"This Is The Time The Swooning Soul Hangs Pendant And Vertiginous Between The New Day And The Old, Nor Dares Confront The One Or Summon Back The Other"

I don't exactly know why it has taken me until I was 40 years old to read something by Dorothy Parker. I honestly didn't even know who she was until I saw the movie Can You Ever Forgive Me? with Melissa McCarthy, where she plays a struggling writer who takes to forging letters by authors and selling them to make ends meet; Dorothy Parker was one of her frequent subjects of imitation. Dorothy Parker is often described as one of the greatest wits of the 20th century (I mean, it says it right on the back of my book jacket) and one of the greatest short story writers in particular. So I don't know how she managed to evade my attention for so long.

And in diving into her short stories collection, it was clear to me that she absolutely had a distinct voice and style, unlike any other I had read before. The stories are largely set in the 1920s and 1930s and are told from the point of view of a society woman (there are some from the perspective of a man, but largely the same concept...high society urban men and women), and very often, there is some kind of miscommunication between the woman and a man, be it her husband, her boyfriend, the man she met at a high society party, or the man she is waiting around to call her. And the dialogue is often clever, funny, smart, and infuriating.

And it seemed clear to me, that Dorothy Parker did not think very highly of women at all (society women or really any woman). The women in her stories are constantly doing things that they don't want to do because it is polite and proper and expected of her. And Parker clearly has disdain for these women as the overall tone, while clever and witty, is one of mockery for women not rising above their situations and taking a stand against the status quo of gender dynamics. I think there was maybe one female character who was saucy and sharp-tongued enough to talk back to a man that she met at a party, in The Mantle of Whistler (and while most of Parker's stories were short, this story was even shorter, not giving any daylight to a strong female character). All of the rest of her women are "proper" women personified - simpering, desperate (like capital D-E-S-P-E-R-A-T-E) for their man's attention and affection (although often playing off that they don't care, but turning around and crying in hysterics), and feeling this obligation to be the perfect female mate. And in some stories (some of the longer stories in particular), the women were very self-aware. They were aware that they were being crazy and asked themselves "Why am I doing this for him?" but would go right back to being the pathetic creature of habit. 

Again there were a few exceptions where some of the women were given more dimension (Big Blonde for example) and fell slightly outside of this mold. But for the most part, after a while, a lot of the stories kind of felt the same. Which explains why it has taken me months to get through what should have been an enjoyable quick read. And don't get me wrong, I did very much enjoy Parker's style of writing. It was easy to get sucked into her banter and the dynamics of the relationship back-and-forth and was very enjoyable for a time. But after a while, I didn't want to read about the same woman anymore...a woman that I kind of wanted to scream at. And I get it, it was like 100 years ago when the gender dynamics were completely different, and women did play these kind of games to get and marry men (even though it often made them miserable, another subject Parker displays with zero sentimentality). And maybe that was the entire point. To hold up a mirror to the society woman that Parker loathed and put her on blast in a sardonic manner to show exactly what was wrong with the whole situation to begin with (and kudos to Parker for wading into some taboo issues like abortion way back then). 

Moving forward, Dorothy Parker will hold a special place in my heart, because I truly loved her sass and style of writing, but overall, I was glad to be done with my time with her society women.

Because I struggled so much with this book, rather than jumping into potentially another struggle bus book from my lists, I'm going to take a quick break for a random non-list book that I picked up on a whim off the table at the bookstore: Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan. I need something that is going to capture my attention for a bit, mid lockdown. Reading is one of my greatest solaces and one that I need to absorb for joy during this time, so I really want to spend it absorbing things that make me happy and that I look forward to reading as opposed to forcing myself to get through something challenging (maybe I'll be ready for challenging in a bit, but not so much right now). I don't know much of anything about the book, so it will be an enjoyable surprise to read it with no expectations. Wish me luck!     

"Because Between 'Reality' On The One Hand, And The Point Where The Mind Strikes Reality, There's A Middle Zone, A Rainbow Edge Where Beauty Comes Into Being, Where Two Very Different Surfaces Mingle And Blur To Provide What Life Does Not: And This Is The Space Where All Art Exists, And All Magic"

Suffice it to say that Donna Tartt is quite a remarkable writer. I found the story of The Goldfinch so remarkable and was completely hooked from the very beginning but combined with her equisite descriptions and aside observations of life (filtered through a oftentimes dark and troubled narrator), I just could not put it down. As I noted a couple posts ago, there were many pages that I dog-eared because a particular passage would capture me and I would be so struck with the words and thoughts behind them. I believe I even read one of them outloud to the bf. That doesn't happen very often at all because he never really seems all that impressed with them in spite of how much I love them.

