"When Destiny Knocks The First Nail In The Coffin Of A Tyrant, It Is Seldom Long Before She Knocks The Last"

There were other quotes from A High Wind In Jamaica that I could have chosen for the title of this post that better captured the story of the novel, but I just loved that line so much when I read it, I had to mark the page, save it, write it down. To be shared and admired.

It's kind of strange to think that there aren't that many books (at least that I can think of...I'm sure a more avid, expert level reader could list off many) that are written by adults, about children, that aren't a children's book per se, but that accurately capture the minds and inner lives of children. And I wasn't expecting A High Wind in Jamaica to do that as marvelously as it did. I think Lord of the Flies is the more obvious example that I could think of that felt similar to this book, but this one felt a little more fanciful and imaginative, as though someone much younger could have read it and enjoyed it for the adventuresome tale of the children's voyage and totally missed the much darker themes that pervaded the story. Like, much darker.

The story tells of the 5 Bas-Thornton children (and 2 Fernandez children), ranging in age from 4 to about 15 growing up in the wilds of Jamaica during, what I assume, is the mid to late 1800s (I don't believe an actual year was specified). The children live, what I can only describe as feral lives on the island. They play in the exotic surroundings, mess with bugs and animals, and definitely don't live in a conventional way as would be expected of a white British family (the girls all have their hair cut short and don't wear clothes...the one time the older daughter wore a dress while playing, she almost drowned from the fabric wrapping around her face). A terrible hurricane sweeps through the island destroying everything the Bas-Thorntons own and just barely leaving them all with their lives. Following the storm, the parents freak and realize it's time to send their children back to a safer upbringing. They are sent on a ship bound for England, but shortly after leaving Montego Bay, the ship is ambushed by pirates who take nearly everything from the ship, including the 7 children. And so the rest of the book tells of the children's time spent with the pirates, their life on the ship, and the very complicated relationships that develop during this time.

What fascinated me about this book was how the immediacy of the children's experiences affect the overall story. The children very much lived only in the present moment (as kids do!); as soon as something was out of site and they had a new environment and people to explore, it was as though the previous existence never was. As soon as the kids have the fascinating expanse of the pirate ship to explore, they give no thought to their parents. At one point at a stop in St Lucia, one of the children becomes seriously injured and is left behind on the island, and none of the children seem to mind or give it another thought. In fact, the boy is not mentioned again in the novel until nearly the very end. And once the children are eventually set on a steamer bound for England, as soon as they set foot on the much more elaborate ship, they give no thought to leaving the pirates and become completely absorbed in their new surroundings.

And this impermanent memory is also an important facet of the story. Back in England, the children tell revisionist histories of what they experienced that often were not true, but romanticized (and violent) stories of what one would have expected to have happened with the pirates. In reality, the children became very attached to all of the sailors on the ship, captain Jonsen and first mate Otto in particular, and didn't see them as dangerous at all. The children developed strong affections for them and they even assumed a parental role in the eyes of the children. And in fact, the children didn't even know they were pirates for a very long time after then had been on the ship and were reluctant to admit they were. And I appreciated that the "pirates" were not depicted as "typical" pirates...no peg-leg, no eye patches, no "Arrrggg."

There was also a very discomforting sexual dynamic with the children and the pirates. In particular, a good portion of the story is focused on 10-year-old Emily. At one point, Captain Jonsen strokes her hair in a kindly way (he expresses his feelings for the children as fatherly and not ill-intentioned at all) that slightly borders into an inappropriate way, and while Emily doesn't really understand what this means, she reacts by biting his hand incredibly hard and runs away. The captain feels ashamed for his actions but is also angry with her. All of the other children don't understand at all and just angry with Emily for hurting him and exclude her from playing with them. Later in the story, when Emily injures her leg and the captain carries her down to the bunk and she kisses him. Like I said...discomforting sexual dynamic. It's as though the girl is just slightly too young to understand what is happening and also doesn't have an adult female to explain anything so any understanding of appropriate interactions are all over the place. Her coming of age in this way, and really for all the children, gives them an odd contrast of living amongst violent men and still being naïve and vulnerable. And while there are glimpses of this innocence ebbing away, they still live with the mindset of children. This is even more evident with the ending of the book. I won't go into details to give it away, but it certainly seems that some of the darker, sadistic sides of the pirates rubbed off on the children, Emily in particular.

