Ulysses

I place Ulysses by James Joyce in the category of really hard books to read so I have some tips on how you can read it.
I stopped and started this book a lot until I understood that there were no quotation marks and just a hyphen to mark when a speech begins.  But even that breakthrough didn't help a lot with the reading of my book.  So I decided to try listening to it instead.  My first attempt did not go very well, and I found that I needed to read along with the recording because some things weren't very clear.  That is when I put it aside for a while.  It was not until I found what I think is the perfect recording of Ulysses that I gave it another go and I will tell you why this version was of so much use to me... it was a full cast of Irish actors who did the job!  With different voices helping to differentiate lines and a copy of the book as well, I was able to successfully read and understand James Joyce's Ulysses! 

Once my technical issues were dealt away with I was able to focus on what the book was about.
In a nutshell, it is basically an account of Leopold Bloom as he lives through a twenty four hour period in Dublin.  Stephen Dedalus who I am already familiar with from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is a secondary character (but more prominent than the rest).

What is also to be understood about Ulysses is that it is meant to be an odyssey of the mind (many passages being the stream-of-consciousness of not only Dedalus and Bloom but other lesser characters).  Listening and reading at the same time really helped to keep track of these switches from dialogue to what I can only describe as musings.  The episodes are named after characters from Homer's Odyssey (though the content of each section is only vaguely parallel to each other).   It was fun to spot the connections!  What I wasn't too keen on is the idea that Stephen was meant to be Telemachus and Bloom was Odysseus (ugh!).  While fascinated with these connections and what Joyce did with these characters I am still the purist when it comes to the Odyssey and I didn't like either Dedalus or Bloom at all to be connected with some of my favourites.
However, it was an odyssey-like experience reading this book, and I can safely say that I will attempt it again at a later date to see what else I can see (or what I had missed) in a second reading.  Listening and reading felt a lot like binge-watching a show, I was exhausted after each episode. It wasn't an easy, comfortable read, but I am glad I made the attempt.

Brontemania!

Last weekend the television show To Walk Invisible: The Lives of the Bronte Sisters was shown on Masterpiece.  I was enraptured!  I loved the show so much I watched it again the the very same day and then again on Monday.  Each viewing gave me more to love and appreciate of the work and skill that was put into this production.  After seeing it the first time I wanted to get out my Bronte collection and read them again!    Last night I just contented myself with flipping through Jane Eyre and stopping to read at random places.  It is the beauty of this particular book that you can do that and be entertained wherever you open up your book!
The scenery was astounding.  Emily quoting her poetry on the moor just sent shivers down my spine.
Of the sisters in the show I loved Emily the best,  she was so fierce and passionate.  Anne and Charlotte were wonderful too, but Emily inspired me the most and I would like to believe that these amazing, wonderful women were really like what was portrayed in this production.  I wondered how I could possibly find out, but then I realized that I already knew!  You just have to read their books to know who they really were and then you can see that To Walk Invisible was faithful to them.    A love letter on a grand scale!

Newbery 2017

This year's Newbery wins were very interesting.  I really enjoyed reading all of them.

I started with Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk.  It is an issue book... but I liked the story anyway.  I'm curious to know what a child would take from it, because I was bummed out (being just a little tired of the novel that has something to teach), but there was enough of a story there to keep my interest. 

I've already written about this book here, but I will say again that it was an unusual treat and I really enjoyed it.

This book is really beautiful.  I have often admired Bryan's art in other books, but this one is extraordinary due to it's content.  It's definitely something I would like to add to the library's collection of African American literature.

Last but not least, I was enthralled from the beginning to the end of The Girl Who Drank the Moon.  It was a clever and magical story with many twists and turns that reunite into a very satisfactory whole.  It had all of my favourite and essential parts to a magical/mythical tale and it definitely deserved this year's Newbery Medal.