The Goldfinch tells the story of Theo Decker, who we meet as a young 13-year old, living in NYC with his mother, following their abandonment by his alcoholic father. After getting in trouble at school and having to go meet the principal with his mom, they make a stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on their way to kill time and because his mother is particularly keen to see a favorite painting of hers. During this sojurn, the museum is vicitim to a terrorist attack, with Theo being one of the few survivors near the center of the blast. He emerges, having connected briefly with a dying man in the museum who insists that he take a painting with him, The Goldfinch, by Carel Fabritius, which Theo does, in his incoherent state of shock and delusion. 

From here, Theo's life trails down a difficult path, initially being sympathetically taken in by the wealthy family of one of his friends from childhood. But his father returns to claim him (and the possibility of any money he can get his hands on through Theo) and Theo moves to Las Vegas where he befriends Boris, the son of a Russian business man who travels the world. Together, they head into a self-destructive path, fueled with drugs and alcohol, but at the same time, cement their friendship. 

Further into his adulthood, Theo continues his darkness, but has established himself as a very sucessful antiques dealer, after connecting with the family of the dying man he met in the museum. All the while, he is tortured over the loss of his mother, the trauma he experienced in the museum, his unrequited love for another survivor of the bombing, and the fear of hiding The Goldfinch, which by now, the musuem curators and authorities are certain was stolen from the museum and not destroyed in the bombing. What unfolds is a sinister and dangerous situation for Theo, who is perhaps too troubled a soul to really be able to handle a sinister and dangerous situation. 

AT 771 pages, this book was dense, but each different vignette of Theo's life (from his time as a young kid before, during, and after the bombing, to his wild and unsupervised time in Las Vegas staying with his father and meeting Boris, to his time as an adult where he is learning to navigate the life that has been thrust upon him) was told with so much riveting detail, that I couldn't possibly see it being any shorter. I actually loved the fact that it was so lush and long because it helped you GET Theo and everything about him and his circumstances and what drove him to the choices that he made. 

And again, I was so remarkably captured by so many passages:

"You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else enitre, and that's not even to mention the people separated from us by time -- four hundred years before us, four hundred after we're gone --it'll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it'll never strike in any deep way at all but -- a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you." 

"What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?"

"And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beutiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky -- so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime." 

I mean c'mon, that last sentence? It's just freaking beautiful. 

Donna Tartt just shot to the top of my list of authors that I want to read everything they wrote. And it's possible that I bought her other 2 novels for that very reason. 

Side note about the movie of The Goldfinch: as I was reading the book, I was aware of the fact that the movie had already been made of the novel. And I found myself already angry about it. Because there is SO MUCH in the book that I was angry that they short-changed it by making it a 2.5 hour, single-sitting movie. It needed to be done as a miniseries, in the style of Big Little Lies. Devote the time, space, and development to explore all of the amazing facets of the novel. So when I watched the movie, while I was pleased that they kept as true to the book as possible and really included much more than I expected, it was all so rushed. It didn't develop anything nearly enough, and you didn't have the sympathy or understanding of Theo (or any of the other characters for that matter) the way you needed to. So while I would give the movie maybe a B-/C+, I don't think many people who didn't read the book would remotely appreciate it, which does a huge disservice to the book. 

So yeah, go read this book, I promise you won't be disappointed!

Given that life has substantially changed in the last couple weeks to a world of pandemic quarantine where we'll be staying home indefinitely, I anticipate my reading will ramp up quite a bit here. And hopefully my commitment to writing here too. I mean, what the hell else do I have to do? I'm being given the gift of time, so in order to avoid a deadly infectious disease, I think I can commit to just huddling up and doing nothing but read. With that said, Dorothy Parker is an absolute delight. But I sometimes struggle with reading books of short stories...I feel as though I have to only read a couple at a time to then reflect and absorb the individual story. If I were to sit down and read it cover to cover, I would never appreciate each story, the tone of them (particularly with Dorothy Parker) would begin to feel monotonous, and I would probably forget most of what I read. So I'm trying to pace myself a little bit with Ms. Parker. But wow, what a wit. And boy will I have commentary about her portrayal of men and women in her stories. 

