To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Harper Lee wrote one novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and it won the Pulitzer prize in 1961. Its themes still resonate with readers and her novel has become a part of our culture. That, I believe, is success.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee almost perfectly captures the main challenge of growing up: realizing human nature, both good and bad.

(I say “almost” perfect because I am sure there are faults in the novel, but I love this novel so much that I don’t want to search for them.) Continue reading »

Stiff by Mary Roach: A Change Your Life (or Rather, Death) Book

One Saturday, my husband laughed out loud while listening to something on his headphones.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

” ‘Maggots’ is an ugly word; she’s using ‘haciendas’ instead!”

My husband doesn’t normally laugh out loud while listening to audiobooks. This was new. After a bit more coaxing, I found that he was listening to Stiff by Mary Roach, which I had wanted to read, until he started talking about maggots.

“It’s about cadavers,” he said.

I was disgusted. I couldn’t read that!

Later, I entered the kitchen, where he was listening without headphones. (Yes, in the kitchen.) The narrator now discussed shooting cadavers with bullets.

“That’s disgusting!” I said, reaching for my lunch. “I won’t be giving my body to science!”

“Well, you better believe I will be!” he responded.

This shocked me. I stammered out an objection, and he reiterated his wishes. And yet, despite my disgust, I couldn’t put in words why I would want to see him dead in the casket. (We’ve been married for only two years, and maybe just the thought of him dead was most disturbing.)

He told me I couldn’t say no to medical research, organ donation, or human dissection until I knew what would happened, be it decay, cremation, or the other things.

Enter Stiff:The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. Yes, I gave in: I listened to it too. It stops being nauseating fairly quickly; you get used to it. And after listening to this (wonderfully narrated by Shelly Frasier) audiobook, I’ve been converted:

Please, don’t bury me! There are too many other, cooler things that could happen to my body after I die! Continue reading »

The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

In The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester delves into two contrasting yet similar personalities who helped to create the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). One is the professor, Dr. James Murray, a prolific scholar who undertakes the daunting task of creating a comprehensive dictionary; the other is a madman, Dr. William C. Minor, a schizophrenic American residing in England at an insane asylum for criminals and reading prolifically to find the words so needed for the dictionary.

The Professor and the Madman is not primarily about the making of the dictionary. (For a comprehensive history of the Oxford English Dictionary’s genesis and early creation, I would suggest The Meaning of Everything, also by Simon Winchester, which I also enjoyed.) Rather, The Professor and the Madman is a dual-biography of two odd characters, how they came together, and how they were different. While Winchester argues that the story has two protagonists, I felt that William C. Minor was the actual protagonist of this story. This was his story: how, despite madness, he could be of inestimable use to the makers of the dictionary. Continue reading »

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Mirth, noun: gladness or gaiety as shown by or accompanied with laughter

If you are looking for “mirth,” The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton is not the book for you. The House of Mirth is about a woman searching for happiness where true happiness will not to be found: through money and a life of materialism. While I did not enjoy reading The House of Mirth as much as I enjoyed reading Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, I did like Lily Bart and I sympathized with the frustrations she felt as a single woman in the repressed early 1900s New York City. Continue reading »

Blogging Awards

Eva at A Striped Armchair awarded me a “Blog Award of Excellence” for the physical appearance of my blog. I’m so honored: I feel like such a new blogger compared to everyone else. Then Alessandra gave me the Brillante Blogging Award and I feel doubly honored. Alessandra says that I pose “intelligent, thought-provoking questions.” I feel like I’ve barely blogged about books lately, but that’s because I’ve been reading! A book review tomorrow, I promise.

Eva awarded me a long time ago in blogging years, and I’ve been putting off passing it on because it is hard to do! Now that Alessandra awarded me too, I can’t put it off. Continue reading »

Bookworms Carnival: Relationships

The July Bookworms Carnival is up at Mixed Metaphor. This month, it is about relationships. Jenn gives us a rundown of a number of books reviewed about relationships.

I submitted my post about The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, which discusses the relationship between husband and wife in the late 1800s in New York City. I loved this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Other books I’ve reviewed relating to relationships:

• The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman (memoi; father-son relationship, in the midst of learning the father’s Holocaust experience)
• Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (short stories; individuals’ lack of relationships, i.e., their isolation)
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (novel; sisters)
• March by Geraldine Brooks (novel; parent and husband)
• Personal History by Katharine Graham (autobiography; wife to mentally ill man)

Trying to list works I’ve reviewed about relationships is hard; I’ve read so many more books, but I’ve only been reviewing online for a few months. I’ll get more books reviewed as time goes by!

Go check out the carnival for other relationship books.

Survey Says…

Thanks for voting in my survey! With 13 voters, 7 use LibraryThing, 5 use Shelfari, 2 use Goodreads, and 1 use no online library catalog tool. (Voters could choose more than one answer.) Continue reading »

Literature in Translation

Chekhov’s stories (which I reviewed yesterday) are available free in the public domain via Project Gutenberg, although the translation is different from the one I read. I loved the translation I read! Compare these to passages from “The House with the Mezzanine: An Artist’s Story” to the Project Gutenberg translation. Is there a “better” translation? I think there is. Continue reading »

Stories by Anton Chekhov

I loved reading Chekhov’s stories. I read a volume of them, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, as well as “The Kiss,” which was recommended by Bloom and unfortunately wasn’t included in the volume translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky.

My favorite stories tended to be the shorter ones that focused on one character or one couple. They each had a sad, poignant ending, and yet I loved the beauty in them. Chekhov didn’t try to say too much in each story, and I finished each one with a sigh, wanting to let my emotions simmer before I went on to the next story. Many of them reminded me that life is challenging and full of depressing things, and yet we all still go on day by day. Explaining Chekhov in those words makes his stories sound depressing, and they were in a sense, but overall, they were beautiful at the same time. Continue reading »

LibraryThing versus Shelfari versus ?

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