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

This behemouth of a book took me a little over two weeks to finish, so I thought that it would be a a good idea to let some thoughts stew before writing the review. Also, this review serves as a wonderful distraction from having to write my Children’s Literature paper thats due in less than 12 hours. And so, on to the review!

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.

* SPOILERS TO FOLLOW*

Dominick’s life, as we come to understand throughout the book, is reflected on as a life of losses. He loses the chance to have a real life independently for himself when he promises his mother on her death bed that he’ll look after Thomas. He looses his wife after their infant daughter dies of SIDS and Dominick loses himself in his grief and anger. He loses his sense of self when Thomas dies, and when he discovers some less than appealing aspects of his family history. All in all, the book is not what one would consider an ‘upper’, but it has its moments of beauty and simplicity woven throughout.

Perhaps one of my favorite aspects of the book is just how wonderfully Lamb intermingles his stories to give a full 360 degree view of the life of one man, a life of both personal tragedy and, ultimately, a life of hope. A friend of mine who is now reading the book described it as “everything bad that could possibly happen to a person” and while a lot of bad things do happen to and around Dominick, that’s not what the story ultimately is. Lamb does a wonderful job with Dominick’s grandfather’s manuscript describing how the family immigrated from Italy and how the family set down roots. It’s also amazing how well Lamb is able to portray the descent from Thomas’s normal life in to deeper and deeper schizophrenia.

The book is sad. I’m just going to put that out there so that there are no surprises. However, by the end of the book, there is more going on than just the sadness. There is a kind of redemptive hope, the idea that despite a person’s history and family, success is still ultimately up to the person at hand. Along the same lines, happiness is also portrayed as a choice. Dominick has every right to live his life as a bitter and angry person – he’s had horrible things happen to both he and his family. However, by the end of the novel he realizes that there is no reason to live a bitter and angry life. It’s a lesson that’s important to learn, and one that a lot of people never do. It’s still not one I’ve mastered, and I’m hoping that the full understand will come along eventually.

I Know This Much is True is a powerful book, and a longer one to undertake, but it’s especially good because it is one of those books that can also be read in the background of other reading. The story is gripping and the characters are rounded, and although it may not be the best reading if you’re looking for laughs, I can’t NOT recommend it! On the nightstand now is The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst and The Canon: A Whirling Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science which are ENTIRELY different and wonderful in their own ways. Reviews to come! Happy reading!

As Nymeth so kindly pointed out, I am indeed alive! And living in my own apartment sans cable has inspired quite the boutof reading lately, so the blog is back with a vengence, at least for now!

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.

Clarissa’s mother left her at a young age, and on this trip to find her birth father, she also comes to some shocking revelations that make Clarissa see that she perhaps had more in common with her mother than she ever would have hoped to have. It’s a book that fills you qith more questions than answers, and I have to give credit to the wirting for creating a story that, while short, carries quite a bit of punch with it. That being said, I will say that one of the best things about the book was that it didn’t take long to get through.

I will say that I did enjoy the book, but it was one of those books that just kind of filled the time gap between the other books I was reading. The story was well plotted, if not a bit forced at timess, and there are probably other common ties I would’ve established between Clarissa and her mother, but those weren’t my choices! All in all I think that it’s one of those books that, while you probably wouldn’t regret readign, it’s also not necessarily the book you should run out immediately to read. There are some adult themes throughout, so if that’s something that bothers you, you may want to steer clear, but all in all, not a bad book if you’re looking for something quick!

Next on the list of reviews is The History of Love by Nickole Krauss, who is married to one of my favorite authors of all time (Mr. Jonathan Safran Foer) and whose book was lovely in that haunting way that I love so much. And then, if I can power through it over the long weekend, there should be a review of This Much I know is True  by Wally Lamb, which at 900 pages is presenting quiet the beast of a book to get through! And if you’re wondering where all the wonderful new book acquisitions came from, the answer is simple – a wonderful new roommate with wonderful literary taste and a penchant for sharing! More to come!

