Dana Swier Huff's Blog, page 66
July 12, 2011
Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Authors I'd DIE to Meet
"Dying" is a little extreme, but there are a lot of of writers I would love to meet.
William Shakespeare: I have so many questions. First, I want to know what he thinks of the literary reputation he has. I would also love to put paid to all those anti-Stratfordian conspiracy theories once and for all (and no, don't bother commenting on this post if you are one—I cannot be convinced). I would also like to know why he went to London and became an actor. I have a million questions!
Jane Austen: I would love to have tea with her. I am really curious what she would make of her current literary status. I think she would be completely baffled—I actually had a lot of fun imagining just such a scenario. I would just love to sit and talk with her.
J. K. Rowling: Her superstar status makes me more likely to meet Shakespeare in this lifetime. Well, at at any rate, her books are some of my favorites, and I would love to talk with her about the characters and find out all kinds of secrets of the HP World that never made their way into the books. I hope Pottermore will have a lot of that.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: I want to ask him about his writing process. I have heard he was a dogged reviser. I know he helped Hemingway make The Sun Also Rises better through some astute editing. I would also like to ask him about all those folks in Paris and what it was like to write in Hollywood. I have so many questions about Gatsby, too.
Oscar Wilde: I mean, he's bound to be entertaining and hilarious, right? I would love to just chat with him. Though I liked his writing (what I've read, that is), I'm more interested in Wilde as a personality.
Mark Twain: Ditto for Wilde, except I truly do love Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . I would love to discuss what he thinks of the controversy surrounding that novel. I want to hear him go off on the new bowdlerized edition.
J. R. R. Tolkien: I have a million questions about Middle Earth. I would love to hear all about how he constructed such a well-developed fantasy world. It seems like such a huge undertaking.
The Brontë sisters: Yes, it's cheating to combine them, but to be fair, I would probably have to meet all of them if I were to go visit Haworth, right? I'd love to chat with them about their writing, how they help each other and work together, and just their family story.
Byron, Shelley, and Keats: I already met them for tea in a dream, so again, even though it's cheating to include all three of them, I'd like to see if they're at all like they were in my dream.
Joseph Campbell: He has such an understanding of why we tell stories, and I would love to just listen to him talk about them. I especially want to pick his brain about Harry Potter. I have often said to students in my Hero with a Thousand Faces classes that it's a pity Campbell died before those books were published because he would have loved them.
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Post © Dana Huff
Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Authors I'd DIE to Meet
July 11, 2011
The Wild Rose, Jennifer Donnelly
The third and final book in Jennifer Donnelly's "Rose" trilogy, The Wild Rose follows the story of Seamus Finnegan, younger brother of Fiona (focus of The Tea Rose) and Charlie/Sid (focus of The Winter Rose), and Willa Alden, Seamie's childhood friend, climbing partner, and soulmate. In The Winter Rose, Willa lost her leg while climbing Kilimanjaro with Seamie, and the accident tore them apart. The Wild Rose begins as Willa has relocated to Tibet, living in the shadow of Everest, taking pictures for a planned book about the mountain, and guiding other mountaineers for money. Seamie, meanwhile, meets a young teacher named Jennie Wilcott and marries her, trying to forget about Willa. Donnelly's familiar cast of characters all make an appearance: Fiona is now a suffragette and Joe has continued serving as MP. Their fierce daughter Katie has started a newspaper and has set her sights on a career in politics. Charlie/Sid and India have settled in Point Reyes, California, but return to England after the mysterious death of India's sister, Maud. Meanwhile, Max von Brandt, a German spy in love with Willa and rubbing shoulders with the likes of gangster Billy Madden, makes trouble for everyone. Donnelly's characters tramp all over the globe—Willa becomes part of T. E. Lawrence's party in Arabia, while Seamie joins up with the navy when World War I begins.
This novel was much more Indiana Jones than your typical "romance." Willa is hardly slowed down by having only one leg. She's a difficult heroine—she can be selfish, and she nurses a drug addiction for most of the novel. At the same time, she's fearless and dashingly brave. I quite liked Seamie's wife Jennie, and I felt she certainly had the short end of the stick, as Seamie would never be able to love her as he had loved Willa, and frankly, she deserved much better. The new villain, Max von Brandt is much more layered and complicated (as all Donnelly's characters are) in this novel.