The book was one that I felt was remarkable. There were so many different levels and nuances to what was going on not just directly in the action of the characters, but indirectly in the author's descriptions. Upon finishing the book, I had a very satisfying feeling of, "This is what good writing is about." I would highly recommend if you're looking for an action-driven book that has a lot more to say.

Onwards and upwards. Next up is The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble. It's on my list of female novels. It seems to be written in the 1980s, so it will be an interesting change to read something from that time.

226 to go. Happy Sunday!

   

"He Sometimes Said It Was Partly His Own Fault, But He Believed Steadfastly That His Position Had Been Brought About By Other People"

When I got to page 3 of Tobacco Road, I groaned audibly and said to the bf, "I'm going to have a really hard time with this book," and then read the following passage out loud:

"Lov asked Pearl questions, he kicked her, he poured water over her, he threw rocks and sticks at her, and he did everything else he could think of that he thought might make her talk to him. She cried a lot, especially when she was seriously hurt, but Lov did not consider that as conversation. He wanted her to ask him if his back were sore, and when was he going to get his hair cut, and when was it going to rain again. But Pearl would not say anything." 

Less than a minute later when I got to page 7, I said again, "Yeah, I'm going to have a REALLY hard time with this book," and then read the following passage out loud: 

"For the past few weeks, Lov had been thinking about taking some plow-lines and tying Pearl in the bed at night. He had tried everything that he could think of so far, except force, and he was still determined to make her act as he thought a wife should." 

Let me point out that Pearl is a 13-year old girl who was sold by her father as a wife (when she was 12, mind you) to their neighbor down the road in exchange for some quilts, a gallon of cylinder oil, and $7. And so that was just the beginning of the many, many reasons that I absolutely despised Tobacco Road. This was easily my least favorite book that I've ever read. So hats off to you Erskine Caldwell. Of the hundreds of books that I've read in my life, I loathe yours far and above any other one that I've even vaguely disliked. 

The book is about the poor, white Lester family in the 1930s who live outside of Fuller, GA: Jeeter, the father (oh, I'll get to plenty about him in a minute); Ada, the mother whose only concern is making sure she has a fashionable dress to be buried in when she dies; Dude, their teenage son, who I suspect may have been slightly mentally handicapped, however, this is not explicitly stated; Ellie May, their daughter who cannot be married/sold off because of her cleft lip; and the grandmother, who everyone abuses, starves, and is angry with because she hasn't died yet (I'm not making this up folks. I could find you the quote in the book that says exactly that). Not to mention Bessie, the older "preacher" with no nose who comes and decides that "God" has told her to marry Dude (the 16-year-old son).

Jeeter has not been able to farm his land for many years since the tenant farmer left and took his equipment and mules with him. In the meantime, the Lesters have spiraled down into complete and abject poverty. All but the last 2 of their 17 children have been married off and/or abandoned them. They are completely starving and have no way to possibly make any money other than trying to sell loads of blackjack oak in Augusta, but no one wants to buy this type of wood for firewood when pine is much better and equivalent price and they have no way to get it to Augusta. 

Almost sounds like a bunch of folks you could kind of feel sorry for, huh? Well don't. They're all absolutely miserable individuals. Jeeter steals food from his neighbor and doesn't share it with the rest of his starving family until he has eaten his fill and gives them scraps. And then blames it on "God" for making him sinful but then assumes that God forgives him. Just because he felt bad about it, that's why God would forgive him. Jeeter lusts after his own daughter(s) and attempts to sleep with Bessie, his son's new wife. 

