The other day at work I finished my book earlier than anticipated and thus did not have my handy back-up book with me. While this may seem like no big deal, in Brianneland, this is a crisis. So, I looked to my employer’s shelves and decided to try the classic, The Three Musketeers. Having only been acquainted with this story by the classic Disney movie starring Oliver Platt and Keifer Sutherland, I was quite shocked by the actual book but not shocked to learn that Disney made their version a little lighter and more family friendly. There’s a lot of death, both expected and unexpected. There are a great many duels and swordfights and battles. The characters and stories are all darker than I expected. With all that said, it was somehow a light book. Dumas manages to make the occassional side comment to the reader that is both funny and charming and made me feel like someone was telling me the story rather than me reading it. I loved this book and I’m so glad that I accidentally read it. The back of the book called it “the best sword and cloak book ever written” and while I can’t say as I’ve read any others, I’m inclined to agree. If you have some spare time for a classic, pick this one up if you haven’t read it yet. Definately worth it.
reading rainbow
November 27, 2009
I recently finished the Pulitzer winner, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. It’s about a boy with big dreams and his attempts to make them happen in late 19th century New York City when the Upper West Side (where I live) was open land and wilderness where people didn’t live. It was so funny to hear him talk about the wilds of the Upper West Side and his new businesses that were opened up in areas no one wanted to visit (West End and Riverside-the two avenues I live between). This book was a very different book from the last two Pulitzer winners I read (Olive and Stone Diaries) in that it was written by a man and a bit more dry. This book left me with questions in a good way as the main character was also left with questions.
Here are some of my favorite lines from the book:
1. “No, the trouble was the wife, Mrs. Louise Hamilton, a buxom bustling handsome dark-haired lady whose large black eyes were skilled in the expression of disdain, outrage, dissatisfaction, and astonished disbelief taht the simplest request had been handled with such ineptitude.”
2. “As a child he had always stopped at the park with his mother, so that the places beyond seemed to him not simply inaccessible but imaginary, like pictures of igloos or cactus flowers. Adulthood therefore was sheer magic: with a wave of the magic wand you summoned a cab and ventured into the imaginary world.”
3. “Every city dweller harbored a double desire. The desire to be in the thick of things and the equal and opposite desire to escape from the horrible thick of things to some peaceful rural place with shady paths, murmuring streams, and the hum of bumblebees over vaguely imagined forests.”
November 25, 2009
The following is a list of the Pulitzer prize winners for the last 20 years. I have read 13 out of the 20 and have at home 3 more that are on the list of things to read. I have just started 1997’s winner, Martin Dressler and am looking forward to it as it takes place in New York City in the late 1800’s. And, on top of that, look at what the New York Times Book Review had to say about it, “The wonderful, wonder-full bok is a fable and phantasmagoria of the sources of our century.” I’m not even sure what that means, it sounds so lovely.
In case you were wondering, my favorite books on this list are: The Shipping News, The Hours, Interpreter of Maladies, Olive Kitteridge and The Road. All great books. I also seriously recommend reading The Road before the movie comes out as Pulitzer winning books don’t always make for the best movies and you’ll want to read it before you see it. (Of course, I never think any movies are as good as the books, so I am a little biased). I am looking forward to reading the rest of the winners of the past two decades but, looking only at title, I’m most excited about The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. How great does that sound? The Pulitzer began awarding prizes in 1948 but didn’t award one every year, which I love. It’s like the Pulitzer is a hard-ass and isn’t just going to give you the award if you were the best of the year because it may have been a crappy year for books. I think that’s so fantastic. I’ve read a few of the much older winners such as To Kill a Mockingbird and one of my favorite books of all time, The Old Man and the Sea. Seriously, man, woman, child, whatever you are, you should read this book. It’s about 4 pages long, so you could knock it out in no time at all.
Happy Reading, friends. I only wish that the Reading Rainbow theme would play in the background everytime I talked about books. That would make this blog-reading experience perfect. (Well, as close to perfect as you can get without Levar Burton telling you about the books!)