The whole series is epic in scope and spans over 30 years. I think just about every historical event that occurs during the time period of this book (1913-1919) touches the Finnegan family. They experience World War I, the Spanish flu, and Lawrence of Arabia—and that's just in this book, so I'm not sure what else Donnelly could have thrown at them. Like its predecessors, this book is eminently readable, but not without its problems. I did catch some continuity errors (Joe's age near the end of the novel, for instance), but those may be corrected in the final publication, as I read a galley copy. Like its predecessors, The Wild Rose is just a really big book. So much happens, and the story threatens to become unwieldy at times. Donnelly does a better job keeping it all together in this book than in the other two, and even with the outlandish events that take place in this novel, it somehow seems more plausible than the others, perhaps because the characters are much more "gray" than black or white. Willa is a more interesting heroine than India. I can't say I liked her as much as I liked Fiona, but she's complex. The series is definitely worth a read. It certainly kept me turning the pages and staying up way too late to find out how the characters would emerge from the latest trap they'd fallen into. I definitely think romantic historical fiction fans would love this series, and I would recommend it for fans of Diana Gabaldon or The Thorn Birds.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Full disclosure: I received a free galley copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. The Wild Rose is available in stores on August 2, 2011.
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Post © Dana Huff
The Wild Rose, Jennifer Donnelly
Musing Mondays—July 11, 2011
Do you think it makes you NOT (or less) "well-read" if there are certain genres that you won't read because you KNOW you won't enjoy them? Why?
This is an interesting question, and I don't have a clear answer to it. I'll try to illustrate through some examples instead. I haven't been a fan of the Russian classic literature I've read so far. I have really tried. Despite liking the movie Doctor Zhivago, I found I couldn't get into the book. I had to slog through both One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Crime and Punishment. Folks rave over these books. They do! And they must have a reason. I feel less well-read because I can't bring myself to try more Dostoyevsky and I'm afraid to even begin with Tolstoy.
On the other hand, I also think it's much more important to read books you like. I have said many times that life's too short to read bad books. I came to the conclusion some time ago that I had to read for me, not to satisfy some arbitrary definition of "well-read." After all, what does that really mean? Some folks would define it as reading a certain number of "classics," while others would define it as reading a certain number of books. Still others would say it's reading broadly, including a variety of genres, as well as reading a large number of books.
I think I have reached a place where I am happy with the amount I read and with what I read. I would consider myself well-read by my own definition, which includes having read a fair number of books in the classic canon as well as a fairly large number of books in general. But that's just my own definition. I may not be well-read by yours, especially since I have so much trouble with the Russians. Either way, I am satisfied with what I've read and how much I've read. I think it's much more important to seek out books I know I will enjoy rather than worry that other folks don't think I'm reading widely enough. After all, it's not my job to critique books, and even if it were, I have a hunch that most reviewers tend to specialize in genres anyway—at least somewhat. Reading is my favorite hobby, and it has given me a great deal of joy and pleasure. Why make it another chore by worry about whether I'm "well-read" enough, whatever that even means?
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Post © Dana Huff
Musing Mondays—July 11, 2011
July 8, 2011
The Winter Rose, Jennifer Donnelly
Jennifer Donnelly's novel The Winter Rose, the second in her "Rose" trilogy, is a sprawling story, but I'll do my best to summarize it. Most of the story focuses on India Selwyn Jones, sister to Maud Selwyn Jones, a minor character introduced in The Tea Rose. Oddly enough, without divulging spoilers, people who ought to have remembered Maud and made some connections, didn't. India is a doctor with dreams of opening a free clinic for women and children in Whitechapel. She begins working for an established doctor, but it becomes clear to her that she cannot work for him long due to his antiquated methods of practicing medicine that India knows have harmed and even killed his patients. Meanwhile, she becomes entangled with notorious gangster Sid Malone, who unbeknownst to most of the cast, is the brother of tea magnate Fiona Finnegan Bristow. Fiona is desperate to make contact with Sid, whose real name is Charlie Finnegan, and convince him to leave his life of crime. India is engaged to be married to MP Freddie Lytton—a bigger cad probably never drew breath. Freddie is only interested in India's large inheritance. India and Sid fall in love, but they are kept apart through Freddie's machinations. A large subplot of the novel involves the Finnegans' youngest brother, Seamie, and his friend Willa Alden, who travel to Africa, where the book's long dénoument takes place, to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. Willa suffers a horrible accident, and her budding romance with Seamie is left unresolved (because it is the focus of The Wild Rose).
