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.