Sula, Toni Morrison

5 stars

First Sentence: In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.

Thoughts: Sula and Nel came from very different backgrounds, but they were the best of friends. Nel’s mother Helene had escaped her childhood in New Orleans to make a new life for herself as a proper woman in the midwest. Nel never knew why her mother was so insistent on everything being just so until she went back to Louisiana for her great-grandmother’s funeral. There she found out that Helene’s apple didn’t just fall far from the tree, it rolled away. She went back to her restricted life. Then she met Sula at school.

Sula was much more carefree than Nel. Her house was much, much more chaotic as well. Her grandmother Eva had left town for a while, then returned with only one leg. Rumor had it she had stuck it under a train to collect insurance money. Sula’s mother Hannah was a loving woman. In fact, she loved every man in town. No one hated her for it, though, because she was so casual when it came to sex. Then there was Tar Baby, a white man boarding at Eva’s house while he drank himself to death, and the Deweys, three boys Eva adopted for no discernible reason.

Then there was Plum, Eva’s son. He came back from WWI a shadow of his former self. No one knew why he stayed locked up in his room all day until Hannah found a spoon burned black. Eva didn’t want her son to die like an animal trapped by heroin so she lit him on fire. Hannah and Sula never completely trusted Eva after that, and can you blame them?

Sula and Nel spent every moment they could together growing up. They knew all each other’s secrets, all their desires, and even their thoughts. Nel provided the restraint Sula needed on her wildness while Sula helped Nel come out of her shell.

Still it was no surprise that Sula grew up to be a hard woman who didn’t trust anyone (except Nel, of course). Eva knew what Sula was when she saw her watching Hannah burn to death. (Eva didn’t start that fire.) After Nel’s wedding Sula left town. She returned ten years later in a plague of robins. Nel thought she and Sula could pick up right where they left off and they did until Nel found her limits. It happened the day she walked in on her husband Jude in bed with Sula.

The last few years of Sula’s life were a continual downward slide. She became the town villain, uniting everyone in hatred. While she did have a few lovers, she spent most of her time alone. She died alone, as well. Twenty-five years later, Nel realized what Sula had taken with her when she died.

It’s beautifully written as only Morrison could write. She had a way of revealing the beauty in darkness. She deserved the Nobel for the way she could make the English language sing. I mean, look at this:

If I take a chamois and rub real hard on the bone, right on the ledge of your cheek bone, some of the black will disappear. It will flake away into the chamois and underneath there will be gold leaf. I can see it shining through the black. I know it is there…

And if I take a nail file or even Eva’s old paring knife—that will do—and scrape away the gold, it will fall away and there will be alabaster. The alabaster is what gives your face its planes, its curves. That is why your mouth smiling does not reach your eyes. Alabaster is giving it a gravity that resists a total smile.

Then I can take a chisel and small tap hammer and tap away the alabaster. It will crack then like ice under the pick, and through the breaks I will see the loam, fertile, free of pebbles and twigs. For it is the loam that is giving you that smell.

That’s art is what that is.

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

5 stars

First Sentence: Towards the end of a sultry afternoon early in July a young man came out of his little room in Stolyarny Lane and turned slowly and somewhat irresolutely in the direction of Kamenny Bridge.

Thoughts: I’ve been rewatching Columbo lately, which inspired me to reread Crime and Punishment. Also I’m currently on a Dostoevsky Quest. But it was Columbo that made me push this novel to the top of the list because Police Inspector Porfiry Petrovich was one of the inspirations for our good lieutenant. They were both rumpled, unprepossessing men who intruded on their subjects’ personal space, and both expert psychologists who never missed a trick. They both know you did the crime, they’re just annoying you until they get enough evidence to bring you downtown.

Even the structure of the book is like a Columbo episode. They all started off with the murder being committed* and the rest of the story was just gathering evidence and wearing down the suspect until the confession and/or final confrontation with the evidence that clinches their fate. Both the book and the show are how catch’em rather than whodunits. The difference, though, is that Crime and Punishment is about the criminal himself and how he feels while he’s being worn down enough to confess.