Whew!
There is a lot going on in this book. I did enjoy it, but perhaps not as much as The Tea Rose. I think it was because I didn't like India as a heroine a whole lot. I couldn't figure out Sid's attraction to her. One thing I do need to single out for praise is Donnelly's description of the Moskowitz family. I have worked at a Jewish high school for seven years, and in that time, I have come to learn much about Jewish culture and tradition. Usually authors who are not Jewish have difficulty capturing it, but Donnelly did a fine job. Ultimately, the book is just too big. Donnelly clearly did her research, and she showed all of it. As a result, the story is unwieldy. Some plotline inconsistencies were bothersome, too, but as they are a bit spoilery, I won't mention them here. Suffice it to say that even Donnelly seemed to lose the thread of her story at times. One thing Donnelly does well is create villains with whom the reader can also empathize. She did it in Revolution with Max R. Peters, and she even managed to explain Jack the Ripper's behavior (a little bit, anyway) in The Tea Rose. Freddie Lytton is no different, but he is more sympathetic than Donnelly's other villains. While I couldn't help but hate him, Donnelly was also careful to show how people like Freddie are made, not born, and how they might still, deep inside, hate themselves for what they do. In all, I still enjoyed the book very much and look forward to seeing if Seamie and Willa can sort things out in The Wild Rose. The Finnegan family are a fun bunch.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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Post © Dana Huff
The Winter Rose, Jennifer Donnelly
Friday Finds—July 8, 2011
I have been immersed in Jennifer Donnelly's "Rose" trilogy the past week. I haven't actually scouted new books that much, but I have found a few to put on my TBR pile.
The first is The American Heiress by Daisy Goodwin. It is the story of Cora Cash, daughter of wealthy American family, who marries Ivo, Duke of Wareham, and finds herself navigating the treacherous waters of English society. Should be good for anyone with Downton Abbey withdrawal.
I can't remember how I came across this next book, but I think it was offered as a giveaway at Goodreads and caught my eye there first. The Ballad of Tom Dooley by Sharyn McCrumb is a fictional retelling of the famous Appalachian murder ballad. True confession: I love murder ballads—great old Scottish, Irish, or Appalachian murder ballads are the kinds of songs that stick with you. I really can't wait to read this one.
Susanna Kearsley's novel The Winter Sea is the story of Carrie McClelland, who travels to Scotland to do research for her novel. As she begins writing, she starts recalling memories that are not her own, and she wonders if she is somehow channeling a Scottish ancestor. Sometimes I wonder if we do somehow inherit memories in our DNA. One of the places I have felt the most at "home" is Athens, when I was a student at UGA. Later, I discovered my family had lived there in the nineteenth century (or near enough). I don't know. Just a coincidence, I guess, but I am intrigued by the family history aspect of this book.
Did you find any good books this week?
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Post © Dana Huff
Friday Finds—July 8, 2011
July 7, 2011
Booking Through Thursday: Dog Days
This week's Booking Through Thursday prompt asks, "Since my dog is turning 10 today … what animal-related books have you read? Which do you love? Do you have a favorite literary dog? (Snoopy, anyone?)"
I am actually reading an animal-related short story right now. It's in P. G. Wodehouse's collection The Man With Two Left Feet & Other Stories via DailyLit. It's called "The Mixer: He Meets a Shy Gentleman," and it's told from the viewpoint of a dog. It's really funny so far, as you might imagine with Wodehouse.
Most of the animal-related books I can recall reading I read during childhood, but here's a list:
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (review): Features Rosie the elephant.
Rascal by Sterling North (reflection): Features Rascal the raccoon.
Socks by Beverly Cleary: Featuring Socks the cat.
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White: Featuring Wilbur the Pig, and a host of other animals, including a spider named Charlotte.
The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden: Featuring Chester the Cricket, Tucker Mouse, and friends.
