Harper Lee wrote one novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and it won the Pulitzer prize in 1961. Its themes still resonate with readers and her novel has become a part of our culture. That, I believe, is success.
At the end of The Return of the King, Sauron’s evil was taken by “a great wind” and neatly “blown away”, with no lasting consequences to our heroes; but Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily. Even after death his evil lingered.This made me wonder if perhaps we’d read different versions of The Return of the King. You can perhaps say that The Lord of the Rings doesn't leave too much room for ambiguity, and that Sauron is the ultimate one-dimensional villain. I don’t care, though, because the books are so completely awesome in so many other ways. You cannot say, however, that at the end the bad guys vanish and that all the terrible things that happened leave no enduring consequences. You really can’t. Taken out of contest, this passage could give you the impression that all the nerdy references are given in a mocking, superior, dismissive “look at how silly and unlike real life all this stuff is” tone. But that isn’t the case at all. I’d have been very annoyed and disappointed if it were. And it's exactly because that isn’t the case that I was surprised with that passage.
This Pulitzer Prize winning and critically acclaimed novel is very sad and includes many stories of horror and trauma. The persistence of memory and the past is part of the novel from a mother's obsessive overprotection to the reconciliation of people's past personal and with slavery as a whole: "To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The 'better life' she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one."
"Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known. He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master."The week before I started The Known World I had to read a few chapters from James Walvin’s Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery for a project, and then I ended up reading the whole thing because the book was too good, too well-written and too informative, for me to put it down. I found that reading The Known World and Black Ivory side by side increased my understanding and appreciation of both books. While one gave me the facts, the other gave me the human realities behind them. The actual human lives. I want to share with you a passage from Black Ivory that perfectly describes what we see in The Known World:
"Overseers and drivers in the Southern cotton fields were presumable no more or less inhuman, kind, sadistic or tolerant than their counterparts in the previous century in the Caribbean. It was the system which debased and corrupted. Doubtless it attracted its fair share of low life; of men, like men on the slave ships, not noted by their humanity or feelings. But even the most considerate of men generally found themselves debased by slavery. In so tainted a system, it was difficult for anyone in a position of authority not to be dragged down into slavery's corrosive mire. Whatever the management's ideal (and there were plenty of whites who sought to pursue it), the reality was much coarser, much cruder, less human."The Known World is an honest, haunting and thought-provoking look at slavery and all that it involves. Edward P. Jones created a world in which everything has multiple shades of grey. This is a book that will stay with me for a long time, the kind of book that the more I think about, the more I like. Highly recommended.
Books I've read so far:
1919 - The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
1921 - The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
1932 - The Good Earth by Pearl Buck
1937 - Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
1961 - To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1981 - A Confederacy of Dunces by Robert Kennedy Toole
1988 - Beloved by Toni Morrison
1995 - The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
2002 - Empire Falls by Richard Russo
On the shelf to be read in 2008:
1940 - The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
1948 - Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener
1955 - A Fable by William Faulkner
1990 - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
I'm afraid I'm not much of a reviewer, but I'm going to try to get better. I'm looking forward to reading everyone else's reviews.
The Known World
This Pulitizer prize winning book by Marilynne Robinson is the definition of modern literary novels. The novel does not have much in the way of plot. It is an epistolary novel of an old man writing for his very young son about his life. It is extremely introspective and beautifully written. I do not think it is for everyone, but I could relate to it because I am like the character and the style. It is not to say that I think as the character does all the time, but I certainly do understand why they mean with lines such as this:I don't know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but that is how it always was for me in those days, (p 18-9 hardcover)
Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can't believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great substance of human life. (104)
Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it? I suppose Calvin's God was a Frenchman, just as mine is a Middle Westerner of New England extraction. Well we all bring such light to bear these great matters as we can. I do like Calvin's image, though, because it suggests how God might actually enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for God's enjoyment, no in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child even when he is in every way a thorn in your heart. (124-5)
When I'm up here in my study with the radio on and some old book in my hands and it's nighttime and the wind blows and the house creaks, I forget where I am, and it's as thought I'm back in the hard times for a minute or two, and there's a sweetness in the experience I don't understand. But that only enhances the value of it. My point here is that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience. Or perhaps it has no fixed and certain nature. (95)
Remembering when they said what they did about looking in windows and wondering about other people's lives made me feel companionable with them. I could have said that's three of us, because as the Lord knows, for many years I did exactly the same thing. (202)
Oh!, I will miss the world! (115)
Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. … There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free…. (Vol. 2, Chap. 2)Ultimately, The Age of Innocence is the story of a man coming to terms with the 1870s social constraints on the most intimate of relationships, love and marriage. Newland Archer finds that the social stigmas prevalent in society distance people: “There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world apart” (Vol. 2, Chap. 6). In the end, he must decide whether or not he will live within the socially unacceptable dreams he has or if he will look “not at visions, but at realities” (Volume 2, Chapter 11).