So with that, back t0 staring at these 4 walls and finding the many constructive things to do. Happy quarantine Saturday. 

"If People Don't All Experience Emotional Satisfaction And Deprivation In The Same Way, What Claim Can There Be For Equality of Need?"

Man, I have been staring and re-reading the title of this post for about 5 full minutes trying to really wrap my head around it and trying to come up with a good answer. And while in my previous post I noted that I probably didn't give July's People a fair enough read, there was certainly parts of, like statements like that, that would catch me re-reading and thinking about. Or a passage, further along the same page discussing death as a relative place based on an individual's place in the economy, a "purchase", describing the wealthy white architect who could afford the private jet in which he crashed and then describing the elderly tribal grandmother who would work the land, bending lower and lower to the earth until she returned to it. It was certainly a novel about race that is teeming with tension when, just that quickly, roles are reversed.

The story is about the Smales family and their servant July. The Smales are a liberal, upper class, white family in Johannesburg (Bam, Maureen, Gina, Victor, and Royce) who are forced to flee the city during a (fictional) violent civil war overturning the system of apartheid (note: Nadine Gordimer wrote the book prior to the end of apartheid, therefore, this was her fictionalization/prediction of what she thought might happen) and are aided by their loyal black servant of 15 years, July. He helps smuggle them out of the city during the fighting and takes them to his village a couple hundred miles away. Once there, they are now the minority and have to live according to July's rules and the ways of the village in order to survive. During this time they confront the immediate loss of comfort, living in huts with dirt ground and bathing in the river, and the fact that many of the other villagers (mostly the women) don't necessarily want them there. And they are living in absolute fear, knowing that many friends and other upper class whites in Johannesburg were killed, so knowing that if they are discovered, they may very well face the same fate.

Amongst all of this is the incredibly complex changing relationship they now face with July, in particular, Maureen (as she is the main narrator). The change in power dynamic, and the levels of trust that both of them have to demonstrate, which is tested many times. In the city as the head of the household, Maureen was generally the one who provided the orders to July, and now, in his tribe, gender roles are far different, which Maureen must adjust to. And back in the city, July had a mistress which Maureen knew about, and now back in his tribe, July must trust Maureen to maintain that secret from his wife. They must also entrust the keys to their truck to July, which could potentially be their only lifeline to getting out of the village if something were to happen.

The racial dynamics during the time of apartheid in South Africa are so well explored in this book in such a simple way and again, there was so much tension. You wanted to believe that because these characters knew each other for so long they would trust each other and everything would work out, but there was absolutely no certainty in that. And while the book was relatively short, it was the kind of book where I felt like every word was so much more deliberate than I was probably giving it credence. Again, the fact that I read this in a half-assed, less-than-focused way probably didn't allow me to get as much out of it as I probably could have. But I still found it engaging, nonetheless.

So after July's People, as I said, I devoured The Goldfinch. With this President's Day off, maybe I will get around to writing that badboy up too.

Oh and yeah, I'm only a couple stories into Dorothy Parker, and she's already a heroine. There is going to be a LOT that I'm going to have to say about her.     

"Today Is Only One Day In All The Days That Will Ever Be"

And so here we are in February. Of 2020. A full 7 months since my last post. My 40th birthday has come and gone. No big reflective post about the origins of this blog. Examining how far I've come. How far away from the original goal I fell. For those of you keeping track, which I know is no one, across the 4 lists there were 326 books. When I started the blog in July 2012, I had read 73, leaving 253, and as of my 40th birthday on September 14th, 2019, I had only added an additional whopping 36 books to that total, leaving 218 left to read (a clerical error added an additional book that I had originally excluded from the list, thinking I had read, but I had not). 

So the goal of this blog that I started with such aplomb and happy ambition was not met. And the simple thing would be to just strikethrough that 40 and change it to 50! Yay! And maybe I will. I certainly won't stop reading all of these classics. Because these lists and these books are as much a part of how I  make choices, not just of what to read but what I do in my everyday life and how I spend my free time, that I truly can't see myself living without them. So while I may not have met the lofty goal, the quest goes on because it has to. 

