The Women's Classic Literature Event Finale Update

I had a very successful year reading classics by women authors. Please click on the links to see my original review of each of the books.

1. The Yearling by Marjorie Rawling (1938)/Jan. 13, 2016

     This book just blew me away. Rawling really wrote a fabulous coming-of-age book about a lonely boy and his pet deer. Of all the books on this list the writing was the most vivid and descriptive. Nearly a year after reading it I can still picture scenes clearly.

2. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)/April 16, 2016

     When I created my original list of books I'd like to read this year I focused first on Pulitzer Prize winners so I could kill two birds with one stone since I am attempting to read as many past Pulitzer winners as I can. The Age of Innocence was the first book written by a woman to win the Pulitzer and it did not disappoint.

3. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)/June 19, 2016

     2016 marks the year I finally read something by Agatha Christie. We actually read this book for my SOTH book club. We had a fun discussion on it, too. One of the gals shared a story how she once purchased enough of the books for her honors class, then ripped out the last chapter from each of the books. The students got to the end of the book and just about died not knowing how it ended up. Of course, those were the days before the Internet. She was teased the students and required a writing assignment before giving them the last chapter to read. What fun. 

4. West With the Night by Beryl Markham (1942)/June 24, 2016

     I became obsessed with Beryl Markham and her writing this past year. I first read a book about her, Circling the Sun, and then two books by her. She describes her life in Kenya and I was just swept up in her prose.

5. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor (1955)/July 7, 2016

     I hadn't done my homework on Flannery O'Connor before I launched into reading her short story collection here. I wasn't prepared for her Southern Gothic style or her racism. But despite this I was captivated by her use of foreshadowing and other literary techniques. I have actually thought about her stories much more than I thought I would after I finished the book.

6. The Splendid Outcome by Beryl Markham (1987)/ July 24, 2016

     This is a collection of eight or nine short stories by Markham. I didn't like them as much as her book West With the Night but a few of them really touched me with their African-ness.

7. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (1937)/ October 23, 2016

     I really struggled to finish Out of Africa by Dinesen. I slogged my way through it finally and then didn't even write a review of it. The first part of it and the last chapters are quite good and touching but the middle bits just did not spark my imagination. I'm afraid I went to the well one too many times on my Africa phase. What I find so interesting is how famous this book and Karen Blixen's story are yet West With the Night, set at exactly the same time in Kenya, is by far the superior book.

8. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868)/ November 27, 2016

     It isn't always advised to reread books one loved as a child. Rereading Little Women provided case in point. What I fondly remembered from my childhood seemed to lose a bit luster on the reread plus most of the moralism and piety just irritated me. 

Should I stick with all women classics again in 2017 or should I add back in the option of reading any classic authored by both men and women?

Little Women...a retrospective

As a young girl I adored Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. I must have been in 5th or 6th grade when I read it. I remember laying on my bed with book in hand dreaming of the life that the March sisters led, pining for a time I would never know. I loved Jo the most. I wanted to be Jo, so sure of herself and so talented, yet fun-loving, independent, and strong. If I was Jo then I thought of my older sister Kathy, as Meg. She was much better looking than me and more feminine, like Meg. My younger sister, Grace, had to be Amy, and in a way she is. Grace is very creative (we could call it artistic) and she does have blonde hair just like Amy. There was no Beth in our family, but that was fine with me since Beth dies and I didn't want anyone in my family to die. My brother, Tony, could be Lawrence (Teddy). He was always willing to play with his sisters if there were no male playmates around and he and I always had good romps when we played in the swimming pool or outdoors. We weren't a perfect match for the March family but if we scrunched we could sort of fit into the slots provided by these literary characters.

With these happy memories to look back on I was thrilled when Little Women was selected as my Classics Club Spin book. Surely a book I loved so much as child should warm my heart as an adult. In fact, I couldn't remember if I had read the unabridged or abridged version of the book first time around so I looked forward to reading the whole unabridged book this time around, all 500+ pages of it. I checked out the library copy of the book and I also cued up the audiobook on my computer. Last summer I got a free download from SYNC and I hadn't listened to any of it yet. First glitch, I couldn't figure out how to transfer the file from my computer to my iPod. Bummer, that meant if I wanted to listen to it I was tethered to my computer. Reading the print version was an option but I already had three (or was it four) books I needed to finish for book club and other projects. All of this I tell you just to make the point that I got off to a rough and a late start.