November 23, 2009
Last week I finished my third Pulitzer installment and again have to say that it was great. One common thread in a lot of the Pulitzer’s I have read in the past is that they are just pieces of a whole story and while you get enough to be satisfied with what you’ve read, you don’t get a neat little packaged ending. I like that. A lot. This book was great. For those of you who don’t remember, I’ll retype the back cover of the book and then continue with my favorite quotes from the book.
1. “He was thirty-five years old and for every moment of those years he had been someone’s slave, a white man’s slave and then another white man’s slave and now, for nearly ten years, the overseer slave for a black master.”
2. “He believed whistling inside or outside the house was bad luck, but right then, as he worked, he was tempted to whistle.”
3. “She did not know the history of eons about herself; there was only the feeling in her bones that for some time she had been venturing into a place unknown and that feeling made her hope for a road that would not cut too deeply into her feet and her soul.”
4. “He wanted to die but he really didn’t want to catch a cold to do it.”
This book was about a plantation and all of the people working in it, with it and in any way involved with it. That’s a lot of people to keep track of, but the author never mentioned anyone in passing. Someone who was mentioned in an aside in the early pages would come back with an entire story later. While I at first thought the man referenced on the back cover of the book was the main character, the further I got into this book the more I realized that there isn’t a main character. At different times you could say that the plantation owners, the owners friends, the town sherrif, the neighboring slaves were each the main character and that made for a very interesting read to be so invested in what happened to so many people. This was a very well written book and I definately recommend it to all, especially Erica. (Ever wonder what kind of book I could read that would not end in a recommendation to Erica?)
November 12, 2009
In my continuing Pulitzer Prize-winning book reading, I am now reading The Known World, Pulitzer winner in 2003. I just started it a few days ago, but wanted you all to read the reason I selected this book. And yes, it was based on its cover. It’s back cover anyway:
“He was thirty-five years old and for every moment of those years he had been someone’s slave, a white man’s slave and then another white man’s slavee and now, for nearly ten years, the overseer slave for a black master.”
That’s it. That’s all the information you get. And that was certainly enough information for me to read this book and I must say, so far it’s fantastic. I’ll let you know when I finish.
November 10, 2009
I just finished another great Pulitzer winner. Perhaps these Pulitzer people really do know what they’re doing when they hand out these awards.
The Stone Diaries by Carol Sheilds, is about a woman and her history starting with just before her birth and ending just after her death. It’s a history that tells of most of her family and the story of her life. Though describing it doesn’t make it sound very interesting.
The following were my favorite lines from the book. Some because they are great quotes and others because of how lyrical the prose was.
1. “His little pauses are sensuous gateways, without which his listeners would fall into a trance”.
2. ” His own society is what he favors. A quite winter room, a chair, a book opened under a circle of lamplight, a comfortable austerity”.
3. “He shrugs with the whole of his small, hardened body and smiles out from the little leather purse of a face”.
4. “Canada is a country where nothing seems ever to happen…a country you wouldn’t ask to dance a second waltz”.
5. “He feels sure that his own life will be a long waiting for the revelation of a terrible truth which he will both welcome and dread”.
6. “She must be mourning for the squandering of herself”.
7. “There are bits of your body you carry around all your life but never really own”.
8. “A choice made when one is flat on ones back is no less a choice”.
9. “The larger loneliness of our lives evolves from our unwillingness to spend ourselves, stir ourselves”.
This book was really great but certainly mostly for women. It’s a book, much like Olive Kitteridge, that seems to ask the question “what has a woman done when she comes to the end of her life?” and seems to leave that answer up to us much like Olive. Erica, as a lover of Olive, I know you will love this book as well and should read it when you get the chance. The rest of you, as you will.
October 8, 2009
In my post fluff summer, I’ve decided to read some smarter books andhave decided to read the Pulitzer winners that I haven’t read. I just finished the most recent Pulizter winner, Olive Kitteridge. This is a book that’s about this old woman who lives in a small Maine town and several of the other people in the town. It’s a little like a short story book without actually being a series of short stories. There are 13 different mini-stories in the book that sort of relate to Olive, whose story is told throughout the book.
