I have this affliction where if I don't read a book regularly, when I come back to pick it up again, I have no idea what's going on or where I left off, and I usually have to backtrack a chapter or two to get my bearings. And then I just get to where I left off the time before. And by then, I'm tired because, well, you know, I just read 2 chapters. So my progress can be static, or painfully slow, and generally frustrating. Which doesn't bode well for how much I'll enjoy a given book
And that's kind of how things started with All the King's Men. I just kept reading the same few chapters over again trying to remind myself where I was 3 weeks prior. But once I finally got going....I read the whole thing in about 2 weeks. And I absolutely loved this book.
The story is about the infamous Willie Stark, or "The Boss," who starts off as a lawyer and then politician from a small town in Louisiana who initially has honest ideals and genuinely wants to make things better and represent the people, but as he becomes the governor, he is lured into the things he has to do as a politician to further himself and his agenda. The story is told through one of his associates, Jack Burden, who often seems apathetic to the goals of The Boss, but does them anyway.
The overall story tells of how both characters came to be where they are, and the inter-relatedness of the 2 characters (one of Jack's family friends, Judge Irwin, is someone who Stark attempts to bribe, Jack's childhood love, Anne, is having an affair with Stark, and one of Jack's childhood friends, Adam, is a doctor who Stark wants to run his new hospital). At one point in the book he even states that "the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story."
The one thing that I took away from this book that was done so exceptionally well, was showing that, under certain circumstances, everyone will turn to doing something dishonest. Certainly, this is completely the character of Stark, who really just wanted to help people, but became the epitome of a corrupt politician, bribing, blackmailing, and doing whatever he had to do to get what he wanted. But every other character also commits some kind of egregious, morally reprehensible act, even those who were initially portrayed as genuinely good and above reproach (phew, a lot of big words there). But ultimately, their bad choices affect others and they all eventually pay for it, and the impact of one person's choice affects the (often bad) choices of another. As an isolated person, you don't always see the ripple effect of one action; how one thing you do impacts the choices that other people make (or if it does impact others). So it was just brilliant the way it was all laid out to see how each action has a reaction. One of my favorite quotes in the book explains this perfectly:
"He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the goassamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things. Your happy foot or you gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God's eye, and the fangs dripping." (Man, I could only ever hope to write that wonderfully!!).
So I can most certainly see how the book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 and why it is included as the "best of" on 2 of my lists (Holla! Knocking out 2 books with 1 stone!). I would recommend it -- it wasn't too political, which I was worried about at first, 'cos that's not my bag baby.
Side note: As I mentioned before, I again made the mistake of looking up the film adaptations as soon as I started reading the book and then envisioning the actors who played the roles in the 2006 version as the characters as I read (Willie Stark = Sean Penn, Jack Burden = Jude Law, Anne Stanton = Kate Winslet, Adam Stanton = Mark Ruffalo, Judge Irwin = Anthony Hopkins, Tiny Duffy = James Gandolfini, Sadie Burke = Patricia Clarkson. I know, talk about stacked cast right??). And most of them I was fine with except Sean Penn (Gandolfini would have been a better representation based on the descriptions in the book) and Kate Winslet (she was just not the right physical description of the character). So we have moved this movie up in the Netflix queue to watch soon. I know I should probably watch the Academy Award winning version from 1949, but I'll get there eventually.
So on I move...begrudgingly to Macbeth. I've been avoiding having to read Shakespeare for a while now, but the book has been mocking me from the bookshelf for months now, so I should just get it over with. For this one, I'm going to check different resources as I finish reading each chapter, so I can have some kind of barometer of understanding of what's going on. It could be very easy for me to just breeze through the whole thing, reading the words on the page without knowing the full meaning. I don't speak Elizabethan English, after all. I think I forgot how useful lit classes can be when you have a teacher and other students to discuss and bounce thoughts off of, to enhance your understanding of a book. So in absence of a lit class, I turn to the interwebs (a valiant substitute, I know).
Only 243 left. Time to pick up my game!
PS. Blogger made some janky changes in the how things are published on the blog page, particularly with the "pages," or in my case, the links to the book lists. So instead of linking directly out to the lists, there are 2 clicks now to get there. Not that big of a deal, but after spending an hour trying to figure out WTF was up, the 2 click approach is going to have to do. Hopefully by the time I check in again, they'll have changed it back.