Before you ask, no, this was not the first time I’ve read this book and yes, I probably should’ve devoted the time to reading something new, but I can’t help it! I just LOVE THIS BOOK so much! It’s almost to hard to describe why, but if its important enough to read more than once, it’s sure as hell important enough to try and describe!

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.

This is perhaps the thing that I love most about this book. While I’ll never turn up my nose at a love story, its entirely too difficult to find one that makes love real. Not sweeping, not always romantic, not always well spoken, and never always easy. Henry is flawed – he can be stubborn, sullen, and a little controlling. And Claire isn’t perfect either – headstrong, a little selfish, perhaps with a few too many regrets. But that’s what makes the love between them so powerful. It not only spans time and separation, but the flaws of both people.

Another thing I loved about this book is that Henry and Claire live the life I could see myself living one day (granted without the time traveling). They’re artists and librarians respectively, and their best friends are fellow artists and anarchists. They recite German and French poetry, know the names of famous artists and discuss foreign affairs the way that only those born of a higher education can. It’s a world of academia, and the book opens that world up, if only for a second.

Don’t get me wrong. This book isn’t necessarily all that easy at times. While straightforward in its language, the concept of time travel, and the trying to wrap your head around how Henry can be simultaneously 42 and 12 while Claire is 19 and hasn’t technically met Henry can most definitely give one a bit of a headache. But its worth it. For the writing, yes, but more importantly for the two amazing characters who welcome the reader in to their lives, as messy and disrupted those lives may be.

As you can see, my love for this book is quite possibly never ending, and is renewed with each new reading. PLEASE read it. You won’t regret it.

Needless to say, I’ve been a little MIA these past few months! I wish I had a better excuse than life, but I don’t! But I’m busting back on to the scene with a vengence and putting three whole book reviews into one. So, without further ado, I give to you my reivew for Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans.

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)

I really zipped through this book, and part of the reason for that was because it’s not very long to begin with (its just over 200 pages) and the other part is because Schlink creates an external and internal world that is a joy to walk around it. Not only is the German countryside beautiful, but the mental processes that are required for Michael to accept some of the negative aspects of Hanna’s life are described in prose that walks the fine line between psychoanalysis and beautiful, beautiful self-exploration. Perhaps it’s difficult to explain, but I have this feeling that, because the work is a translation, orginally written in German, that the English verison had to do something a little extra to make up for whatever might have been lost in translation. Either way, if you have the time – and trust me, you have the time! – I would recommend picking up The Reader and letting the world overtake you for a few hours.

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.

The thing I love most about this book is the relationship between the family of Kambili’s aunt, Ifeoma. The family is poor – very, very poor, especially compared to Kambili’s family – and yet they spend their days in song, laughter, hard work and prayer. The lessons they teach Kambili seem to jump right off the page, so much so that when Kambili finally starts to come around to their way of thinking I could feel myself cheering for her, wanting her to learn that she is good enough for so many things in life. In addition, the prose is sparse but provides a look at Nigerian life that is eye-opening. African literature is slowly becoming more and more a favorite genre of mine, and this book only increases my growing affection for such. It’s a powerful book about women who learn to become powerful in and of themselves. (5 Star)

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.

My biggest problem with this book was the ending. All of the strings are tied up, so its not one of those novels where the ends are left loose and the reader is left with questions. To the contrary, all questions are answered – I just didn’t like the answers provided! This is merely a matter of taste, but the book had an ending that just left me feeling a little – gilted. I wanted there to be a bit more, and the explanations given to some of the issues aren’t as satisfactory as I could have desired. Specifically, the ending of the relationship between Christopher and his childhood friend, a Japanese boy named Akira, left much to be desired in terms of satisfaction. Other than my issues with the quality of the ending, the book really is a beautiful trip back in time to the era when China was ruled by Chiang Kai Shek and when opium ruled the streets. I’m not the biggest fan of detective or mystery books, but I thought that Ishiguro did a wonderful job of blending the detective-narrative along with the other issues in Christopher’s life – his love affair with a climbing socialite, his paternal instincts towards the girl he adopts, and the internal struggle he will always face over why his parents were taken. Of the three books, When We Were Orphans was probably my least favorite, but that doesn’t make it a bad book in any way! Take my word for it – its a joy to read! (3 Star)

