Finished: The Rainbow (Lawrence) Hmm...well, it was complicated, deep, a bit consternating...and now I'm done with it. :-) I'm not sure it belongs on the Top 100 list, but there it sits...and so I read it. Maybe I'm just not deep enough or smart enough? I don't know...I think it just isn't my kind of book. I was interested in the characters, as usual, but there was just far, far, far too much detailed inner turmoil and introspection for me. The story follows three generations of the Brangwen family in rural England. From Tom Brangwen, who falls for the Polish widow, Lydia, who has a young daughter, Anna, we see how quick people were to marry after just meeting another available person. Though, they had two more children together and remained married until their deaths, I never really got the sense they were madly in love. Tom did adore his step-daughter, Anna, though. Then, we follow the independent Anna as she falls for her step-cousin, Will, and marries him. Their relationship is volatile, and mostly sexual, and swings from dark to light to dark...but they stay married and have 9 children together! Anna comes to see that her "role" on earth, and one that she truly cherishes, is to have children and be a mother. Will always has his dark nature, and even alienates his oldest daughter Ursula, who grows up adoring him...but grows to hate him as he treats her cruelly due to his own inability to relate to people. Ursula, the first born of Will and Anna takes on the rest of the story as we watch her also very independent nature come to terms with her own powerful feelings about all things in nature, and then her own sexuality. She falls in love with Anton Skrebensky, but then also has a love affair with a woman. She is never ready to totally conform or give herself over to Anton to be married...yet she hates the independent life she carves out as a teacher. As the story ends, she's not at all fulfilled in her life, but she realizes that she's got a lot more of life to live and many more experiences to come that will define her being. All of the characters analyze their sexual desires and feelings towards their partners to death, and I think that's where the book lost me a bit. I can see where it would have been a bit scandalous in the early 1900's when it came out. And, of course, his sequel, Women in Love, which is the continuing story of Ursula and her sister, Gudrun, is also on the Top 100 list, so I'll probably be reading that at some point.

Finished: Pilgrim's Progress (Bunyan) A reaffirming story of what is means to walk the walk as the life of a Christian. The pilgrim in the story, literally named Christian, begins his journey towards accepting God's way and Jesus as his Savior, much to the dismay of his family and friends. From then on, the story becomes an allegory with all kinds of negative and positive attributes becoming people and places that Christian must encounter. With names like Faithful, Hopeful, Ignorant, Good Will, Giant Despair, Destruction, Vanity Fair, Hypocrisy, and on and on, Christian must face these cities, friends, and foes as he walks the "straight and narrow path" and journeys to pass through the "wicket gate" to get to the "Celestial Palace". Along the way he strays off the path a few times, and those are the times he faces the worst persecutions. The story is nicely written with bible verses written at the end of nearly every chapter. I spent the first half of the book with my bible open, looking up verses as I went, but it became too distracting and made the story not flow smoothly enough for me. Pilgrim's Progress is widely considered the second best book next to the Bible to own for a Christian. It certainly has some nice lessons, puts things in simple words, and even has nice explanations and positive lessons you are supposed to learn from the book all listed in the back. It got a little too preachy for me at times, but then at other times it was soul-refreshing to just read  and feel peaceful at the same time, knowing what the future does hold in the life hereafter for a Christian. :-)

Finished: Dark Places (Flynn) My third Gillian Flynn book. Not quite as good as the other two, but still a nice page-turner. And, it was really a story that made me sad at the poverty and tragedy of the Day family. Libby Day, the only surviving member of a family who is slaughtered one night, apparently by her 15 year old big brother, Ben, is living a meager existence physically and emotionally 25 years later when a group who believes her imprisoned brother to be innocent, wants her to recant the testimony she gave as a 7 year old which helped put Ben behind bars. The book goes back and forth between the viewpoints of current day Libby, 15 year old Ben, and their bedraggled mother. Every scenario you can come up with as a reader just leaves you sad at the poor circumstances of the divorced, single mother of four children, trying to keep the farm from being foreclosed on, trying to keep any kind of food in her children's bellies, trying to make ends meet....and really, as we see her personality unfold, realizing she's just not that great of a mom. Libby, the super-screwed up adult, does get to the bottom of things eventually. I spent the whole book thinking Ben actually DID do it, after reading all his chapters. He was also a messed up kid due to his familial circumstances...messed up with a wild older girl who was into devil-worship and was pregnant with his child. Yeah, a "dark" book as the title suggests. Off to read something lighter I think. :-)