The criminal is Rodion Raskolnikov, a university dropout who’s obsessed with Napoleon. He believed that Great Men like Napoleon could commit crimes with impunity because they were improving society. From the beginning it’s clear that Raskolnikov’s cheese and cracker are not in close proximity. He decides to kill an old pawnbroker because she’s preying on the poor. He pawns a couple of items with her to case her apartment and find out where she keeps her money. When he hears her sister will be out for the evening, he takes his chance. Raskolnikov comes in pretending to pawn another item only to bludgeon the old woman with an axe. While he’s rummaging around in her pawn chest, he hears her sister come home. Sister is the next to get bludgeoned with the axe. He has a close call when two other men come up with items to pawn, but he gets away without being seen along with the axe and what little loot he could gather.

From then on Raskolnikov is constantly tormented by his conscience and/or everyone he knows. He works himself into a fever after he hides the loot in a vacant lot. In a fit of delirium he actually confesses to a police officer, but no one’s sure if it’s a real confession or if it’s just the fever talking. When his best friend invites him to a party he meets Porfiry Petrovich who immediately suspects him of the murder. Eventually he gets enough evidence to call Raskolnikov into his office and tell him he knows he’s the killer and it would be better if he made a formal confession.

Meanwhile Raskolnikov’s mother and sister Dunya move to St. Petersburg for his sister’s wedding. Raskolnikov meets his intended brother-in-law and it’s hate at first sight. He knows this man is a cad and a bounder who’s only marrying Dunya so he can have someone to boss around. He also befriends Marmeladov, a down-on-his luck civil service officer, and through him Marmeladov’s daughter Sonya, a hooker with a heart of gold. Sonya is the only person who has any influence on Raskolnikov, but he’s made such a mess of his life even she may not be able to save him.

*The good ones anyway. There are a few that break the mold but those are generally considered the episodes we do not speak of.

Grand Hotel, Vicki Baum

6 stars

First Sentence: The hall porter was a little white about the gills as he came out of the No. 7 phone booth.

Thoughts: I recently watched Grand Hotel, the movie from 1932. You should all do that. It’s a great movie with a fantastic cast (not one but two Barrymores!*). Later I was scrolling through Goodreads and saw that someone on my friends list had shelved Grand Hotel, the novel from 1929. “Wait, it’s a book?” I thought and immediately jumped on the library catalog. Whaddaya know, my local library had it. Soon I had it as well, for three weeks at least.

Just like Metropolis, the novel is just as good as the movie. It’s the classic story of intertwining lives in a hotel**, both guests and employees. The hall porter, Senf, who we meet in the first sentence, is trying desperately not to be distracted from his work throughout the story. His wife’s in the hospital having their first child, you see. It’s not an easy labor since it takes up the entire book which covers a few days, so he’s well within his rights to be anxious.

Hanging out in the lobby is Dr. Otternshlag who is living a life of quiet desperation after being physically and psychologically scarred in WWI. He takes a liking to the new guest at the hotel, Herr Kringelein, because he senses a similar longing for death in him. Kringelien’s longing is different, though. He was recently diagnosed with A Terminal Illness+ and has decided to spend his last few months living it up. He deserves it. He’s spent his whole life being browbeaten both at work where he was an accountant at a textile mill, and at home where his wife was bitter and hateful. Otternshlag helps Kringelein get a really nice room at the hotel and then takes him out to see the sights of 1920s Berlin.

Meanwhile, Grusinskaya, the celebrated Russian ballerina, is having a crisis of her own. She used to fill the house when she danced, but now most of the seats are empty and the only applause is arbitrary. She looks at herself in the mirror and sees an old woman. (My god, she’s forty!) She looks around her and sees only sycophants and servants. She has no friends. She has no one who cares about her as a person. She only has her famous pearls.

Those pearls have caught the eye of Baron Gaigern, one of the broke nobility that drifted around Europe in the early twentieth century living off their faded titles. He’s taken to cat burglary to fill his slim wallet and his current job is to get those pearls. He breaks into Grusinskaya’s room one night while she’s at the theater, but is caught behind the drapes when she comes back early. She finds him there and they immediately fall in love. She wants him to come with her to Vienna, but he wants to get the money to pay his own way because masculine pride and all that. Since he can’t take her pearls now, he has to find another source of easy money.