Right from the epigraph I knew that my childhood memory of the book wasn't going to hold up.

Go then, my little Book, and show to all/That entertain and bid thee welcome shall, /What thou dost keep close shut up in thy breast; /And wish what thou dost show them may be blest/To them for good, may make them choose to be/ Pilgrims better, by far, than thee or me./ Tell them of Mercy; she is one/Who early hath her pilgrimage begun./ Yea, let young damsels learn of her to prize/The world which is to come, and so be wise;/ For little tripping maids may follow God/ Along the ways which saintly feet have trod. 

Apparently Louisa May Alcott was making a point right from the start that all the work-a-day stories in the book about the sisters were not nearly as important as the religious messages she would be delivering therein (Shmoop). And to say there is a preaching tone to the book is stating it mildly. As a child I missed all the literary allusions to Pilgrims Progress and knew nothing about the Transcendentalists ideals. As an adult I felt clobbered over the head by them.

With these thoughts in mind I wonder what is it that makes Little Women so special? Why is it even considered a classic? After consulting Shmoop I found a few answers to my query. It is consider the classic book for girls. Why? Probably because every girl whoever reads it does exactly what I did as a child---fit, or tries to fit, her family into the pages of the book. We all know people exact like Jo, and Meg, and Amy.  We may even know a few sweet Beths. We all wish we had mothers like Marmee and families who lived up to their ideals even if it means they forgo earthly riches. We want friends like Laurie and opportunities for creative pursuits.

The first 23 chapters of Little Women were published in 1868 and it is largely accepted that these chapters were based on Louisa May Alcott's life. These chapters seem so real because they probably were quite true. The second half of the book, chapters 24-47, were originally published a year later in 1869 in a book called Good Wives. The reading public demanded that Alcott continue the story of the four sisters into adulthood. Everyone wanted to know if Jo and Laurie would end up together. "Without her own life experiences, the second part of the novel may feel less realistic. However, no amount of fan-mail could force Alcott to marry off the two main characters in the way her readers expected" (Shmoop).

In addition to being the quintessential girl book, it holds up well to the scrutiny of English teachers over the ages with all kinds of themes, literary allusions, and literary spin-offs. I pity the poor boy who ever had to study this book in class, though I dare say it is unlikely to happen in this generation. High School English teachers no longer have the luxury to teach long books and students, with a few rare exceptions, are unlikely to select them for their own enjoyment.

In a funny coincidence, the day I finished Little Women this week I opened up Google to find this picture as their Google Doodle of the day, since it was Louisa May Alcott's 184th birthday.

Google Doodle from Nov. 29, 2016

Am I glad I read Little Women again even though it didn't 'wow' me the way it did when I was a kid? YES. Will I read it again? UNLIKELY. Will I recommend it to readers of the future? YOU BET. It holds a special place in American Literature and always will. "Aside from moral lessons, historical significance, and the sheer enjoyment of reading, Alcott's novel includes a well-drawn cast of characters that are still familiar to us (Shmoop). Hopefully these characters will be our friends for life.

Source:

Shmoop Editorial Team. "Little Women." Shmoop. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 1   Dec. 2016.

Splendid Outcast: Beryl Markham's African Stories

As you know, if you are a faithful reader of this blog (does such a person exist? I don't actually know.) Anyway, if you have read my blog infrequently over the past several months, you should have noted that I have been on an African kick. It started with Circling the Sun by Paula McLain, which led to West With the Night by Beryl Markham, a look at Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (the movie and a bit of the book) and finally to The Splendid Outcast, African Stories also by Markham.

The Splendid Outcast was published in 1987, after Markham had died. Each short story highlights events that Markham either experienced herself or she drew from her own experiences and just made them into a fictional account. Markham's biographer, Mary S. Lovell, commented before each story with information about what was happening in Markham's life at the time the story was written, where it was originally published, and if the story was drawn from Markham's own life how the facts were altered. I found these editorial comments very helpful. In addition, Lovell wrote a lengthy introduction to the collection which I also found insightful and helpful in understanding Markham. Even though Markham wrote West With the Night about her own experiences growing up in Kenya, becoming first a horse trainer and then an aviator, she didn't give us many details about her personal life. Lovell fills in a few blanks here. Among the most interesting to me was Lovell's assurance that Markham did indeed pen West With the Night, not her third husband, as some scholars believe.

