Reading Notes and A Get Well Soon For Big Al

Just when things were turning around for my Timberwolves, our leader Big Al Jefferson goes down for the season with a torn ACL. Big sigh.

Get Well Soon, Al! We know we won't see you the rest of this season, but we'll be thinking of you! And to the rest of my T-Wolves: We're there for you, guys! Show the naysayers what you can do!! Go Wolves!!

The reading front is going well. I finished Book II, Canto IV of The Faerie Queene last night. I've finally gotten a handle on the language well enough to read the cantos before looking at the reading guide! I'm pretty proud of that accomplishment!

The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin is a little slow going, because I'm reading all the notes. This will not be the last time I read an annotated edition of a book. I'm getting so much out of the extra information! My only complaint is the person who wrote these notes feels the need to point out every time he thinks a part of the book is boring. Is that normal in annotations? Just curious.

Bigger Thomas is still making me nervous in Native Son, and I picked up some essays about the book. I'm trying to decide if I should go ahead and read them before I finish listening to it or wait until I'm done. Decisions, decisions.

Oh! I started listening to Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. She's full of spit and vinegar, I tell you! I think I like her. I have come across one section of the book that raised even my eyebrows. I don't want to tell you what it is, because it's a pretty prominent story line that I really didn't see coming. I'll bet it caused some problems when the book came out!

And check this out:

The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe.


[T]he story of an amateur entomologist who wanders alone into a remote seaside village in pursuit of a rare beetle he wants to add to his collection. But the townspeople take him prisoner. They lower him into the sand-pit home of a young widow, a pariah in the poor community, who the villagers have condemned to a life of shoveling back the ever-encroaching dunes that threaten to bury the town. (Description from Amazon.com)

Yes, I bought the book. How could I not? There's just something about that kind of weirdness that I can't pass up!

Happy Reading, Everyone!

Reading Is For Everyone!

Now that I think about it, which one do you suppose is the "intellectual"? :-)

There's more fun at LOL Cats!

Reading Notes

"There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed." The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 96.

How beautiful is that? I'll bet I read that sentence twenty times before I continued the chapter. I am loving Uncle Tom's Cabin, even if it is difficult to read. It is difficult for me to read because I have such a hard time wrapping my brain around the concept of slavery and the belief that slave-owning was a perfectly acceptable way of life. People justified it with passages from the Bible. Families were blithely torn apart. Children were sold away from their mothers and that was okay. People believed that black people didn't have feelings the way white people did. Yeah. I have a really hard time grasping that.

I'm listening to Richard Wright's Native Son also. Native Son is the story Bigger Thomas, a young black man in 1930's Chicago. It is interesting to compare the literary form of the slave experience and the free but pre-Civil Rights black experience side-by-side. So much is different, but so much is the same -- the anger and hatred of some black people and the acquiescence of others to their situation, the prejudice and hypocrisy of some whites and the true sympathy and assistance of others. The people that I find the most frustrating are the ones who think they're sympathetic and helpful but really are only perpetuating the belief system. For example, the sobbing slave owner pledges to someday buy back the slave that is being sold to a creditor because they don't want the slave treated badly any longer than necessary. The rich white girl talks about how black people should be treated with respect, but she goes on to treat her family's black driver like a favorite pet or a newly discovered species.

I have enormous respect for those who fought for their rights -- men, women, minorities, all of them. I can't imagine living in the world of Uncle Tom or Bigger Thomas.

Photo Meme

I've been tagged by Reading Mama! Let's see, fifth photo in the fifth folder. Hmmmm. . . Searching, searching, OK, got it. Here we go:



It's Max! The pic is from 2007, and he's probably waiting for someone to throw a ball. That's his usual activity. :-) And just for extra credit, here's Skye from the same folder:



Such handsome men, if I don't say so myself! :-)

In a previous post I declared the rest 2009 to be tag-free here at Books 'N Border Collies, so I won't tag anyone specifically. But if you want to play along, post the fifth photo in the fifth folder in your photos stash and leave a link here so we can check it out!