While all this is going on, Herr Preysing is trying to save his textile business. His stock has been falling while a rival firm’s has been rising, and he’s hoping to negotiate a merger between the companies. He has another scheme in the works, a deal with a Manchester cotton mill, that he hopes will make his struggling business look more desirable to the other firm. The Manchester deal falls through, though, so for the first time in his life he has to bend his morals to benefit his business. The new angle in his usually rigid morality helps him reconcile himself to initiating an affair with his stenographer, Flammchen. She goes along with it because she’s a single woman in the 1920s and she has to do what she has to do to get by.

If you’ve seen the movie, you know the main plot points (and vice versa). The book, though, goes into more detail about things they couldn’t show on screen in the 1930s. The sex that was implied in the film is actual on the page. Also everyone wanders around naked at least once during the course of the novel because it’s Germany. What I don’t understand is why they change the gender of Baby Senf. Why did they do that? It has no bearing on anything, it’s just a weird choice to make.

*I have a game I play when I watch a John Barrymore movie. It’s called “How many times do they show his profile.” The man (or his directors) knew what he had and made sure to show it off as often as possible. I forgot the number for Grand Hotel but it was a lot.

**The origin of the trope, in fact.

+I think it was tuberculosis. It usually is in pre-antibiotic novels before switching to cancer, then AIDS, then cancer again. If you want to be really tragic, get all three at the same time.

The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

5 stars

First Sentence: On the 24th of February, 1815, the lookout of Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the three-master, the Pharaon, from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.

Thoughts: After a year of Weighty Tomes, I come across the Weightiest Tome of Them All. The Count of Monte Cristo is 1400 pages long. Fast-moving, exciting pages that pull you along for every single step of the long journey. Certain other authors of Weighty Tomes could learn something from Dumas, mainly how not to be boring.

We all know Monte Cristo as the classic tale of revenge served icy-cold. It begins with Edmond Dantes. He seemed like a nice enough guy—at first. He was the first mate of the Pharaon, promoted to temporary captain after the actual captain died on their last journey. He’s impressed M. Morrell, the shipping company owner, enough that he’s going to be promoted to actual captain himself on the next journey. Which is great because now he has enough money to marry the lovely Mercedes and pay off his father’s debts so he won’t starve while Edmond is overseas.

Except…there are those who are jealous of his good fortune. There’s Fernand who’s in love with Mercedes and furious that she’s brushed him off for that Dantes guy. Then there’s Danglars, the second mate who wanted the captain’s chair. And there’s Caderousse, Dantes’ father’s neighbor whose been bleeding Dantes Sr dry financially while his son is away.

Danglars has a plan. Before the captain died, he made Edmond promise to stop off at the Isle of Elba to deliver a letter to You Know Who. (This part of the story takes place in 1815 in case You Don’t Know Who.) Rumor has it that Edmond saw You Know Who in person while he was there. And he has another letter he’s supposed to deliver to Paris. So Danglars concocts a conspiracy involving Dantes and writes a letter outlining it. Caderousse, drunk as usual, just laughs it off. Danglar laughs too, and crumples up the letter, making sure Fernand sees where he throws it. Later Fernand picks it up and delivers it to the deputy crown prosecutor, Villefort. He’s the worst possible person to get this letter because Villefort’s father is part of the actual conspiracy to return You Know Who to France. Desperate to hide this spot on his family’s name, Villefort takes advantage of You Know Who’s return to condemn Dantes to life imprisonment in the Chateu d’If, the Alcatraz of Marseilles.

And there Dantes would have died if not for the Abbe Faria, who popped up in Dantes’ cell after he miscalculated the distance he would need to dig his escape tunnel. The two quickly became friends. Faria taught Edmond languages, mathematics, philosophy, and other subjects to pass the time. Then Faria has a stroke that leaves him partially paralyzed. Knowing that the killing stroke will be coming soon, he tells Edmond the location of a treasure hidden on the isle of Monte Cristo off the coast of Italy. When Faria dies, Edmond switches places with the body and escapes d’If by being tossed off a cliff into the sea. He gets free of the shroud, washes up on an islet, and gets rescued by some passing pirates. Edmond bides his time, makes some friends among the local pirates, gets some money, buys his own skiff, and now he’s ready. He goes to Monte Cristo and finds the treasure. And what a fabulous treasure it is!