The Splendid Outcast is a collection of eight short stories, four of them were written in the 1940s by Markham with editing help from her husband. Her best stories are about horses and horse racing. Three of the stories were probably written by her husband but with material he had gleaned from Markham. The quality and descriptions were quite different that the other five stories, not really as good. The last story, "The Quitter" was written by Markham herself without editing help from her husband. It was published in 1946 and may have been written for purely financial reasons. It, too, wasn't as good as the first four stories in the collection. Apparently Markham and her husband, Raoul Schumacher, made a good writing team, and when one or the other wasn't involved the effort fell a bit short.

My favorite story in the collection is "The Captain and His Horse". In the story, which I think is actually true, Beryl is allowed to ride a captain's horse, Baron, out with the hunting party. Beryl was quite young. The Baron is so smart it is easy to assign human intelligence to him. In fact, because of Baron's quick intelligence and action Beryl is saved from sure death. Here is a quote from this story, a brief descriptive paragraph about the colors of Africa which I think is simply spectacular,

"To say that it was a clear day is to say almost nothing of that country. Most of its days were clear as the voices of the birds that unfailingly coaxed each dawn away from the night. The days were clear and many-colored. You could sit in your saddle and look at the huge mountains and at the river valleys, green, and aimless as fallen threads on a counterpane---and you could not count the colors or know them, because some were nameless. Some colors you never saw again, because each day the light was different, and often the colors you saw yesterday never came back."

Oh man, that quote just gives me shivers it is so lovely. I wish I had the ability to write as well as Markham so when I see that special sunset, or the light dappled through the leaves, or the animal squinting in the sun, I could capture the moment with such beautiful prose.

I don't know how easy this book is to find. I found a copy at a used bookstore in a neighboring town. Check your public library, perhaps they have a copy you could borrow.

My rating, a 4, is because of the inconsistent quality of the writing. I liked all the stories but I loved the writing on only the first four.

Source: print, I purchased the book.

A 2016 year-long challenge to read classic literature by women authors.

A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor

One of the best things about reviewing a classic book like A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor is that it really isn't necessary to review review it, since the novel, or in this case, the collection of short stories, has already been reviewed by scads of people, most of them much more knowledgeable than me. So I am left with the fun job of giving my impression of the writing or the author and reporting a few tidbits of information you may have missed about the author or the time period in which she wrote.

In her short lifetime, thirty-nine years, Flannery O'Connor, only published two novels and several dozen short stories. Yet, she has been revered for her writing skills ever since. Her writing style is known as Southern Gothic, "a style rooted firmly in the American South that emphasizes the grotesque, the horrifying, and the-just-plain-wrong. In the Southern Gothic tradition, it's impossible to look away from life's horrors"(Shmoop). As one reads her stories it is hard to miss the foreshadowing but the reader will probably also notice a feeling of  foreboding. One is told something awful is going to happen and then the whole story evolves into one horrifying mess, little by little. It is a little like watching a movie and when the music gives off this creepy vibe the audience is warned to beware.

The title story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the opening line sets the stage for bad things to come: "The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida." And she tries to talk her family out of going by telling them she heard that the Misfit has escaped from prison in Florida. What are the chances of that deterring her family from taking the trip? None. Now here is what makes O'Connor so brilliant, according to the author of The Art of X-Ray Reading, she plants dragon's teeth along the way. In other words consider, "a dragon's tooth as a seed---detail, dialogue, place name--- that will sprout into something significant later in the story. When you see a sign for a town named Toombsboro, the author has planted a dragon's tooth" (Clark 79). The seventeen pages of the opening story are full of dragon's teeth right up to the horrifying conclusion, which, by the way, the reader is prepared for thanks to the hints along the way...and you guessed it, Misfit is part of the ending.