Jeeter spends every waking moment of every day lamenting how terrible his life is, talking about his grandiose plans to fix it (somehow plant his field, go sell wood in Augusta, fix his automobile, go see his son a county away, etc, etc), but never does a single thing about it. Nothing. Ever. Everyone tells him that he could get a job in the cotton mills in the nearby towns, but he is too stubborn and says that he was meant to farm land. Aside from the fact that he hasn't farmed land for 7+ years because he's too lazy to (granted, he cannot obtain seed and fertilizer, but he himself repeats many times that he always wants to do it, but just can't seem to actually find the motivation to do anything). So instead he damns his family to starvation and misery. But claims that "God will provide." And perhaps the way I'm saying it may make it sound like many of these things are outside of his control, and are a realistic look at the trials and tribulations of a poor family during the Depression. But the book is clearly written in a manner to show that Jeeter is an "all talk no action" kind of person and the reader is not supposed to have any empathy for him. He continually blames all of his miseries on everyone else and doesn't do anything to change his own circumstances, even though there are ways that he can. 

Once Dude gets married to the older, manipulative preacher (who may have at one point been a prostitute), Bessie spends almost every last dollar of hers to buy a brand new car, and things seem to be looking up! Dude can derive hours of simpleton pleasure by honking the horn of the car, and Jeeter now has a way to haul his wood to Augusta, and also has a way to go visit his other son. But Dude little by little destroys the car (apparently you can't drive over 2 feet tall tree stumps, and cars actually need oil to work...but hey! The horn still works!) and kills a black man in a wagon in the process. But no biggie! Jeeter's response was, "Niggers will get killed. Looks like there ain't no way to stop it." Actually there is. Don't crash into their wagons and kill them. 

The only slightly redeeming character was the grandmother, who never spoke to anyone but still went out of her way to light the fire every night hoping that there would actually be food to cook. But she is eventually run over by Dude in the new car and absolutely no one cares. She drags her injured body a few feet across the yard towards the house before Jeeter finally decides to bury her in a shallow grave out in the field. I wasn't entirely clear if she was actually dead yet when he did this.

I understand that this novel was written in a specific time and era and was intended to capture the lives of poor, rural whites in the 1930s. And that the attitudes about women, blacks, etc were intended to be a reflection of how they were in that time and space. And I also understand that the book makes the reader reflect on his/her own response to how the characters deal with poverty and face his/her own opinions and prejudices against those who have little way to improve their own situation. And I will admit that it did make me uncomfortable to be so unsympathetic to their struggles. But there were no redemptive qualities about any of the characters at all that could make my feelings about this feel invalid (except slightly grandma).

And maybe that was Caldwell's intent. Most reviews of the book indicate that Caldwell wrote this as a serious commentary on poor rural Southerners. But many other reviews point to the work as black humor. And I can see how that there are many scenes that are just too ridiculous to be serious (the daughter with the cleft lip dragging her bare ass across the sand towards the neighbor to get at him and his food, everyone watching as Bessie and Dude get it on in the dilapidated house) but I did not find them funny at all. Apparently the movie version of the book takes the comedic approach and presents it more like a Beverly Hillbillies or Hee Haw kind of spin. Which I also never really found very funny. 

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone. And I'm actually annoyed that I spent a week of my life reading it. Thankfully it was short and an easy read. Side note: there was SO much repetition in this book, it probably could have been condensed into 50 pages. A character would not just say the same 4 times in a row but would think the same thing over and over again too. That also contributed to my annoyance while reading. So I'm happy to cross this one off my list and grateful that I don't ever have to read anything by Erskine Caldwell ever again. 

So, rant over. 

Next up, A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. 

And sadly, I realized last week that I didn't do a very good quality control check on my list of books that I read because I had marked off Slaughterhouse Five as having read it, but I have not. So I am still at the magic number of 227 books left to go. As long as what I'm reading isn't filled with despicable, miserable characters who repeat themselves over and over, I'm pretty sure the next book will be more enjoyable. 

Happy Sunday!

"That Is, Time Travel Is Sort Of An Altered State, So I'm More...Aware When I'm Out There, And It Seems Important, Somehow, And Sometimes I Think That If I Could Just Be That Aware Here And Now, That Things Would Be Perfect"

What is really remarkable about The Time Traveler's Wife, is that it is Audrey Niffenegger's first novel. Because the logistics of trying to write this book seem very daunting to me. I envision large whiteboards with the timeline of Clare (the titular character), the straight timeline of Henry (the time traveler), and then a third crazy timeline of when he time travels to the past or future.