Over the next couple of decades, Dantes uses his treasure to formulate his plans for revenge. He buys a title from the Italian government and becomes the Count of Monte Cristo. He develops several secret identities to help him nudge events in the way he wants them to go. He rescues a lovely Greek princess from slavery. He makes friends in high and low places. Now it’s 1838 and he’s ready to return to France.

Dantes’ enemies have prospered over the intervening quarter century. Danglars is now Baron Danglars, a wealthy banker. Fernand has married Mercedes and become a Count himself. Villefort is now the chief prosecutor of Paris. Caderousse owns an inn. All of them have wives and (except Caderousse) children who will be convenient pawns in Dantes’ game.

One by one, Dantes brings down the people who tried to destroy him while he saves the ones who weren’t to blame. In the end, the wicked are punished, the good are rewarded, Dantes has learned a valuable lesson about Man’s place in this world in relation to the Almighty, and the young lovers live happily ever after. A satisfying tale in all respects.

Dune, Frank Herbert

6 stars

First Sentence: In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final worrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old woman came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.

Thoughts: And so begins the greatest science fiction of all times. I judge people by this series. If you like it, we are of the same tribe. If you don’t, I’m sorry for your loss. And if you appreciate the Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson books as well we’re buddies. If you’re a pretentious jerk who doesn’t like them, well I think I just made my opinion of you known.

Anyway. In the beginning House Atreides lived on Caladan, an ocean world. Due to political machinations, they were given control of the desert planet Arrakis, aka Dune, the source of the spice melange which was the greatest source of wealth in the known universe. It enabled people to live longer and healthier than they would have naturally and the Spacing Guild used it to fold space. There were other uses as well, but those were mostly kept secret for various reasons.

Paul, the scion of House Atreides, was known to have special powers. For example, he’s been having prophetic dreams lately. The Bene Gesserit sent one of their Reverend Mothers to test Paul to see how special he was and if his mother Jessica’s manipulations had screwed up their breeding program. (She was supposed to have a girl instead of a boy.) And so Paul faces the gom jabbar, a poisoned needle held to his neck as he keeps his hand in a box of pain.* He passes with flying colors and is declared Human.

When they reach Arrakis, Paul’s abilities take a new dimension. He knows things before he knows them, like the proper way to put on a Fremen stillsuit. It doesn’t help that the locals think he might be the promised one of legend. (OR DOES IT?) Jessica uncovers messages left from the previous Bene Gesserit representative that there is a traitor in their midst. Meanwhile Duke Leto, knowing that his enemies in House Harkonnen have left nasty surprises for him on their new planet, sends his best men out to uncover them and make alliances with the Fremen natives.

And then the Harkonnens strike. Leto is killed, but Paul and Jessica escape. Paul, overwhelmed by prescience, foresees a terrible future where he leads a jihad across the inhabited planets. They meet up with Liet Kynes, leader of the Fremen, who sends them into the desert to take refuge with the “wild” Fremen tribes. They meet up with Stilgar’s tribe. To prove their worth to their captors/saviors, Jessica undergoes the ordeal of the Water of Life, which awakens her fetal daughter’s awareness long before it should have appeared. But it works out thanks to the assistance of the tribe’s Reverend Mother who helps Jessica calm her daughter’s mind and take over as the new Sayyadina.

After defeating a Fremen in a knife fight, Paul fuses Imperial and Fremen fighting styles to help the Fremen attack the Harkonnens, who have retaken the planet. But his visions of the coming jihad are becoming more disturbing. He tries desperately to find a way to avert the war, until the only way out is to overdose on spice so he can open his mind to its fullest extent. And so Paul Muad-dib Atreides, Usul to his tribe, becomes the Kwisatz Haderach.

Dune is a dense novel covering environmentalism, conservation, the rule of law, corruption, honor, native rights, drug use and abuse, and fate. You can find something new every time you read it (I do). There are plots within plots, which I think qualifies it as Literature. It will outlive us all.