I can't say I really have a favorite literary dog. I am kind of a cat person. I do love Hobbes from Calvin and Hobbes, and I was a pretty big fan of Garfield as a child. Snoopy is fine, but I always thought he was a little bit mean.
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Post © Dana Huff
Booking Through Thursday: Dog Days
July 6, 2011
WWW Wednesdays—July 6, 2011
To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…
• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you'll read next?
I am reading the second novel in Jennifer Donnelly's trilogy, The Winter Rose. I am enjoying it so far. Not as many of the plot points turn on coincidence (which was a weakness of The Tea Rose), so it has more of an air of plausibility. It's still fun, but I like the characters profiled in the first book better.
I did just recently finish The Tea Rose (review). I also recently finished Dexter Palmer's The Dream of Perpetual Motion (review). Really enjoyed the former, but not the latter.
The next book I plan to read is The Wild Rose, the third and final installment of Donnelly's trilogy. I have a galley copy on my Kindle. After that one, I'm not sure what will be next. Maybe Sarah Addison Allen's The Sugar Queen and Garden Spells, which are on their way to me courtesy of PaperBackSwap.
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Post © Dana Huff
WWW Wednesdays—July 6, 2011
July 5, 2011
Top Ten Tuesdays: Top Ten Rebels in Literature
I just came back from the post office where I mailed off a bunch of PaperBackSwap requests. I logged in to my content management software here at Much Madness and discovered WordPress has an update. And it's a slick one! Nice job, WordPress folks.
Anyway, to business. Rebels are those folks who buck the system. Sometimes they do it because they care. Sometimes they do it because they don't. Here's my list of the top ten rebels in literature (or at least in the part of it I've read).
Huck Finn. As he tears up his letter to Miss Watson and says, "All right, then, I'll go to hell," well you just can't get more badass than that. It's incredibly brave, and he shows he will follow his own conscience. I think I understood for the first time this year after teaching the book for several years that Huck has to light out for the territory because he has to go somewhere that is not tainted by an antiquated morality he disagrees with—he's simply too good for Missouri.
Severus Snape: He defies the most powerful and fearsome dark wizard in recent memory, a man known for his ability to "read minds," and spies for the Order of Phoenix and Dumbledore, and it's all because he loved a woman so much that he is willing to do anything to protect her son, even though Harry was also the son of his worst enemy. Dumbledore once said that he thought sometimes Hogwarts sorted people too soon, and Harry told his son that Snape was probably the bravest man he ever knew. What Snape did—standing against his former master and all of his Slytherin friends—took a lot of guts.
Hester Prynne: Marked as a fallen woman, she defies the villagers who label her, quite literally, as an adulteress and refuses to name the father of her daughter Pearl. She becomes such a help to the villagers that they come to associate her letter with "Able" rather than "Adultery." In defiance of the villagers, she wears the letter (except for a brief moment when she is alone with Pearl and Dimmesdale) for the rest of her life to remind the villagers of their cruelty, hypocrisy, and judgment.
Katniss Everdeen: She defies the entire capitol during the Hunger Games and becomes a symbol for the districts as they rebel, led by District 13. She is hard and tough, but she loves her family and friends fiercely. Rebellious to the end, she kills President Coin when she realizes the woman is no different than her arch-enemy President Snow.
Captain Ahab: He threw his entire crew under the bus in his quest for Moby Dick, and he wouldn't listen to reason. He refused to help the captain of the Rachel look for his lost son. His single-mindedness both terrified and enthralled the crew of the Pequod. In the end, only Ishmael is left to tell the tale of the driven captain who defied even God in his quest to pursue vengeance.
Dorian Gray: In defiance of mores of his time, he lives exactly how he wants to live while his enchanted portrait bears the scars of his sins. He lives a completely hedonistic lifestyle. He treats people however he wants, even destroying or killing them if they get in his way. He is a man without a conscience who lives by his own set of rules and never has to pay for his crimes. Until the end, that is.
The Lorax: He stands up against the Once-ler in an attempt to protect the environment. He alone knows where greed and destruction of the Truffula trees will take their once-beautiful home, and he keeps crying out, even though the Once-ler shows no signs of listening.