I envision this last whiteboard to have lots and lots of arrows going in every direction. Because there were times when it was hard enough for me to wrap my head around where Henry was coming from and where he was traveling to, the fact that there could be 2 of him in one place, and what was going on with each of the versions of Henry that was important to the story. Fortunately, each chapter (and even many subsections within a chapter) indicated the date and how old Henry and Clare were (or sometimes just how old one of them was if the chapter was only told from one of their perspectives). I think I went back and looked at these dates and ages from previous chapters at least 100 times while reading to match things up. Because there were events that occurred when Henry went into the past that were told early in the book and then events that occurred during the time when Henry left to time travel that were related to what happened in the past that you end up reading about later. Confused yet? Exactly. That's why I was so impressed with the book. 

I also was impressed with the creation of the rules and circumstances around how Henry time travels. It's something that I think could kind of be taken for granted and accepted casually as the reader focuses more on the content of the story between Henry and Clare. But something as simple just the basic concepts around his time traveling is actually the biggest driver of the drama in the book. For example, the fact that he cannot take anything with him including clothes and the inherent problems this causes him, how he can't control where and when he travels to, and not having clothes or money all have a huge impact on him and I would say even affects many facets of who he is. And not just who he is in regards to having to be super fit to run away and fight if he happens to drop into a public place stark naked or having to learn how to pick pockets for money. But these things that Henry has to do for self-preservation while time traveling seem to make him very wild, self-destructive, and reckless when he's in his 20s. So something as simple as the "rules" of Henry's time travel really drives a significant amount of the story. 

I mentioned that I have seen the movie a couple times, and the book was definitely more enjoyable to me. Just because there was just so much more detail in the book that the movie lacked. The movie could have been much longer to try to capture more of the details of Clare and Henry's love, explain the time travel better, and include some other critical parts of the storyline. Side note: there is the strangeness that Henry knows Clare from the time that she is 6 years old which could absolutely be seen as a creepy, pedo turn off to the entire book/movie, but the book does a good job of showing his feelings for her as just being kindly and caring which don't develop into love until Clare is much older. So it didn't even cross my mind as being creepy at all in the book. I think the movie was lacking a little bit in this regard. 

Needless to say, I flew through the 500+ page book in a week, so clearly I was engaged. And I read that Niffenegger is working on a follow-up to this book, which is exciting. This is definitely a world that I would want to be re-immersed in and to read about another story of another character who faces the same set of time traveling circumstances. Once the groundwork is laid, it seems that there are infinite possibilities of how a character would handle his/her time travels. I know I will read it when it comes out. 

And so it's back our regularly scheduled programming. I head back to the reading lists with Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell. I was running low on books in the queue from the lists so I recently went on a book buying spree. There are few things in this world that bring me as much joy as buying books. I don't know what it is, but there's just something about seeing the physical representation of incredible stories just sitting across the room from me waiting to be unlocked that brings me so much happiness and anticipation. So I'm all stocked up and ready to soldier on. I seem to be on a roll lately, finding my reading mojo, and I'm happy as can be about it. Hopefully I don't hit a sour note/book that deters my momentum. So I'm looking at you Tobacco Road, don't let a girl down!

Happy Sunday!

"What It Had To Offer Was A Mild Form Of Sanctuary, An Assurance Of Privacy, And The Protection And The Discretion That Attach Themselves To Blamelessness"

I must admit, I am a bit surprised that Hotel du Lac won the Booker Prize back in 1984. But in a way I can sort of see it. It was probably a book, that when it came out, was well-received and was probably felt to have delivered an interesting portrait of the social and sexual dynamics between women (and to a lesser extent, men). But I don't know if time has been to kind to it. It feels much more typical and not anything that out of the ordinary, and certainly not spectacular. 