And I'm sorry if this whole post sounds a little Bitter Betty. I feel like it should be so much more reflective of this whole endeavor that I've undertaken. But the last 7 months have just kicked me so hard in the teeth that there's a reason not just for the absence in posts but the lack of reading. And a lack in reading makes my heart hurt. And all of the other things going on that have affected the lack of reading make my heart hurt too. Mostly getting sucked into the void of 70-hour work weeks from about August onward to December. When I left my last job it was for largely the same reason and I swore I would never do this to myself again. Because it affects every part of my being and of my life. I become this opposite version of myself that I loathe. This version who bitches about work to anyone who will listen even though I know they're only pretending to feign interest and concern. But I can't stop myself from the verbal fountain of complaining because I am stuck in the drowning suction where the only thing that exists is the waking hours of work and the few hours of sleep in-between. And if I try to grasp for some sympathy from even a partially listening ear, I tend to go for it, even as I see the boredom reflected in their eyes as I prattle on about the failure of team members to provide input on time, gigantic changes in scope, blah blah blah. 

And so that was where my life existed for almost 6 months. While July's People languished on my nightstand. And I know I read it. And I'll give a recap. But I didn't give it a fair read, because it was during such a low time for me, even when I was able to devote time to it, like on an airplane. My mind was elsewhere, and not in a good place. 

So explain to me how, following July's People, I read The Goldfinch, an almost 800 page book in 2 1/2 months, while I was also still dealing with all of the 70-hour work drama bullshit. I guess the heaviness somehow matched exactly how I was feeling, and it was hard to put it down. There were so many phrases and passages that I dog-eared because I wanted to save. Suffice it to say, yeah, I absolutely adored it. I didn't want it to end. I've had it on my mind for DAYS since I've finished it. And I may actually read it over again. And I very very rarely do that, only because there are so many books that I want to read. But I just loved it so much in such a heartbreaking, lovely way. 

And again, maybe the melancholy of the book just caught me at the right time. The grey loneliness of winter and the shit time at work all wrapped up in the painting and the excessive drug use and death. I don't know. 

Anyway, I'll write a recap for that too. But up next, I'm finding it hard to make a choice of what to read next. I'm going to try Stories, by Dorothy Parker because she may be a good fit for how I'm feeling lately and to at least keep me on track with the reading lists. But we'll see Maybe I'll come around and have a more positive attitude about 2020. Until then, here's a snippet from The Goldfinch to leave you with. 

"That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open."

"She Prayed That God Would Look On Them And See The Beauty Of Their Existence And Leave Them Alone"

Many of the books that I've read recently, not just on my book lists, but also ones that I've read for my own personal interest, are ones that seem to span large periods of time, sometimes even lifetimes, as in the case of The Old Wives Tale. So I delighted in the characters in Bel Canto being all confined to one single location (the vice president's home of a South American country) over a relatively short period of time (~4 months) and the entire story (epilogue excluded - which I'll get to) takes place all within this location and time frame. I absolutely loved it. The familiarity you gain with the setting, with each room, with the layout of each room in relation to each other, with each object in each room, with each character, with each person's attire, how each person's attire changes, with the passing of time as portrayed and importantly connected to the change in weather. All of these things are critical to the story. And I just loved it. It felt claustrophobic but in the absolute best way I've ever read. And maybe it harkens back to my love of books/movies that are set in mansions (see December 1, 2013 post for further discussion on this point), but I was hooked from the very first sentence. 

The book is about Roxane Coss, an American opera singer, who has agreed to perform at the birthday party for a wealthy Japanese business man at the home of a South American vice president. The Japanese business man, Katsumi Hosokawa, agreed to have the party in the South American country under the pretense that he was interested in opening a factory there, but in actuality, only agreed to come because somehow they were able to hire his favorite opera singers, Ms. Coss, to perform, opera being the single personal indulgence he allows himself to love. However, during the party, a group of terrorists takes the entire group of high-class party attendees hostage, initially intending to acquire the president as their hostage, but unfortunately, the president is not in attendance. So the terrorists have to figure out what to do from there. 

What happens from there, is a 4-month captivity of ~40 hostages (a large majority are released initially) from around the globe, many of whom cannot speak the same language, except for Mr. Hosokawa's translator who bears the burden of translating for nearly everyone. And during this time, a whole world of things change in so many ways, driven in part by Roxane's singing, which somehow seems to affect not just Mr. Hosokawa, but his translator, the other hostages, and all of their captors. 