*Both Gom Jabbar and Box of Pain would be great names for metal bands.

Roots: The Saga of an American Family, Alex Haley

6 stars

First Sentence: Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.

Thoughts: Never have I read such an intense book. I kept having to put it down because I kept getting angry and/or depressed. I can see why Roots was such a phenomenon when it was published.

As the title indicates, this is the story of an American family starting with the first ancestor to arrive in North America. Specifically Alex Haley’s family and by “arrive in North America” I mean “dragged here against his will” because said ancestor was from Africa and brought here as a slave. That man was Kunta Kinte, a nice young man from Juffure who didn’t deserve all the bad things that happened to him.

The first 150 pages are about Kunta Kinte growing up in Juffure. He proceeds through early childhood to little boyhood where he got his first outfit of clothes, learned to read and write, and got his first responsibility herding his father’s goats. Then he’s ready to Become a Man which begins with him having a sack thrown over his head and ends with him learning hunting skills and getting circumcised. Ouch. Now he’s a young man with a hut of his own and his own (small) goat herd. He gets more responsibilities, including guarding the village at night.

And then, right around page 150, he’s captured by slavers and crosses the Atlantic. This is the most difficult section of the book, reading-wise. That ship is horrible. It is the stuff of nightmares. I fully believe the legend that sharks still swim the old slave ship routes because those things were awful, blood-soaked nightmares. I want to go back and slap my ancestors. HARD.

The ship lands in Virginia and Kunte Kinte is immediately sold, He keeps trying to run away until some trashy rednecks catch him and cut half his foot off. He’s then sold to a kindly (for a slave owner) doctor who treats Kunta’s severed foot and then gives him work tending the garden and driving the carriage. Kunta marries Bell, the cook, and they have a daughter they name Kizzy. Kunta tells her stories about his life in Juffure as she grows up. Then, just when you’ve settled in, more horror. The doctor discovers that Kizzy can read and write (illegal for slaves at the time) and sells her. Her screams as she’s separated from her parents are only slightly less terrible than the slave ship.

It doesn’t get better. Kizzy’s new owner rapes her, eventually “fathering” (loosely defined) a son that he names George. Kizzy tells George the stories her father told her when she was growing up. George grows up and befriends the slave who tends the master’s fighting chickens, eventually becoming Chicken George, the best cockfighter in all of North Carolina.

They’re in North Carolina now, by the way. Up north of Greensboro near the Virginia border. My desire to slap my ancestors has intensified accordingly. Now it’s personal.

George marries and has children, making sure they all know the stories of Kunta Kinte. The Civil War breaks out, which only makes the racist Southerners even more insufferable. Then the war ends and the slaves are free. Chicken George leads his family to Tennessee with some other freed slaves where they build a new town and begin their free lives. George’s most responsible son, Tom, starts a rolling blacksmith service and does all right for himself. His son ends up running the local lumber mill and also does all right for himself. His daughter goes to college, meets and marries a Nice Young Man, and brings him home along with their baby to meet the family. That baby was Alex Haley.

From then on the story is about how Roots came into being. Haley heard the stories that had been passed down from his original ancestor, now known only as “The African,” and became interested in tracing his family history. It took a long time, but he was finally able to identify which language the African words in the stories had come from and from there which part of Africa his ancestor came from. More research narrowed it down to the country and then, finally, the exact village. When Haley visited Juffure, the griot recited the history of the village and Haley finally learned the name of “The African.” He was able to fill in the blank spaces in the griot’s history with his own family story, and everyone in the village welcomed him as a long-lost son. Meanwhile the reader gets up to find the tissue box because the words on the page have gotten blurry.

I don’t as a rule recommend Weighty Tomes to all and sundry, but this is a book that everyone needs to read. But, as the man said, you don’t have to take my word for it.

The Book of Three, Lloyd Alexander

6 stars

First Sentence: Taran wanted to make a sword; but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes.

Thoughts: Here we enter the Chronicles of Prydain, one of the most classic of all classic fantasy series. If you were raised right, you know Taran & Co. as old friends and welcome any chance to visit with them.