Next up on the list? Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, volume 1 in The Cairo Trilogy and, of course, more blog posts! Happy reading! – BM

Title: The History Boys

Author: Alan Bennett

Number of Pages: 144

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

The History Boys, a play by Alan Bennett, is an absolutely wonderful play, and was made it to quite a movie, as well (which I’ll talk about a bit more later). The play focuses on a group of boys whom are all trying to get in to Cambridge and Oxford with the help of three core faculty members: their female history teacher, they’re gay male “general studies” teacher, and a new teacher – Irwin – a young man wh is responsible for teaching the boys how to be original enough to actually get in to Oxford and Cambridge.

The play’s main male lead, Dakin, is a cocky student who is used to getting what he wants. He’s an intelligent boy, who uses his intelligence to manipulate those around him. Its fantastic! I’m in love with him. So much so that there is a serious need for me to re-do my list of most desirable male fictional leads. The best part of the play, however, is what it has to say about the study of history in and of itself. The play, through Irwin, advocates for taking history and spinning it on its head. See Stalin as an evil human being? Irwin tells the boys to find something – ANYTHING – good to say about Stalin and make the case that maybe he wasn’t so evil after all. Writing an essay on the Church at the eve of the Reformation? Mention the 14 foreskins of Christ to really make a bang. Part of it speaks to the general hipocracy and the lengths students will go to in order to make sure that their essays stand out above the rest. As a student, I recognize this method and know that, in all honesty, there is quite a bit of truth to how effective it is. On the other hand, its an admonission to look at the other side of the story – the side of history that perhaps the loser would have told, or the side that no one gives much thought to in the cultural lexicon. As a lover of history (particularly the untold history) I found this aspect of the play to be quite intriguing as well.

One of the other things I loved about the book had to do with the relationship between Hector (the gay “general studies” professor) and the boys. Hector takes the boys home from school on his motorcycle (a different boy daily) and, on the way home, reaches behind him and begins to fondle the boys. At first, as a reader, I was really, really surprised at this. However,  to both Hector and the boys, this isn’t something worth paying attention to. It is merely something that happens – a course of action chosen by their eccentric teacher that all the boys must deal with. A personality quirk. Later, when Dakin begins to hit on Irwin, the question of the line between teacher and student, a line which has already been blurred, is erased almost entirely. And, while I am adamantly against inappropriate student-teacher relations, it adds a dimension to the play that really make it an even more worthwhile read.

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.

All in all, although there are some definite adult themes running through the play, I couldn’t have been happier with the time I spent reading it. Happy reading (or, I guess, watching!)

Title: All’s Well That Ends Well

Author: William Shakespeare

Number of Pages: 192

Rating: 4 out of 5 bookmarks

All’s Well that Ends Well is a quasi-comedy of Shakespeare’s. I say quasi-comedy because, although it technically has a happy ending, the tone is definitely not keeping in line with the comic gener, especially Shakespeare’s comdey. The story is of the young maiden Helena. Helena’s father, a physician for the Count Rossillion, has just died and the King is ill. Helena goes to court to cure the king with a special sure her father possessed. At this same time, the Countess’s son Bertram (whose father has also just died) goes to court to enlist in the service of the king. When Helena cures the King, the king tells her to pick whomever she desires as a husband. Of course, Helena is in love with Bertram, and she picks Bertram for the kings offer. However, Bertram can’t stand Helenaso he goes away to war without consummating the marriage. Helena, realizing that he’s run away from her, follows him. Bertram has written Helena a letter saying he will only return to her when she can get the family ring off his finger (hard when he’s far away at war) and is pregnant with his child (hard when you haven’t slept together). Helena, with the help of her friend Diana, tricks Bertram at night and gets him to sleep with her and give her the ring from his finger. In the end, Bertram is still with Helena, Helena is pregnant with his child, and alls well that ends well.

