L Reads a Classic and Tries (and Probably Fails) Not to Make the Review Sound Like an English Lit Lecture

The Mill on the Floss is George Elliot’s second book and reportedly her most autobiographical.  Elliot, who was born Mary Ann Evans in 1819, used the male pseudonym George Elliot in order to be taken more seriously as a writer.  Her first novel, Adam Bede, won critical acclaim until the critics found out it was written by a woman.  In the nineteenth century, women were not supposed to be intellectual beings, after all, and widely read Elliot, who spoke and read several languages, and populated her texts with scientific debate, was a conundrum for the critics and reading public.

Along with her novels, George Elliot may be most famous for openly living with a married man.  Having met George Henry Lewes in 1851, the pair chose to live together, and called each other husband and wife, despite being unable to marry due to the fact that Lewes could not divorce his wife.  Elliot’s decision caused quite the rift between her and her family, and resulted in her brother choosing not to speak to her until many years later when Elliot finally lawfully married John Cross in 1880.

Getting back to The Mill on the Floss, which I mentioned was purported to be very autobiographical, it is a story about a brother and sister, Tom and Maggie Tulliver, and the trials and tribulations of their lives from childhood to adulthood.  Maggie is an incredibly smart, well-read young girl who doesn’t quite fit into her society, a society that expects girls to dress prettily, learn to sew and keep house, and be proper young ladies.  Her older brother Tom also struggles with his place in society.  His father wishes him to receive a gentleman’s education but Tom is not interested in book learning and would rather build animal traps.  Both children, however, have little choice but to be molded into their required place in society, despite how against their nature that place is.  When Maggie, as an adolescent, begins an innocent, but forbidden friendship with the son of her father’s nemesis, Tom chastises her for it, and forces her to end the dalliance.  But it is not until later, when Maggie spends a night away from town with their cousin’s fiancé, does Tom cut all ties with her, refusing to listen to the truth or acknowledge Maggie as his sister, for she has disgraced the family irreparably.  Shades of Elliot’s life story, no?

The novel is a superb example of high realism, in that the characters and their lives are fully realized and simply jump of the page, easily coming to life for the reader.  Elliot also intersperses the story with interesting commentary on the nature of man, evolution and various other debates engaging Victorian minds of the day:  class issues, scientific advances and discoveries, the woman question, etc.  Because of this, it is not an easy read.  Most people either love or hate Elliot’s books.  I, unfortunately, had to read it in a very short period of time as it is required reading in my Victorian Literature course, and so I am of two minds about the book.  I think, had I really taken the time to immerse myself in the novel, I would have enjoyed it far more than I did.  I generally read from a feminist critical perspective, and Maggie’s tragic story of being forced to choose between duty to her family and duty to herself and never feeling like she could be happy in life is one that truly resonates.

If you’re looking for a meaty piece of fiction to sink your teeth into, definitely give this one a shot.  I’ll be looking forward to the summer when I can give it a more slow and thorough going over in order to tease out all the delightful subtleties.  That’s just the English Lit geek I am!

Till next time, happy reading!

L J

“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favourite book”

~ Marcel Proust

Windsor Book Club Reads: Water for Elephants

I am of two minds about this book.  On one hand, I really enjoyed it.  It’s quite well written and the story is an interesting one that kept me turning the pages, wanting to know what happens next.  On the other hand, its setting is a circus in 1931, when animal brutality was rampant.  I’m not a fan of the circus novel, and hate reading about animal cruelty.  For much of the novel, I found myself alternating between wincing and cringing, taking pauses to hug my sweet puppy**, and wanting to do serious bodily harm to the circus’ animal director (gnash teeth).

 

The story in a nutshell:  Ninety or ninety-three year old Jacob Jankowski is living out his final days in a nursing home when a circus comes to town and sets up the big tent in the parking lot across the street.  This sends Jacob down memory lane to 1931, the year his parents died, when the bank took their house, and he jumped a train, suddenly finding himself a part of the Benzini Brothers’ Most Spectacular Show on Earth.  The world of train circus’ and circus life circa 1930s comes vividly to life, with all its unique characters, animals and events.  Throw in some romance, a couple of dastardly villains, and some very cute animals and their antics, and it’s a winning formula for a good book.  I just wish there wasn’t such a realistic portrayal of how circus animals were treated back then.

 

Despite my dislike for the circus novel, I do have to give credit for the author’s skill in drawing realistic characters, and bringing history to life.  Jacob’s struggle to leave boyhood behind when the tragedy of his parents’ sudden death thrusts him into adulthood, is compounded with his struggles against August, the schizophrenic animal director, who takes much of his anger out on the animals.  Jacob, a Cornell trained veterinarian, is caught between helping/protecting the animals, and keeping himself alive, for working men on the circus train who meddle in the business of circus boss Uncle Al or important performers like August, find themselves “redlighted” or thrown off the train, usually when it’s moving.  Add to this is Jacob’s growing attraction to and love for the beautiful Marlena, caught in a loveless marriage to August, and often a victim of his rantings, anger, and before long, physical abuse.  Jacob must find a way to save her, the animals and himself.  No easy feat for young man on the cusp of adulthood who must also contend with a tanking economy at the start of the Great Depression.

