I Had Not Understood Then What I Think I Have Now Come to Understand: That We Can Keep the Past Only By Having the Future, For They Are Forever Tied Together

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.

"But the Truth is, Whether They Think About Him or Not, the Tiger is Always There, in Their Movements, in Their Speech, in the Preventive Gestures that Have Become a Part of Their Everyday Lives"

Alright, yes, I admit it, I've been horribly delinquent on writing posts (2+ months to be exact). But there has been progress, I swear. I just haven't gotten around to writing about it.

I recently took a 2 week vacation from work with the sole intention of doing as little as humanly possible. Or at least doing as little as possible that resembled work. I spent part of it at a gorgeous resort in Mexico and part of it visiting my sister and her family in Seattle. The first part of the vaca involved doing absolutely nothing other than eating, drinking, sitting by the pool/beach reading, eating, drinking,  sitting by the pool/beach reading, repeat. Between airplane time and reading at the pool/beach, this allowed me to finish The Tiger's Wife in only a few days. Once I really got going, it just sucked me in.

The story is about a young woman, Natalia, in an unnamed Balkan country (I spent probably more time than the author intended trying to figure out what actual country it was intended to be based on the names of locations and the historical events described) and her relationship with her grandfather, who had recently passed away. She recounts stories that her grandfather had told her of his life, stories that are fantastic, and impossible, and almost like fables or fairytales. But stories, that when told in the way the grandfather had recounted them, seem almost plausible.

I had a bit of a hard time seeing where the book was going. There was a lot of jumping back and forth between the present story of Natalia, flashbacks of her past including times with her grandfather, stories that the grandfather told (that actually happened to him), and stories of other related characters in the grandfather's stories. When I was about 2/3 of the way through the book, I found myself really hoping that there was going to be some amazing revelation that brought all of these segments together in Natalia's ongoing narrative. And there was some amount of that in the end, but maybe just not what I was expecting.

What I must say about the book though, is that it is astounding to me that it was written by someone in her early to mid 20s. Not just astounding, but truly mind-blowing. The richness of the descriptions and the nuances of every detail was definitely what I loved the most about the book. From the sounds to the smells (I particularly loved the descriptions of the smell of the tiger), it gave so much to the story. Again, her gift for translating observation into words to enhance the narrative was just amazing.

Overall, I did really like the book. It took me a while to get in to the story (even though I was still thoroughly enjoying reading the book for the beautiful writing itself), but once I did, I had to keep reading. I would get pulled into one of the side stories (particularly, the one of the tiger's wife and the grandfather), and want to know what happened, even if that meant 80 pages straight reading without stopping (well, maybe stopping to refill my cocktail or re-apply sunblock...).

So on I go. Rather than picking up some Shakespeare to read while on vacation (I haven't seen that on any "Good Beach Books" lists, have you?), I moved on to another book from the lists, All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. Still not necessarily a light and airy beach read, but considering that I read it on airplanes, it didn't really matter. So far so good. I didn't know that there was a somewhat recent movie remake of the book with Sean Penn as the main character. And I can already tell you that I definitely do NOT picture him as Willie Stark. So he's going to have a lot to prove to me. I'll definitely have to watch it as soon as I'm done with the book. And possibly the original version of the movie too.

Happy Sunday!

"I Have Come to Be Very Much A Cynic in These Matters; I Mean That it is Impossible to Believe in the Permanence of Man's Or Woman's Love"

And so The Good Soldier is completed. I always read everything that comes included with the books. And because many of these are the classics and come in some kind of series of re-published classic novels, they usually have introductions, author histories, endnotes, and all kinds of other stuff to enhance the overall understanding of the book. So I had read the introduction that accompanied The Good Soldier and had at least a good idea about what to expect or what made this book different from others published by his contemporaries. But now after having read the book, I must say that I've never read anything even remotely close to The Good Soldier.