A great damp loaf of a body. At six he weighed eighty pounds. At sixteen he was buried under a casement of flesh. Head shaped like a Crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair ruched back. Features as bunched as kissed finger tips. Eyes the color of plastic. The monstrous chin, a freakish shelf jutting from the lower face.
Viking North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties Cromarty Forth, Tyne Dogger, Fisher German Bight,
Humber Thames Dover Wight, Portland Plymouth Biscay, South Fitzroy, North Fitzroy Sole, Lundy Fastnet Irish Sea, Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides Bailey Fair Isle, Faeroes Southeast Iceland, with all the variables, moderates or good thrown in, in between.
I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.
Very uncomfortable reading for me. Disturbing and (literally) haunting. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and written by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, Beloved tells the story of a family’s life before and after their escape from slavery. Sethe and her daughter Denver live in isolation at 124 in the countryside near Cincinnati. Also ‘present’ in the house is the ghost of Sethe’s other daughter, nicknamed Beloved, who died when she was two. Sethe fled to Ohio from Kentucky many years before after escaping from her owners at ‘Sweet Home.’ Also at Sweet Home was Paul D., who has now come to Ohio to look for Sethe. Soon after Paul D.’s arrival at 124, he drives the baby ghost out; however it’s not long before a strange young woman is found near the house and who calls herself Beloved.
I had a very difficult time following the story at first, and I’d probably understand it much better if I re-read it at some point. The storyline unravels as it goes along, and we see bit by bit the horrors that Sethe escaped from. Her actions are also called into question. Her mental state is dubious. But whose wouldn’t be after undergoing the ordeals she has gone through?
Other people went crazy, why couldn’t she?
I didn’t enjoy this book, but I don’t think readers are supposed to. The subject matter is difficult, and I don’t like hearing the horror stories of Beloved or Maus. At the same time, I realize they are necessary and I’ll continue to force myself to read them.
1987, 275 pp.
Rating: 4/5
While March focuses a little bit on Marmee, the majority of this book is about Mr. March (called March), the father of the girls, who, in part one of Alcott’s novel, is away fighting in the Civil War. In this novel, we read his letters to Marmee—and then we read the truth of what is happening to him in the South. March writes “I promised her that I would write something every day…I never promised I would write the truth” (page 4).
In a fascinating contrast to the girls’ failures in Little Women, March’s failings are huge to him; he cannot solve them in a chapter or even by the end of the book. As Little Women delves into the little problems of teenage girls, March delves into the larger problems of an adult before and during the civil war: slavery, death, violence and war, betrayal, marital and extramarital relationships, and confusion about one’s role in the world and in a family. To me, it is an intriguing contrast to the goody-goody world of Little Women.
Geraldine Brooks has thoroughly researched both the civil war and the life of Louisa May Alcott’s father, Bronson Alcott, for many of the philosophies and characteristics of Mr. March. Since Alcott herself based Little Women on her own experience, basing Mr. March on Alcott’s father seemed very appropriate. I love a well-researched novel, especially historical fiction, and this certainly was well-researched.
I also loved the concept of fleshing out a character that otherwise wasn’t noticed. I know I never gave a thought to Mr. March when I first read Little Women. Only on rereading Little Women now, knowing that I’d read March next, did I realize how little attention is given to him.
Note: I’d recommend reading Little Women (at least part one) before approaching March. They complement each other nicely.
Originally posted here. Visit me on Rebecca Reads.
The Trees begins the saga of the Luckett family and fifteen-year-old Sayward, a calm, stoic, and the oldest of five children as they settle in the great forests of the Alleghenies. The trees are so thick, a person could walk for weeks and not see the sun. When her mother dies and father abandons the family, it is Sayward's job to raise her family and somehow build a life for them.
The Fields shows the beginnings of a community as Sayward and her neighbors tackle the trees to make clearings for crops. As she deals with babies, starvation, and tragedy a church is built and neighbors leave their isolation to help each other and make decisions as a group.
