off visiting friends instead of at home: "I miss Oliver worse," she said, "when he's here, and away from me, than when he's at sea."

I kind of know that feeling she's talking about! When one of my kids was home from college, I wanted to be with them as much time as possible while they were home. :-)

Anyway, there were alot more, but those are the ones I wrote down. Loved the book!

Finished: A Daughter of Eve (de Balzac) Another good de Balzac story! This is yet another book from his La Comedie Humaine opus that has the character Eugene de Rastignac in it...though his role is very minor. Eugene is becoming less of a likable character as he gets more and more embroiled in high society, politics, etc. However, I will still probably read at least one more de Balzac story that centers more on de Rastignac. In A Daughter of Eve, though, the story starts off with naive, young upper-society sisters, Marie Angelique and Marie Eugenie who are raised by a strict, pious mother. At 18 and 20, the sisters marry the first respectable men to ask for their hands in marriage to escape their stifling upbringing. Marie Angelique, known as just Marie, marries a good man in high society, Felix de Vandenesse. Marie Eugenie, known as Eugenie, marries a scheming, harsher man, banker Ferdinand du Tillet. Though the sisters are as close as sisters can be, the two husbands, now inlaws, are competitors in society and on the opposite side of the "political issues". After a few years, both of the sisters have children, and both are miserable for different reasons. Eugenie is constantly monitored and bullied by her husband, yet for outward appearances, she's got all the riches she could ask for, to keep her in the manner that du Tillet would expect his wife to be kept. Marie, on the other hand, is married to a kind, understanding, yet somewhat boring young man. De Vandenesse has taken his young wife under his wing and continued her education, brought her out into society, and surrounded her with everything she could want. The problem is...he's too nice and predictable....Marie needs a challenge! Into her life comes the artist/journalist/"bad boy", Nathan Raoul. Though Nathan has had a long-term love affair with a beautiful local actress, Florine, he falls hard for Marie de Vandenesse, and she for him. Marie and Nathan never physically consummate their affair, but they meet quite often for about a year and declare their feelings for each other. Meanwhile, all the upper-crust men like du Tillet, de Rastignac and the Baron Nucingen, conspire to make Nathan fail at the new newspaper he has started up in hopes of making a success and being offered a position in the local parliament. Du Tillet himself wants that position, and the men all pretend to be supporters and friends of Nathan's, lending him money...all the while planning to call in the notes right when they're due and force Nathan into debtor's prison before he can make a success of things. When Nathan's 40,000 pound note comes due and payment is demanded, Nathan realizes he will go to prison, so he attempts suicide. Marie finds him in time and saves his life, and then proceeds to try and borrow the money from whoever she can to keep Nathan from prison. She goes to her beloved sister, and together they come up with a plan to get the money, but the plan would end up eventually compromising both of them. Eugenie begins to worry that her sister is headed for a huge mistake and actually goes and confides in Marie's husband....honestly, one of the most understanding men I've encountered in a novel. He ends up letting Marie know that he knows all about her affair, and he doesn't blame her for feeling like she fell in love with the artist, scoundrel, Nathan. He feels like she was seduced by the excitement of it all, and realizes he had not provided her with enough interest right in their own backyard. Rather than chastise her and throw her out, he understands her and forgives her. He tells her they must get back the letters she has written to Nathan so that nothing can get out and ruin her reputation. He concocts a scheme at a masquerade ball to let the actress Florine know that Nathan had been two-timing her with Marie, and Florine hands over all the letters. Marie now sees the duplicitous behavior of Nathan, since she had no idea that he had another lover. Poor Nathan, though, had really fallen in love with Marie and would have dumped Florine in a heartbeat, but it was all too little too late. Nathan spends the next few years in the poverty known to many artists back in France of those days, and still on the arm of Florine. Marie's husband whisks her off to Italy, etc., and they have a grand adventure, rekindling their marriage which is now stronger for all the missteps. And, Eugenie actually finally stands up to her bullying husband and says she will do as she pleases, which actually pleases her husband more than he'd like to admit. In all, I was happy with the ending of this story and hope that Marie and her husband stay happily ever after married. :-) Nathan Raoul appears in something like 19 of the books in La Comedie Humaine, so he must bounce back and have his ups and downs, lol.

