Book Review: MISTER PIP by Lloyd Jones

 

At long last, I have finished reading the novel, Mister Pip, written by Lloyd Jones. My copy of this novel was published in 2008. I've probably been reading it for three or four years!!! And it's only 256 pages long. My aunt recommended it to me years ago.

It's the first person narrative of a young woman named Matilda living on an island that is under siege as a small pawn in a multi-island war. She is a young teenager when the book begins and often at odds with her mother, who seems proud, dogmatic and unreasonable. The mother, of course, is worried about the war, her absent husband and her daughter's salvation and physical safety - but from the girl's perspective (and the reader's as well) the mother is simply difficult. We don't discover her super-human strength until late in the book, when it becomes impossible not to admire her, despite her obvious flaws. I will never forget the mother's heroism in her final act of defiance.

With war ravaging the island, they ask Mr. Watts, the island's only white resident, if he will teach school since all of their real teachers have fled. He agrees to do so, but he is not a teacher, so he spends much of every class period reading aloud from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. The children are entranced by the story of Pip, which takes them away from their war-torn island to 19th century England, providing a much-needed escape. The children return to their huts at night and share story developments with their parents, who have no other source of entertainment. The entire island is caught up in the book, until the book disappears. The children and Mr. Watts then try to re-create the book in fragments from memory. Mathilda, our narrator, remembers it best and is Mr. Watts' favorite pupil.

When evil soldiers arrive to destroy all of their possessions and terrorize the residents of the village, Mr. Watts tells them his name is Mr. Pip. He regales them with mostly true but sometimes made-up tales of his life, hoping to escape the island on a boat at the end of the seven-night story.

I won't tell you how it ends, but it is shocking and disturbing -- man's inhumanity to man (and woman), man's (and woman's) humanity and bravery, young woman's instinct to survive and, later, thrive, despite the devastations of war.

These things happen. We go on. We remember. We will never forget.
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Here are some fragments from the book:

* "I want this to be a place of light," he said, "no matter what happens." He paused for us to digest this....For the first time we were hearing that the future was uncertain.

* When Mr. Watts read to us we fell quiet. It was a new sound in the world. He read slowly so we heard the shape of each word.

* in a book -- no one had told us kids to look there for a friend.

* Stories have a job to do. They can't just lie around like lazybone dogs. They have to teach you something.

* I discovered the value of four walls and a roof. Something about containment that at the same time offers escape. .... What they had kept safe was more than our possessions; our houses had concealed our selves that no one else ever saw.

* A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.

*Dreams are nervy things. All it takes is for one stern word to be spoken in their direction and they shrivel up and die.

* I remember feeling preternaturally calm. This is what deep, deep fear does to you.

Book Review: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

What a beautiful, beautiful book! I loved the movie version, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, many years ago when my boys were small. I remember seeing it twice in movie theaters -- once in Utah and once in Minneapolis while visiting my best friend. We drove to the movie theater on a January evening in sub-zero temperatures to see it. I don't think she loved it as much as I did.

But that's because (as you know from previous posts) I am one of the few people on the planet who is more entertained watching grass grow than watching action flicks. I can't explain it! But I guess I don't need to apologize for it, either. That's just who I am.

About ten years ago, my aunt recommended the book version of it to me, and I finally got around to reading it six months ago. I finished it tonight. (I can't explain that, either. I am a very, very slow reader. My daughter, Abby, says I don't read - I analyze.)

The book is about an English butler and a head housekeeper at an estate in England just before the onset of World War II. They are consummate professionals and very, very English, rarely betraying their personal feelings about anything. The author is a master of nuance. I found myself marveling that someone named Kazuo Ishiguro could write so convincingly about being an English butler.

Mr. Stevens, the butler, reflects on his long career and his indefinite future while traveling to meet Mrs. Benn, the former Miss Kent, who was once his employee. He hopes to convince her to rejoin the household now that her long marriage has come to an end. I won't tell you what happens.

But reading the book at this point in my life, when I am more than half-way done with my 'magnus opum' (raising a family), I was profoundly touched by Mr. Stevens' situation. He has given his all to Darlington Hall, contenting himself with 'the remains of the day' and the resultant accumulation of dignity.

Here are some passages I especially enjoyed from the book:

'One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.'

'I distinctly felt that rare, yet unmistakeable feeling - the feeling that one is in the presence of greatness.'