Hotel du Lac is the story of Edith Hope (irony in the last name), a romantic novelist, who has sought refuge (although we find out later that it is more of a forced sabbatical) at the Hotel du Lac on the shores of Lake Geneva, which is the type of place where many people come to hide, recover, or seek a simple kind of privacy. It is the end of the season and the hotel is sparsely populated with a few colorful characters - Mme de Bonneuil, a deaf older woman who seems a relic of a much older time, Monica, a gorgeous modelesque woman with an eating disorder and a little dog, Mr Neville, a droll and controlled man and a man who seems accustomed to getting his way, and Mrs and Jennifer Pusey, a very vibrant, extravagant mother and daughter pair who are only too happy to talk incessantly about themselves and flaunt their wealth and penchant for buying clothing. 

The book moves fairly slowly and many of the scenes repeat themselves over and over again - lots of tea and coffee in the salon, dinner at appointed times, and lots of walks. And while this may sound really boring and tedious, Brookner does a nice job of interspersing these standard events with other facets of the story including stories of the other guests as well as Edith's own backstory for her imposed exile to the Hotel du Lac. And the slow pace and redundant events make sense for the character. She's seeking some kind of resolution or atonement for her past sins, event though she doesn't really seem to view them as sins at all, but views them in a vaguely disinterested, impartial manner. And through her interactions with Mr Neville, seems to question whether love is necessary at all and tries to come to terms with the version of herself that she feels she is, the version that everyone tells her she is (which, from Mr Neville, Monica, and the Puseys, is pretty harsh), and the version of herself she has the opportunity to become.

I enjoyed the book very much. While I have a strong fondness for books, movies, and tv shows that take place in large old mansions, apparently I also have a fondness for stories set in old luxurious hotels as well. So I suppose I can expand my repertoire. I think it's just the luxury and formality of it that appeals to me somehow. As a side note, I would LOVE to see this done as a movie. 

So next up, I again take a quick break from the lists to read The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. I didn't really have any intention of reading this book, but my sister lent it to me and it is her new bf's favorite book. And when people lend me books, I have to read them right away...I never want to hold onto other people's stuff for longer than I need to. I watched the movie years ago on a flight back from Amsterdam. I was travelling for work in first class (a corporate policy that I was grateful to take advantage of) and have very strong memories of being all reclined in my super reclining seat, with the fancy blanket (you get fancier blankets in first class fyi), fuzzy socks (you get fuzzy socks in first class also), and warm chocolate chip cookies (you get the point about first class by now) and bawling my goddamn eyes out. I'm sure the guy next to me thought I was certifiably insane. And the movie has been on tv here and there for the last week or so and I seem to only catch the last 15 minutes or so, and I still end up bawling like a baby. So I fully expect extreme waterworks once I finish the book.

227 to go. Happy New Year!  

"Thus, After Everything Has Been Most Carefully Weighed, It Must Finally Be Established That This Pronouncement 'I Am, I Exist' Is Necessarily True Every Time I Utter It Or Conceive It In My Mind"

Not gonna lie, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around philosophical arguments. And I know that there is some background information that is needed to understand the tenets of structuring a philosophical proof, which I know I learned at some point in time. But it has been a while since my intro to philosophy class, so I've certainly forgotten a lot of it. But I was still able to understand Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy fairly well and still could turn a critical eye to his arguments.

There are 6 different meditations presented: 1) Concerning those things that can be called into doubt; 2) Concerning the nature of the human mind: that it is better known than the body; 3) Concerning God, that he exists; 4) Concerning the true and the false; 5) Concerning the essence of material things, and again concerning God, that he exists; and 6) Concerning the existence of material things, and the real distinction between mind and body. Descartes initially starts by ignoring everything that he isn't absolutely certain about and then one argument at a time, demonstrating what is known for sure.

While I generally was on board with how he went about demonstrating "certainties," there occasionally seemed to be some assumptions that led to certainties that seemed a bit incongruous to me, particularly around his arguments for the existence of God. One of his key assumptions was that, because he has an inherent thought of what God is, God must exist. But he limits his views on having an inherent thought of what God is to only himself. It doesn't mean that every person or every culture inherently has an idea of a "God." And he never mentions the fact that someone else could have placed the "inherent" thought of God into his mind, which seems kind of like a given, because everyone (especially in Descartes' time) is taught about God. So it just seemed like one of the most important assumptions of his argument was not a very sound idea. I had multiple other similar feelings about his other arguments throughout the meditations, but I won't bore you with my philosophical analysis.