Another story in the collection, "Good Country People" is

as hilarious as the first is horrifying. But other elements are familiar: the culture of the southern countryside, the authentic feel for rural speech patterns, the interesting blend among characters of familiar and bizarre. The channels may be different, but the voices sound as if they are coming through the same radio (Clark 85).

Story titles are helpful little dragon's teeth, too. O'Connor gives her readers little clues to assemble as the story is read. "Ah, here it the title," the reader may exclaim to herself when she finds in the text. In several of the stories the phrase that makes up the title is repeated over and over as in the stories "Good Country People" and "The Displaced Person." It was fun uncovering the titles, especially those which provided clues for the remainder of the story.

No wonder Flannery O'Connor's stories have been read and dissected by so many schoolchildren and college students over the years, they are so rich with symbolism, foreshadowing, and other literary devices. I am guessing that the use of her stories has fallen off in recent years, however, because of her frequent and often disparaging use of the N-word. I get it that she lived in the South prior to the Civil Rights Movement, but that doesn't make repeated use of the term any less egregious. Readers beware.

Flannery O'Connor was a Roman Catholic. She "was at heart a Christian writer, and all of her stories were in one way or another related to the life of Christ. Their religious themes could be difficult for the average reader to spot (Shmoop). In her own writings in Mystery and Manners, O'Connor said, "The universe of the Catholic fiction writer is one that is founded on the theological truths of the Faith, but particularly on three of them which are basic -- the Fall, the Redemption, and the Judgment" (185). Now I am not sure I saw too much redemption in her ten stories in this book, but I sure noticed a lot of falling and judgment.

All in all I am glad for a chance to read this author and a book that is considered one of the 75 best books of the past 75 years. But I am with TS Eliot who was "quite horrified by her stories." Even though, I still want to read more of them in the future.

Works Cited:

Clark, Roy Peter. The Art of X-Ray Reading. New York: Little, Brown and Company. 2016. Print.

O'Connor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt and Brace. 1984. Print.

O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961. Web.

Shmoop Editorial Team. "Flannery O'Connor: Biography. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 10 Jul. 2016.

Spin selection book

Read a classics book, if for no other reason than you will feel good about yourself when you are done!

West With the Night by Beryl Markham, a classic if I've ever read one.

Last  month my book club's selection was Circling the Sun by Paula McLain, It is a novelized memoir of Beryl Markham's life. After finishing that book my attention immediately shifted to the original, West With the Night by Markham herself. The book was published in 1942, and though it got good reviews it fell into almost immediate obscurity. I think the timing wasn't good with a war on and all.  It would have remained out-of-print and little known but in 1983 some papers of Ernest Hemingway were found by his son. In them Hemingway praised Markham's book and her writing to his publisher Max Perkins,

…As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer…she can write rings around us all… The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people’s stories, are absolutely true… I wish you would get it and read it because it is a really a bloody wonderful book.

Markham was still alive living in poverty in Kenya in 1983 and the re-publication of her masterpiece allowed her to a live out her life in comfort.

Unlike most other memoirs I've read, West With the Night reads much more like an adventure novel, or a travel journal, or a collection of short stories not necessarily presented in chronological order. Markham was born in England in the early 1900s and moved to British East Africa (before Kenya was Kenya) with her father in 1903 as a colonist. He was a farmer, a businessman, a horse trainer. She was a wild thing who wanted more than anything to be a warrior, went a boar hunt which nearly killed her favorite dog,  and was "moderately eaten" by a pet lion. Each chapter represents a memory of Markham's life in Africa, or as a horse trainer herself, or as an aviator once she learned to fly. My favorites were the Africa stories.

“There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa -- and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely to be haughtily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa. ... Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.

Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home.” 

If a hunter goes on a safari in Africa he/she only knows that part of of the continent's story. If missionaries go to Africa to win souls, will they really experience the soul of the land? Markham would argue that few people outside of Africans themselves would ever know and understand this incredible land because they come to it with ulterior motives.

We know, or think we know, quite a bit about Markham's contemporaries: the Baron Bror von Blixen and his wife Karen and their friend, Denys Finch-Hatton because of the famous book and film, Out of Africa. Though Beryl had an affair with Finch-Hatton, she only talks about him a little in this book and only about his flying and his death.