'Dignity is something one can meaningfully strive for throughout one's career. Those 'great' butlers like Mr. Marshall who have it, I am sure, acquired it over many years of self-training and the careful absorbing of experience.'

'The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming, or vexing. They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit.'

'It was one of those events, which, at a crucial stage in one's development, arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one's ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has new standards by which to judge oneself.'

'It was a though one had available a never ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable. But I see I am becoming unduly introspective....'

Book Review: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

[Please Note: I listened to this book on CD, and the reader, Jayne Entwhistle, was really good.]

It took two recommendations to get me to read this book because I was put off by the sacharin sweetness of the title and feared it would be a book about middle aged (or older) women concluding that life is wonderful because they've overcome everything that makes it difficult. Well, it wasn't about middle aged people at all and I had it all wrong.

The heroine of this book is a hilarious eleven-year-old girl named Flavia de Luce, who lives in an enormous country house in the English countryside. (Her bedroom is the size of a dirigible hangar.) Her passion in life is chemistry, and I do mean PASSION! It is poetry to her. Her mother died in a climbing accident in Tibet, so she lives with her two older sisters and her emotionally absent father, who spends all of his time pursuing a stamp collection.

Early one morning Flavia discovers a dying man in the cucumber patch of their garden. Her father is later arrested for the man's death, but Flavia is always two steps ahead of the police is trying to find out what really happened. Flavia suspects her father may have done it (she heard them arguing the evening before), but she wants to figure it all out.

I enjoyed this book so much that I only let it end because I knew there were two other volumes waiting in the wings with the same characters by the same author.

It is a little difficult to believe that an 11-year-old could have so much wisdom, knowledge, wit, and understanding - but it isn't beyond the realm of possibility. It's possible that Flavia is an unrecognized genius, I suppose. But the fact that she's 11 makes it easier for her to get into and out of dangerous places with ease. She's not above acting 11 (or younger) if throwing a fit is required to obtain access or information, for example.

I highly recommend this book and look forward to reading the other books in the series. I have great respect for Alan Bradley!!! He must be a fascinating person to know.

After listening to my library copy on CD, I bought the book, too, in regular book form. It's just that good!

Book Review: "Persuasion" by Jane Austen

I've just finished reading "Persuasion," Jane Austen's last novel. Because of the archaic language (written in 1816), many people mistakenly assume that reading Austen is some sort of an academic exercise, like reading Latin, but it is pure pleasure! With all of its hilarious characters, witty words and romantic elements, it's a bodice-ripper for the mind.

I could not put it down and dreampt of it in my sleep. The language does effect speech patterns (and writing styles), however.

The main characters in most of Austen's books are slightly unpredictable, idealistic youg women, but in this novel the heroine, Anne Elliot, is older but wiser, jaded by disappointing life experiences. The bloom of her youth is behind her. She is useful to everyone but valued by almost no one. At the outset of the novel, it looks like her life will continue in that vain until the end.

But,of course, love intervenes.

I found myself wishing with Anne Elliot that the object of her affection would appear at a party or chance to meet her on the street. or that he would glance at her at just the right moment to convey some meaning.

Jane Austen is all about subtlties!

I read this book over 20 years ago and had fond memories of it, but the only part I remembered clearly involved a minor character at the end of the book.

Here are some excerpts I loved:

"There is hardly any personal defect," replied Anne, "which an agreeable manner might not gradually reconcile one to."

On Mary Musgrove: "While well and happy and properly attended to, she had great good humor and excellent spirits, but any indisposition sunk her completely; she had no resources for solitude."

"A thousand feelings rushed on Anne, of which this was the most consoling: that it would soon be over."

"She found that to retentive feelings, eight year may be little more than nothing."

"Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement."

Mrs. Harville: "I hate to hear you talking so...as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days."


It was an impulse of pure, though unacknowledged friendship.

Like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.

After all she had gone through, nothing was so likely to do her good as a little quiet cheerfulness at home.

Family connections were always worth preserving, good company worth seeking.

"My idea of good company, Mr. Eliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company."
"You are mistaken, said he gently. "That is not good company, that is the best."

A sick chamber may often furnish the worth of volumes.

There is so little real friendship in the world!

"I am no match-maker, as you well know," said Lady Russell, "being much too well aware of the uncertainty of all human events and caluculations."

He had an affectionate heart. He must love somebody.

Of course they had fallen in love over poetry.

She had some feelings, which she was ashamed to investigate. They were too much like joy, senseless joy!