 

Friendship, camaraderie, and love of fellow man and man for beast are woven like silken threads throughout a story that I would probably describe as beautiful set against any other background.  The circus thing just tarnished the story too much for me.

 

What my fellow book clubbers had to say:

 

We had a great turnout at the Green Bean Café last night, which provided for some wonderfully diverse discussion of the book.  Reviews were mixed, with some liking the book and others not.  We were of two minds regarding the main character.  Some found Jacob to be weak; not stepping in to stop the abuse of the animals or instance, and others attributed this to his youth and being uncomfortable confronting an authority figure (in the role of August).  Also, the grief he was experiencing at the death of his parents must have played a huge role in how he dealt with experiences.  It was felt that he grew up in the end, and was able to take on substantial responsibility with the choices he made at the end of the book.  It is also worth noting that the book is told in both present day and in the past, through memory.  Some of us liked the ninety plus-year-old character of Jacob, and enjoyed his story more than the young Jacob’s experiences in the circus, while for others it was the other way around. 

 

Many of us agreed that the book was well-written, and that the author had clearly done her research and was skillful in bringing history to life in her descriptions of Depression Era circuses.  Even if that setting was not everyone’s cup of tea.  And while the male characters were well drawn, the character of Marlena was not as fully fleshed out as it should have been, considering she played such a large role in the great romance.  Many of us were left wondering what, other than her great beauty, Jacob saw in her to hold his attraction.  I understand, from comments made of those who have seen the movie, that her character is given more justice on the silver screen.  I look forward to comparing the two when my hold on the DVD at the public library finally comes in.

 

Regardless how you look at it, this book led to some lively discussion around the table, and for that alone, made it well worth reading.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L :)

** This is why I don’t understand animal cruelty and never will.  How could anyone hurt this sweet face?

 

This is her "if you put down that book, I could lay in your lap and you could pet me" face. lol

Indigo Lakeshore Book Club reads: The Dovekeepers

This was a disappointing read for me, made more so, I think, because it kept getting truncated by class reading.  I’ve never been a huge fan of Alice Hoffman.  I find her characters are weird.  A couple of years ago I read and reviewed The Ice Queen, and found it a decent read, but odd, with the main character emotionally frozen in ice.  But Hoffman is also the author of Practical Magic, a book I also didn’t particularly like, but which was made into one of my all-time favorite chick flicks staring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman.  It’s a great sisterhood movie and so because of that, Hoffman will always hold a special place in my virtual bookshelf, but when it comes to actually reading her….well…..

 

In The Dovekeepers, Hoffman attempts to bring to life a major event in Jewish history and write the women’s story.  History is rampant with tales of man’s doing, with little emphasis on the lives and deeds of women, so Hoffman’s book is quite ambitious and from a feminist perspective is to be applauded.  However, and I think I’ve made my opinion on this clear in the past: authors who set out to deliberately write a tale based on some real-life event, no matter how talented, always, for me, take a great risk.  I am a firm believer in the organic style of writing where the story presents itself out of the ether and is naturally birthed rather than forced from some notion that “this” whatever that may be, would make a great story.  (and maybe that’s why I’ve never finished a book of my own lol). 

 

The real-life events inspiring The Dovekeepers is the attempt of the Romans to drive the Jews out of Judea, culminating with a massacre at King Herod’s desert stronghold, Masada.  At the end of the day, two women and five children survive this war.  Their tale is recorded by Josephus, a 1^st century Romano-Jewish historian, and it is this recount of events which Hoffman tries to bring to life with a fictionalized account of the lives of four women trying to survive events beyond their control from 70 – 73 C.E.

 

Hoffman’s novel is separated into four books, each one told in the first person voice of one of the four women.  It begins in 70 C.E. when Yael and her father are driven out of Jerusalem, crossing the desert to find refuge at Masada, where others fleeing the Roman army have created a self-contained community.  The following books are stories of three women she meets and forms friendships with at Masada.  Each book tells the individual tale of the life of each woman and the atrocities this war has wrought upon their lives and families. 

 

The problem for me in reading this book (and isn’t there always a problem? lol) was that there was no distinct voice between each book.  Each woman’s story started to run together as one tale (and perhaps that was Hoffman’s goal, to show that her story is the tale of all women during this time in history, not just these mere four).  But with the four distinct stories, I found there to be a fair bit of retelling, as each told her story prior to Masada, but also her daily life and events living in Masada that intersected with the other three women, which became repetitive at times.  Hoffman’s writing chops did, however, show themselves in her ability to weave together and intersect the lives of all four women, so that the novel came to a decent conclusion.