Most stories contained in these books are based on actual tales and personal accounts Conrad Richter heard as a boy from pioneer family and friends. The introduction tells how he feels an obligation to those resourceful people who's names never appeared in history books, but had a direct influence in building our country.
Anyone looking for good female role models or literary figures need go no further. Sayward's strength, dignity, and grace make her one of the most powerful women in American literature and enhances the honesty of this stunning work.
I am mystified why this is not required reading in school and cannot recommend this series highly enough. Retire your Little House on the Prairie and experience these instead. This is as real as it gets. Five Stars
The Known World
Edward P. Jones
388 pages
"I had almost forgotten where I was," Winifred said, meaning the South, meaning the world of human property. (p. 34)
Set in a fictitious Virginia county around 1840, Edward Jones' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a story of slavery; specifically, the rare occurrence of slaves owned by free black people. The plot revolves around landowner Henry Townsend, his wife Caldonia, and the events following Henry's untimely death. The novel explores themes of prejudice, the ignorance and brutality of white men, and the potential for every slave to make their own way once free.
Jones' narrative style is non-linear, branching off from events of 1840 to those in the distant past or future. Foreshadowing is frequently used to predict a character's success or failure, or the state of relationships: "Neither Robbins nor Colfax would know it for a very long time but that day was the high point of their friendship." (p. 39) This is used effectively, for example, to show how a child slave becomes a free and independent adult, while keeping the novel firmly set in a period of just a few years' time. And, while many of the characters lack depth, the women in this novel are amazingly strong, singlehandedly holding the community together.
I found Jones' literary techniques interesting, and he successfully held my interest. However, I found myself unable to get inside the characters and this detracted from my enjoyment of this book. Not a bad read, but not the great read I'd expect from a Pulitzer winner. ( 
My original review can be found here.
What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That’s where the interest is. That’s where the meaning will be if I find any. -From Angle of Repose, page 199- Lyman Ward, a retired history professor and writer, returns to his grandparent’s home in Grass Valley, California - wheelchair bound and facing a progressive, crippling bone disease. His intent is to research his grandmother’s life through the news clippings and letters of her past. To write her story, Ward must fill in gaps, imagine conversations, and uncover the truths which lie hidden in Susan Burling Ward’s history. During this one hot, dry summer in a quest to know his grandmother, he will discover the meaning beneath the shadows of his own life.
Wallace Stegner penned Angle of Repose in 1971 for which he won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. The novel - said to be his masterpiece - connects two points in American history…that of the late nineteenth century West with that of the turbulent, sometimes self-indulgent Vietnam era. Stegner creates complex and intriguing characters. Susan Burling (based on the historical figure of Mary Hallock Foote - a nineteenth century writer and illustrator) becomes an unlikely pioneer when she marries the quiet and ambitious dreamer Oliver Ward. Their adventures in mining camps and the vast wilderness of Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, and California create a backdrop of unbelievable beauty and isolation from which their lives unfold.
She guided her horse through willows and alders and runted birches, leaned and weaved until the brush ended and she broke into the open. She was at the edge of a meadow miles long, not a tree in it except for the wriggling line that marked the course of the Lake Fork. Stirrup-high grass flowed and flawed in the wind, and its motion revealed and hid and revealed again streaks and splashes of flowers-rust of paintbrush, blue of pentstemon, yellow of buttercups, scarlet of gilia, blue-tinged white of columbines. All around, rimming the valley, bare peaks patched with snow looked down from above the scalloped curve of timberline. -From Angle of Repose, page 237-
Angle of Repose is not simply an historical novel. It explores the idea of identity and how the past often intersects the present. When Lyman Ward explores his grandmother’s story, he is really seeking to find understanding in his own life.
Fooling around in the papers my grandparents, especially my grandmother, left behind, I get glimpses of lives close to mine, related to mine in ways I recognize but don’t completely comprehend. - From Angle of Repose, page 5-
Stegner’s prose is alluring, filled with gorgeous descriptions which engage the reader’s senses. His characters are bigger than life, but carry real flaws which allow the reader to identify with them; to nod in understanding; to empathize with their torments and cheer for their successes. I can understand why Angle of Repose is lauded, why it captured the Pulitzer and why readers are quick to recommend it. I found myself completely immersed in the lives of Susan, Oliver and Lyman Ward and I was sad to turn the last page of this sprawling and satisfying novel.
Highly recommended; a must read; rated 5/5.