If you weren’t raised right, let me introduce you. Taran is a young boy living at Caer Dallben with Dallben the wizard and Coll the man-of-all work. Tarn dreams of adventure despite repeated warnings from this guardians that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Taran doesn’t care; he’s bored with farm work and wants to go out into the wide world and Do Stuff. He gets his chance when Hen Wen, the oracular pig, gets scared and runs away.

Taran chases after her into the woods where he’s immediately lost. He runs into a gray-haired wolfish-looking man who is also looking for Hen Wen. At the farm, though, he didn’t know she ran off until he runs into our stalwart Assistant Pig-Keeper. Taran gets cocky with him until he learns the man is actually Prince Gwydion, the son of King Math of Prydain. Gwydion’s interest in Hen Wen is simple: he needed an oracle from her. Seems that a new war lord known only as the Horned King (because he wears a horned skull on his head) has been raising armies all over Prydain and Gwydion wants to know how to stop this. He suspects that the Horned King is in league with Arawn, ruler of the dark lands of Annuvin. He joins Taran’s search, along with a strange furry who-knows-what named Gurgi who appears shortly after.

The first thing they do is run into one of the Horned King’s scouting parties and get captured. They’re carried off to the Spiral Castle, home of Queen Achren who is definitely in league with Arawn. She separates Taran and Gwydion, throws Taran in the dungeon and does who-knows-what with Gwydion. Taran escapes with the help of a girl named Eilonwy. She’s been sent to Achren to learn how to be an enchantress, but she hates her guardian and would love the chance to stick a few thorns in her side. Rescuing Taran and the man in the other cell would be a great way to do that. Taran, thinking that the other man is Gwydion, encourages her. When they meet in the woods outside the castle, Taran discovers that the other man is actually a bard named Fflewddur Fflam and yells at Eilonwy, hurting her feelings. Fflewddur tells him to stop being a jerk, so Taran apologizes and all is well again.

Except that when they escaped, the Spiral Castle collapsed, killing everyone inside. Including, as they all believe, Gwydion. Now Taran has a new quest: finish what Gwydion started. He has to put aside the Search for Hen Wen and go to Caer Dathyl instead to warn King Math about the Horned King. Adventure ensues. Taran discovers some of the secrets of Prydain, finding his pig along the way, and basically gets in way over his head until Gwydion steps out of the woods to save the day.

In the end we’ve all learned a valuable lesson: Dallben and Coll knew what they were talking about when they warned Taran about adventures. It still doesn’t make much difference, though, because there are more adventures ahead for the Assistant Pig-Keeper and his friends. Glee!

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

5 stars

First Sentence: We were at prep, when the Head came in, followed by a new boy not in uniform and a school-servant carrying a big desk.

Thoughts: Like The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Madame Bovary was a scandal when first published because it was about a woman having an affair! But there the comparisons end (except for the heroine’s fate, which we’ll go into later). The Awakening was one long slog through futility and is the reason why I hate Kate Chopin with a burning passion. Madame Bovary was written by a man and it definitely shows, but it has more going for it. For example, the characters. There’s more than just The Husband, The Wife, The Lover. There’s also more detail about Emma Bovary’s life that makes her a real character.

But first let’s start with M. Bovary. His first name is Charles and he’s kind of a dunce. He just drifts along through life, steered by his overbearing mother. She wants Charles to be a doctor so he duly goes to medical school. He can’t pass all the requirements for being an M.D. though, so he becomes a health officer instead. In modern terms, that would make him a Nurse Practitioner. He marries Heloise, a rich widow who comes with the Approval of Mama, who does nothing but complain and then duly dies. This leaves Charles free to court the pretty young Emma Roualt, a girl he met when he went to her father’s farm to set his broken leg. Emma agrees because she wants to get off the farm and live somewhere with more people.

Emma settles in to her new life as Madame Bovary the Younger and is soon completely bored. The only bright spot in her life came when she and Charles were given an invitation to the Grand Ball held by the local nobility. Emma was enchanted by the elegant house and all the glamorous titled guests. She spends the next year hanging on the hope that they’ll get invited to the next ball, but they aren’t. They only got the first invitation because Charles had treated some of the Local Nobility for various illnesses the year before.