Finished: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll) After having read that, I'm pretty sure I read that sometime in my childhood. A bizarre little dream story that I wouldn't put on the Top 100 list over the books Little House in the Big Woods or Charlotte's Web, but oh well. No need to recap it really...everyone knows it's about Alice going down the rabbit hole and having all her weird adventures with the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Turtle, the Griffin, the Duchess, and the Queen of Hearts! :-)

Finished: A Clockwork Orange (Burgess) Hmm. I'm not really sure what to think about this book. It was quite a trip though! Does it belong on the Top 100 list that has been staring me in the face for over 2 years? I'm not sure that it does. Even the author (in the preface) says that this is the least of his works he'd like to be known for, but known for it he is. It's some kind of cult classic, I suppose, that scares me to think that people who read this book actually sympathized and/or glorified the actions of the miscreant, violent, soulless 15-year old  Alex....the "protagonist"...the "anti-hero". Hmm, I say again. I don't think I've ever read such a violent book...though the horror of Lolita comes close to being as unsettling with the constant rape of a young girl by her mother's widowed husband. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex and his "droogs" (one of the made-up words of the nadsat, half-Russian, half-English, half-teenage babble language used throughout the book) roam the streets at night and attack innocent people...violently. (I had to have the urbandictionay.com open on my phone so I could look up words as I went along, and sure enough, most of them were there "from A Clockwork Orange", it would say.) They don't stop at beatings and theft, but continue on with brutal rapes. They get hopped up on drugs and live to be violent. Alex gets caught and sent to prison after an elderly woman dies from his behavior. After two years, so he's now only 17, he is sent to be the guinea pig in an experimental treatment by the government where he is forced to watch the most violent of films over and over, strapped down, and with his eyes forced open by clamps. Injected with a substance that makes him violently ill as he watches the films, his body is literally reprogrammed to reject all things violent...even violent thoughts, because he begins to get violently ill when he starts thinking those thoughts. In other words, he's not a morally changed person...but he's forced to adhere to a certain, simpering behavior to avoid becoming ill. What the doctors do at this facility is cruel and scary, and is a huge statement about the government forcing their own kind of violence. When Alex is released after two weeks of torture and deemed "cured", he tries to go home to his parents, but they have let out his room. He wanders the streets and is viciously beaten by two police officers who turn out to be one of his old "droogs", and one of their former droog enemies. Left out in the country after being beaten, Alex stumbles to a house where a kindly man takes him in and feeds him, etc. He recognizes Alex from his picture in the paper as the inmate who was treated and "cured" and released back into society. The man is pretty off his rocker himself and tells Alex he will become part of his group of people who is trying to stand up to the government. The group uses Alex by confining him in a room and causing him to relive some the music associated with his anti-violence treatment, causing Alex to jump out a window to take his own life rather than listen to any of it for a second more. The group of men stand around him. It was what they wanted....for Alex to die so they could blame the government for what they did to this boy. Alex doesn't die though. He is battered and broken, but he lives. And somehow the broken bones, head injury and/or the subsequent treatment at the hospital undo his "cure" and he's back to his violent tendencies. However, by the famously "left out" 21st chapter, which was included in the book I read, Alex is now 18 and tired of all the behavior. He decides he wants to change, lead a "normal" life...even maybe have a wife and son. Hmm, I still say. Oh, and the nice man who treated Alex kindly is one of Alex's former victims!! At the time of that particular piece of brutality, Alex and his droogs had on masks, so the man doesn't recognize him...but this was the home where they broke in, tore up this man's life's work...a novel in progress called "A Clockwork Orange", beat the man to a pulp, and all brutally raped his young wife. The man now lives alone, he tells Alex, because his young wife died of her injuries from a brutal rape and attack. Alex is taken aback and tries to hide who he is...but that all becomes a moot point since the man is now whacko and wants to just use Alex to get back at the government. Anyway....finally, I read it. I read it pretty fast, so it did hold my attention. I'm just still a bit unsettled to think this is a book in the Top 100.

Just a taste of the nadsat language used constantly in the book:

gulliver = head
listo = face
pretty polly = money
veshch = thing
horrorshow = good
oddy knocky = own (like on my own)
cally = shitty
rot = mouth
rooker = hand
smeck = laugh
tolchock = punch
malchicks = teenage boys
devotchkas = girls
glazzies = eyes
malenky = little
viddied = saw
zoobies = teeth

and this weirds me out because I can remember calling teeth "zoobies" in college, but I never knew why that was slang for teeth. Was is from this book? Hmmm.....