Tips

There are books that are very difficult to read.  Being as obsessed as I am with "reading it all", and wanting to tackle all of the books listed on my Great First Lines of Literature coffee mug, I had to read this book, no matter how hard it is to read.  Not because it was just on my mug but because Thomas Pynchon is listed in a few of my reference books and Gravity's Rainbow happens to be the most often mentioned books of his to be read...

I tell you now... it was a doozy.  That is where the title of my blog entry comes in today.  I have tips for die-hard readers who want to tackle this particular book (which was a really hard slog).  

First, I found it hard to begin (even with it's Great First Line!), and I had to backtrack a few times before I could get into the rhythm of it.  I had the ebook to start, but felt that it was too hard to move around in (going backwards and forwards as I did), I considered buying a hard copy (but after some progress through both the ebook and the audio, I found my disgust for the subjects in the book made me very reluctant to hold such a book in my hand!  I knew for certain that I would never wish to revisit this novel ever!).  So the audio book was my primary route through this book with the ebook on hand for some clarifications on certain names etc.,

Essentially, I think that Gravity's Rainbow is all about what men may like to do with their penises (and I'm not saying that all men would want to do this!).  I could look beyond the various sexual encounters in this book, and the sex-free portions to try and find the underlying meaning of what it is all about, but to me it read like something I remember learning in college at one of my psychology courses and it bored me to tears then (what else could the rockets be about but the many ways of "lifting off"?).  I truly do not care about complexes, ids, egos or the bodily fluids of humans and what they might want to do with them.  It is not essential to my understanding of the world to know or care about such things.  I should state that while I was disgusted about a lot of what I read, I am not standing in judgement of what two consenting adults may like to do to each other, honestly it is none of my business! 

So, on to the tips.  I strongly recommend that you not drink or eat while reading this book or even have much food in your stomach (this really helped me a great deal).   I was nauseous a time or two before I decided to cut out the food and drink.  I also recommend that you give yourself some time after reading each installment to soothe or cleanse your mind of what you read (it can be very disturbing).  Music is great, a fluffy, comfort read is good ( I would visit some of my favourite fan fiction sites), poetry can be helpful... I mixed it up because I didn't want to associate any of my favourite things too much with what I was reading.  

You should know... I don't think that there really was any point to this book.  No real purpose other than my statement on what I think it was about (penises). Or maybe all of the gross stuff just distracted me from what Pynchon was trying to say... I'm not interested in re-reading this book to find out!  

Good luck!

The Inquisitor's Tale

I love it when there are coincidences in my life.  Every year I outline a plan for what I want to read and what I want to focus on.  I have lots of categories to choose from (wouldn't want to get bored...) and last year English literature was one of my categories (though really, it is a category every year!).  I generally flit about, from one century to the next,  popping from one author to another.  Often the things that I read refer to other books (in reading terminology that is referred to as the book bullet), so I will cheerfully head in that direction (if I haven't already read the book mentioned). Since I discovered the pleasure of audio books I have been having fun listening to books I read more than twenty years ago (because after two or more decades and thousands of book later I can't quite remember the plots any more).
One of my favourites was a reading of Gulliver's Travels  by David Case.  His voice was perfect for reading such a cheeky story and I had many fits of the giggles over his dry and acerbic delivery.  What was also listened to last summer was Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales by a cast of narrators.  I loved it and was laughing hard and often (though I really hated The Parson's Tale which was basically a two hour sermon at the end!).
Which brings me back to what I said at the beginning about coincidences.
The Inquisitor's Tale is exactly the style of story telling that was used in The Canterbury Tales. I was thrilled when I picked it up at the library, all shiny, new and embossed with gold, and excited to realize what it was about!
  The story is situated in 1200's France with remarkable characters, an exciting beginning which keeps you hooked until the finish (and no creepy sermon at the end!).  There is only a hint of bawdiness (it is a book meant for kids after all).  The violence was a bit much at first (but really, so many tales from that time are stuffed with violence I don't think Gidwitz could or should have left it out).  The story was also stuffed with religion (which wasn't as annoying or preachy as it could have been) and had smatterings of real people and true events.  It also had plenty of mysticism and flatulence (all these things that are, believe it or not, in The Canterbury Tales!)
There is something good to say about that kind of storytelling, and even though Chaucer's tales in some part were unfinished, I think he left us something very valuable beyond the prose and the poetry: the narrative frame.  I am profoundly grateful that Adam Gidwitz decided to write this book.