Charles gets wind that there’s a medical practice opening up at Yonville, so he and Emma move there. That’s when they meet the local pharmacist Homais. He’s loud, obnoxious, a total boor, and my favorite character in the book. I’m not sure why. I’d hate him if I met him socially, but in the book he adds some spice to the village. He has a clerk working for him, Leon, who is duly impressed by the lovely Emma Bovary. She’s also interested in him. They take a walk together, then Leon gets scared by his feelings and takes a job in another town before he gets into trouble.

Enter Rodolphe Boulanger. He’s the moneyed rake of the town looking for a new mistress. Emma fits the requirements perfectly. She throws herself headfirst into the affair, gets clingy, and starts to annoy Rodolphe. He breaks up with her via a note in a basket of apricots. Emma promptly collapses into a nervous heap.

After a few months of indulging her Catholic guilt, she goes to Rouen with Charles to see Lucia di Lammermoor. Emma was a big fan of Walter Scott and loved the novel the opera was based on. Charles hadn’t read the book, so he kept bugging Emma throughout the performance asking her what was going on and interpreting everything incorrectly. Enter Leon. He was also at the opera and noticed the Bovarys in the audience. He’s working in Rouen now, you see. Emma does see, quite a lot. Soon she’s traveling to Rouen once a week to have an affair with Leon. Then she gets clingy and starts to annoy him.

Enter Lhereaux, the local merchant. Between affairs, Emma’s been buying all sorts of new clothes and trinkets and such and now she’s run up a huge debt. Lhereaux decides now is the time for her to start paying up. So just when Leon is starting to make himself unavailable when she comes to Rouen she finds herself under a huge pile of debt. There’s only one way out for a nineteenth-century heroine: suicide.

This is a well-written book, even in translation, but Emma’s death scene was completely overdone. Oh, the medical details were correct but the DRAMA!!!! surrounding it was overblown to the nth degree. But that’s what you get when you’re a naughty woman in a novel in the 1850s. A drawn-out death meant to hammer home the message that Nice Women Don’t Do This.

Still, it is a tragedy. Not because Emma died but because she never had any real opportunities. She was educated in a convent which meant minimal education with a maximum of praying. If she had any talents, they were atrophied at an early age. There was nothing for her except to become a bored housewife twiddling her thumbs. Why shouldn’t she have an affair or two or three to break up the monotony?

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

6 stars

First Sentence: When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.

Thoughts: Everyone can stop looking for the Great American Novel because it was published in 1960 and called To Kill a Mockingbird. Almost everyone I know has read this book and loved it. Maybe a few didn’t love-love it, but that’s okay. Everyone has different tastes. For me, though, this is one of those books where every character is an old friend and I love visiting with them.

Well, not with the Ewells but that goes without saying, doesn’t it?

I think the reason I’m so fond of this novel is because of my eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Trexler. I’m using her real name because she deserves the tribute. She was our class commentary on the book, explaining the details of Scout’s life in a rural 1930s town to a bunch of suburban middle-schoolers in the 1990s. Mrs. Trexler had grown up in the country so she was our link between our lives and Scout’s. She made the book come alive for us.

While I don’t know what is was like to grow up in Alabama in the 1930s, I do know what it’s like to be a six-to-eight-year-old girl who doesn’t understand what’s going on around her. Nobody explains things to Scout and they didn’t explain them to me, either. Or to you. We all had to figure it out on our own. Oh, Atticus tried to explain, but he was a lawyer and tended to resort to legalistic speech. Like when he defined rape as “carnal knowledge of a female by force and without consent.” That’s technically true, but what six-year-old will understand it?

Thing is, Scout is too young to have the historical and cultural knowledge she needs to fully comprehend the things happening around her. But what she can do is observe. Lee picks us up and drops us into Scout’s head and we never see anything outside of her perception for the whole book. However, since we aren’t Scout and we do know something of history, it’s a dual perception. You’ll find something new in the book every time you read it. I do, anyway.

