The Time Traveler's Wife; Audrey Niffenegger

I haven't found a book on this BBC list yet that I wouldn't consider good, in at least one way. I don't have problems with them in regards to an interesting story, plot holes, characterizations, etc. This one isn't some sort of exception. It is well-written, definitely. Niffenegger's conception of time-travel is interesting and novel. Her two main characters are a study in people dealing/accepting weird situations. The whole world constructed within her novel is excellent because it is on the very cusp of ours; and she makes her reader believe this could be possible, and that in the not-very-distant future, we will find out that hers is indeed the world we are inhabiting.

I liked it. Very much, as evidenced by the fact that I read it within the confines of a 24-hour period. That's not that impressive for me. It was 537 pages, give or take, with big print. It doesn't look that daunting from the outside, and its a quick read so, if you've been thinking about giving it a go, I've heard the movie is crap compared and I'm telling you now that it's worthwhile.

Here is the part where you should stop reading if you are intending, at any time in the future, to read this book and you care about spoilers. I shall even insert a picture to make sure that if you don't want to see what comes next, it's only your fault if you do. (The picture, by the way, is from our tour group waiting in the airport in Germany to get to Thessaloniki. I've been scrapbooking!) You can come back and read the end of this post after you've read the book, if you're that interested.

And here it is. I don't ask a lot from books. I'm not what most people would call picky when it comes to the kind of "literature" I read. Give me an interesting plot. Give me memorable and hopefully, at least at times, virtuous characters. Give me some sort of a take-home message, even if it's something as benign as, "Life is short; live it while you can." Not that that message is really benign, per say, but you do tend to hear it a lot. At least I do, and that's kind of sad because I'm still working a desk job and not, for instance, writing a novel or saving the world.

And this novel does have good characters. The plot is fascinating and heartrending. The message is BEAUTIFUL; and has to do a lot with not taking for granted what you have, and living in the moment and loving. LOVING!

But what I ask in my reading material, most of all, more than anything, is for a happy ending. I don't even care if it's trite (which is a "fault" many have found in the Harry Potter series epilogue; I loved it. All I'd really like to know is what all of them do for a living now. Especially Harry, but I can live with not knowing, because I know that they are happy, and relatively safe.)

Which is the point. Not only did the ending of that book make me cry, they were not happy tears. They were not tears of rejoicing with the characters I had come to love over the last 500 pages. They were sadness and grief and horror pouring out of me.

Some people can find beauty there, but I just get upset and have to sort of mope through my other activities for a while. So that was the fault I found with the book. I didn't like the end. So that's not too bad in the grand scale of things. Maybe you'd be able to deal with it, at least better than I do/did.

I guess I figure that life has very few happy endings and authors have no excuse because their worlds are their own construction and are not bound by the rules of ours.

Anyways, on to some Shakespeare now.

War and Peace; Leo Tolstoy

It seems so ... familiar to call him Leo, but as that is what is on the cover of the book, I sort of feel like I need to go with it. I would prefer to call him Leopold or Leonardo, but as far as I know, he's just called Leo.

Wow, War and Peace. First of all more than anything, if you are going to read this book, at any time in your life, for the love of all that is good, do not read the back of the book. At least not if you have the Barnes and Nobles Classics addition. I don't know what the deal is, but I guess that because this is a really famous book, whoever writes those thinks oh, everybody knows what's going to happen. Look-- I may be reading this book for the wrong reasons, because I am interested in the plot, but you putting on there what is going to happen, really angers me.

I'm not sure how lucid I just was, but I was really angry about learning what I did off the back of that book.

That being said, I was angry because this book was fantastic. It was entrancing. I loved loved loved so many of his characters. The way Tolstoy takes historical events from Europe and Russia and works in his ideas and these characters is superb.

There are slow parts, at least for me. Sometimes I had a hard time paying attention, especially when he's detailing parts of campaigns, and the last part of the epilogue was incredibly philosophical (yet interesting).

The problem with this book is the size. Everyone looks at this tome and thinks, "there's no way I'm going to be able to finish that." It's just daunting. But it is worthwhile.

Also, it is really interesting to follow Tolstoy's patriotism.

But I loved this book, even if it did take me a MONTH to read it, and I think I will read it again and I have no doubt that I'm going to get even more out of it next time.

Some Quotes I Liked:
"No, to kill a man is bad, wrong..."
"Why is it wrong?" repeated Prince Andrey; "what's right and wrong is a question it has not been given to men to decide. Men are for ever in error, and always will be in error, and in nothing more than in what they regard as right and wrong."