I found Helena INCREDIBLY annoying. Like, really, really annoying. So much so that I wrote an entire paper about it for my Shakespeare class. First of all, she is ridiculously manipulative. Secondly, she’s headstrong to a fault. I don’t know how many times Bertram tells Helena that she wants nothing to do with her, but she just won’t take the hint. Furthermore, she goes through great lengths to force Bertram in to being with her. Its entrapment. I know quite a few people who disagree, who see Bertram as a foolish boy who is deliberately avoiding his responsibilities. However, I see him as an unfortunate man with his back against the wall and nowhere to go but into a marriage that he hates or run to a war he doesn’t particularly care to fight. It’s frustrating to watch him do all he can to deliver the message to a girl that refuses to hear it. True, a lot of times we champion the woman who knows what she wants and pursues her goals to whatever end possible. However, in the case of love, or, in the case of Helena’s love for Bertram, sometimes too much is too much. The only positive thing about the play was its explorations of questions about marriage, love, and what it takes to make a person recognize their faults. I would definitely recommend the play, but don’t necessarily expect that happiest of happy endings! Happy reading!

Title: The Sound and the Fury

Author: William Faulkner

Number of Pages: 336

Ratings: 3 out of 5 bookmarks

** SPOILERS THROUGHOUT – Its too hard to write about this book without some spoilers. You’ve been warned** The Sound and the Fury is the story of the Compson family, a family of the slowly dying Old South. The story is about a series of events that greatly impact the family, told from the point of view of four very different narrators: Benjy, a mentally and physically retarded man trapped in his own mind; Quentin, a neurotic and self-destructive man with a penchant for self delusion and incest; Jason, a money grubber and misanthrope whos main goal in life is to make all those in his life miserable; a third-person narrator who attempts to provide somewhat of a netural depection of the Compson family. The other main character of the novel, the Compson sister Caddie, is never given her own personal narration section, making her a lovely ambiguous character for the reader. The evens in the novel range from Caddie’s promiscuous ways, eventual pregnancy and running away from home to Caddie’s daughter stealing money from Jason and Quentin’s suicide. The entirety of the novel is told in Faulkner’s signature style, and my feelings towards the book have been mixed from the start.

The writing style, as I’ve mentioned before, caused me quite a few headaches as I was reading the book. The opening section, told from Benjy’s point of view, was particularly difficult. Because of Benjy’s mental illness, he doesn’t understand the difference between past and present. So all of the stories he tells about his family that occur in the past are told as if they are currently happening. To add to that confusion, the scenes we see through Benjy’s eyes are not told linerally – they are told out of order, and only after many careful readings of the section was I able to put all the pieces in to their correct place. Quentin’s section, however, was almost more difficult to read, seeing as how I expected him to be able to narrate much more smoothly. But his constant neroticism kept muddling up his narration, although I found the scene when he and Caddie discuss killing themselves to be absolutely wonderfully crafted. After these two highly difficult sections, it was a relief to get to Jason’s section and the final portion, narrated by an omniscient 3rd person. True, Jasons whining was really extreme, but at least he complained in a normal, easy to understand fashion.

The book is a classic. Almost everyone I’ve talked to has read this book and had some kind of serious reaction to it. Most people have loved it. Some have hated it. But there doesn’t seem to be any middle ground. I’m going to have to say that I’m on the hate it side, just because I found the book too much for me to deal with. It was just too much to wade through. However, I fully recognize the genius behind Faulkner’s writing style, which is why the book got the three out of five that it did. The themes of family and what is insanity and who to trust and what to do when you can’t do anymore – all of those themes permeate the work, and they were definitely worth investigating. I’m glad I read the book. I just don’t think I’ll be reading it again any time soon.

Happy reading! Oh, and for those of you curious about my long absence? Blame an absolutely miserable case of the stomach flu. Literally no moving for days. But I’m back – and back with a vengence!