Also, the illustrations throughout the novel are perfect and in keeping with the style of the era.  They really made the story a bigger and better thing.
I think Neil Gaiman would approve.

A Change of Plans

I began this blog with the intent of polishing up my out-of-shape writing skills.  I had thought that it would come in handy when I began university courses.  In the past six months I have changed my mind about getting that university degree.
This was a hard choice.  I have always dreamed of having a great education, with degrees and masters galore in the fields that interested me.  Practically, however, I am a 47-year-old woman who lives (and will probably keep on living) in northern British Columbia with very little in the way of career choices.
So this is my compromise (it really isn't too far from what I am already doing):  I will teach myself!  I will study the fields that interest me, indulge in what is appealing to me and use the money that would have gone into a very expensive degree or two, to pursue my own goals in the literary world and to travel!  In some ways, it is a relief to not worry anymore about how I will be able to pay for or even get a university education.
I am not a writer, I am a reader,  a very enthusiastic one, and my interests are vast and very exciting to me.
I will continue to write in this blog because it is interesting to see my opinions and writing from years ago and to see how my thoughts have changed since writing about them, plus I love writing about reading.  I want to share my love of books!

Beloved

This is one of those books I made myself read because it is on one of my literary mugs "The Greatest First Lines of Literature".

So one of my reading challenges this year is to read the books that I haven't already on this mug and one other, "The Banned Books" mug.

  And it's been quite a challenge, because some of these books, while being 'great' or 'banned' are a challenge to read.  Either it' s the language, the writing or mostly the content that is hard to digest.

So this summer I decided that I needed to put in a concentrated effort to make myself read some of these books (which I will talk about soon).

It has all been very heady stuff, and Beloved tops the stack at being a very challenging book to read.  I made three first attempts before I finally made it stick.  When I could stick with it I was engaged and anxious to get to the end, because I really couldn't see where the book was headed.  I knew what I had hoped to see but that, of course, is no guarantee that an author will be considerate and take your  own feelings or preferences to account.  It won the Pulitzer Prize so you can almost bank it that this would be a stressful, ugly and painful novel about slaves. And it was.  That's not really a spoiler.

Beloved is not the first book this year that I have read about slaves.  Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe was tackled earlier on in February during Black History Month, and I had to make a few tries to start reading that one too.    There are many similarities, but one thing I am extremely grateful for is that the speech is easier to read.  It really bothered me that Stowe had most of her characters sound illiterate and it was so bad you could barely understand what she had them saying...

Beloved, was an easy read, and even when the speech was slang, I didn't have the need to parse what was said.  

Morrison was clever to feed out the horrible parts in bits and pieces throughout the book, which was very kind and humane of her.  It was a story which wound around you like a spell, with each divulgence, and then grasped you at the climax when everything was laid bare and horrible, holding you there until the very end. 

At some point it feels like we as a people have written so much (too much!) about the horrible times in our history, and it feels like we are beating it long after it should have been laid to rest.  I can honestly say that some people are total jerks for writing something this horrible and it has angered me very much.  But I think that has more to do with how the author has treated the subject.  Beloved is different.  Toni Morrison wrote a thoughtful, insightful book about ex-slaves and the ghosts of their pasts which do come back to haunt them as any hard thing in a person's life does.  It was real, honest and a way of writing that makes me think about those times soberly and with sadness, but not with anger.  Like a story about the war,  the Holocaust, or any other terrible event in our history, this too should be remembered all the time, because it happened, and it should never be forgotten, lest it should happen again.