Whoever suffered inconvenience, she must suffer none.

When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it.

Anne saw nothing, thought nothing of the brilliancy of the room. Her happiness was from within.

On women loving longer than men: "We certainly do not forget you as soon as you forget us. It is perhaps our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. "

A word, a look will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening, or never!

To flatter and follow others without being flattered and followed in turn is but a state of half enjoyment.

Book Review: "How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life" by Mameve Medwed

After seeing "Julie & Julia" this afternoon, I came home and plopped down to finish reading this novel, which I had started a little over a week ago. (I did play tennis this morning -- I'm not strictly a couch/movie theater potato!)

My one sentence assessment would be: It wasn't great literature, I didn't marvel at the author's depth of meaning or well-crafted phrases, but I enjoyed it.

A down-on-her-luck 35-year-old woman named Abby owns a small antiques business in Cambridge, Mass. where she grew up as the only child of a celebrated Harvard professor. She's had four semi-serious relationships in her life, but she's sworn off men, when she goes on the Antiques Roadshow with a chamber pot she'd inherited from her now-deceased mother. The chamber pot turns out to have some real value, and when her step-siblings see the PBS broadcast they want to split the value with her 50-50. A legal battle ensues.

I won't tell you how it ends in case you read it, but it is fairly predictable. All right, very predictable. Nonetheless, I kept turning the pages to confirm my suspicions.

Book Review: "The Uncommon Reader" by Alan Bennett

What a fantastic book! The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett was published in 2007, but I never heard anything about it until I stumbled upon a recommendation on my library's website. Tightly written and only 120 pages long, Bennett proves that brevity really is the soul of wit.

The title makes it sound like some sort of academic anthology, but it is the fictional account of how the current Queen of England discovers a love of reading late in life. It's full of political and literary satire and great insight into why people read and write...I've never read anything like it! It was definitely 'unputdownable' and extremely fun.

(I must warn gentle readers that the book has one extremly crass line in it, spoken by an advisor to the Prime Minister at the bottom of page 86, if you'd like to avoid it, as well as one bad curse word.)

Book Review: The Herring-Seller's Apprentice

I haven't read a lot of mystery novels in my lifetime for the same reason I haven't seen a lot of horror movies -- I guess I just don't enjoy the sensation of being scared. But, intrigued with the synopsis on the back cover, I picked up a mystery at the library this week and devoured it. It's sooooo good! (And I wasn't scared once -- it's not that kind of book.)

The author, L.C. Tyler, is British, but I couldn't find any information on him/her (even a gender reference) at the publisher's web site. It is my personal suspicion that L.C. Tyler is a lot like one of the novel's most colorful characters, Elsie (L.C.?) Thirkettle, who edits the main character, Ethelred Tressider's, books. Ethelred makes his living writing mediocre mysteries and romances under three assumed names, but in reality his life is quite dull until his ex-wife goes missing and he is named the executor of her estate, which puts him in contact with all kinds of people from their shared past. Elsie, a choco-holic, shadows him on his rounds, trying to piece together what happened to Geraldine, whom she never liked anyway. Her interactions with Ethelred are hilarious! It's the very dry British humor throughout the book that makes every page a pleasure.

It's a short book -- just 206 pages. The characters are well drawn and all of the scenes are set with just the right amount of description, never too much. The mystery part was satisfying -- I didn't figure it out early on, though I did guess most of it before the very end.

Half-way through reading it, I hopped onto Amazon to see what other reviewers had said about it (confident that they had loved it, too) and found that there were none, so I wrote the first review. (It only recently came out.)

One caveat: being a British book, there is a little bit of language and some off-color references, but nothing too terrible. (I've been reading more modern British lit lately and I am always surprised by the offensive language -- I don't get it. But I think this book has much less language than most. It seems to have been peppered here and there like artificial seasoning.)

I just thumbed through the book to find a suitable passage to share, but in the interest of not divulging any of the plot, I will share only the opening quotation, which I love:

Mais il faut choisir: vivre ou raconter. -- Jean Paul Sartre

(But one must choose: to live or to remember.)

Book Review: Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler

I picked up this book because a) Anne Tyler is a respected literary novelist worthy of emulation, and b) the story intrigued me: middle aged housewife wanders away from her family while vacationing at the seashore -- just gets up and walks off into a new, solitary life for no apparent reason.

