America's Queen

I did it! I've finally finished the last book on my list. Of course I saved the longest nonfiction for the end--America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis by Sarah Bradford. 450 word-packed pages. A fan of all things of the Mad Men era, I was surprised to find that I really didn't like dear old Jackie O. At least in the biography, she came off as self-centered, frivolous, and profligate with money. She did seem to be a devoted mother, however. The Kennedys, frankly, came off as horrible people too. Everyone seemed to be sleeping with everyone! Jack with Jackie's sister Lee, Jackie--after Jack's death--with Bobby, Lee with Aristotle Onassis, and later, of course, Jackie with Aristotle.

I was interested in reading about Jackie because, in high school, a family friend used to tell me he knew what I would do when I grew up: the Jackie O. job. I knew this meant something in publishing, but it wasn't until I read this biography that I realized how accurate he was. Jackie was an editor and I work in sales and marketing, but she worked on a number of illustrated art books and museum catalogues, which is exactly what I work on. It was during her publishing career, in fact, that she seemed the most likable. She worked hard on her books and didn't put on airs in the office, making her own phone calls and getting her own coffee. It also seemed to be the period of her life when she was happiest. She was in her most stable relationship and seemed to love her work.

Now that I'm done with "the list," I've been whipping through some (relatively) current fiction--Little Bee, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, The Forgotten Garden--and look forward to wandering into a bookstore and picking up some random book that strikes my fancy.

Billy Budd

Herman Melville's Billy Budd very nearly made it onto my unfinished list. And really, looking back, I don't think that would have been such a bad decision. My first mistake was that I tried to read this at the gym. Melville has not been optimized for elliptical reading. The direct opposite of Hemingway, he uses about 10 words for every 1 he really needs. When nothing has really happened in the first 30 pages of a 100-page book, something is wrong. I gave up trying to read on the run, but felt like I should pick it up again under more studious conditions. After all, it was only 100 pages.

So I finished it. But that's about all I can say. I got lost in the wordiness of it all and never really cared about what was going on. There was a mutiny. On a ship. Billy Budd was framed. Or maybe he did it and was rightly punished. But I think it was the former.

Needless to say, I no longer have any inkling to read Moby Dick. I loved Melville's short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener," but now I think we must part ways. Only one book to go on the list! A biography of Jackie Kennedy. Of course I left a thick nonfiction book to the end. And there are lots of words on every page! It will take me a while--I think I will need to intersperse some fiction. It is summer, after all!

The Road to Yesterday

The volume of short stories by L. M. Montgomery, The Road to Yesterday, instantly transported me back to childhood when I raced through the entire Anne of Green Gables series. Set in the small village where Anne and Gilbert Blythe have settled to raise their family, the stories concern the people surrounding the Blythes. Anne and Gilbert make cameo appearances here and there, but they are mostly mentioned in passing. Most of these mentions, however, occur in the form of snide remarks. It is quite blasphemous, in fact, the way the townspeople talk about the family--she is too clever for her own good and acts superior, he is accused of being too flirtatious with his nurses. One suspects most of this is mere jealousy, but it is hard to read for a devoted fan of the original series!

The events in the stories are familiar fare to fans of Montgomery's work--hard-luck orphans who suddenly find themselves in fortuitous circumstances, old maids finding love late in life, and serendipitous mistaken identities. They are a little more worldly than the original Anne books, with a couple involving illegitimate children and parents in jail, but they are charming stories nonetheless.

One story includes an appearance by Walter Blythe, the son who resembled his mother's spirit the most. I instantly remembered the moment in the series when he is killed in World War I. It is the first book I remember crying openly at. While these stories aren't quite as good as the novels in the series, the mere chance at seeing these beloved characters again makes it worth it.

Gone With the Wind

When I started this project, I think the book people were most surprised that I hadn't read was Gone With the Wind. I'd always meant to . . . but it is 1,000 pages after all. But what a great 1,000 pages! I've seen the movie a few times, although not recently, and the book was just as sweeping and epic as I'd expected. But it also had a feminist bent I didn't really anticipate. Scarlet, who starts out as a flighty southern belle concerned with nothing more than snagging her beloved Ashley turns into a rather capable businesswoman when faced with the harsh realities of post-war Georgia. She runs her husband's store, and when she is tipped off on how profitable sawmills are, acquires two of them and runs them to the shock of gentile Southern society.

The book starts off as an American version of Emma, with Scarlet concerned only with eligible bachelors and opportune matches, has this interesting feminist pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps middle, then ends as an American Wuthering Heights with Rhett and Scarlet as two stormy and somewhat despicable lovers. Of course, what those British classics don't have is the race issue. A recent Time Magazine article celebrating its 75th anniversary calls it "unforgivably racist." As I was reading the book, I wasn't convinced Margaret Mitchell shared the racist views of her characters, but rather was portraying a time and a place from history. But who knows . . . 1934 Atlanta wasn't exactly the capital of civil rights.