Alright, so maybe not so brief. Sadly, this isn’t a real post, either. But its a post to tell you that I’ll be posting soon! Like, within a matter of hours kind of soon! And I’ll have so much to say you won’t believe it (okay, maybe not really, but come on. I’ve got to peak your interest somehow)! Coming up: A review of The Sound and the Fury, my favorite of Faulkner’s short fiction, a review of The History Boys (both the play and the movie), as well as a catch up on some memes. I’m telling you – it’ll be ridiculous!

Happy reading!

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!

Other than that, my reading is hitting a stride for sure. I’m about halfway done with The Sound and the Fury as well as Rock Bottom, which is a completely hilarious book that I got not too long ago from my fabulous local library. I’ve also started Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by the famed Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. It really has been quite the week. I say this because, unfortunately, I may be a little absent from the blog for a bit (in person, that is. I’m going to try a get a few reviews written tomorrow that I can publish throughout the week) because this next weeks spells PAPER CITY!!! My Transnation Migration requires a 10 page paper on the morality of globalization. A 12 page literary analysis of Sense and Sensibility for my Jane Austen class, and a historical background for the ‘personal narrative’ as a form in early-18th century American writing. Sounds like just buckets of fun, right? Maybe not so much, but so is the plight of the student! So, enough of my whining. How about a book review?

Title: Northanger Abbey
Author: Jane Austen
Pages: 182
Bookmarks: 2 (out of 5)

I’ll admit it – I didn’t like this book as much as I feel like I should have. I mean, its part of the Austen canon and, as usually happens with so-called ‘classic literature’ I tend to go in to it expecting it to knock my socks off. After all, there are reasons that these books are so classic. However, Northanger Abbey wasn’t like that.

The story is about Catherine Morland, an absolutely normal girl who leads an absolutely normal life. She reads a lot of novels, particularly of the gothic persuasion. In fact, Northanger as a whole is really just a huge satire of the gothic novel genre. Anyway, Catherine goes to Bath and ends up making some friends in a local family on vacation, the Tilneys. The Tilneys, after some time in Bath, invite Catherine to go with them to their home at Northanger Abbey. Catherine, as such a huge fan of gothic novels, thinks a trip to an old, dark, creepy Abbey where the mother of the Tilney family died is just too good to be true. SPOILER The truth is, however, that nothing happens to Catherine while she’s at the Tilney’s. Everything is perfectly normal. The only thing that DOES happen is when General Tilney, the father, finds out that Catherine isn’t as rich as he thought she was so he kicks her out. The the son, Henry, gets all ‘oh-n0-you-didn’t” and goes to her and is all like “I love you, I don’t care how poor you are, screw my dad, lets get married” and, of course, because its Austen, shes all like “yeah, totally!” END SPOILER

As you can probably tell, the whole problem I had with this book is kind of that nothing really happens. To begin with, the narrator, at least to me, has no real qualities that make me want to sympathize with her in any way. Catherine is described as being plain and kind of boring. And that is EXACTLY what she is. So much so that it’s not like Austen is making fun of those kind of people, but that she just wrote a completely flat character. I will say, however, that I did enjoy the slightly more realistic love story that develops in Northanger than that happens in Sense and Sensibility. In Northanger the characters go through some kind of actual flirtation and we can, as readers, see them falling in love with one another, as opposed to some other Austen lit that is just, like, “and then everyone woke up one day and was in love and got married”. I also liked this particular passage of the novel, a paragraph that, for me, got close to redeeming the entire book.

Yes, novels; – for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptious censure the very perfomances, to the numer of which they are themselves adding – joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the Reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel talk to threadbare strains of trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure that those of any other literary corporation in the world, no speices of compostition has been so much decrie. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are alomst as many as our readers.

As you can see, there is definitely a little bit of sarcasm going on there, which is just one more thing to appreciate about Austen. Of course she knows how to satirize with the best of them. All in all, I will say that Northanger Abbey is not a difficult book. Its just one that I didn’t particularly care for, either way. Happy late Valentine’s Day, and happy reading!