I can’t offer enough apologies for my complete and total absence from the blogosphere for so long! I have little excuse, other than being a student leaves me plenty of time for reading but very little time to write about it! So let me begin by getting caught up on some LONG overdue matters of business.
First, a HUGE thank you goes out to Jeane, a friend of mine over at DogEar Diary that was kind enough to (a very, very long time ago I may add, and my dearest apologies for taking so long to recognize it!) award me the Lovely Blog Award, an award I’m not sure I deserve, considering my often frequent absences! This is an award that needs to be passed on to 15 people, which I gladly do now!
1.) A Striped Armchair
2.) Book Haven
3.) Musings from the Sofa
4.) Naked Without Books
5.) So Many Books, So Little Time
6.) Stuck in a Book
7.) Things Mean A Lot
8.) A Fondness for Reading
9.) A Guy’s Moleskin Notebook
10.) Bending Bookshelf
11.) Book Nut
12.) Books on the Brain
13.) Citizen Reader
14.) Eloise by the Book Piles
15.) Sophisticated Dorkiness
All of these bloggers have never steered me wrong in my search for great books and what is perhaps even more amazing is that they always manage to steer me in a way I would have never expected, always with wonderfully delightful results.
Alright, now that that little matter of business is all wrapped up, I’m absolutely DYING to talk about Mary Renault’s Fire From Heaven, which I recently dived in to on the recommendation of my Yalie friend Jesi Egan. The book is the first in Renault’s Alexander trilogy, and as the first volume, focuses on the life of Alexander the Great up until his 20’s.
The novel is absolutely AMAZINGLY written, and I’m not even half way done withthe first volume and already I’m dreading the end of the entire trilogy. I can see what my friend Jesi was talking about when she said that this is the book that makes you fall in love with Alexander. And not in that ‘we love him because he was part of history’ way but love as in an overwhelming attachment to what happens to him. And even though Renault makes it fairly clear from the get-go that she’s part of the whole ‘Alexander liked boys’ philosophy, he is still possibly one of the most attractive literary creations of the actual man that I’ve ever read.
I think part of my love for this book stems from a childhood fascination with everything Greek, and in that light it doesn’t disappoint. The book speaks of Alexander’s witch-mother Olympias, who is described as being absolutely beautiful, but complete terrifying in that beauty. She is constant defiance of her husband, King Phillip II of Macedon, who is also described as an almost tyrranical leader, and the two seem to be waging almost silent but constant war over how to raise Alexander. Even with this tension in the background, the book outlies the many ways in which Alexander becomes known as the King of Asia, and one of the greatest Greek kings. He kills his first man in hand-on-hand combat at age 12, years before even his father had, and he is placed under the tutelage of Aristotle in his early teens, which is when he also forms a solid friendship with Hephaistion, the young son of an underlord, who participates in Alexander’s education with him.
This is as far as I’ve gotten in the book, and it’s heartbreaking – the passages where Hephaistion describes his budding (non-friendly) love for Alexander, with the knowledge that taking a bed-boy may be common practice, but love between men seldom was, are enough to bring you to tears. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the book, however, is that it immediately takes you to ancient Greece, envelops you in the world that existed there. It doesn’t necessarily matter that my Greek political/military history is pretty much non-existent, or that the names are pretty much totally confusing (a problem I also, funnily enough, had with Tolstoy), it speaks to the power of the book that I am able to open its pages and forget that I’m riding a smelly old bus to campus to take a test I haven’t studied for – I become a member of Philip’s court, watching this beautiful, strong, headstrong and talented boy grow up in to what will be (with the beauty of hindsight) an absolutely legendary military leader! I can’t say enough for the book – literally, I’m out of time at the work computer – but please, please, PLEASE read it. You won’t regret it! Happy reading, and I’ll see you all again soon – promise!
BookMaven
I Know This Much is True, written by Wally Lamb, clocks in at just under 900 pages (like, literally, at 899) and has a pretty epic story, but one of the things I like most about it is that it doesn’t feel like a 900 page book. The story revolves around a pair of identical twins, Dom (Dominick) and Thomas. At the very beginning of the book, the reader learns that Thomas has cut off his own hand in an attempt at political protest, hoping that this action, in all of its severity, will draw media attention to the act and hopefully stop the impending war in the middle East. Also, Thomas is a paranoid schizophrenic, which takes on new importance throughout the book as Dominick struggles with the fact that he looks the same as his brother, but is so inherently different.
Shortly after finishing The Time Traveler’s Wife I picked up and powered through Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida. The book focuses on a girl named Clarissa who, shorlty after her father’s death, learns that he wasn’t, in fact, her birth father. This send Clarissa on a trip around the world, back home to her mother’s old hometown in Eastern Europe, an area known as Lapland that is essentially a mixture of Russia and Sweden.