As a quick background to what the book was about, the story is told from a narrator, John, about his times spent with his wife Florence, and another couple that they spent many years with abroad, Leonora and Edward Ashburnham. And while initially the narrator states that he was truly happy during the 9 years that these 2 couples spend together, he acknowledges that it was all false. That so many things happened during their time that he didn't know about that completely taints his understanding of each person, particularly Edward and his wife Florence, such that it has, in the end ruined his life.

The main thing about the book that threw it off from anything I've read before was simply, the narrator. So even while I say in the previous paragraph that his knowledge of everything that happened amongst his wife and friends "ruined his life", that is not really certain. In another breath the narrator will describe how he doesn't feel anything. How things came to pass and how he never really felt anything. And then he will rant about the horribleness of the entire situation and the tragedy of it all.

And the crux of the novel is understanding that the narrator is tremendously unreliable in his accounts of everything that occurred. I don't much care for reading between the lines or being uncertain about what is actually happening in a narrative...I generally feel that's a cop out in being honest about the truth of the story. Any movie or book that ends with "maybe it was all a dream" or "maybe it didn't really happen that way" I personally think it was the author/screenwriter being lazy. So knowing, when I started the book, that this is how the narrator was, I was a little concerned that the entire narrative was faulty and not to be believed, and that it would frustrate and irritate the crap out of me.

But it really wasn't how the book felt. For example, in the very first chapter, the author swears by the comfort and stability of his and his wife's time spent with the Ashburnhams (he uses the phrase "I swear" multiple times in this chapter when describing what he knew of them and of their time together). That they passed many wonderful years sharing the same interests and knowing each other so intimately and the narrator is so certain that it was all true. And then in the next breath, he rants about how it was all false and that it was all a "prison of screaming hysterics." And then in the next breath, he's back to swearing that it was all brilliant. And then in the next breath, he says that he knows nothing about anything (the phrase "I don't know" also appears a few times in this chapter too).

So while initially I thought that the author would tell the story in a way where you wouldn't know what was reality and what was false, in the end, the story was told pretty faithfully, but it seemed more like the narrator was unwilling to believe his own account of what happened, mostly because he may just not have wanted to accept it. Or because he was conflicted about what he thought he knew and what the truth turned out to be.

Another interesting facet of the book is that nothing is told in chronological order. The narrator recounts the tale in bits and pieces, in no linear fashion. And near the end of the novel, the narrator even acknowledges that he has done this, but as he explained very early on in the novel, he wanted to tell the story as though he was telling it to a sympathetic soul at the fireplace of a country cottage however the story came to him. So I must admit that even now, if you were to ask me the timeline of the overall events, I don't think I could explain them to you without having to draw out a timeline. And while it complicates things in my head, it doesn't necessarily seem to be that critical to understanding the whole of the story

Final verdict? I did really like the book, if only because it presented me with a completely different way of writing a novel. And I am beyond impressed with Ford Madox Ford's ability to do this. The novel is certainly a triumph and even he regarded it as the finest thing he had ever writer. Like I said, it's like nothing else I've ever read before, and while I attempted to explain what that means, I don't know if I adequately did that. So you should probably just read it yourself to figure it out.

And total random last minute trivia note about Ford Madox Ford: he was a writer in residence at Olivet College here in Michigan shortly before he died.

So on to the next one. I'm taking a quick break from the reading lists to pick up a more recent selection, The Tiger's Wife, by Tea Obréht. Because I have Shakespeare up next, I need to mentally prepare myself for that (reading more of the older works takes much time and is much more tedious for me).

244 books left to go. Given the god-awful winter we've been having here, I'm hoping to get my grizzly bear on and hibernate until spring and maybe plow through some more reading. We'll see how that goes.

"Happiness is Not a Possession to be Prized, it is a Quality of Thought, a State of Mind."

We were finally able to rent Rebecca. It was actually on tv a few times during the holidays, and I had to resist the temptation to watch it without the mister as we had agreed to watch it together...he had already raved about the Hitchcock version.