One main thing that was very interesting to me about reading philosophical texts from the 1600s was how much the advancement of science and understanding of the brain has impacted these arguments. There is so much more we know now about the universe, perception, the senses, aberrations of the senses, mental illness, and how changes on a cellular/neuronal level make us the unique individuals we are with the minds we have, it would be interesting to see what these arguments would be with all of this taken into account. In some regards, I think they would largely be the same, because there is still a very real concept of "the mind" that cannot be pinpointed (yet?) by science by just identifying which neuronal connections mean what.

But in other regards, it seems like there is much more understanding around our brains, creation of the universe, and other relevant scientific findings that make philosophical arguments of the existence of God more difficult to prove, particularly when it comes down to understanding what is "real" based on our own senses and that which is external to us. What we perceive is much more fickle and less certain than we tend to think it is. Any number of aberrations from color blindness, to synesthesia, to hallucinations and psychosis, to phantom limbs, to differing types of amnesia wreak havoc on our on individual perceptions of the world around us and of our own bodies on minds. And very often, we have no reason to doubt these things because they are real to us. And if you can dismiss these things as just aberrations, then what really is the "correct" way of perceiving things? Just interesting to think about...

So anywho, Meditations was an interesting break to use my noggin in a very different way than I normally do when reading. I have a few other philosophy texts in the Best Literary Works list, and I'm not particularly dreading them as much as before reading this. And if I was smart, I would go read Aristotle now, because many of Descartes' arguments sought to disprove Aristotle's theories. But meh. I would probably get frustrated and it would then take me another year to get through it. So I'll shift to reading something a little more in my wheelhouse, Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner. I'm actually quite looking forward to something that's a more digestible type of fiction, since I haven't had that for about a year or so (Ulysses being super challenging, H is for Hawk being nonfiction, and Meditations being philosophy). And having the next week off makes me look forward to it even more.

Happy Holidays!

228 more to go.

"The Hawk Was A Fire That Burned My Hurts Away. There Could Be No Regret Or Mourning In Her. No Past Or Future. She Lived In The Present Only, And That Was My Refuge"

There might be a bit of amused coincidence in finishing a book about a bird of prey the day after we as Americans celebrate a day of thankfulness and gratitude by eating turkey. Here is where I would make a smart comment about the fact that if Ben Franklin had chosen the turkey as the American symbol, maybe we would be eating bald eagle on Thanksgiving instead; however, that little ditty is actually a myth (although Franklin did seem to be opposed to it being an eagle).

Any-who, I did finish H is for Hawk. And as I previously mentioned, I really had no idea what the book was about when I impulsively put it into my Amazon shopping cart. And I'm generally not a fan of non-fiction autobiography-type books and I didn't really know that's what I had signed up for. And after recently reading When Breath Becomes Air, I think I'm good with books about facing the reality of death and facing our own mortality.

The book is a self-recounting of Helen Macdonald's time after the death of her father spent training a goshawk. Prior to reading this book, I knew absolutely zero about falconry and training hawks/birds of prey. And honestly, that was definitely what I found most interesting about the book. The idea of being able to train a completely wild, non-domesticated breed of animal is quite fascinating. And the history behind how this was an aristocratic activity (and how hunting in general in England was reserved for the elite and royalty due to owning of the expanses of land where the hunts were conducted) was also so interesting to me. Macdonald details all of the steps of this process in lovely detail, so even though I had no concept of what would be involved, equipment names, etc, her explanations and descriptions provided a very comprehensive understanding of everything involved. It's the science nerd in me. What can I say?

And while I can appreciate her parallels between training the hawk and her grief process following her father's sudden death (and certainly there were many parts of the book that felt like I was reading the cathartic journaling of someone dealing with the death of a loved one), there were times when it felt a bit forced. I have no doubt that Macdonald's choice to obtain and train a hawk at that time in her life were very much entwined with her desire to self-isolate and to retreat into the wildness of a goshawk, but the abundance of "training hawk as dealing with grief" parallels in every chapter just seemed like a little much to me after a while.