I guess I don't need to say again how much I loved this book. However, when I was reading and got to the end of each chapter, I kept expecting it to end with some kind of cliff hanger. Some kind of action related to the hostage situation going on outside to leave me on pins and needles (like, I don't know, some kind of action from the government to end the stand-off or some kind of foreshadowing about what was to come). But it really wasn't like that. Which, after a while, really made me settle down and accept that the book wasn't intended to be about the action of the events of the terrorism take-over going on outside the house, but the events going on internally between the characters inside the house. And that it was ok that the action was more quiet, and subtle and about them, and their interactions, and their moments. So those were what I was meant to feel and be left with after I finished a chapter. Not this urgent need to move on from action to ACTION to ACTION!!!! But to just hold onto these words and exchanges because, as I knew and as the reader knows, this does not, will not last. And I did not want this book to end. So many of the reviews that I've read of the book have said nearly the same thing, so that must be a damn good thing when you don't want your reader to let go of your characters, probably because you know how things will end. 

There was an epilogue that I most certainly could have done without. It actually made me kind of grumpy afterwards. But I'll not give anything away, and let you decide for yourself what you think about it. 

I did have a chance to watch the movie version of Bel Canto this week as well. I'd say it was a pretty decent version of the book, but something felt just not as emotionally gripping as the book. I think the casting was pretty great (Julianne Moore wouldn't have been my first choice but I liked her much more than I was expecting t0), and there were some modifications from the book that I didn't much mind (epilogue was excluded so I didn't shed a tear to see that gone). But it felt like it could have been a little bit longer and slower to just develop some of the connections to some of the characters that you get so much in the book. I enjoyed it, but would heartily recommend the book first. 

Oh and did you know that the book was inspired by actual events when hundreds were taken hostage at the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru in 1996 (opera singer excluded)?

So next up is back to the lists and on to July's People by Nadine Gordimer. I'm into the doldrums of summer and it's a short read so I'm hoping for this one to be a great, quick, engaging read! 

Oh yeah, and 55 days until my 40th bday. Post about that and my lack of meeting the goal of this blog, Coming Soon! xoxo

"Memory Believes Before Knowing Remembers. Believes Longer Than Recollects, Longer Than Even Wonders."

I had never read anything by William Faulkner in high school. It seemed as though everyone else had to read As I Lay Dying in their English class but for some reason, my teacher chose not to include it for us. Go figure. So Light in August has been my first read of his. And I am aware that many say that he is, if not the greatest American writer, then certainly the greatest American writer from the south. And of the works that I've read from my lists, I seem to have recently chosen many writers who represent some of the writers who are most often named in any "best of" southern writers discussion and who provide a very distinct portrait of the south in the 20th century (Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and, begrudgingly to me, Erskine Caldwell). So I honestly didn't know what to expect from the book, but, 1) I did have high expectations, and 2) I may have gone in with a little bit of southern lit saturation, because I do feel like I've read a lot of it lately (although looking back at what I've read lately, it hasn't really been all that much).

Light in August tells the story of 3 main characters. First, Lena, a pregnant unwed young woman, who travels to Jefferson, Mississippi from Alabama in a quiet, dogged determination to find the father of her unborn child, convinced that he is an honest man and that he really intended to come back and marry her (spoiler alert: he is a big turd and he had no such intention). Second, Joe Christmas, a man who had arrived in Jefferson as a bit of a drifter and who no one knew much about, but the reader learns much about his history, and his mixed race background and the violence and difficulties that have plagued him as a result. Third, Gail Hightower, a former disgraced reverend, who has a very bitter streak against the people of Jefferson for his ousting from the church. There are multiple other important supporting characters, in particular, Byron, who falls in love with Lena and who may or may not do the right thing by her in regards to reuniting her with her baby daddy; Brown, Lena's baby daddy; and Joe Christmas' whack-a-do grandparents by birth who he has never met. 

