Book Four - Pride and Prejudice



My education has been woefully lacking. I've read very few of the classics, apparently, much to my disadvantage. I just finished reading Austen's Pride and Prejudice after years of watching the classic 5-hour BBC miniseries, and the more recent Keira Knightley film version.  Even though there's no doubt that I love Colin Firth and the beautiful images of the English countryside, I'm happy to report that, as is so often the case, the book is better.

The story of Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy is fun. The love story is not really all that extraordinary - just a series of misunderstandings, but the language is smart and quick; the retorts are biting and veiled behind obsequious politeness and double entendre.  Who doesn't wish they could express themselves so smoothly and readily in a match of wits? And it's certainly fun to live vicariously through intelligent characters. 

The book is a portrait of life during Austen's time, and lays bare the silliness of idle society. Mrs. Bennett's constant attempts to "one-up" her neighbors, Mr. Bennett's complete disengagement, how everyone judges everyone else - I suppose this is no different than certain people in society today (or perhaps even as society as a whole has always been now and forever). And maybe that's why Pride and Prejudice has remained so popular.  Even though nearly 200 years have passed since its original publication, Austen's characterizations still ring true.

I suddenly feel an overwhelming urge to watch that BBC miniseries. All five hours of it. Again.

Book Three - A Death in the Family

I finally finished A Death in the Family, by James Agee, this morning.  It's not a long book, but there are passages of nearly "stream of consciousness" narrative that I struggled with just a bit.  I can't say that I loved the book; something "lighter" usually appeals to me more.  But I did love how true the book was - how Agee seemed to know exactly how people think and act and react.  There were a few passages of which I took special note:

...Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

                                                                                                                  p. 7

I can't say why this particular passage struck me as so beautiful.  It could be because it seems so true to me that we all struggle to know our place, who we are, that we matter to others.  When we're children, we assume our parents know who they are and who we are, but of course they don't.  We're constantly changing, shifting, and often we don't know ourselves.  And sometimes we never come to know.

And God knows he was lucky, so many ways, and God knows he was thankful.  Everything was good and better than he could have hoped for, better than he deserved; only, whatever it was and however good it was, it wasn't what you once had been, and had lost, and could never have again, and once in a while, once in a long time, you remembered, and knew how far you were away, and it hit you hard enough, that little while it lasted, to break your heart.

                                                                                                                 p. 87

That's beautiful, and so authentic.  Many times, I think of my daughters when they were small, and the people they were then, and I miss them.  Those people, who they were, are lost now, and while I love the people they have become, I miss the people they used to be.  And if they have become new people, I have to recognize that I'm not the same person I was when I was younger, either.  I'm grateful for what I have - it's better than I deserve, as Agee says - and many times I'm glad I'm not that person anymore.  But sometimes, I miss her, too.

Book Two - Things Fall Apart

I read most of Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, on the way to and from Denver this past weekend when Ross and Hannah and I traveled to pick up Laura from the airport for the Christmas holidays. We all stayed for a few days in Colorado - a great getaway!  The only downside was reading this rather depressing book in the middle of the festive and celebratory feel of the city.

Things Fall Apart is the story of an African tribesman, Okonkwo, his three wives and multiple children, their day-to-day lives in the village, the traditions, beliefs, and customs of the people, and Okonkwo's ultimate downfall.

Yes, yes - I get that white missionaries were perceived as evil, what with forcing their religion onto others and all.  But, oh my gosh, were things really that much better before the white man came to Okonkwo's African village?  He beat his wives and killed a boy (with a machete, no less) who had lived with his family for years.  He exhibited no patience with anyone, and was self-satisfied, superior, and superstitious.  He apparently loved one daughter because she understood him, but even that love was tarnished because he always regretted that she was not born a boy.  Again, I know this was his culture, and that he couldn't have realistically felt otherwise, but I was still greatly annoyed with this guy, and couldn't find a single redeeming quality in him.  As a consequence, I wasn't upset that he killed himself; in fact, it was a relief that the book was over.