 

What my fellow book clubbers had to say:

 

It’s was a small group that met at Indigo Books in Lakeshore last night.  Two of us had finished the book and two hadn’t.  Spoiler alerts were not needed as the two who hadn’t finished the book had no interest in doing so.  Yikes.  We were all in agreement that the first book, Yael’s story, was the toughest to get through, and that though the book improved slightly, it really wasn’t escapist reading.  If you enjoy reading historical fiction and learning about other cultures, or more about historical events, then this book would probably be your cup of tea.  However, if you’re looking for an enjoyable story, to take you away from it all, you might want to give this book a pass.

 

Highlights of the evening included some beautiful pictures of places mentioned in the book, which K brought to share, and which helped bring the book to life, and made it for me, a somewhat more interesting read.  As well, there were some delicious Vanilla Chai Tea samples to partake of, which the lovely Starbucks girl passed around.  And that rather says it all, doesn’t it?

 

Next month we’re reading Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See, an author I’ve not read before, but as the book does look interesting, I’m quite anticipating it.  Why don’t you read along with us?

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L

 

“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope...I have loved none but you.”

~ Jane Austen, Persuasion

L Reads Alex Cross #10: London Bridges

In this tenth installment of the Alex Cross series, Cross once again battles the Wolf, the villain of the previous book.  In London Bridges, the Wolf turns terrorist and holds several large cities hostage (New York, Washington, London, Tel Aviv and Paris), threatening to blow them up if he doesn’t received a whopping four billion dollar payout and the release of several hostages held in the Middle East.

 

James Patterson has clearly bought into the war on terror in writing this novel, as the Wolf is seen schmoozing with Al-Qaeda and several Middle Eastern heavyweights while threatening to end of the lives of tens of thousands of Westerners.  While the Wolf very blasély blows up bridges and kills those few who can identify him by sight, Cross races against time to find and stop this Russian madman.

 

Filled with Patterson’s unique brand of red herrings that make no sense and go nowhere, and do nothing but confuse and frustrate the reader, London Bridges was just an okay read.  Blame it on the fact that I’m a girl, but I became quite bored by the constant descriptions of weaponry, vehicles and military maneuvers.  International terrorism just isn’t my cup of tea.

 

One more Alex Cross book read, only eight more to go, until Patterson publishes another of course.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L :)

 

Emma Donoghue's Room

Emma Donoghue’s Room was getting a lot of blog press last year as well as it won a number of literary awards and was shortlisted for The Governor General’s award 2010 and the Man Booker prize 2010.

 

I bought into the hype and added it to my to be read list, talked it up to people as a book I really wanted to read, had heard was really good.  Well I finally read it over the Christmas break, and it is good.  Just not as good as I’d led myself to believe it would be.  Room just doesn’t live up to the hype.

 

Told from the point of view of five year old Jack, we discover he and his mother live in Room, a small shed in the backyard of the man who abducted Jack’s mother seven years earlier.  The first third of the book explores the day to day life of Jack and his mother, the weekly schedule of chores they keep, the hour of TV Jack is allowed to watch each day, the books they read over and over and over, and the various Sundaytreats they’ve received in the past and what should be asked for next Sundaytreat.  Each night at nine o’clock, Jack must be in bed, in the bottom of the wardrobe because that’s when “he” would visit and Jack would count the creaks of the bed on his fingers, waiting until it was safe to come out and join mommy in bed.

 

It’s a disturbing life, made more so by the fact that it’s told from such an innocent perspective.  Jack knows of no other life.  Everything outside Room is either on TV or in Outer Space.  He has no concept of the real world and so when his mother devises a plan to escape, a plan in which Jack must be the hero and bring the police to free his mom, he has to learn very quickly that more exists outside Room’s four walls than his mother ever let on.

 

I guess this is where the plausibility of the book broke down for me.  The time line is very brief, between the hatched plot and its execution, all hinging on Jack’s ability to escape from the man and alert the authorities, people he’d only ever known to exist in TV land.  While having the story told from Jack’s five-year-old perspective added an interesting twist, there were just some details that when revealed, were hard to take coming from that perspective.  I think the book may have worked better if both Jack and his mother’s voice could have been heard.  But that said, it’s still a book worth reading.

 

Till next time, happy reading!