In the story, a murder occurs, and some very serious issues around race come to the forefront. Which isn't surprising, given that the novel was written and set in the early 1930s. While I was reading the book, I found myself very curious what Faulkner's sentiments were about racism, given that he was raised hearing stories in his family about the Ku Klux Klan. And while the sentiments of the book definitely don't condone it, they definitely didn't come down that hard against it either. And while there are a great MANY essays you can find out there about Faulkner's writings and their overall impact on race, it's less easy to find historical essays about his personal feelings about race. But it is clear that his writings themselves really seem to speak for themselves when it comes to how far he was willing to go to put issues of race out there for public discussion, certainly given that this work in particular was written in the 30s. A mixed race man having consensual sex with a white woman in her plantation home (a white woman who devotes her time to helping improve the lives of blacks in the south, incidentally) who goes on to murder her, and yet, who the reader still feels quite sympathetic towards as the rest of the events of the story unfold? Yes, I'd say there are a lot of layers there indeed. 

I was expecting the actual writing to be more dense or more complicated or more flowery or more "extra" (as the kids these days would say). Or just more something, I guess. And again, I think that's because I came in with the expectation noted above. I expected to just be blown out of the water. And I don't think I necessarily was. I thought the book was wonderful, and again, it absolutely makes a statement about race given the time that it was written, and it also explored the concept of personal identity. I am very much looking forward to the other Faulkner works that I have on my list, because I suspect that they are going to be very different. And I'm kind of really looking forward to that.

Up next for a break from my reading lists during my 4th of July vacation week is Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, a book that I had purchased on a random book store whim a couple years ago and just haven't gotten around to reading yet. When I traveled to Thailand earlier this year, on our airline, we had many movie options to chose from, and the film version of this book was one of those options. So I had to do my best, when I would glance over to someone's seatback and see Julianne Moore and Ken Watanabe, to avert my eyes so as not to ruin the book and/or movie for myself before getting around to reading and/or watching. So I have the entire week off and expect to do nothing but sit on my fanny and read. So expect a quick run through this one!

218 left to read!

"We Had More Than Any Two People In The World. And Then We Fell Down. First You, And Then Me. Yes, It Makes It Even. We're Down Here Together. But We're Not Up High Any More. Our Beautiful Mountain Is Gone."

About three quarters of the way through The Postman Always Rings Twice, I found myself wondering what the title of the book was intended to mean. Because there was absolutely no mail delivery in site anywhere in this novel. 

And while clocking in at a short 116 pages, man, was there a lot of story jam packed in there. The book tells the story of Frank, a vagabond who finds himself at a diner in southern California, where he is offered a job by Nick Papadakis (referred to throughout the novel as "the Greek"), which he accepts and after seeing the Greek's wife, Cora, in the kitchen, he immediately lusts for her. Turns out, Cora isn't all that happy in her marriage, and takes an immediately liking to Frank as well (I use the term "liking" loosely, as they pretty much just start bangin right off the bat). And so the 2 of them hide their relationship from the Greek and make plans to murder him, which goes awry (both times). 

The writing in this novel is terse and almost like gunfire. It gets very much to the point but still has a way of alluding to events and feelings that the characters are having in a very successful way. The relationship between Frank and Cora is very intense, violent, and impulsive, which is also how the writing felt. 

My initial thought of the meaning of the title was how it relates to the events in the novel...that you may not get away with something on the second try. But after slightly more research (ok, Wikipedia research), James M. Cain indicated in a conversation with screenwriter Vincent Lawrence that the title referred to the anxiety he felt waiting to hear back from publishers about his submitted manuscripts and that the postman would ring twice when he had news. After Cain discussed it in more detail, he decided that the phrase was appropriate to describe Frank's situation by the end of the novel: that he may have avoided fate the first time, but not the second. So I guess I wasn't all that far off in my assumption. And I love the seeming obscurity of the title in regards to the content of the story. I am a fan of things that make you think and come to your own conclusions, which this certainly did. 

I haven't seen either of the 2 film versions of the novel (the 1946 version with Lana Turner and John Garfield or the 1981 version with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, which I hear has some pretty intense sex scenes, which fits in pretty well with how it was described in the novel), but definitely would like to see one, if not both. James M. Cain went on to write Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce, both of which became hit films and he became well known as a crime noir writer, although it sounds like he wasn't very fond of any kind of label being ascribed to his writing. 

All in all, this was a quick and intense read, one that I appreciated very much. It's intriguing to me to see writers who can do so much with so few words, versus some of the other writers I've come across recently (I'm looking at you James Joyce and Gertrude Stein). 

Up next is Light in August by William Faulkner. I've never read anything by Faulkner so I have no idea what to expect. Wish me luck. 

219 to go. Happy St. Patty's Day!