I've read other Anne Tyler novels in the past and I saw the film adaptation of The Accidental Tourist, so I knew that she favored flat, staid (even emotionally dwarfed) characters -- they are in this book as well. Even Delia, the main character, flattens before she gradually expands. (Her life becomes excruciatingly dull while she's 'on the lamb,' because she's on a vacation from all emotion -- at least I think that's why.) I found Delia's husband Sam to be unrealistically dull and humorless. I'm not sure that such people actually exist. Everyone, in my experience, takes some pleasure in life and has some moments of levity -- everyone has some emotional range -- but not Sam. When her husband, her children, her mother-in-law, and her siblings interact with her while she's away, they are unrealistically polite and composed. Delia's 15-year-old son is slightly belligerant, but not as belligerant as he might reasonably be after being abandoned by his mother.

As the book progressed, I kept expecting Delia to suffer some negative consequences for leaving without saying a word to anyone. I wanted someone to yell at her. I wanted her to miss someone inconsulably, realize her mistake, and go home. While I liked the ending (which I will not divulge), I thought it still lacked some satifying emotional quality for me.

But then who am I to criticize when on the whole I really liked it? Anne Tyler's writing is good, simple, and clear. She invokes the sense of smell frequently throughout the book (from the very first sentence), which was very effective in making me feel present in many of the scenes.

Worth the Wait: The Writing Class by Jincy Willet

I finished reading The Writing Class by Jincy Willett last night at 2am. I would use the old cliche that I 'could not put it down,' but being a mother of four (one in absentia) I had to put it down quite a few times, reluctantly.

I thoroughly enjoyed it!

[Caveat to Sensitive Readers: You might reasonably be put off by the language of the 'bad guy' in the book, but hey, what kind of language would you expect a murderer to use while writing threats? Which reminds me of the Polly Klaus case in a northern California courtroom when her molester/murderer drew criticism and disgust for flipping off the child's family when the verdict was read. What kind of behavior did anyone expect from a person capable of killing a lovely little girl? The media seemed more outraged by his hand gesture than by his crime.]

The main character, Amy Gallup, is rather cynical, to say the least, which is partly why I find her so hilarious. Her take on life is brutally honest, but she has rare moments of warmth and compassion, too, especially while interacting with her basset hound, Alphonse. She embraces her flaws and insecurities and allows them to define the boundaries of her life so that she can live in a perpetual comfort zone, but her comfort zone is shaken with the new writing class she's teaching at the university extension.

"With remnants of creative energy," Amy Gallup blogs, too. Jincy writes about bloggers: "They clearly believed themselves on some sort of world stage, where they just might be attended to. They needed to communicate. Amy did not. If people stumbled across her site, fine, but it would exist without them, just like her books, whose continued presence in the Library of Congress was her ego's only comfort."

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a non-formulaic, literary murder mystery, to anyone who enjoys laughing and reading at the same time, to anyone who has ever thought of attending a writing class, to anyone who writes....

Jincy Willett is AMAZING! I only wish she were more prolific. On the other hand, I would not want to rush her. She's a writer who knows what she's doing. I stand in awe.

Anticipation....

I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of two novels I ordered from Amazon yesterday. (I ordered them online after checking with local Barnes & Noble stores - not in stock. Ugh!)

I will be reading the first book, A Lantern in Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich, for my August book club. I'm looking forward to it because of its great reviews. Here is one of those:

"If a book can be valued by the number of times that it is recalled in the reader's mind as a source of humor, comfort or warm nostalgia, then this book is among my most cherished few. Get this book, read it, love it. "

I stumbled across the other book, The Writing Class, while checking to see if Jincy Willett had written another book since Winner of the National Book Award several years ago. I loved that book (despite its dark humor) and found her writing to be incredibly good. So now she has another novel out and it's on its way to my house, even if it isn't on the shelf at Barnes & Noble for some inexplicable reason. Here are some comments about The Writing Class:

“The funniest novel I have read, possibly ever. Brilliant, totally original, and worthy of its title. I promise you will laugh constantly and to the point of stomach damage.”---Augusten Burroughs, bestselling author of Running with Scissors and Dry

“Riotous [and] hugely funny . . .Willett’s satirical abilities remain deliciously undimmed…. Amid the antic, hilarious, gender-bending battle of the sexes that Ms. Willett whips up in this book, either one may qualify as a reason to kill. Either that, or to die laughing.”---The New York Times

I'll have to post later to tell you what I thought of these, but I am REALLY looking forward to reading them!