And I just adored it. It very fairly depicted the book...a few minor things that were different, but no deal breakers (well, except maybe the ending...but I won't give it away for you). Probably changes that just made more sense in a film sense than for the book. Most of all, the film very successfully makes Rebecca ever-present in a dark, ominous way. Everyone loved her, admired her, wanted to be her. And although she's gone, she's everywhere, from her raincoat, to her handkerchiefs, to her handwriting, to what sauces she would choose for lunches with guests. Without doing a thing, she keeps the second Mrs. de Winter constantly feeling inadequate and measuring herself against Rebecca. The book certainly did a better job of providing insight into Mrs. de Winter and why she was so terrified with shyness and almost paralyzed in her new position as Mrs. de Winter, but the suspense was expertly done. But I liked that that the movie wasn't SO Hitchcock. So many of his movies have such a distinct style to them, and even though this one fit that milieu, it was definitely more subtle. And Manderley...ahhh, Manderley. Lovely to see it translated from my imagination to the screen. 

Overall, 2 thumbs way up. On the book and the movie. See it. Read it. Do it.

"Last Night I Dreamt I Went To Manderley Again"

Usually when I read a book, I dog-ear the pages when I come across a particularly interesting, salient quote that grabs my attention and then when writing this blog (side note: for some reason when I type out the word "blog", my fingers inevitably type it out as the word "blob". I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something...), I go back to all of the pages I dog-eared to see if there are any I liked enough to use as the title for the post.

For Rebecca, I had quite a few that I had liked very much ("Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind." And "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."), but I really had to choose the first sentence of the novel. Because in such a simple first chapter, the tone is set for the rest of the book. You know something terrible happened to this couple to drive them to their current location and dynamic, and clearly this location, Manderley, played a significant role.

Suffice it to say, I am obsessed with this book. I loved it. Cover to cover. Every word. Every page. I just loved it. I read 200+ pages in 3 days. Once I got going, I just could not put it down. The way the suspense was conveyed was so well done. It wasn't a murder mystery, it wasn't a horror novel. It was so subtle that you didn't even really know what was wrong with the situation, but just that something was off. Was it the house? Was the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, really evil? Was the narrator just a bit crazy herself? But all is revealed in time, and there was one bit fat surprise twist about two-thirds of the way through the book that I did NOT see coming at all. I can absolutely see how this book would so marvelously lend itself to Hitchcock's deft hand (more on that in a moment). Psychological suspense at it's finest.

And I've always been a sucker for mystery novels. I pretty voraciously read as much Agatha Christie as I possibly could when I was in middle school/high school. And just the intrigue to the stories got me, particularly when they're set in mansions. I don't know why the idea of old, ornate mansions fascinates me so much (I recently discovered that I have this same fondness for movies, particularly offbeat wacky comedies like Clue and Murder By Death. I could watch these damn movies over and over again, certainly not because they're very good movies, but because they hit some strange chord with me). So when I started reading this book, it so easily fell into that milieu that I have loved so much and haven't really read much of lately, which may have contributed to me enjoying it as much as I did.

I can not WAIT to watch the movie of Rebecca. However, once again, it's not available On Demand so I'll have to wait until the mister can get it through Netflix. He assures me sometime in December, and I'm sure I'll be pestering him as often as I think I can get away with before driving him crazy. Usually after I finish reading a book, I'll do a quick internet search to read about themes etc that others have noted in the book, or read about movie adaptations. And when I read about the film adaptation for Rebecca, it seems that at the time Hitchcock made Rebecca, Hollywood production code required that if a character had murdered someone, the murderer would have to be punished for his/her crime (quite different from movies today, right? Keeping morality and social codes in movies? That's crazy talk!). So I imagine that the ending of the movie is quite different than the book, and I'm not sure that I want to there to be a different ending than what was presented in the book, but I'll have to wait and see how I feel about it...