“Denys (Finch-Hatton) has been written about before and he will be written about again. If someone has not already said it, someone will say that he was a great man who never achieved greatness, and this will not only be trite, but wrong; he was a great man who never achieved arrogance.”

She writes more about her friendship with Bror von Blixen because she becomes a pilot spotter for his elephant safari business. The chapters about elephant hunting where they worked together were the most difficult of all to read because, of course, elephants are now endangered and no one should be hunting or killing them. But I had to remind myself continually that Beryl and the Baron were doing this in the 1930s before people understood the fragility of the animal kingdom in the face of human incursions.

The title of the book West With the Night was in reference to Markham's remarkable flight from England to New York, via Nova Scotia in 1936, the first female to make this solo flight across the ocean, she said she was almost continually flying with the night.

Unlike Circling the Sun, readers will learn nothing from this book about Markham's love life, her husbands, or about her son, who lived in England with his father. So really the book isn't about Beryl Markham it is really about three things: horse training, flying, and Africa itself. Markham is just the story-teller.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that there are quite a few scholars who believe that Markham didn't actually pen this book. They believe that it was ghost written by her third husband, Raoul Schumacher. I was asked by other book club members if it bothered me if indeed it wasn't written by Markham. After a brief pause I decided it didn't. The book is exquisitely written and the stories belong to Markham. Markham's biographer, Mary Lovell, asked Markham about the controversy because she had always maintained that she was the sole author of her book.

Beryl herself was totally unconcerned about the theory that she had not written the book. When I discussed the subject with her, she dismissed it, 'Oh, that darn thing again?" Asked how she answered her detractors, she shrugged and said, 'I don't bother...' (Lovell, 1987)

That settles it for me.  Just because someone doesn't have a lot of formal education doesn't mean they are stupid. Shakespeare is a case in point.  Markham also wrote a few short stories, published in a book called  The Splendid Outcast which adds to the proof, in my mind anyway, that the gal could write.

Markham mused on the first line of the book, “How is it possible to bring order out of memory?”  West With the Night is her attempt to do just that. And for her memories I am grateful because now I too can travel to Kenya through the beautiful words on a page and live with her as she recalls a few precious memories of a time gone by.

Source: half and half: Print edition checked out from a school library in my district; Audio edition checked out from the public library.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

West With the Night fulfills another selection from the Women's Classic Literature event.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie's famous mystery novel, And Then There Were None, spins around the verses of the disturbing poem, "Ten Little Soldiers."

Ten strangers are lured to a mansion on a island off the coast of Devon by U.N. Owen. As they dine together the first evening a record begins to play with the voice of their unseen host accusing them all of a deadly secret which caused the death of someone else. Within a few hours the first guest is dead. He chokes to death from cyanide poisoning. Soon the guests figure out their likely murderer is among them. But who is it?

And Then There Were None is Agatha Christie's most popular novel. It was published in 1939. In 2015 it was voted as the favorite Christie novel in a worldwide survey to commemorate her 125th anniversary. It also is the best selling crime novel of all time. (Christie webpage.) And it is the very first Agatha Christie novel I've ever read. Can you believe it?

Last week my family and I listened to the audiobook of And Then There Were None as we traveled to Oregon for a family reunion. Even though the book has been made into numerous movies and spoofs, none of us knew how it worked out and became thoroughly engrossed in the mystery. When we got home from our trip we still had an hour of the story left, so we sat in the family room listening to the conclusion together.

Agatha Christie said it is was a very difficult book to write but the idea of basing a novel on the "Ten Little Soldiers" poem really fascinated her. (Christie)  No matter how difficult is was to write she did it masterfully. What a chilling and perplexing mystery. I highly recommend it. We are reading this book for next month's book club. Betty, a retired teacher, told me she taught this book years ago but before she gave the students their copy of the novel she removed the last chapter of the book so the children wouldn't know who the murderer was before she was ready for them to know. They anxiously awaited the last section which she gave them after a few writing assignments on who they thought did it.  Obviously, she gave this assignment in the days before the Internet, but what a fun assignment.

Now I am off to see if I can locate the BBC series (Dec. 2015) of "And Then There Were None" and the Family Guy spoof, "And Then There Were Fewer" (2010).

Source: Audiobook made available on Hoopla by the Pierce County Library system.