This book talks about issues of marriage, parenting, dealing with death, family members who are disabled, children who move away, children who are angry with their parents and Olive’s aging process and her withdrawal from society. What I like about Olive is that she’s messed up. She has real problems and doesn’t think warm and fuzzy thoughts and she feeds her dog donuts. She felt like a real person. I also liked that this book wasn’t so much a story with a beginning, middle and an end, but more of a picture of a portion of peoples lives. Usually in books peoples lives have a story that starts, gets mucked up and then gets resolved. As if that ever happens in real life. As if we are ever only dealing with one storyline at a time and that they ever get completely resolved. I liked that his book dealt with the stories that way. I would finish a chapter and think, “I wondered what happened next? I wondered if that girl ever got a job? I wonder if that guy left his wife?” and I liked that I didn’t know, that I only got part of the story. However, I can see how this might bother a lot of readers, so use caution before diving into this book.
Right now I’m reading a collection of the O. Henry short story prize winners from 2008. Stay tuned.
October 1, 2009
Okay, this is again about the book I just read. Sorry for those of you who skim over the book-related blogs as this is the third one in a row.
In the ninth grade, our World History teacher, Kim Pennington, told us that there was a queen who didn’t like knocking and insisted that people scratch on doors instead. Immediately, classmate Jayson Kennedy raises his hand and says, “But what if you’re vaccuuming?” Needless to say we found this very funny since they didn’t have a lot of vaccuums in Queen Victoria’s time. For most people, that’s where the story would end, but not with me. Amber and I decided to start using the scratch when knocking on one anothers doors when we lived together. This is actually a handy technique because if you are asleep, you don’t typically hear the scratch. This is handy if you’re just checking to see if the other person is awake without having to open their door or knock and wake them up. When I moved in with Meghan, I introduced this to her and she uses it like a champion. So, we have long been proud to carry on this Queen Victoria tradition. Is it funny that this is the take-home lesson I took away from 9th grade World History? Probably.
Anyway, in the Know It All in the V chapter, what does the author tell me he learned but that Queen Victoria made people scratch on doors instead of knock. I should probably let him know that it’s not a long-dead practice, but frequently used on the Upper West Side.
October 1, 2009
Let’s flashback to 1998, when Zak and I were sophomore’s in high school. Zak had driven to our house in his dad’s super cool orange/tan van. Maren and I were walking Zak out to his car when we noticed the strangest bug on the antenna on the front of the van. Rather than comment on how odd it was and moving on with our life, we decided to trap it in a jar, transfer it to a ziploc bag, and freeze it for further examination the next day.
So, the next day, we looked at it in depth the next day and decided to take it with us to the University of Oklahoma library to look it up in some insect identification books. What we found was rather upsetting. What we had captured and frozen was the Assassin bug. The assassin bug has a long projection on the front of it’s face that it uses to inject lethal saliva that liquefies the insides of the prey, which are then sucked out. The South American variety, often called the kissing bug, bites humans on the lips and can cause a fatal heart disease. All of this we learned on our scientific investigation that day 11 years ago. Needless to say, we have long been more afraid of the assassin bug than most normal humans. Luckily, we don’t see them very often.
So, we haven’t done much thinking about this long-ago researched bug, until I was reading my book The Know It All and discovered that the assassin bug can also shoot it’s saliva up to 12 inches. That means that it doesn’t even have to be on you to hit you. This I found alarming and immediately called Zak to report this new assassin bug detail.
This is what I love about reading. Random information in a book that might have been glossed over by any other reader, brought back a memory of an adventure that Everyone had 11 years ago. I love that for each reader of any book, different things have different meanings. So for me, this book brought back many great memories of funny things, but for someone else, it might have reminded them of bad things, or happy things, or something completely different. Reading rocks!
