Books, End of May

It's been another three months and I've continued reading, with this time around including books I never thought I'd read.  Here's the list and the year in which I'd last read the book.

Call of the Wild, Jack London — 2002

The Commodore, C.S. Forester — 2020

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway — 1991

Firestarter, Stephen King — 1995

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott — never

Night without End, Alistair MacLean — 1985

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen — never

Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein — 2019

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson — never

Only nine books, which seems like I'm slowing down.  I'll be honest; Little Women was a slog.  18 hours long by audiobook, it took me all of April to read it, this after slicing through six books through March.  I appreciate why it appeals; I personally feel it invents the genre of both legitimate modern Christian literature and every sort of magazine story from the Saturday Evening Post through Reader's Digest.  But its just schmaltz from end to end.  I appreciate that the characters become real after a time, that they feel real, that their goals and identities acquire a solidity that many writers I've read simply cannot achieve.  Hemingway wishes he could make characters this strong.

But gawd, what insipid, cloying, miserable little cretinous self-righteous toad stools they are.  It's a whole book of fucking Mrs. Grundy, the book to read if we're ready to explore a world where the end goal is putting the ghosts of our companions into a silver picture frame and crying about them whenever we see their dear little harpsichord, the one they loved so much, standing in the corner, newly dusted every Tuesday in memory of sweet little Beth.  Gag.  Makes me want to get drunk, in a strip club, before going home and fucking a drag queen.  Sorry.  I'm just way too, um, sinful to read a book like this.

Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand, I loved.  I absolutely loved.  I have not read a new story so well constructed, so smashingly built, so piercingly conceptual, in more than a decade.  Absolutely wonderful.  And for none of the reasons that certain kinds of women seem to love it.  Not long after reading it, I stumbled into that piece of shit miniseries (youtube located it for me, because my phone could hear that I was reading the book) with Gemma Arterton, Lost in Austen, which was plainly written by someone who had not read the book.  Not long after, I was shoved into that absolutely crap Hugh Grant and Marisa Tomei movie, The Rewrite, where Alison Janney acts with a stick up her ass while she preaches all about Jane Austen — plainly has NOT read the fucking book.  These last three months (read Pride and Prejudice in the first week of March, positively gobbled the book whole) I have been rankled with spastic, idiotic platitude-like ramblings from actual women and characters about the "female liberalism" of Elizabeth, and between laughing my head off and pounding said head on the table, I dare someone to point out one line that clearly would not have been stated by any well-bred woman in the era, as something a well-bred woman would be expected to say at that time.

Apparently women today think women in the early 19th century were the equivalent of burka-wearing 19th century arabs.  A little history, people.  Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, ffs.  In 1819.  While sharing a house alone with two of her male lovers, way, way, way far from family and the clergy.  And was not burned at the stake.  Austen was not writing in the 15th century.

But, the book.  Genius.  Pure genius.  Hard to explain why.  Characters able to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time.  Characters committing wrongs, without being wrong.  Oh, Wickham and Lydia were doofs, but the balance of the main characters being both prideful AND prejudiced (and no, one character did not represent one while another represented the other — there's some English lit professor bullshit for you), and how smashingly that ended with both being deliciously humiliated and forthcoming and open-minded all at the same time ... oh, the world should make this much sense.

That moment when Elizabeth realises she totally fucked up.  Wow.

Jekyll and Hyde disappointed but, eh, was clever enough.  I got a lot more out of a Farewell to Arms, being older, and could accept the ending much better this time around.  A lot of my memories of the book were out of order, which I suppose makes sense.  I had read the Call of the Wild aloud to Tamara soon after we returned to Canada; she'd never even heard of the book.  Sad to say, it can never be made into a movie, first because it's about the dog, not the man, and second ... the world has decided to believe the wild is a beautiful, Rousseauian place, where nothing very bad needs to take place, ever.  The sheer murderousness of this book can never be presented to a general audience of this present day.  More's the pity.

Firestarter I last read when I was working catering at the university, which is why I know when that was.  I can't seem to leave the Hornblower books alone; I find myself re-reading them.  I could write ten posts about Starship Troopers, but what would be the point?  There are certain books that have emerged into our culture as things that are talked about but never, ever, read.  Every time I meet someone bitching and moaning about the Fountainhead, I ask a very simply question about a prominent, major character of the book and get the answer, "I don't remember him."

Hint: it's the prominent, deeply destructive character that manipulates everything beginning about half the way through the book, whom no one discussing the book ever, ever mentions by name.  I assume because none of them have gotten that far when reading it.

But Starship Troopers ... I have to keep going back to it, because it grounds me.  And I'm not a nazi, I've never been in the military, I'm deeply red liberal (in Canada, where the colours make sense) and socialist.  So, headscratch your way out of that one.

Finally, Night without End.  I don't know if I'm going to read another Alistair MacLean.  I remember that I'd liked the book, but this time around, no, not really.  It reminds me of why I don't like a whodunnit, which the book is.  Combined with one of those action stories where no matter how often the character succeeds, something always goes wrong. Sort of like the last page of the book, the Princess Bride.  Gets tiresome.  Like the writer's thinking, "What can I break next?  I ought to make something break here."  All the while, writing pages and pages of, "It might be Bob.  Or it could be Dave.  Or maybe it's Fred.  'Course, can't discount Janet."  And so the character ponders and ponders, and the book gets larger and larger, until pretty much anyone could have done it, and I just don't care any more.

Anyway, reading an omnibus of Conan stories now.  I'll have more to say about those three months from now.