Family Summer Reading

My son Tom recently 'complained' that I do not read to him. (He was apparently too young when I did read to him to remember now that I used to read to him.)

This gnawed at me. I always envisioned being the kind of mother who read to her children. Over the years I've started many books with them (Five Little Peppers and How they Grew, Cheaper by the Dozen, Charlotte's Web, Treasure Island...) only to abandon them when interest began to wane. I sulked for a couple of weeks, then went to the bookstore to buy a book I have always wanted to read: The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne. I will be reading this book aloud to my children in command performance fashion every evening until we've finished it.

We started reading about Pooh's adventures last night. Tom, age 16, the one who complained that I never read to him, tried to get out of it. "You have to listen," I said. "I can't have you growing up thinking I never read to you!" So he lounged on the sofa while Abby crocheted, Scott and Emily sat quietly, and I read.

Tom interrupted after the first page or two to complain about the writer's style, but I assured him the book is a classic. A few pages after that, we all chuckled at something Pooh said to Piglet. I held the book open to show them pictures in the beam of lamplight and we were all charmed. So far, so good. We're all looking forward to Chapter Two this evening.

So my message to any mothers out there who fear they've missed the boat on reading to their children: it's never too late. (It's certainly easier if they're still in the house, however.) The main thing for me is sharing my love of literature with them and teaching them that books can be as entertaining as video games and movies, even more so.

And I want to put in a plug for listening to books on tape or CD. On a fantastic car trip from Utah to Hannibal, Mo. in 2000 we listened to Tom Sawyer going and Huck Finn coming home. I could never have read it as well as the narrator of those tapes, who was a master of 500 voices (like Jim Dale of Harry Potter CD fame.) We laughed all the way there and all the way home and while on our vacation, touring Injun Joe's cave was particularly exciting because we had just heard the tale. One summer we listened to lesser known kids' books as we ran errands around town and polished off several books that way. Even Taylor, who was less inclined to read novels, enjoyed hearing those, which I selected to match his interests.

Just Tagged...My Follow-through

My sister-in-law, Leah, 'tagged' me with the following:
1. Grab the book nearest to you at this moment.
2. Turn to page 123.
3. Post the fifth complete sentence on that page to your blog.

The book closest to me was The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. I read the book in 2004, but had it out on the piano, ready to send to my little brother.

The fifth sentence on page 123 reads: "I don't understand."

This book had a profound effect on me emotionally at the time I read it. I have rarely burst into tears while reading a book. When I finished reading it in the middle of the night, I wrote a long letter to my husband before going to sleep.

Some of the passages I underlined in the book include:

***But all endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time...

***People often belittle the place where they were born, but heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners...

***You are here so I can teach you something. All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you...

***You didn't get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to...

***Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else...

***All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped...

***Silence was his escape, but silence is rarely a refuge...

***Each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one. (The book's last sentence.)

A Day at the Utah Book Festival

I've just returned from spending the day at the Utah Book Festival at the City Library downtown. I thought I'd write the insights that struck me as I sat in several lectures, workshops, and discussion groups today among a throng of other booklovers.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "A Woman and a Cow" Lecture delivered Thursday on campus at the University of Utah:

Ms. Ulrich is a Pulitzer prize-winning professor of history at Harvard. She is also an amazing LDS woman and a feminist in the most complimentary sense of the word. She said that she enjoys the detective work of being a historian. (I could relate to that - I enjoy detective work, too...maybe I should dabble in history...still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.)

Karen Chamberlain, "Solitude and Community on a Utah Desert Ranch":

Author of the memoir 'Desert of the Heart' and a poet and screenwriter as well, Ms. Chamberlain struck me as a very sincere wordsmith. The book is about the largely solitary time she spent at the Horsethief Ranch in Southeastern Utah, a homestead built in 1928 that is 20 miles from the nearest building. She lived alone and worked the ranch because it gave her an opportunity to write and to experience life as a pioneer without telehone, technology, crowds of people, or even electricity. She said that she had enjoyed solitude even as a child, and solitude on the ranch became her teacher. She differentiated solitude from loneliness, which she said is a void, a yearning to be somewhere else or with someone else. She said that before going to the ranch her identity was tied up in what she did, but at the ranch she discovered that her core identity was much deeper and simpler.