"But you know what they say," he said, "that war is like a game of chess."
"Yes," said Prince Andrey, "only with this little difference, that in chess you may think over each move as long as you please, that you are not limited as to time, and with this further difference that a knight is always stronger than a pawn and two pawns are always stronger than one, while in war a battalion is sometimes stronger than a division, and sometimes weaker than a company. No one can ever be certain of the relative strength of made by the staff, I would be there, and helping to make them, but instead of that I have the honour of serving here in the regiment with these gentelmen here, and I consider that the day really depends upon us to-morrow and not on them... Success never has depended and will never depend on position, on arms, nor even on numbers; and, least of all, on position."
"On what then?"
"On the feeling that is in me and him," he indicated Timohin, "and every soldier."

"Strange are the historical accounts that tell us how some king or emperor, quarrelling with another king or emperor, levies an army, fights a battle with the army of his foe, gains a victory, kills three, five, or ten thousand men, and consequently subdues a state and a whole people consisting of several millions; and incomprehensible it seems that the defeat of any army, one hundredth of the whole strength of a people, should force that people to submit."

My 2012 Reading Challenge

Back in 2009, I first read the BBC books challenge. I'm not sure if the one I found was unadulterated, but in any case, it came with this little note that said the BBC said they thought most people had only read 6 out of this list of almost 100 books. I was offended. I'd read 30 of them. I'm using this year to not only finish out their list, just because I'm mad at their pretension, but also add on a couple of books that I've been meaning to read and haven't. The three that I've already blogged about were on that list and here are the remaining challenges for my year:

Great Expectations; Charles Dickens

Catch 22; Joseph Heller

Finish the Complete Works of Shakespeare

Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

Birdsong; Sebastian Faulk

The Time Traveler's Wife; Audrey Niffeneger

Middlemarch; George Eliot

Gone with the Wind; Margaret Mitchell

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Bleak House; Charlie D.

War and Peace; Leo Tolstoy

Brideshead Revisited; Evelyn Waugh

Crime and Punishment; Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Anna Karenina; Leo Tolstoy

David Copperfield; Charlie D.

Emma; Jane Austen

Persuasion, Jane Austen

The King's General; Daphne du Maurier

The Kite Runner; Khaled Hosseini

Captain Correlli's Mandolin; Louis de Bernieres

Memoirs of a Geisha; Arthur Golden

Winnie the Pooh; AA Milne

The Da Vinci Code; Dan Brown

A Prayer for Owen Meany; John Irving

The Woman in White; Wilkie Collins

Far from the Madding Crowd; Thomas Hardy

The Handmaid's Tale; Margaret Atwood

Atonement; Ian McEwan

Life of Pi; Yann Martel

Dune; Frank Herbert

Cold Comfort Farm; Stella Gibbons

A Suitable Boy; Vikram Seth

The Shadow of the Wind; Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime; Mark Haddon

Lolita; Vladimir Nabokov

The Secret History; Donna Tartt

The Count of Monte Cristo (UNABRIDGED); Alexandre Dumas (if I can even find it)

On the Road; Jack Kerouac

Jude the Obscure; Thomas Hardy

Bridget Jones's Diary; Helen Fielding

Midnight's Children; Salman Rushdie

Moby Dick; Herman Melville

Oliver Twist; Charles Dickens

The Secret Garden; Frances Hodgson Burnett

Notes from a Small Island; Bill Bryson

Ulysses; James Joyce

Swallows and Amazons; Arthur Ransome

Vanity Fair; William Makepeace Thackeray

Possession; AS Byatt

A Christmas Carol; Charles Dickens

Cloud Atlas; David Mitchell

The Remains of the Day; Kazuo Ishiguro

A Fine Balance; Rohinton Mistry

The Five People You Meet in Heaven; Mitch Albomy

The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (only have a few to finish)

The Faraway Tree Collection; Enid Blyton

Heart of Darkness; Joseph Conrad

The Wasp Factory; Iain Banks

Watership Down; Richard Adams

A Confederacy of Dunces; John Kennedy Toole

A Town Like Alice; Nevil Shute

Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

Reflections on the Revolution in France; Edmund Burke

1001 Arabian Nights

Hawaii; James Michener

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Robert Louis Stevenson

Don Quixote; Miguel Cervantes

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; Jules Verne

I've never even heard of some of these books. I hope I'm going to be able to find them. And I hope inter-library loan isn't always charging me $3 a book, because our local public library isn't what you would call incredibly well-stocked.

I'm doing War and Peace next. I feel like "doing" is a better word than "reading", in this case, because I'm actively scared of this book. It is massive. It is the longest single book I've ever taken on and so far, in my life, I haven't been a fan of Russian literature. But Patrick promises me this is better than Notes from the Underground and I'm trying not to be intimidated by Leo Tolstoy. I'm also going to try to finish this book before January is over. And at the latest before mid-February. I haven't decided if I'm going to mid-book updates on how I feel about.

I feel so far like I've been really unfair about these books. I've done a lot of the proverbial judging by covers. That's not right. And I'm glad I'm learning my lesson about that.

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

I had this novel in my head as a piece of rabid feminism. I think that's because it was in 10 Things I Hate About You, which I watched far too many times with my brother.