So on to the next one, which is The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. I had no idea what the novel was about when I chose it, and I seem to be inadvertently choosing novels about late 1800s/early 1900s society with some kind of adultery or impropriety driving the story along (between this one, the Age of Innocence, and Rebecca). I'm sure I'll be ready to mix it up once I'm done with The Good Soldier (and I have Shakespeare on deck next, so I'm sure that will sufficiently squash my turn of the century mindset).

245 books to go.

"A Book Must Be the Ax For the Frozen Sea Within Us"

Quick demonstration of what an immense book dork I really am:

I was in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago to run a 1/2 marathon (in addition to some other debauchery...) and on the last day I was there I had some time in the morning to kill while waiting for friends who were staying at a different hotel to wake up and recover from the night prior before meeting up with them. So I spent my time walking to The Venetian and in and around The Grand Canal Shoppes, when I came across the Bauman Rare Book store.

How is it that I find the dorkiest possible thing to do in Vegas? Looking at old books? But I did. For a sizable amount of time. I had never really given much thought to original print versions of books...it didn't really seem all that interesting to me, but to actually see them blew me away.

The only theatrical work Cervantes ever published in his lifetime which was ~400 years old? Jack London's very first printing, first edition of Call of the Wild, inscribed for his mom? An actual signed copy of The Catcher in the Rye (from what I understand, Salinger did not do this very often)? I couldn't even believe what I was seeing. And it's not like you're just looking at pictures of these on the internet. The books are right there in front of you (although certainly behind glass), each with their own story to tell of how they passed through hands over many, many years. I was completely transfixed and fascinated with each and every one, to look at the little creases at the edges of the book jackets and how the tinge of the covers had changed over time. So many of the books I had read (even an original version of The Age of Innocence) that I got so giddy excited to see. 

So if you ever find yourself in Vegas with time to kill and you're as much of a dork as I am, I would highly recommend strolling over to check this store out. You won't regret it. And if you're not interested, hey, I hear they might have some other stuff you can do in Vegas too.    

"You See Monsieur, It's Worth Everything, Isn't It, To Keep One's Intellectual Liberty, Not to Enslave One's Powers Of Appreciation, One's Critical Independence?"

We finally watched the film version of The Age of Innocence last night. It took me a while to get my hands on it, largely because I am an On Demand whore, and if the movie is not immediately available at my fingertips, I get ornery and a bit of anxiety. And I don't have Netflix, so the mister had to get it for us to watch.

And let me just say, this was an absolutely gorgeous and very faithful retelling of the book. Go figure that it was Scorcese. One of the biggest things that Edith Wharton did magnificently well in the book was the translation of the things that were valued by those in the wealthy echelon that the story centers around - particularly home interiors, furniture, food, and clothing. And all of these things were so opulently displayed in the movie - while watching it I was hoping that the costume and set designers received Academy Awards for their work, (only 1 of these turned out to be true). It's one thing to imagine in your mind that kind of extravagance and that kind of detail while you're reading a book, and another thing entirely to see it translated in even more detail that your imagination could have summoned. So that visual part of the film was done to perfection.

And the acting and translation of the story was very faithful too. The love affair between Newland and Madame Olenska is much more overt in the movie (it felt a little more reserved in the book), and the book certainly captured Newland's frustration with having to be tied to societal norms (while also revering them) more than the movie, but I think the gist of it was there. There were times while watching the movie that I think, if you hadn't read the book, you would have been thoroughly confused (characters and events that were squished into the movie without the sufficient explanation), but overall, it was a very fair representation.

So overall, I really really liked it. It's the kind of movie that I wish I was able to watch on a regular basis. Like if it was on tv and I happened across it, chances are I would stay there and watch the entire thing until it was done.

I'm plugging away on Rebecca (100+ pages down) and am already looking forward to watching the movie. Hitchcock here I come.

Happy Sunday!