Thoughts on Cane.

Usually the fact that a book isn't available in my library means it is going to be some obscure, random book that is often difficult to read or understand.  Cane, an ILL book, did not let me down in this regard.  I can tell it is good literature.  Dealing with the experience of being African American in the early 20th century.  Unfortunately, I don't have the educational background or historical understanding to really appreciate this book for the excellent literature that it is.  It's embarrassing - I'm like, uh, yes, I can tell that this is good literature, but I can't get much more out of it than that.

Pea has discovered Where's Waldo the last couple of weeks, which has been really fun.  I fondly remember enjoying those books when I was young.

The big fat Greek book.

Corelli's Mandolin started off very slow, and very long.  I just couldn't get into the portrait of life in Cephallonia - it was all very nice, but just didn't do it for me.  I feared a long slog through the 430 pages.  Thankfully, the character of Corelli showed up and saved the book.  I read the portions dealing with the love story between him and Pelagia with interest, and read the sections dealing with the horrors of the war with somewhat less interest.

Here's the thing about war books - we know that war is terrible.  And I acknowledge the effort on the part of the author to make us understand what it was like for the Greek people to go through what they went through at the hands of the oppressors.  It doesn't make it less sad, or easier to read about.  I am not suggesting that writers should not write about it - I just personally don't like to read about it.

Mike says that this book was made into one of the worst movies!  It did get a 29% on the Tomatometer.  I did not know that Penelope Cruz was in the role of Pelagia.  I think I'll skip the movie on this one.  (Not a shock, I know - I don't watch movies)!

Cannery row...or, why I am a doofus.

Today I finished Cannery Row, which I really liked.  It is not often that one finds literature idealizing the poorest members of Depression-era society.  But that is what this book does.  Everyone is reasonably happy with their life and the overall goal is to make Doc happy by throwing him a party.  These are people living in storage sheds, an industrial boiler, and prostitutes.  But they are good people who are trying their best.  Interesting book and interesting perspective.  The image of the starfish clinging to each other will be in my mind for a while.  That's what humans do when they are nervous, too.

Here comes the embarrassing part.  So I'm reading this and in my mind, comparing it to Absalom, Absalom.  I'm thinking to myself, wow, these sentences are shorter and this is a lot more readable.  It was only after finishing the book that it dawned on me.  Steinbeck and Faulkner are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT AUTHORS.  I had sort of amalgamated them in my mind.  Faulkbeck, or something.  Whoops.

Books 131-140

Not quite there yet, but need to get this down so that I can start figuring out library holds, etc.

131. The Case of Comrad Tulayev by Victor Serge (1949)
132. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming (1953)
133. The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)
134. The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino (1973)
135. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1765)
136. Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth (1800)
137. Castle Richmond by Anthony Trollope (1860)
138. Cat and Mouse by Gunter Grass (1961)
139. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
140. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951)

Lot of castles on here!

Always look on the bright side of life.

Last night, it rained and thundered a lot at our house, and our windows leaked again.  I learned this because Fuzz was up at 10PM, and his fussing sounded different.  Usually I can run in and soothe him and he will fall right back asleep.  This time, I ran in, and he was all wet, and there was water spraying everywhere.  Whoops.  This was an annoying thing to have happen at 10PM, because I had to get him up, Mike had to get Tupperware containers to catch the water, we had to get a whole bunch of rags to mop up the mess, and I think that Fuzz is going to have a bit of a water stain on the paint underneath his window in his room.

In the big picture, this is not a huge deal.  I don't think that God or the universe is out to get me because of the annoying window leak or anything.  It's unfortunate but we have moved on (and will have to figure out how to repair these things).

Voltaire, in Candide, mocks people who are optimists, and the view that things are generally for the best.  He does this in a pretty entertaining way, by creating this character and having this ridiculous series of unfortunate events happen to him.  The idea is that by the end of the novel, he essentially has his optimism beaten out of him.  It's pretty clever and creative, especially when you consider that it was written in the 1750s, so it certainly has stood the test of time.

I don't really agree with the idea though that optimism is silly.  It is silly to rely on optimism only and not do something about one's situation.  I can be optimistic that it won't rain again and hence our window won't leak, but that would be silly.  I will instead be optimistic that we will find the right repair person and get the windows fixed and it won't be an issue any more.

So I will continue to look on the bright side of life, although that may seem silly to Voltaire.

What could possibly be more depressing?

...Than a mid-1950s cancer hospital in the middle of the Soviet Union?  When I started Cancer Ward initially, I could not think of anything that would be more depressing.  Solzhenitsyn actually lived through this experience and the novel draws in part on his experiences.  As I learned from Wikipedia, this novel serves as a metaphor for the Soviet Union after Stalin.  (Definitely wouldn't have figured that out on my own.)

I really found this book interesting, though, once I got into it.  Yes, it was depressing, but the characters were really well written and I learned a lot reading about their experiences.  I also found the book hopeful - many of the characters have goals that they intend to achieve, and their cancer is viewed as a minor obstacle along the way.

Russia has always interested me.  I studied the language for a few years in high school and college (and retained very little of it, certainly not enough where I could read any of this novel in the original language).  The history and the diversity of cultures there has always interested me as well.

Sometimes books like this leave me feeling depressed and sad, but not this one.  I am very glad I read it.  I learned a lot.

The long, long, long adventures of Camilla

It's been a while! Before we left on vacation, i looked up the next 3 books on the list and hurried to the library to collect my vacation reading. Well, it turned out i did not need any of them.

Camilla is one of the longest books i have read so far. One estimate online has it at 350,000 words. (i read it on the kindle, so I have no sense of how many pages that is). I started it before we left and it occupied me the whole 2 weeks of vacation. I really, really liked it though. Sometimes these older novels are hard for me to get into, but this one was really interesting.

Of course there are some things about it that do not translate well to modern times. Camilla is one of those passive heroines. Things just keep happening to her and she does very very little on her own behalf to make things different. The few decisions she does make often lead to disastrous results until a man comes in to fix things for her.

However, it is a happy, uplifting story and things all turn out the way they should in the end. I like when that happens in books.

Now we are back from vacation and fall is almost here!  Hard to believe!