Guy Montag: At the beginning of
Fahrenheit 451
, he is a fireman who relishes his job burning books. As the story progresses, he defies his whole society once he realizes how keeping books and information from his society has kept them in the darkness of ignorance. He joins up with a group of book-lovers determined to preserve literature for the future.
Atticus Finch: He does the unthinkable in his society—he actually defends a black man accused of raping a white woman. Atticus is licked even before he begins because of the racism entrenched in his society, but he does it anyway because it's the right thing to do, even if it will make him unpopular in town.
Juliet: She defies her family's ancient feud with the Montagues by falling in love and marrying Montague's son Romeo. Juliet even chooses her new husband over her own family after Romeo kills Tybalt. Rather than marry a man her family chooses for her, Juliet feigns her death. If only that messenger hadn't been waylaid by the quarantine for the plague and Romeo had received Friar Lawrence's message! When she awakes and discovers Romeo, believing she was truly dead, has committed suicide, she kills herself by stabbing a dagger into her own heart rather than continuing to live without her Romeo.Top Ten Tuesdays is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.
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Post © Dana Huff
Top Ten Tuesdays: Top Ten Rebels in Literature
July 4, 2011
Musing Mondays—July 4, 2011
Below is a link to an NPR discussion about the simple fact that there's no way you can read, see and experience all the things that are available to be experienced. The two methods for dealing with it are culling (i.e., cutting out certain genres that don't interest you, etc.) or surrender (i.e., just making peace with the facts and enjoying what you can in the time that you have).
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/27/137451477/you-cant-possibly-read-it-all-so-stop-trying
So, do you cull, or do you surrender? Or do you do both?
I think I do a bit of both. I am very selective about which books I will read in certain genres. For instance, my nonfiction reading is almost exclusively limited to history, education, and literature, although if a book looks interesting and doesn't fall in those narrow confines, I will read it. I am fairly selective about fantasy and sci-fi. I don't read a lot of it, but I am careful about what I do choose to read in those genres. My favorite genre is historical fiction, so I tend to broaden my scope and will often read historical fiction, even if I don't think I'm interested in the subject. I have too often discovered that I can become interested if the book grabs me.
I set a goal to read 50 books this year. I keep a to-read list. I can feel the pressure to read as much as I can before I can't read anymore, but I have also accepted that I just won't be able to get to everything that is good and worth reading. So I also have made peace with the idea that the article calls "surrender." Life is too short to read bad books, but I am determined to enjoy the ones I have time to get to.
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Post © Dana Huff
Musing Mondays—July 4, 2011
July 3, 2011
The Tea Rose, Jennifer Donnelly
Jennifer Donnelly's novel The Tea Rose is the story of Fiona Finnegan, poor but relatively happy with her fiancé Joe and her boisterous Irish family in Whitechapel. But a murderer is stalking their midst. A man known as Jack the Ripper is murdering prostitutes. Fiona's world is shattered when her father is killed for attempting to organize a union in the tea company he and Fiona work for. In the wake of his death, Fiona loses almost everyone and everything that matters to her and makes her way to New York where she engineers an incredible rags-to-riches story and climbs to the top of the world tea trade.
OK, this book is really, really, really improbable, but that didn't stop me from enjoying it a great deal. Sure I rolled my eyes at the over-the-top coincidences and unbelievable turns of events, but it was a great ride. The plotting is fast-paced; it was difficult to put down. Set against the backdrop of Jack the Ripper's Whitechapel and Edith Wharton's Old New York, the book brings together many areas of personal interest for me: tea, the Whitechapel murderer, and the Gilded Age. Fiona has spunk, as we are constantly being told by the characters, all of whom adore her on sight for her shrewd business acumen and forthright manner. Donnelly brings the era and settings to vivid life. In the bargain, the reader, through Donnelly's characters, rubs shoulders with everyone from Gilded Age robber barons and Mark Twain to up-and-coming artists Monet and Van Gogh. It's an epic sweeping story, but doesn't try to be anything other than good escapist reading. I can't wait to read the next two books in Donnelly's generational saga: The Winter Rose and The Wild Rose (I was able to obtain a galley from NetGalley, even though the book won't be released until August). I won't say I loved it as much as I loved Revolution, but it was a gripping summer read. I would recommend it to fans of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
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Post © Dana Huff
The Tea Rose, Jennifer Donnelly