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

by F. Scott Fitzgerald



"I know myself, but that is all." Amory Blaine in This Side Of Paradise

There is a saying my friends and I use when one of us is being hopelessly self-centered -- "Enough about me. Let's talk about you. What do you think of me?" The main character of this novel, Amory Blaine, reminded me a lot of that quote. Actually, most of the characters in this novel reminded me of that quote. Despite the self-absorption, I liked listening to the book. Fitzgerald paints such a vivid portrait of the Roaring Twenties that it's almost like watching a movie. I nearly forgot I was listening to a book.

I didn't find any of the characters terribly sympathetic, but I enjoyed the debates about love and politics, religion and literature. Especially the literature. It's fun to listen to intellectuals, or even pseudo-intellectuals, expound on their theories. Just as when I read The Great Gatsby, I can't seem to put my finger on what I felt this book was about without reading it again, but I find myself thinking about Amory in an abstract form and comparing his ideas and experiences to my own. I look forward to revisiting him in the future in printed form rather than audio and taking a closer look at this work.

Reading Notes

February is off to a good start! I've already finished two books and plan to do some reading in honor of Black History Month in the coming weeks. I have The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Confessions of Nat Turner waiting their turn, while I've already started The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin and Native Son.

I chose the annotated edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin, because I'm hoping to obtain a deeper understanding of the book. I've never read it before, so my current knowledge of it is superficial. I'm barely into it, so I'll let you know what I think of it when I have more under my belt. As of now, I love all the pictures and sidenotes, and I think I'm going to be happy with my choice.

I started listening to Native Son by Richard Wright a couple days ago. It's my commute audiobook. I'm four discs into it, and it has been a long time since a book had me so tense. Bigger Thomas' ceaseless anger is palpable and he literally makes me nervous. The scene in which the murder occurs was astonishingly intense for someone like me who reads serial killer novels with barely the batting of an eye. It was like watching the proverbial train wreck. I wanted to look away, and I couldn't. I was mortified at his actions and felt supremely sorry for him at the same time. Very surreal.

I'm also back at The Faerie Queene. Book II starts with a bang! Deception and suicide in Canto I. No lack of action here!

There is one other book going at this time, an F. Scott Fitzgerald. I'm going to hold my thoughts on that one for a little while except to say he does know how to paint a vivid picture!

Happy Reading, Everyone!

GOING AFTER CACCIATO

by Tim O'Brien



"Even the refugee must do more than flee. He must arrive. He must return at last to a world as it is, however much in conflict with his hopes, and he must then do what he can to edge reality toward what he has dreamed, to change what he can change, to go beyond the wish or the fantasy." (Sarkin Aung Wan in Going After Cacciato, pg. 318)

I read The Things They Carried a couple of summers ago, and I've never forgotten it. I've been meaning to read anther Tim O'Brien book ever since. If you've never read O'Brien, I don't think Going After Cacciato is where I would recommend starting, but it's a beautifully disturbing book that showcases his stunning writing.

I still don't know for certain what happened in this story. When Cacciato deserts during the Vietnam War and heads for Paris, Paul Berlin and others in his squad follow to bring him back. Somewhere along the way, the search for Cacciato becomes just an excuse to get away for themselves. But I was never really positive what was actually occurring and what was a fantasy in Paul Berlin's head. Which I'm pretty sure was the point. Berlin was never a brave man and under the extreme stresses of war he developed a coping mechanism to which I think a lot of us can relate. However, we eventually must face the reality of our situation no matter how terrible or lose ourselves in a delusion that we cannot maintain.

THE HISTORIAN

by Elizabeth Kostova



It's easy to see why there are so many good reviews for The Historian. It's also easy to see why other readers may not have liked it so much. It's not a quick read. It's very, very detailed and moves somewhat slowly, so if I had been reading this rather than listening, I may have been more impatient with it. For me, it successfully had the same feel to it as Stoker's Dracula, but I admit it has been many years since I read that. Someone who read them closer in time may disagree.

What I loved about the book was that the majority of the tale is told in the form of letters. For some reason, that technique makes what could be a bit dull much more exciting for me to read. I've seen complaints that the letters are amazingly elaborate for missives that were supposed to have been dashed off in a hurry. I cannot disagree with that as an observation, but I had no problem overlooking it. The style captured exactly what I would have wanted in a book of this kind.

I have no life lessons to pass on from my reading of this debut novel except maybe if you suddenly find a mysterious book in your possession which is empty except for an eerie woodcut of a dragon, stock up on silver bullets, crucifixes and garlic. :-)