Finished: All The King's Men (Warren) Wow, a book I never in a million years thought would suck me in...being about a political icon from Lousiana...but it sure did. In fact, even though it's a Pulitzer Prize winning book, and in the top 100 of every single darn book list I had dug up, it was one of those books I had just decided I wasn't going to force myself to read. I'm so so glad I changed my mind. :-) This book was about so much more than "Luzianna" politics and Willie Stark, i.e. the thinly masked character based on the 1930's governor of Louisiana, Huey Long. This book was first, for me, whose father was a Northern Louisiana boy, about being enveloped by the whole feel of that state...or of that part of the state. I can't even describe it, but I could feel it...just remembering the long drives we would make from Texas up through the piney woods of Louisiana to see my grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins. Honestly, I read the entire book with the Louisiana accent completely embedded in my head, lol. Secondly, the book was more about life lessons, right and wrong, how a great man could be a scoundrel, but how it could all come from his heart, deep down, being in the right place, but his human nature being one of never taking no for an answer...no matter what the cost...and no matter who he had to bribe. I've never read a thing about Huey Long until two days ago when I read a bio to see who exactly I was reading about in this book. It seems as if he was loved by many and hated by many, but by gum, he certainly made a difference in Louisiana. In All The King's Men, Willie Stark makes his imprint on the poor people of the state as well, and on the other politicians too. He comes from humble and even naive beginnings. It is when he is actually used by the shady incumbent governor of the state...encouraged to run against him, that he actually gets a whole lot of reality thrown his way. He thinks he's loved and being encouraged because they think he can do good...when in reality, the incumbent governor just wants him to run so the people who are ready for a change, will split the vote between Willie Stark and the other guy running against the incumbent, thereby assuring the incumbent of a win. That is the turning point for Willie Start...when he realizes that he's got to turn to granite to make it in that world of politics. Third, the book is actually more about Willie Stark's right hand man, former reporter turned governor's confidant and do-everything man, Jack Burden. Jack is the narrator of the story and this book is actually more about Jack and his realizations, his growing up, and his self-evolving than Willie's. Jack is one of the few people who Willie trusts implicitly, and he's one of the few people who will tell Willie exactly how it is. We have some wonderful flashbacks into Jack's life growing up on the coast of Louisiana next to his childhood friends, Adam and Anne Stanton, who both play prominently in the story later down the line. And, we've got some great characters in the story who are so vividly described and meticulously written, that you feel as if you can look up and see them walking down that small-town Louisiana street...right up to the courthouse in the square in the middle of the town where the four busy streets surround it. Amazing the imagery of the book. Yes, Robert Penn Warren is very long-winded...over 600 pages worth, but I savored every word of it. Anyway, there are characters like Sadie Burke, Lucy Stark, Judge Irwin, Tiny Duffy, Sugar-Boy O'Sheean, and on and on. I'm not saying I'm in love with this book. It will take me awhile to digest it and figure out if it belongs in my favorites...but it is definitely a book that belongs on the top 100 list. There's massive heartbreak, there's humor, there's intensity, there's reminiscing, there's love, deep love, and there's hate, there's passion. I love many of the passages, so I will include a few below. I also had no idea that Robert Penn Warren was a three time Pulitzer Prize winner (two for poetry) until I read his bio.

When Willie and Jack go to Chicago on business, they are shown the town by a man named Josh Conklin. The little gem about "the real thing" is the kind of writing Penn did all over the book...little things you might not have thought of before, and he puts them into words:

Up there a fellow named Josh Conklin did us the town, and he was the man to do it, a big, burly fellow, with prematurely white hair and a red face and black, beetling eyebrows and a dress suit that fitted him like a corset and a trick apartment like a movie set and an address book an inch thick. He wasn't the real thing, but he sure was a good imitation of it, which is frequently better than the real thing, for the real thing can relax but the imitation can't afford to and has to spend all the time being just one cut more real than the real thing, with money no object.

This passage is from when Jack Burden's childhood mentor and father-figure, Judge Irwin, has declared that he will back Willie Stark's opponent in the upcoming election. Willie "the Boss" had counted on his support. He wants Jack to find something out in the upstanding, honorable, squeaky clean Judge's past that he can use to "convince" him to come back over to his side. I just love Willie's way with words:

    It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be), "There is always something."
    And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge."
    And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something." 