Finished: And The Mountains Echoed (Hosseini) Book Club Book #2. A good, solid book by the author of The Kiterunner, a book on my favorites list. This one jumped around a little bit too much between characters, never really leaving me feeling complete about any one character's journey or story. The opening chapter really sucked me in as the poor Afghan villager, Saboor, tells his children, Abdullah and Pari the story of a monster, the div, who comes to the village each year to take one child away. The villagers must obey his decision or he will kill an entire family. Of course, the choice about which child to give up is at the center of the story, and a few years after the father of the child gives him up, the father goes in search of the div to kill him. No one has ever tried this before. The div says, before you kill me, let me show you something.....and the div shows him a virtual paradise amidst the heat and draught ravaged villages. All the children he has ever taken are running happily around in a green, paradise with plenty of water and being schooled and taught all kinds of manners, etc. So, in comes the key question of the novel. Should the father leave his son there where he is clearly better off physically or take him back to the village where he could die of poverty, starvation and/or cold, but be with his loving family. The father leaves his son there. So, as Saboor takes his children on their own journey into Kabul, we see how very close 10 year old Abdullah and 3 year old Pari are. We also soon see that Saboor is taking Pari to Kabul to be adopted by his brother-in-law's wealthy employers who cannot have biological children of their own. Abdullah is devastated, and Pari too young to remember. She's swept up in the whirlwind of the nice "lady" who takes care of her and grows up forgetting her village family. Abdullah is tormented the rest of his life, even after he moves to America and has a wife and daughter, also named Pari, of his own. Not until Abdullah is very old and clearly suffering from Alzheimer's or dementia does his sister discover that she was adopted and has a beloved brother. By the time Pari and Abdullah finally meet, Abdullah remembers nothing of his sister...so sad. However, his daughter, Pari, and his sister, Pari, have finally met and will live happily as family. So, in between all that, the book focuses on several other pairings of people and their ethical trials and tribulations. But, as quickly as someone is introduced, they are left at the end of their story...right when I wanted to know more. For instance, I would have loved to read more about how the injured girl, Roshi, was helped by the outgoing, but egotistical, Temur, after his seemingly well-intentioned cousin, Idris, dropped the ball on getting her help. Anyway, it was still a well written book that once again opened my eyes to the bigger world around me. I'm glad I read it. :-)

Finished: Inferno (Brown) Another page-turning Dan Brown book, and this one set mostly in Florence, my favorite city in Italy! :-) Of course, Brown's Inferno is all about a bunch of clues that a madman uses from Dante's Inferno, so that was kind of fun to read as well. And, again, Robert Langdon, the perpetual hero of the Dan Brown novels, is the hero of the book, helping the World Health Organization track down what they presume to be a world population-crushing virus before it is released on the innocent public. This time, Robert is helped and hindered by the mysterious, child-prodigy turned complicated grown doctor, Sienna Brooks. At times she appeared to be on Langdon's side, and at times a foe, but in the end, she did the right thing. I really liked her character and hope she'll turn up in another Robert Langdon adventure! So, though they don't manage to save the day in the end, the virus isn't really a killing virus, like they thought, but a virus to render 1/3 of the world's population infertile, thus slowing down the eventual demise of civilization due to overpopulation. It was an interesting read! My favorite parts, though, were all the descriptions that I could see so easily in my mind's eye of the different sites in Florence! :-)

Finished: The Golden Bowl (James). Ugh, that was a very difficult read! Henry James is just so darn wordy! A book that was almost 800 pages should really have been about 200 pages for all the plot it had. I have read that in his later years Henry James wrote much more vaguely and intricately and round-aboutly and over-metaphorically, and I think I just witnessed that. I really enjoyed two of his books, The Portrait of a Lady and Washington Square...but one of his other books, The Wings of the Dove, was so atrociously ambiguous that I read only the first 20 or so pages and then returned it to the book store...the only book I have given up on in this entire reading endeavor of mine. So, anyway, I went into The Golden Bowl wondering which of the two types of writing I would get...and it was the latter. However, I stuck this one out because I was intrigued by the story. It's the story of American millionaire art dealer, Adam Verver, and his beloved daughter, Maggie, who marries an Italian penniless prince, Amerigo. Maggie falls head over heals in love with the prince, but we know right off the bat that the prince is marrying Maggie for her money, though he treats both Maggie and her father with the utmost respect and consideration. Until, that is, the former love of his life, and coincidentally Maggie's dear childhood friend, Charlotte, comes to London for their wedding. Here we find out that Amerigo and Charlotte still love each other. They couldn't marry when they were in love before because both were very poor, and how could they then have existed in life without having to :::gasp::: work for a living? Maggie and the prince go off for a year or so on their whirlwind wedding trip, and we join them two years later where already their baby son, Principino (that's all he's ever called) has joined the family. Maggie's father falls in love with his grandson and Maggie soon begins to feel that her father also needs a companion, so she convinces him to marry Charlotte! Of course, this throws Amerigo and Charlotte back into each other's orbits, so an affair ensues. When Maggie finally gets wind of the affair, she acts with grace and lets her husband know that she knows without letting her father know. By the end of the book, Maggie has convinced her father to move to America with Charlotte, where her father and Charlotte will basically start over, which will also allow the prince and Maggie to start all over again as well. Not hard doings for Amerigo or Charlotte, since they both somewhat loved their spouses and really loved the money that came with them, apparently more than they really loved each other.Throughout the book it is always clear that Maggie and her father adore each other, and would do anything for each other, including making sacrifices to keep the other from being hurt. It's just too bad that it was so hard to figure all this out most of the time due to the bizarre, rambling writing! I've only got one more James book on my list to read, and then I think I'm over and out with Henry James. :-)