I was actually surprised at how many issues from the war and Reconstruction the book included--the poor conditions of the Confederate soldiers, the unabashed extortion of the Carpetbaggers, the not-much-better-than-slavery conditions for the newly freed blacks, and the disenfranchisement of Southern citizens. It was a meatier picture of the period than I expected. But the romance of the book is probably the most captivating aspect. Even though I knew the outcome and was shocked by the foibles of both Rhett and Scarlet, I couldn't help but hope they pulled it together in the end. But frankly, he still didn't give a damn.

Our Lady of the Forest

Our Lady of the Forest by David Guterson was quite a pleasant surprise! I loved Snow Falling on Cedars, but was hugely disappointed with his second novel, East of the Mountains. So much so I'm surprised I even picked up this book, but it was being sold at a bargain price at the Strand in NY, so I must have thought it worth the chance.

A teenage runaway who makes her living collecting mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest has a vision of the Virgin Mary in the woods. She tells a few people about it--an opportunistic fellow mushroom picker and the young priest of a struggling parish--and soon she has attracted hundreds if not thousands of followers. They descend on this small Washington town, setting up souvenir stands and selling snacks at outrageous prices. Some believe it is truly a miracle, while others are skeptical and think the girl's past drug use has something to do with her visions. The lives of the townspeople are woven into the story--the priest who wants to build a new church, the mother of a missing child, and a father who feels responsible for his son's debilitating accident. They all find hope in the Virgin's appearance, whether they truly believe in it or not.

This isn't the kind of subject matter I'm usually drawn to, but Guterson handles it well. We're never told definitively if the visions are real or false--it's left to the reader to decide. The mix of sincere belief and opportunistic swindling is an apt commentary on modern-day religion in America. It is often commercial and after the money of its followers, but occasionally people are sincere. Although not as sweeping as Snow Falling on Cedars, this was an engaging novel, and in the future I would happily pick up another of his books from a bookstore sale table.

Dorothy Parker: Complete Stories

I read the Penguin Classics edition of Dorothy Parker: Complete Stories a little at a time--mostly on plane-rides to New York--over the course of a couple of years, so I can't recall a lot of detail about the stories. This is the first Parker I've read--I knew her by reputation, of course. Well, mostly for her famous, "I like to have a martini, two at the very most; three, I'm under the table, four I'm under the host!" Which, I just learned via Google, you can get on a bevy of martini glasses. It also appears on the cocktail napkins at the Algonquin Hotel bar, her famous haunt. What I enjoyed most about the stories, besides of course her acerbic wit, was how she could write a dinner party scene and reveal every character's foible through nothing but dialogue. The way her characters talk give away all the flaws they should be trying to cover up. And the way she uses details to poke holes in the image the character is trying to convey: "Lily Wynton wore, just as she should have, black satin and sables, and long white gloves were wrinkled luxuriously about her wrists. But there were delicate streaks of grime in the folds of her gloves, and down the shining length of her gown there were small, irregularly shaped dull patches; bits of food or drops of drink, or perhaps both, sometimes must have slipped their carriers and found brief sanctuary there. Her hat--oh, her hat. It was romance, it was mystery, it was strange, sweet sorrow; it was Lily Wynton's hat, of all the world, and no other could dare it. Black it was, and tilted, and a great, soft plume drooped from it to follow her cheek and curl across her throat. Beneath it, her hair had the various hues of neglected brass. But, oh, her hat." "In his zeal for order Mr. Wilcox strongly urges military discipline. In fact, he verges on the fanatical on this subject. He ardently believes that the louder an argument is uttered the more convincing it is; therefore, he is wont almost to shout, with accompanying virile thumps on a neighboring table, that the only thing which can save this country from ruin is three months' compulsory military training, annually, for all the men between the ages of eighteen and forty. Mr. Wilcox was forty-one last January." And, of course, none of her characters can seem to refuse a drink: "This is a nice highball, isn't it? Well, well, well, to think of me having real Scotch; I'm out of the bush leagues at last. Are you going to have another one? Well, I shouldn't like to see you drinking all by yourself, Fred. Solitary drinking is what causes half the crime in the country. That's what's responsible for the failure of prohibition. But, please, Fred, tell him to make mine just a little one. Make it awfully weak; just cambric Scotch." It makes you wonder if she ever met anyone she actually admired.

Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy was quite the surprise. I'd heard mixed reviews of Hardy, so I didn't know what to expect, but I rather liked this book. I thought it had surprisingly modern ideas for a nineteenth-century novel. Jude is tricked into marriage by one girl, so it is already salacious when he starts pursuing Sue Bridehead, his true love. After his wife runs off to Australia and later seeks a divorce, he is free to marry Sue. But she is gun shy after her own failed marriage, so they live together and pose as a married couple without ever making it official. While this is nothing out of the ordinary in 2011, it seems pretty revolutionary for 1895.