September 30, 2009
I just finished reading a really fantastic book that Meghan picked out for me in the Portland, Oregon airport. And she did a great job! This is a book written by a man who read the Encyclopedia Brittanica cover to cover in a year. It’s the true story of what he was reading at the time and what happened in his life. It’s written in a great way with each chapter being a letter of the alphabet and it’s not written in paragraph/narrative form, it’s written like an encyclopedia with entries for each letter. There were some really great ones, allow me to list them for you:
Bell: The world’s largest bell was built in 1733 in Moscow, and weighed in at more than four thousand pounds. It never rang-it was broken by fire before it could be struck. What a sad little story. All that work, all that planning, all those expectations-then nothing. Now it just sits there in Russia, a big metallic symbol of failure. I have a moment of silence for the silent bell.
Casanova: The famous 18th century lothario ended his life as a librarian. Librarians could use that to suck up their image.
Berserkers: Savage Norse soldiers from teh middle ages who, it is said, went into the battle naked. Hence “going berserk:. So to truly go berserk, you should take off your pants. Noted.
Climate and weather: Lightning goes up. It shoots right up from the ground and into the cloud. This is what the encyclopedia says in the section on climate and weather. I reread this passage a couple of times to make sure I hadn’t gone batty-but no, lightning goes up. To be technical, it does first go down-there’s an initial bolt called the “leader” that zips from the cloud to the ground. But the bright part, the part that flashes, is the “return stroke”, which goes from the ground back to the cloud. This is profoundly unnerving. When I didn’t know the history of canned laughter or the existences of a sexy Confederate spy, that was mildly vexing. But this is unnerving. This is a while new level of ignorance. I’ve been looking at lightning all my life, and it’s sky-to-ground direction seemed about as certain as the slightly asymmetrical nose on my face. To be confronted with this totally counterintuitive information-it makes me paranoid. What other incorrect ideas do I have? Is the sun actually cold? Is the sky orange? Is Keanu Reeves a brilliant actor?
Death: A Russian nobleman patented a coffin that allowed the corpse-if he regained consciousness after burial-to summon help by ringing a bell. Another good idea. Because that could really screw up your week-to wake up and find yourself in an airless coffin. I guess nowadays they could put cell phones in there.
Divorce: The easiest divorce around: Pueblo Indian women leave their husband’s moccasins on the doorstep and-that’s it-they’re divorced. Simple as that. No lawyers, no fault, no socks, just shoes.
Garrick, David: Famed 18th century Shakespearean actor who also managed the Drury Lane Theatre. He fought to “reform” the audience, discontinuing the practice of reduced entry fees for those who left early. I don’t like this guy. His reform in terrible. We need to go back to the old system: You stay an hour at a movie, you pay half price. You stay a half an hour, quarter price. Leave after ten minutes, the theatre has to pay you for your trouble.
Greenland: A mystery solved. I’ve always wondered why Greenland-which is basically a massive sheet of white ice-is called Greenland. Turns out the country’s name was coined by and Erik the Red, who had been banished from Iceland in 982 A.D. for manslaughter. He called his new home Greenland in order to entice more people to join him there. In other words, it was all a shady PR ploy by a felon. Shady, but smart. No doubt he got more takers than if he’d gone with something more accurate, like Bleakland or Depressingland or Youllstarveland.
Hollywood: This was founded by a man named Horace Wilcox, “a prohibitionist who envisioned it a community based on his sober religious principles”. Well, I know that a lot of Hollywood types are in AA. But other than that Mr. Wilcox would probably not be overjoyed.
James, Jesse: The greatest robber of the Wild West died in 1882. He was shot in the back by a gang member while he was at home “adjusting a picture”. That doesn’t seem right. Being shot in the back is bad enough, but while adjusting a picture? A notorious bandit shouldn’t end his life engaging in interior design. Well, at least he wsn’t crocheting throw pillows.
Urine: Dalmation dogs and humans have strangely similar urine (they’re the yonly two mammals to produce uric acid). This could be useful if I ever smoke pot, apply for a government job, and have access to Dalmations. REgardless, the unexpected connections continue to amaze.
So, there you have it. Some of the many things I learned while reading this book. Next up, the most recent Pulitzer winner.