In parallel with her own story of training her goshawk, Macdonald tells of many of the writings that inspired her interest in hawking, in particular the book The Goshawk by T.H. White, who was the author of The Sword in the Stone. And the portrait of White was quite fascinating. I knew absolutely nothing about him, and realized that I actually don't really know anything about The Sword in the Stone either. I'm really only familiar with the Disney-fied version and even then, I've only seen bits and pieces. But to read of White's life, struggle to connect with other people, and closeted sexuality in relation to his own training of a goshawk I think brought a strength to Macdonald's own story. I had hoped for a more compelling end to the book related to the parallels of Macdonald's time spent training her hawk and White's, but not to be.

I did enjoy the book and again, the details of training a hawk were fascinating. But not sure if I would have read it had I known more about the book ahead of time. So yeah. Moving on.

Next up, I'm taking a strange sojourn to hit one of the pieces listed under the "Philosophy" section of my List of Best Literary Works: Meditations by Rene Descartes. It is fairly short in length so I hope to make fast work of it over the holiday weekend, however, I fully expect lots of mental gymnastics along the way. I took an intro to philosophy class as a freshman undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and it was one of those classes that really blew open my entire way of thinking about the world, and now, nearly 20 years later, I can point to as a moment when my way of looking at the world changed. So I'm expecting to see a revisit of many of the topics that were discussed in that class, which I'm looking forward to.

Happy thanksgiving!

"Some Say That We Shall Never Know And That To The Gods We Are Like The Flies That The Boys Kill On A Summer Day, And Some Say, On The Contrary, That The Very Sparrows Do Not Lose A Feather That Has Not Been Brushed Away By The Finger Of God"

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is based around a very simple concept (with a similar quote noted in the book): do we live and die by accident, or do we live and die by plan? In the Afterword of the book, there are excerpts of letters and lectures by Thornton Wilder and he indicates his belief that there are really only a few really great subjects to write about. Which is a very interesting concept...are there really only a handful of basic moral dilemmas people encounter and all books are written around these themes, with different backdrops, characters, and dynamics between the characters?

So Thornton Wilder takes this simple concept, and sets it in Peru where a monk happens to see a osier bridge over a ravine break and 5 people plummet to their deaths. He feels that this circumstance provides him with the perfect opportunity to conduct a "scientific" study of every minutiae of these individuals' lives and determine that there was a reason that God chose them to die. So, yes, he seems to already have his conclusion determined before he begins his examination that these individuals were somehow morally reprehensible and that they deserved what happened to them (it's amusing to me that they referred to it as a "scientific" study when he already knew what he wanted the results to be).

The majority of the rest of the book is then a sketch of each of the 5 characters: the Marquesa de Montemayor, a self-isolated woman who is estranged from her daughter but obsessively craves her daughters love and approval; the Marquesa's young maid/assistant Pepita; Esteban, an identical twin who was emotionally distraught over the recent death of his twin brother; Uncle Pio, an older enigmatic traveler who had devoted most of his life to the instruction, support, and occasional emotional manipulation of Peru's most famous actress; and Jaime, the son of the famous actress.

I cannot begin to say how gorgeously written this book is. I was reading it on an airplane next to my bf, and a few times I had to lean over to him to show him a particular sentence and how exquisite the wording and descriptions were. Again, it was such a simple concept, but the portraits of the characters were just so rich and interesting. And it was written from the perspective of someone who was reviewing their lives, so it was a bit removed but the narrator still knew things about the characters' inner minds that wouldn't likely have been something that could have been researched after their deaths. And in the end, did the monk achieve the foregone conclusion that he set out to confirm? Well, I'll let you find that out for yourselves!

I did love this book very much and I'm looking forward to reading Our Town, also by Thornton Wilder (I've never seen the play or movie). In the meantime, I'm taking a break from the lists to read H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald, an impulse Amazon purchase. I didn't really have much of an idea what the book was about, but so far, it's interesting. I don't usually buy nonfiction books, and honestly didn't realize it was until I started reading. It won lots of awards and was on lots of "Best Of" lists, so hopefully it will be good!

229 books to go! Happy 5th of November!