For example, on this read-through I finally realized the significance of the penknife Sheriff Heck Tate is waving around at the end of the book. It’s been thirty years since I first read this book and every single one of those years I believed Tate’s story about Bob Ewell finding the kitchen knife he was stabbed with in the dump and carrying it with him when he stalked Scout and Jem after the Halloween carnival. Ha-ha, what irony! Stabbed with his own knife. But this time I got to the part where Tate told Atticus that he took the penknife off a drunk and the lightbulb flashed on. Bob Ewell was the drunk. He had the penknife with him. The kitchen knife came out of the Radley kitchen in Boo’s hand as he ran outside to save the children. And now the only question I have is how in the actual hell did I miss that for so long?

I wonder what revelation I’ll find the next time I read the book?

The Man in the Iron Mask, Alexandre Dumas

4.5 stars

First Sentence: Ever since Aramis’s bizarre transformation into the confessor of the order, Baisemeaux, the warden of the Bastille, had not been the same man.

Thoughts: Well that didn’t go the way I was expecting. I’d known the broad outlines of the story before I read the book, but it turns out I only knew half of it. I really thought Aramis was going to get away with it until he didn’t.

So what was Aramis up to? We’ve been asking ourselves that since Book One of Vicomte de Brangelonne and finally we have an answer. He’s going to further his plans to be the next prime minister of France, following in the footsteps of Cardinal Richelieu and Cardinal Mazarin. Thing is, Louis XIV doesn’t want a prime minister and wants to be an absolute monarch. However, there’s one little flaw in his plan and it’s at the Bastille: Louis’s secret twin brother Philippe. (Which is also the name of Louis’ younger brother Monsieur. Unimaginative parents.)

Aramis, who already found Philippe the Twin in Louise de la Valliére, goes back to the Bastille to tell him the truth of his heritage. Our sneaky religious then goes to the warden and presents a letter signed by the king authorizing Philippe’s release. He then takes Philippe with him to observe the King’s routines until he’s ready to make the switch.

Here we reach the limit of what I previously knew about the book. Aramis succeeds in switching Louis and Philippe the Twin and his plan works for a couple of hours until the real king returns in a right fury. Turns out that Aramis had confessed his plan to Fouquet (the finance minister) because he was going to kidnap the king from Fouquet’s house. The minister was terrified of the consequences of this switch, mainly because it was happening at his house, so he went to the Bastille, rescued the king, and brought him back during the morning levee. Confusion ensues.

Aramis takes off, Porthos in tow. From now on they occupy the first two spots on Louis XIV’s Specialized High-Intensity Training list. They hide out in Belle Isle, hoping the fortifications they built in the first volume will protect them from the royal wrath. Narrator: it will not.

Meanwhile, Raoul is still reeling from the revelation that ended the last book when he walked in on his One True Love Louise being the king’s mistress. Like a proper romantic hero, Raoul declares he will never love again and starts looking for the best way to get himself killed. It appears in the form of Duc de Beaufort who’s about to embark on a military expedition to Algiers. Athos reluctantly lets his son go, fearing that they will never meet again in this life. Narrator: they will not.

What about d’Artagnan? He’s caught between a rock and a hard place when the king orders him to Belle Isle to capture Aramis and Porthos. D’Artagnan does his best to convince them to escape, but then he finds out the king didn’t entirely trust him and sent another man with secret orders…orders to kill. Once again d’Artagnan resigns his commission and is locked away until Aramis escapes. Porthos, alas, fell victim to foreshadowing.

Later, d’Artagnan and Aramis are reunited. Aramis finally feels some sort of guilt for all his machinations as he tells the story of why only one of them escaped. He goes on to exile while d’Artagnan goes back to Paris where he learns that both Athos and Raoul have died. Well that sucks. But wait, what’s this? Some good news? Yes it is! At long last d’Artagnan gets what he always wanted: appointed Marshal of France. His joy, however, is short-lived because of course it is.

And so the Saga of the Musketeers comes to an end. The Age of Bravery is over, the Age of Romance and Manipulation has come into full flower. But it’s not altogether a tragedy. Our Heroes kept true to themselves and each other until the very end. And that’s what the story was really about in the first place.