I guess it could be construed that way; it having been published in '71, and the way she goes on about sex and marriage, especially when she's lucid.

I think it's a well-written book. I'm not saying it's going to go into my favorites file, but the beginning is entertaining - the thoughts and actions of the main character college girl seem sort of true to form. What she wants from life and what annoys her, what disheartens her, all the everyday things she does, are understandable. It reads almost like some sort of sitcom.

And then everything changes and you're swept up into this different life and you're sucked into her pain and everything she doesn't understand and her disillusionment and learning why the novel is called the Bell Jar.

It's pretty dang good. But, it is without hope, which is why you won't see it on my bookshelf at home or in my favorites file (which exists in my head, so ... hopefully no one's gonna see that.)

I read this in a night. Less than. I started it at like 5:45 and finished it around 10. And that's with stopping for dinner and long chats with my husband, so if you're curious about it, it's not really a time-consuming read.

The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

I made it my goal to finish this book today; because I knew it was going to disturb me and I didn't really want to prolong the experience.

I was right, too, by the way.

The first thing you have to put aside when you start this book is theology, if you care, which I do. The portrayal of heaven really bothered me at first because it was so based on the individual. But then I remembered this was a work of fiction and it didn't need to conform to reality; God, as I recall, is never mentioned in this entire work of human pain, difficult situations, growing up and letting go.

I'm not prepared to say that it was a bad book, because it wasn't. The characters were really well done. The narration, from the point of a murdered fourteen year old girl, sounded right.

It reminded me of Night Road, in a way, by Kristin Hannah.

I can't understand the depth of pain that encompasses the loss of a child, to violence or otherwise, so I have a really hard time understanding all of the differing reactions. I can only imagine how I would respond to that kind of a tragedy - and I would hope for myself that I would have both of my arms wrapped around God's knees and trusting Him - His plan. So when a story is told about this kind of grief, and God is left out of the picture, I can't understand it.

However. The book was well-written, if incredibly disturbing. I now need to go listen to something else to get parts of it out of my head. But I liked the ending. By the way.

Germinal, Emile Zola

I have an ambitious reading list for 2012. Ambitious is the word Patrick used. But I feel pretty good about having read one book already this year.

I started the year off with this book, Germinal by Emile Zola, because I was dreading it. And in a way, it was terrible. But it was also extremely compelling and interesting.

The action takes place during Napoleon III's reign. It takes place between a series of coal mines and is about the struggle between capitalism, socialism, and anarchism.

I appreciate the author's rather characterization of all three, which is rather objective, and that he seems to stress that no way is right when it goes too far.

One quote I particularly liked was from the main anarchist character to the socialist:

"Can you understand this? A couple of hat-makers at Marseilles have drawn the lucky number in a lottery - a prize of a hundred thousand francs - and straight away they have invested it in annuities, saying they were never going to work any more! Yes, all you French workers have that one idea: you want to dig up a treasure and live on it for evermore in selfish and lazy isolation. You make a great song against the rich, but when fortune gives you some money you haven't the guts to give it back to the poor. You will never deserve to be happy so long as you have personal possessions, and your hatred of the bourgeois simply comes from your mad desire to be bourgeois yourselves in their place!"

It seems like that is still true today. The loudest voices against capitalism are only the most envious.

It's true also that capitalism is wrong when it goes so far as to drive people to starvation and death, only because it can. Exploitation for profit is wrong.

The book is way better than my poor ability to describe it, especially at midnight. Zola gives amazing descriptions of factories and the degeneration of people into animals. I'd recommend it if you are interested in socialist or anarchist ideologies, or want an interesting and slightly challenging read. It does have some pretty horrifying descriptions of death and dying though, so be prepared.

I'm not sure what I'll read next, but Germinal was a great start to 2012.

Rambling

We only get one life. It is composed of these seconds and minutes we race through or cherish. It's really hard. It's difficult for me to work out. I don't want to waste a minute. But what counts as waste, and what counts as something you just have to get done because life isn't just about having fun, but about responsibility. I guess some people would argue that you can't make every second meaningful. And what is meaningful anyways? I love the time I spend sitting next to Patrick while he plays Oblivion and I ask him questions (because I want to figure out my own course of action in the game) and he answers so patiently while he's trying to fight off morts, which stresses me out. Are we wasting time? Maybe. But I just love being with him, and I know playing these games is a way of relaxing for him. And if I can share that relaxation time, I'm there.

I guess part of determining the meaningfulness of a moment is figuring out what your endgame is. Being close to my husband and spending time with him is important to me. Thus our meaningful computer game moments.

But what about in jobs? I sit at this desk all day wondering if what I do counts. Or if I'm working against what I believe. In that case, I should go! But, I don't know where to go next. And part of life is responsibility - and I need to work to stay busy and to help us reach our goals.

Rambling.