Book 50: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

My poor book cover is in bad shape, but I like the design so I decided to scan it and post it anyway.  This was a short, little book, 284 pages, which belies it's content which is amazingly deep.

The characters are very deep and very human.  Atticus is a model gentleman and father.  He struggles with himself and believes he should do more for his children than he's able, but isn't that how all fathers should be?  His children are intelligent and curious and he pulls no punches in explaining reality to them.  He believes that they are capable of understanding it and, for the most part, they are.  Exploring complex ideas from the point-of-view of a child is a big part of what makes this book so good.

The real plot to the book starts in the second half, though there are signals from near the beginning that it is coming.  It centers on the trial of a black workhand accused of the attempted rape of a white woman.  The book addresses a multitude of themes simultaneously from this point forward.  While the subplot of Boo Radley shows the attitudes of the children toward someone different: from fear to curiosity to understanding, the main plot addresses other, higher themes.  Atticus, being the consummate gentleman, finds his beliefs leading him from fair play to equal rights while the town battles itself between racism and social discrimination.  The black defendant is clearly innocent, but the accuser, though poor, white trash, is still white.  How the town deals with these attitudes is explored well and realistically while the children view the events from an innocent point of view, calling into question social norms and why they exist.

This is now one of my favorite books of all times.  It addresses many important themes and does it in a way that doesn't feel exceptionally heavy.  It gets the message across without feeling preachy.  I would highly recommend this book to anyone, no matter their reading preferences.

10 out of 10.

Book 39: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

I've always liked this movie, but I've never read the source material.  Since I found a copy of the book recently I thought I'd give it a try.  I've also tried to read some other works by Ken Kesey without much luck.  I've always found him to be a little too off-kilter for me without much of a focused story. When telling people that this is the next book I'm intending to read I've been told a few times that it's really good.  So here goes...  It's about 330 pages, so that makes about 48 pages per day.

REVIEW:  I've been trying to get this book review going for a while now and I keep getting stuck.  It's just such a difficult novel to do justice to.  Let's just jump right in.

Kesey writes some extremely interesting characters.  The focus of the book is Randle McMurphy, a minor criminal, con-man and hooligan who has been given a short prison sentence and decides to feign insanity in order to serve out his term at a mental asylum, which he assumes will be comparatively easy and comfortable.  The inmates of the asylum are expertly written and very believable.  Rather than writing over-the-top, ranting and raving lunatics, Kesey has created complex characters with subtle problems that keep them from living normal lives.  The character that really shines for me, however, is that of the narrator, "Chief" Bromden.  Because everyone believes him to be deaf and mute and, therefore, harmless, he (and, therefore, the reader) is allowed access to areas normally off-limits giving a behind-the-scenes view of the hospital and the staff as well as the patients.  In addition, the Chief's inner dialogue gives realistic and sometimes disturbing views into the mind of a schizophrenic and a view of the ward from someone who probably actually belongs there.

Overall, the story is one of the individual versus the system.  Nurse Ratched has established an strict regimen in the ward and McMurphy is set up to resist and attempt to overthrow it.  It's a theme that is repeated many times in books from this era, especially the dystopic novels, in which I would nominally include this book.  The struggle of McMurphy to assert his independent nature against the authoritarian regime of Nurse Ratched is a war with battles won by both sides, though the ultimate outcome is never really in question.

The only bad things that I can think of about this book are really in comparing it to the film.  I don't really want to get into a film review here, but any review of the book would be incomplete without addressing it.  First, the novel is much better than the film.  I love the film, it is one of my all-time favorites, but there is so much in the novel that just can't be expressed visually, including the mental illnesses of the inmates.  This could be why the focus of the film shifts away from Bromden toward McMurphy.  It would be difficult, if not impossible, to effectively show the inner dialogue and conflict of the Chief.  Randle is extroverted; Bromden is introverted.  One makes for decidedly better viewing on film.  Finally, a minor gripe.  Because I'd seen the film (several times) before reading the book, I had mental images of the film characters in my head while reading.  For the most part, this didn't really bother me, but the descriptions of the characters don't necessarily match the film depictions.  Especially, in the case of McMurphy.  Great as Jack Nicholson is, he doesn't really look like Randle Patrick McMurphy.

Overall, it was an amazing book.  One of the best I've ever read.  Though it's a short book, it packs in so much that it took me a while after finishing it to process it all.  I just set down the book and sat where I was, thinking.