The Time Traveler’s Wife is a love story spanning the lives of Claire Abshire and Henry DeTamble. But as if they don’t have enough to worry about (as all couples occasionally do) Henry is also a time traveler, who in his later years – after he and Claire marry – goes back in time to visit his wife as a child. Claire, however, doesn’t time travel and thus lives her life lineraly, with Henry jumping back and forth. It’s at times saddening, at times thrilling, and always working towards what is established early on as a less than happy ending.
The Reader is a book that I literally just picked up and finished within a day. It was one of the most moving stories I’ve read in a long, long time. The story, for those of you who haven’t heard about it (or seen the movie, which I hear is also absolutely phenomenal) is the story of Michael and Hanna. Michael is a young German boy who meets and begins to conduct a passionate love affair with Hanna, a woman almost twenty years his senior. The two fall in love until one day Hanna leaves. Years later, when Michael is a law student covering the trial of female guards responsible for inmate death Auschwitz, Michael sees Hanna again, this time behind the defendant’s bench. Hanna is found guilty and spends years in prison. While she is there, Michael comes to the realization that Hanna is illiterate and this is why she enjoyed their old ritual of him reading to her. He begins to read to her on tape, sending her the cassettes and one day Michael recieves a letter from Hanna. She has learned to read and write, thanks to the help of his tapes, and she is facing release from prison soon. The events that follow, which I won’t spoil here because of how beautiful they are, make the last 50 pages of the book some of the most impactful. (5 Star)
Purple Hibiscus was the book I finished right before I powered through The Reader. The worlds of the two novels are so entirely different it’s almost laughable. Kambili Achike is a 15-year-old Nigerian girl whose father is, essentially, the head of the local church. Along with her brother and mother, the family lives in an almost constant state of fear because, in addition to being devotedly pious, Kambili’s father is also emotionally and physically abusive. For a period of time, Kambili is sent to live wither her aunt who is a university professor and who, along with her three children, teach Kambili what it means to laugh, to love, to have fun and to, most importantly, realize that social and political involvement isn’t a sin. Kambili has lived her life in the fear that she will never be good enough, either for her father or for God, a fear that was instilled in her by her father. Her stay with her aunt makes her realize that this may not, in fact, matter as much as Kambili once thought it would have.
When We Were Orphans yet again takes the reader to a completely different place (it seems like my geographical adventures are becoming more and more broad lately – Germany, Nigeria and, in this novel, Shanghai) and a completely different time period! The book focuses on Christopher Banks, a detective whose parents were abducted at a young age for fighting against the import of Indian opium in to China. Christopher grows up and, after making a name for himself as a detective, decides to side his most important case ever – what precisely happened to his parents when they were abducted years ago. The case sends him back in to the streets of war-torn Shanghai and forces him to choose between the woman he loves, the life he has created for himself in England, and the world he has always known. He gets answers, but not necessarily the answers he (or the reader) expects.
Title: The History Boys
The movie of The History Boys was perhaps even more enjoyable than the play, if for no other reason that seeing the play enacted almost always adds even more layers of depth. The only main critique that I had of the movie was that the British accents, although wildly authentic, made some of the dialouge hard to understand, and made some of the plot points a bit hard to catch. There is also a lot of French spoken throughout the story, which – for someone who doesn’t speak French – was a little bit distracting, although not entirely unwelcome. There is also quite a bit of poetry quoted throughout the story, particularly the poetry of Auden. Which, for someone who wishes she knew more poetry than she does, is absolutely fanstatic. Perhaps thats another contributing factor to why I liked both the movie and the play so much – the boys are adorable, they’re clearly intelligent, and they spend their days talking about poetry and art and history and hitting on other really cute, intelligent boys (you heard me right. Boys with tragic stories and insurmountable flaws hitting on other boys with tragic stories and insurmountable flaws is one of my favorite things in the world). The movie starred the original cast that opened the show which leant, in my opinion, to the legitimacy of the movie, in addition to providing a familiar point of reference in later readings of the play. Its always been a dream of mine to go to Oxford or Cambridge for graduate school, and so watching the boys in this movie go through what they go through is a kind of life-reference point for me, as well.
Title: All’s Well That Ends Well
Title: The Sound and the Fury
This weeks reading has been a little….scattered, to say the least. Let us being, shall we, with the picking of my honors undergraduate thesis for my English major, which will basically involve me looking at the literature of the 1960s counterculture and investigating it as a form of propaganda and as the manifesto of a movement. This means that by next spring (when I actually have to start, you know, writing my thesis) I will have read a ton of work by Ginsberg, Kerouac, Bukowski, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesy, and a host of newspaper articles as well as studying quite a bit of the music of time time (studying lyrics as a form of contemporary poetry). I’m really, REALLY excited about the topic, and it was the highlight of my week to sit in my advisor’s office and make book list after book list!
Title: Northanger Abbey