March
)
"These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner of the stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like "the Cleveland Chicken," sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are."This almost 900 pages long tome contains over sixty stories, originally published between 1947 and 1978. Most of the stories are about upper middle-class suburban families, and are told from a male perspective. Don’t be fooled, though. There is much more here than stories about rich people drinking martinis. These are subtle stories, stories that show us the hidden corners of our lives. When the narrator of “The Worm in the Apple” asks, What was at the bottom of this appearance of happiness? he is asking the question with which a great deal of these stories deal.From the Preface
1925: So Big - Ferber.
1926: Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.
1930: Laughing Boy - LaFarge.
1932: The Good Earth - Pearl Buck.
1934: Lamb In His Bosom - Miller.
1937: Gone With The Wind - Mitchell.
1939: The Yearling - Rawlings.
1940: The Grapes Of Wrath - Steinbeck.
1951: The Town - Richter. [This is the last book in Richter's excellent "Awakening Land" trilogy of books about Sayward Luckett Wheeler, a pioneer woman. All three --The Trees and The Fields are the other two -- should be read to get the full effect.]
1953: The Old Man And The Sea - Hemingway.
1956: Andersonville - Kantor.
1958: A Death In The Family - Agee. [Sad novel about a family that loses their husband and father in an automobile crash. I'm eager to read the revised version of this novel.]
1961: To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee. [Would it be a stretch to say that if there is a "perfect" book on this list, TKAM is that book?]
1966: Collected Stories By Katherine Anne Porter - Porter.
1975: The Killer Angels - Shaara. [A novel about the days leading up and the actual Battle Of Gettysburg, as viewed by both the northern and southern commanders. Probably the best novel about the American Civil War.]
1982: Rabbit Is Rich - John Updike. [Updike was being recognized for his trilogy of "Rabbit" books that not only tell the story of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, who never quite got over the fact that his high school basketball career was the high point in his life, but also provide a time capsule-like look at how society changed during these years.]
1983: The Color Purple - Alice Walker.
1984: Ironweed - William Kennedy.
1985: Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie.
1986: Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry.
1989: Breathing Lessons - Anne Tyler. [Although this novel is terrific, I think she was really being recognized for her excellent novels Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist.]
1991: Rabbit At Rest - [Even after all these years, I still can't believe Updike brought an end to Rabbit's story.]
1992: A Thousand Acres - Jane Smiley.
1994: The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx. [For years after reading this novel, I wanted to move to Newfoundland.]
1995: The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields.
1996: Independence Day - Richard Ford. [I remember being so happy to read the news that Ford's book had won the Pulitzer. I really enjoyed his short story collection Rock Springs.]
1999: The Hours - Michael Cunningham.
2001: The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay - Michael Chabon. [I wouldn't be surprised if Chabon was a repeat winner one of these years.]
2002: Empire Falls - Richard Russo. [I really like Russo. He reminds me of Anne Tyler, except male.]
2005: Gilead - Marilynne Robinson. [There's a part in this book where the aged minister says of his young wife that she "just melted" into a book. That describes how I experienced this luminous novel.]
2006: March - Brooks. [I'm a huge fan of Little Women, and except for a few nit picky things, I think Brooks did an excellent job of telling Mr. March's story.]
We’ve always known families…that live together for years without speaking, for whom a historic dispute over land or money burns so hot that it engulfs every other subject, every other point of relationship or affection.An aging father’s decision sets into motion a series of events that ultimately cost lives and destroys relationships. This is the similarity the novel has with the play. What differs is how it is told, and who dies, although I would mention that there are different types of death; spiritual and physical. Thus the correlation between the two becomes even more apparent.
This is one of those books that I love so much that I am hesitant about trying to write about it for fear of trivializing it in some way. I reread this book in February, but was unable to even approach writing about it until I decided to just do one of these questionnaires so that I can be walked through the process. The years have come and gone without a single word from you. Only the sky above us do we hold in common. I look at it often, as if, somehow, reflected from its immensities, I will one day find myself gazing into your eyes. Your dear, large, clean and beautiful eyes.
Harpo no better at fighting his daddy back than me. Every day his daddy get up, sit on the porch, look out at nothing. Sometime look at the trees out front the house. Look at a butterfly if it light on the rail. Drink a little water in the day. A little wine in the evening. But mostly never move.
Harpo complain bout all the plowing we have to do.
His daddy say, You gonna do it.
Harpo nearly as big as his daddy. He strong in body but weak in will. He scared.
Me and him out in the field all day. Us sweat, chopping and plowing. I'm roasted coffee bean color now. He black as the inside of a chimney. His eyes be sad and thoughtful. His face begin to look like a woman's face.