And, of course, Willie was right, and there was something...something that sent shock waves and repercussions reverberating through the rest of the book...affecting, in particular, Jack, Anne, Adam, Jack's mother, and Judge Irwin himself. And, when Jack finds out later in the book that his childhood sweetheart and love of his life, Anne, is actually having an affair with Willie, he just can't handle that and hops in his car and drives west all the way out to California for a few days:

I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go. It was just where I went.

And, on his trip West, Jack relives in his mind his childhood with Anne and Adam and we see that instant when Adam's kid sister, who always tagged along with them wherever they went, ended up becoming the girl who stole Jack's heart. It is several pages long, but there was just one little snippet of passage I really loved. It was so vivid I could see every emotion:

And little girls sit on hassocks and lean their cheeks pensively against the dear father's knee while his hand toys with the silken locks and his voice reads beautiful words. That was Anne Stanton. And little girls are fraidy-cats and try the surf with one toe that first day in spring, and when the surf makes a surprising leap and splashes their thighs with the tingle and cold they squeal and jump up and down on thin little legs like stilts. That was Anne Stanton. Little girls get a smudge of soot on the end of the nose when they roast wieners over the campfire and you---for you are a big boy and don't get soot on your nose---point your finger and sing, "Dirty-Face, Dirty-Face, you are so dirty you are a disgrace!" And then one day when you sing it, the little girl doesn't say a thing back the way she always had, but turns her big eyes on  you, out of the thin little smooth face, and her lips quiver an instant so that you think she might cry even though she is too big for that now, and as the eyes keep fixed on you, the grin dries up on your face and you turn quickly away and pretend to be getting some more wood. That was Anne Stanton. 

Oh my, I just loved that description. :-) So....yes, I would say I'm so very glad that I read this book which I avoided for so long!

Finished: Fear Nothing (Gardner) Another good page-turner by one of my favorite contemporary "who-done-it" authors. :-) This time I actually pegged who I thought it would be, and I was wrong! The story is about two sisters who come from an evil serial killer father. One of the sisters was only a year old when the father was found and died in the police raid. She had been pretty sheltered from the horror, and was adopted by a kind doctor and grew up to be a respected psychiatrist herself. The other sister was four when the father was found, and she had already been subjected to endless horrors and tortures herself. She ended up killing someone by the time she was 14, and has been incarcerated for life for years and years. The story starts with a serial killer who is now replicating the awful modus operandi of the infamous father. The sisters must work together in their own warped way...along with Gardner's recurring main novel character, female detective, D. D. Warren, to unravel the mystery and catch the killer. As I said...another great page-turner, which made my treadmill walking go by faster than ever. :-)

Finished: Our Town (Wilder) So many feelings evoked with so few words...great play! The simple story of small town life in the early 1900's during three different small slices of time with the same people. Act One, the Webbs and the Gibbs are next door neighbors with two kids each. Both George Gibbs and Emily Webb are sixteen and friends. Act Two, high school graduation day and George and Emily are in love and it's also their wedding day. Act Three, funeral time...nine years later. Emily has died giving birth to their second child. A few flashbacks are thrown in so we see exactly when George and Emily decided they are meant to be together. The scenery and props are bare minimum. The words bring the power and emotions. It's as if you live each one of the Acts with them. Truly, how can Wilder say so much with so little? While someone like James has to use over 400 pages to, quite frankly, not give me nearly as clear a picture of those moments in life?? Sure would love to see this acted out on the stage. In the meantime, this has prompted me to Google "Top 100 Plays" to see what comes up. I know that all of Shakespeare's works are plays, but a couple of his show up on book lists. Lordy, you have to be specific. I Googled "Top 100 Plays" and the third entry was baseball plays. Really?? Anyway, a fast, but meaningful read, Our Town. :-)