And apparently many found it a little too nontraditional. The book was met with outrage when it was published, surprising Hardy, who thought of it as a moral tale. It was burned publicly and nicknamed Jude, the Obscene according to the Wikipedia article. Like many of today's accusations against books, it seems like an over-reaction. It's not giving too much away to say the couple faced many hardships due to their choices, so it was in no means an endorsement of the lifestyle.

Controversy aside, this was a pretty good read. I would definitely pick up more Hardy.

Sweetsmoke

Sweetsmoke by screenwriter David Fuller is a novel set during the Civil War that follows Cassius, a favored slave on the Sweetsmoke plantation. When Cassius learns that Emoline Justice, the woman who practically raised him in the absence of his own mother, has been murdered, he investigates who killed her and uncovers a secret intelligence system against the Confederate Army in the process.

Over the course of the story, Fuller delves into slave life and the plight of freed slaves. At one point, a fellow slave tells Cassius, "Free man go wherever he want, Cassius. Free man free to go hungry with no roof over his head, free man free to get picked up by the paddyrollers without a note from the Old Master to keep him safe. Free man free to be whipped like a common slave, since he look no different to the white man." When Cassius travels to the front lines of the war to find the son of his master, the conditions of the Confederate soldiers aren't much different--they are underfed, lack supplies and sufficient uniforms, and one is seen walking around barefoot.

While the story is okay, what I found really interesting about this book was Fuller's use of punctuation. The dialogue of free men and women is shown between quotation marks, but the words of slaves appear without quotation marks. Which means you have to pay attention, but as a copyediting student, I thought such a symbolic use of punctuation was unique and extremely effective at showing how these people were treated as lesser beings.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

I didn't take to Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn right away. I probably would have given up about 100 pages in if a couple of close friends--whose reading tastes I trust--hadn't said this was one of their favorite books. It's not a grand epic tale by any means; it captures the everyday struggles and triumphs of Francie Nolan, a young girl growing up in early twentieth century Brooklyn. And ultimately, it does so with as much heart as other beloved coming-of-age novels like Little Women and Anne of Green Gables.

It was about halfway through the 400-page novel that I really got sucked in: when (spoiler alert!) Francie's father died. It was written so realistically and honestly it was a cathartic experience. After I finished the book, I read an article saying this was an autobiographical novel and that Smith had, in fact, lost her father at an early age.

I feel like I'm one of the few book lovers who didn't read this book growing up, so I won't go too much into the plot. I do want to be a major book nerd for a moment and write about the beautiful Reader's Digest edition that I read. I found this book in a Friends of the Library used bookstore. I thought Reader's Digest only published volumes of several condensed novels. But after confirming this was the full, unabridged text, I bought it. It's a handsome hardcover with 2-color printing throughout, and it's printed on thick cream-colored paper of much higher quality than your typical novel. There are even full-page engraving-style illustrations every so often. I don't think Reader's Digest still releases books like this, but they sure had a good thing going when they did.

The Winter Rose

The Winter Rose by Jennifer Donnelly is a historical novel set in early turn-of-the-twentieth-century London. Among its many characters are India Selwyn Jones, one of the first graduates of an all-female medical school, and Sid Malone, the leader of the most infamous street gang. The two cross paths . . . his life needs saving, both literally and metaphorically, of course . . . and they fall in love. But in between the tale of star-crossed lovers and a few bodice ripper scenes, this sweeping epic of a novel weaves a pretty good tale. Of the many side characters, there is an up-and-coming politician and his wife, India's dastardly fiance who has political ambitions of his own, a couple of adventurous teens who lead us into the world of early mountain climbing, and India's plucky nurse sidekick.

Like Emma Brown, this book gets a little preachy in its modern day stance on social conditions of the time. India's great dream is to open a free clinic in Whitechapel, a working class neighborhood of London. She defies the doctor she works for by supplying women with contraceptives and actually providing sanitary conditions for her patients. A number of political issues, including women's suffrage, are touched on via the politicians. But mostly this is a love story. It's the kind of book you reach for on a rainy day when you don't want to leave the house--fully engaging and one you can't put down. Not the brainiest of novels, but meaty enough that you don't have to be embarrassed. It lost me a little at the end when the action moves to Africa--due to the kind of coincidences generally found only in nineteenth century novels, several of our characters end up on the continent independently only to cross paths later. But I found myself hoping for a happy ending so much I could overlook this.

I picked this up as a galley because I knew Donnelly from her young adult novel A Northern Light, which is loosely based on An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser. It's about a murder on a lake . . . the details are fuzzy, but it was also a great read. Only 9 books left on the list! Single digits!!