L J

 

Unbearable Lightness – Portia de Rossi

Portia de Rossi candidly shares her struggle with anorexia and bulimia in this candid memoir.  As a young girl growing up in Australia, Portia knew she wanted to be a model.  Attending photo shoots and runway shows, the naturally healthy 11-year old was told to lose weight. She was given false measurements to put on her modeling card, then had to “fit” into the sample sizes provided for her fashion jobs.  Wanting to help Portia realize her dream, her mother helped out with quick diet advice, sending Portia on a decade and a half long spiral into an unhealthy eating regime that saw her restricting her calorie intake to 300 a day while exercising for hours at a time prior to a photo shoot or audition (once she began acting), to binging on thousands of calories of food at one sitting after her “work” was done.  These binges were followed by purging sessions so she wouldn’t gain any weight, and although she landed a job on the hit show Ally MacBeal at a healthy size 8, Portia was convinced no one would accept her as an actress until she could fit into the sample size clothing (usually a size 4) sent to the set.

 

Portia de Rossi openly describes her crazy thought processes and insane diet and eating plans that kept her losing weight until she was an incredibly unhealthy 88 lbs, but still pinching the stomach fat she saw in the mirror.  The secret of her sexuality and her family’s refusal to acknowledge that she was gay fueled a lot of Portia’s inability to love and accept herself, and see herself for the beautiful, healthy woman she was, and it wasn’t until a major health scare that threatened lupus and organ failure, did Portia enter counseling and begin getting help for her disordered eating.

 

A truly remarkable book, Unbearable Lightness is a must read for just about every woman I know.  So many of us struggle with weight and acceptance and trying to fit into the very unnatural and unhealthy Hollywood or fashion industry image of what a woman should look like that we fail to recognize we are already beautiful, and much healthier just as we are, regardless of the number on a scale or clothing tag.

 

To every woman everywhere who has been brainwashed by fashion magazines and the diet industry into thinking you have to be a size 4, 2, or 0 to be beautiful and accepted, please, please, please!! read this book!  Hopefully it will help change the way you think and feel about yourself…for the better.

 

Till next time, happy reading,

L :)

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference."

            ~ Elie Wiesel

   

Windsor Book Club Reads: Night by Elie Wiesel

I first read this book a few years ago, when it was making a splash on Oprah’s book club (not that I follow Oprah’s book club, but I was in Chapters with a friend at the time who mentioned this book because everyone was talking about it and well, you know me, talk up a book to me and I’m there!)

 

Reading it a second time for January’s meeting of the Windsor Book Club didn’t lesson the horror of the novel any.  Night is Wiesel’s true story account of his life in the concentration camps during the Holocaust.  Although he and his family came late to the camps (in 1944, when German soldiers finally made their way to his family’s small village of Sighet in Transylvania), the story is no less harrowing or heartbreaking, and the atrocities experienced by himself, his father and others in the camp no less significant than stories of those who spent the entire war in the camps and survived to tell their tale in order that history would never repeat itself.

 

From the descriptions of the train journey from Sighet to Auschwitz, cramped together in cattle cars with little food and less water, where many Jews perished, to the daily life in the camps, Wiesel spares few details.  What stands out for me, as a modern day reader with no firsthand experience of this time in history, is that Wiesel’s words ring with compassion.  It is evident he writes his story because such horror to a people must be recorded and learned from, yet there is no anger in Wiesel for the people who perpetrated this crime.  Instead what Wiesel struggles with is faith.  He questions a God who would choose to allow this to happen to the “chosen” people.  His very faith is shaken to the core, yet when he is finally liberated from the camps, he says:

 

“Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions.  That’s all we thought about.  No thought of revenge, or of parents.  Only of bread.

And when we were no longer hungry, not one of us thought of revenge.”

 

I am not a religious person.  A spiritual person, yes, but I follow no organized religion, but to me, these few sentences from Wiesel are what religion and faith should be about and what Wiesel never fully puts into words, but rings clearly for me:  forgiveness.  It is this message, I think, that makes the book resonate with so many readers.

 

What my fellow book clubbers had to say:

 

It was a very small, intimate group at last night’s meeting, which made for some great discussion.  We all to a one enjoyed reading Night, and for some, learned more about this period in history.  When asked what the defining moment in the novel was for us, many talked about the relationship between father and son, and how basic survival outweighed family loyalty and what that must have been like for these sons, who chose life over saving their fathers.  There is one rather harrowing scene in the book where

Elie’s sickly father is beaten to death in front of him, calling out to his son the entire time.  Unable to go to his father, paralyzed with fear that he may be killed too, Elie remains still and silent, and afterwards feels relief over the death of his father, for the sickly man is no longer a burden to Elie.  From our modern day, comfortable viewpoint, it is difficult to imagine being in Elie’s position and making that difficult choice.  That utter destruction of man, turning him into a mere beast intent on nothing more than pure animalistic survival, is one of the things that truly make the Holocaust so incredibly horrific.

 

Till next time, happy reading.

L J