Finished: The Ambassadors (James) Lordy Henry James is wordy! I had forgotten how cumbersome he is to read when I decided on this, which is supposed to be his "best" work; and, it was...a very good book...just so very complicated to read! If you were to take the conversations out of the book, which to me were the imperative movers of the action in this story, they'd probably take up about 40 pages, at the most, of the over 400 page book. I would have definitely loved more of the conversations between the main characters rather than the in depth supposings and wonderings and personal discoveries we got from the rambling thoughts of the main character, sigh. As it is, I'm really glad to have read the book and only wish that there had been a more definitive ending as well. The Ambassadors, set in the early 1900's, is about reserved, possibly stodgy, 55 year old New Englander, Lambert Strether, who travels from America to Paris to retrieve the wayward son of his "fiance", Mrs. Newsome. Her twenty-something son, Chadwick, or Chad as we know him, has been over in Paris for three years now and she thinks it's time he comes home and takes over the responsibility of his deceased father's wealthy firm. She and her daughter, Sarah, are terribly concerned that Chad has become a reckless, irresponsible, caddish man who is associating with all manner of people beneath them in Paris. In particular, they are worried that a lowlife woman has put her hooks in Chad and that he has fallen under her spell and is daily, hourly, by the minute, becoming more and more depraved. They want him home. Strether, with no real job or income of his own, other than putting his name on a magazine that Mrs. Newsome owns, is their perfect mouthpiece to go and convince Chad that he needs to come home. However, the minute that Strether steps off the ship in France, he is overwhelmed with the beauty, and the life of the place. He does go to find Chad, and expecting a sarcastic "ass" of a young man, he finds a matured, mannerly, polite, friendly, very likable young man in his place. Chad has grown up, and for the better. Chad's friends are also just as charming, and Strether at once finds the entire environment intoxicating and liberating to his own weary soul. Strether is soon introduced to the Mademoiselle Jeanne de Vionnet, and assumes the young girl is the one who has stolen Chad's heart and kept him in Paris. However, it is really Jeanne's mother, Marie de Vionnet...the married, yet separated from her husband, woman who has taken Chad under her wing and made him the man he is. She is in love with Chad and he with her. Marie equally charms Strether to the point that he begins to think it would be better for Chad to stay in Paris. Chad, however, resigns himself to going home and is ready to break his ties with Marie. He knows there's really no future with her since he can never marry her. However it becomes Strether who convinces him to take more time there. Truly, Strether just wants more time there for himself, I believe. In a cathartic speech to one of Chad's young friends, Bilham, Strether expresses the importance of living while you can and doing so in one's youth, as the young men are. Strether thinks back to getting married at a very young age, and then losing both his beloved young wife and young son early in the marriage. After that, he never went out and enjoyed life, and here he is 55 years old. For the first time in decades he is feeling, seeing, breathing life. Of course, it helps that he met the lovely Maria Gostrey on the ship over to Paris, and she becomes his sort of tour guide around Paris. She falls for him, and he struggles with wondering if he truly has feelings for Mrs. Newsome at all since he both falls for Miss Gostrey and comes to be so charmed by Chad's love, Marie de Vionnet. In any event...when Strether fails to produce the desired results, Mrs. Newsome stops communicating with him and sends her married daughter and her husband over to seal the deal. Chad shows them all a wonderful time, but the daughter doesn't budge. She's disgusted by his life in Paris and says he needs to come home immediately. Chad says he will do whatever Strether recommends, which puts the entire thing on Strether's shoulders. And Strether, coming to understand the depths of the feelings and intimacy between Chad and Maria, declares to Chad that he would be a "beast" to leave Maria and go home. Chad, however, seems to possibly be not quite as attached as Madame de Vionnet, so though we don't ever find out the decision he makes (stay or go)...ugh!!...we get the feeling that he will eventually head on back to take over the company. Meanwhile, Strether decides to sail back to America as well, and give up the sure love of Maria Gostrey to head for the uncertain relationship that may or may not remain with Mrs. Newsome. I would really have liked a little epilogue that summed it all up so I'd know how everyone ended up! It was refreshing that there really wasn't an evil character in this book. And, there was no catastrophic death or sad ending to the book. It was just a very involved character analysis of a few good people and the situations they got themselves into. In all, a very good book. :-)

Just a smidgen of poetry...

Every so often I have to reread some of my favorites, which I did tonight:

Brown Penny by William Butler Yeats
She Walks In Beauty by Lord Byron
Merciless Beauty by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Good Morrow by John Donne
At The Mid Hour of Night by Thomas Moore
The Time I've Lost in Wooing by Thomas Moore
Daybreak by Stephen Spender
Crossing the Bar by Lord Alfred Tennyson
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman
Tears, Idle Tears by Lord Alfred Tennyson
Solitude by Lord Byron

and a few new ones I hadn't read before:

The Old Woman by Joseph Campbell
The Moon Is In The Marshes by Joseph Campbell
The Dancer by Joseph Campbell
Night-Piece by Joseph Campbell

Song by Francis Stuart
Ireland by Francis Stuart
Words May Lose Meaning by L.A.G. Strong
Two Generations by L.A.G. Strong

A Dedication to My Wife by T.S. Eliot
To ___ by Percy Bysshe Shelley