Carol Lynn Pearson, Panel "Mormon Writing: Promised Land or No Man's Land?":

I first read Carol Lynn Pearson in the 1980s when Goodbye, I Love You was published, a memoir about caring for her gay husband as he died from AIDS. It was a powerful, beautiful book that made me proud of my faith. She's recently come out with a follow up book called No More Goodbyes, a book that tells the stories of LDS young men who commit suicide because they are homosexuals. She sees herself as a bridge between the LDS and the non-LDS, and she feels called to this work of impacting the lives and arousing the consciences of LDS people.

Christopher Kimball Bigelow, Panel "Mormon Writing: Promised Land or No Man's Land?":

This author uses humor as a bridge between the LDS and the non-LDS. He said that good literature of any genre portrays what it's like to be a human being. Mormon lit misses the mark when it is agenda-driven.

Emma Lou Thayne, Panel "Mormon Writing: Promised Land or No Man's Land?":

Ms. Thayne is an 83-year-old poet and the author of several hymns. She is a real treasure! Everyone knows who she is and she seems to know everyone else connected to words in the state. She said that good writing is all about sifting, sifting, sifting until you are left with the essentials only. Good writing is always a product of what is thought, felt, and believed. She facilitated the discussion and interjected periodically with very insightful comments and observations. What a delight to see her in action!

Book Club Panel:

I decided to go to this panel discussion because for some time now I've considered forming my own book club. The one I've been attending for several years now (and thoroughly enjoy as a women's discussion group) rarely selects quality books to read. I'd like a more serious book club for booklovers. Maybe we just need to modify the one we have and make it into what it could be...

Jane Hamilton, "Literary Confessions: The Worst Thing I Ever Did":

I can't say enough good things about this session! She was FANTASTIC! Ms. Hamilton is the writer of several bestsellers, including two Oprah Winfrey selections: The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World. I have never read any of her books, but I bought two tonight and will soon get started. She was hilariously funny and obviously brilliant...As a writer she said she starts with character, voice, trouble, and a setting and usually knows the last line of the book before she begins. She says she wrote initially out of rage because she had no time or space to write, no babysitter, and no money. Her first book was rejected about 30 times.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History":

The historian (see above) spoke about what history is: 1) what happened, 2) based upon surviving sources, 3) reconstructed by later generations who have some interest in it. She has explored how history was made by women, common, ordinary women for the most part, women who talked back or misbehaved, nudging world events along. She recounted another historian's observation that if women's libbers had been burning girdles instead of bras everyone would have been on board. (Huge laughter and applause!)

Now my head is aching from hanging on so many words. My face is tired from smiling. I have laundry to do, as always. They really should come up with a 4-letter word for laundry. As the great equalizer it deserves one.

"Love in the Time of Cholera" from My Library

A few years ago, my husband and I decided to finish our home and added a library in an unfinished corner of the ground floor. It's a small room, a nook really, with a glass door, a large window, and floor to ceiling built-in maple bookcases. I am sitting in this room now and I have just finished re-organizing it. Our books primarily deal with the following topics: religion, home improvement, children's chapter books, children's picture books, health, science, history, academic review course materials, travel, arts and crafts, accounting and business, foreign language, atlases, coffee table books, yearbooks/scrapbooks, and literature, which is the largest collection by far.

Most likely because of my background as an English major, I always mark passages in the books I read. I started doing this originally so that I could recall significant events for tests and essays. Today I do it so that I can thumb through books I read and recall exactly why I liked them so much, how they affected me and why.

For this entry I will share some significant passages from "Love in the Time of Cholera," the first book I read by the author Gabriel Garcia-Marquez:

...she had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love. p.66

He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past....He had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia. p. 106

...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. p.165

The only convincing document he could write was a love letter. p.171

She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children, but because of the friendship formed while raising them. p.207

She would visit with new friends or some old ones from school or the painting classes: an innocent substitute for infidelity. p.212

She had barely turned the corner into maturity, free at last of illusions, when she began to detect the disillusionment of never having been what she had dreamed of being when she was young....Instead, she was something she never dared admit even to herself: a deluxe servant. p.221

Men blossomed in a kind of autumnal youth, they seemed more dignified with their first gray hairs, they became witty and seductive, above all in the eyes of young women, while their withered wives had to clutch at their arms so as not to trip over their own shadows. A few years later, however, the husbands fell without warning down the precipice of a humiliating aging in body and soul, and then it was their wives who recovered and had to lead them by the arm as if they were blind men, whispering in their ear, as if not to wound their masculine pride, that they should be careful, that there were three steps, not two, that there was a puddle in the middle of the street...p.257

For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death. p.345