The book had one little glimmer of redemption: the conversation between the tribal elder and the priest was interesting.  The author made a good point: One man's superstition is another man's religion (and vice versa).  At least, I think that was the author's intention.

The missionaries' arrival signaled the beginning of the end of an era, the end of a way of life, blah, blah, blah.  Change is everywhere, all the time.  If you don't learn to live with it and adapt, you perish. I'll bet his wives did a little jig of happiness when they learned they were rid of the guy. 

Book One - Beowulf

Ross and I listened to Seamus Heaney read his translation of Beowulf on the way to and from Laramie when we travelled to attend Hannah's graduation from the University of Wyoming this past weekend.  I loved Heaney's Irish accent and, as the back of the case stated, when Beowulf was originally told it was listened to, not read.  So I felt very authentic listening to it in modern English (albeit with an Irish accent), while traveling 80 mph down the Interstate.

The story (as I understand it, anyway) involves Beowulf (a Geat) who comes to the rescue of the Danes and slays not only Grendel, the blood-thirsty monster who is snacking on Danes in a most unappealingly graphic way, but also slays Grendel's mother in an underwater battle (no mean feat).  All of that action happens pretty early on, and then Beowulf returns to his homeland where he is made king, after the convenient demise of the existing monarch.  Fifty years go by, and then a dragon rears its ugly head and requires Beowulf's attention.  Okay.  The guy has to be 80, but he takes up his sword and does his best, but dies in the process of ridding his country of this menace.  The 50-foot dragon also dies, but that's of little comfort to the countrymen left behind (even to - perhaps especially to - the cowards who hid in the woods and could have come to Beowulf's aid but instead, well, cowered).  A lot of treasure, etc. is burned (and subsequently buried) with Beowulf, which I think is a shame, since it could have been put to good use helping the peasants instead of providing some symbolic sacrifice that helps no one.  Note to self: remind my family to remove all my jewelry before they cremate/bury me.

Really, all this book did for me was to make me want to visit Denmark and Sweden.  But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Stacey's summary of the book:  "Yawn."

Book List

The List:  College Board's 101 Great Books, recommended for college-bound readers. (Okay, we already have college degrees, but a little reading never hurt anyone.)

The Players: Stacey and me, two project-driven girls on a mission to be well-read.

The Plan:  Read them alphabetically, by author.  Because that's how we roll.

The Timeline:  We're shooting for four years.  But it could reasonably take forever, or until we kick the bucket.

Onward!

Author	Title
--	Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua	Things Fall Apart
Agee, James	A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane	Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James	Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel	Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul	The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte	Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily	Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert	The Stranger
Cather, Willa	Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey	The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton	The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate	The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph	Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore	The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen	The Red Badge of Courage
Dante	Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel	Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel	Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles	A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor	Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick	Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore	An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre	The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George	The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph	Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Selected Essays
Faulkner, William	As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William	The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry	Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott	The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave	Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox	The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von	Faust
Golding, William	Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas	Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel	The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph	Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest	A Farewell to Arms
Homer	The Iliad
Homer	The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor	The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale	Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous	Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik	A Doll's House
James, Henry	The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry	The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz	The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong	The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper	To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair	Babbitt
London, Jack	The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas	The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García	One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman	Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman	Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur	The Crucible
Morrison, Toni	Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery	A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene	Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George	Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris	Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia	The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan	Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel	Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas	The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria	All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond	Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry	Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D.	The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William	Hamlet
Shakespeare, William	Macbeth
Shakespeare, William	A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William	Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard	Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary	Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon	Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander	One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles	Antigone
Sophocles	Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John	The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis	Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher	Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan	Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William	Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David	Walden
Tolstoy, Leo	War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan	Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire	Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.	Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice	The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith	The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora	Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt	Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar	The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee	The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia	To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard	Native Son