10 out of 10.

Book 28: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

I have to admit, I'm not really looking forward to this one.  I'm mostly reading American Literature to see what I missed in high school and some of it I have found to be very enjoyable.  Ernest Hemingway is still one of my favorite authors.  But, based on the last Faulkner novel that I read, I'm expecting this one to be a downer.  The title doesn't give me much hope of a happy ending either.  I am going to stick with it anyway, though.

Only 261 pages in this one so it should take long to get a verdict.  That's less than 40 pages per day, if anyone is counting.

REVIEW:  Well, Faulkner is still not my favorite American author but it wasn't too bad.  The novel revolves around the death of Addie Bundren, the matriarch of a poor, southern family.  The event and it's aftermath is seen from the point of view of several people who are associated with the events and jumps from person to person with each chapter.

The chief complaint that I have about American literature, principally early 20th century American literature, is it's tendency to devolve into a kind of suffocating tragedy of desperate poverty.  This one is not much different as the surviving family continue to make bad decision after bad decision as terrible luck strikes at every turn.

The writing is interesting, however.  Faulkner tends to write in a stream-of-consciousness style and uses a colloquial voice for his characters.  He is able to give each of his characters a unique style and you can really tell who is narrating by the way they speak.  The story is also interesting and it moves at a nice pace, though it's horribly depressing and a bit frustrating due the choices of the characters.

Overall, this has not done much to improve my impression of American Literature in general.  It had a good story and great writing style but unlikeable characters and a heavy mood.  I appreciate that it's an important piece of literature but it wasn't something I enjoyed very much.  6 out of 10.

Book 19: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

I never really cared for American Literature until I discovered Hemingway.  Now that I've read most of his works I'm expanding to Faulkner.  This book was probably assigned in high school English class so it's been something I always felt I should read.  

348 pages in this one, a leisurely 50 pages per day.

REVIEW:  This book took a little while to get into.  Not only is it a stream-of-consciousness style novel, but it jumps around in time and space and has a confusing cast of characters.  Along with the confusing cast and the jumps in time and space you also have sections with no punctuation and others where Faulkner gives dialogue from Southern black characters which he spells out phonetically, “Dont you dare come in dis do widout a armful of wood.  Here I done had to tote yo wood en build yo fire bofe.  Didn’t I tole you not to leave dis place last night befo dat woodbox wus full to de top?”

Once I got into the correct stride, however, the book became much more readable and I began to be able relax and enjoy it.  It’s a rather sad story about the downfall of a traditional Southern family.  Each of the characters feels the loss of status and property in different ways but it’s all pretty melancholy. 

What I found most interesting about the whole story was the relationships between the blacks and whites in the novel.  It’s a complicated interplay.  The blacks have been free for some time now, but they are still segregated into their own communities.  The town’s white population have a complicated view of their black neighbors and seem to spend a lot of time agonizing over it while the black population has the view of “You tend to yo business en let de whitefolks tend to deir’n.”

Probably my favorite passage in the book comes from this narrative and takes place when Quentin, the eldest son, reflects on the relationship between blacks and whites:

“When I first came East I kept thinking You’ve got to remember to think of them as colored people not niggers, and if it hadn’t happened that I wasn’t thrown with many of them, I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.  That was when I realized that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior…”

Well said.  All in all, I really liked the book, though it was rather sad.  I’d give it about an 8 out of 10.

Book 5: "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway

When I read The Old Man and the Sea a few years ago I became completely enthralled with Hemingway's writing.  Reading The Sun Also Rises soon afterward pretty well confirmed it.  Since then I've read all his books except this one.  I'm still behind since my vacation, but I'm not going to throw myself any more softballs.  495 pages means 71 pages... in order to catch up completely I'd have to read 165 pages a day... I think I might shoot for 100 and see how it goes.

Update: Finished the book on August 23rd taking 5 days at just about 100 pages per day.  Another great book!  This one is about a group of partisans fighting in the Spanish Civil War.  One of the most interesting aspects of this book was the was the way Hemingway wrote the dialogue.  You are reading the words in English, but the characters are speaking Spanish and the written words, while awkward in English are very good translations of what would actually be said in Spanish.  It makes for some interesting reading, in my opinion.  It's a very deep book, at it's core and the characters spend a lot of time figuring out what's important to them in wartime and how a country can be torn apart by civil war.  Sad, but very good.