Crystal’s Comments (group member since Jan 04, 2013)

Crystal’s comments from the Classics Without All the Class group.

Michelle wrote: "I'd say the best books I read were Killing Kennedy by Bill O'Reilly, The Sanctuary by Ted Dekker and The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick. All the books were completely different but equall..."

I've been interested in reading some Ted Dekker. Have you read the Circle Trilogy? I'm wondering how it is.

The Reader

Interview with the Vampire

7/26



Arthur Conan Doyle - The Extraordinary Cases of Sherlock Holmes
Bernhard Schlink - The Reader
C
D
E
F
Gaston Leroux - The Phantom of the Opera
H
I
J.D. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye
Knowles, John - A Separate Peace
L.M. Montgomery - Anne of Green Gables
Michael Ende - The Neverending Story
N
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
P
Q
Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451
Stanislaw, Lem - Solaris
Tolkien, J.R.R. - The Hobbit
U
V
Wharton, Edith - The Age of Innocence
X
Y
Z

Fahrenheit 451

I don't think Archer is a hypocrite at all. Rather, I think he's just torn between convention and passion and doesn't truly know his own mind.

His justification of his own affair while condemning others' doesn't qualify because his situation truly is different. He's not chasing after multiple girls, never thinking of leaving his wife but only wanting a tryst (like Lefferts and Beufort). Rather, he truly loves Ellen and wants to live his life out with her. I'm not at all saying that his emotional affair is justified. I'm just saying that his "affair" and the other examples given in the book are two different things.

I spent most of the book disliking May. I just found her so...flat. But after finishing it and reflecting on her whole character and all her actions, I somewhat admire her.

Archer's assessment of her was bias and unfair. What I see when I look at her is a woman who is fighting to uphold the norms of her society but has also found a way to use those to her advantage. She must be very clever to be so manipulative, I think.

Instead of starting a scene with her husband, she has faith that he and her cousin will also follow societal rules once she tells them that she's pregnant. And she surrounds him with her friends, who make him feel the weight of their knowledge and suspicion, making ostracization all the more real a prospect.

She is in no way a forward-thinker, but I would still say that her meekness is sometimes a facade that she's expected to wear and manages to hold all her aces behind.

I am completely addicted to this group. I have always enjoyed reading classics, but in college I hated my literature classes because there was so much pressure and competition, not to mention that the professors usually pushed their own bias on the students.

I am grateful for this group because we're just reading for fun, and there's no shame in saying that you hate a certain hailed work or that you don't understand it. And if we hate the book, we can quit reading it. Excellent!

The Left Hand of Darkness and A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Silence by Shusaku Endo.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

What about Anthem by Ayn Rand?

How about Dante's Inferno or John Milton's Paradise Lost? Or The Red Badge of Courage?

I liked Newland and Ellen the best.

I favor Newland because I find his complexity alluring. I love how he questions the society he's been raised to revere in one passage, and then seems to be its utmost supporter in the next. Moreover, I like how romantic and somewhat rebellious he is.

He truly wants his wife to be his best friend, his equal in thought and conversation, and not just someone to dote upon him and serve him. Yet, even though he quite naturally falls in love with Ellen, he still puts May's needs (and their child's) above his own desires. I find him honorable and fully human.

Ellen I admire because she is her own woman, but she doesn't flaunt it. Yes, she puts her nose up at New York's rules over who she should and shouldn't find a friend in, but she has great respect for its more important morals, which is what leads her to ultimately denying Archer. I like that she is confident enough in herself to fellowship with Mrs. Struthers and the dethroned Mrs. Beaufort, but also not selfish enough to steal a woman's husband.

I think it's interesting that the whole time Archer thinks of women as not having any depth of feeling or thought and being captives to their husbands when, in reality, his wife obviously had fears beneath the surface that she was just too proper to share with him.

However, I do agree with him that women were, in some way, jailed by society. They were trapped within themselves. No matter what they felt or thought or desired, if it wasn't acceptable, they had to smother it within their hearts.

Even if he was wrong about women being vapid, it's somewhat worse when you realize that perhaps they had the same inner life that the modern woman has but had no way to express it.

Kaileigh wrote: "Wow.
I finished it last night. Once I made it into the second half, I couldn't put it down.
May surprised me the most. At first, I thought she was just some clueless woman that just wanted to make ..."

May surprised me, as well! I didn't care for her until almost the end of the book when I realized how observant and sneaky she had been the whole time. But also how strong she was to watch her husband dabble with her cousin and plot a way to keep him.

I loved everything about this book from the very beginning. I found it very witty and humorous, as well as heartbreaking in some scenes.

While I understand how parts could bore a reader, I find the critique on a society that cares about trivialities very relevant to today's society, especially in America. Moreover, the idea of being in love with someone that you should not have pervades through all of time.

I liked all of the main characters, and I found myself almost in a moral quandary trying to figure out whether I wanted Newland to be with May or Ellen.

I wholly enjoyed this book, and I am glad that it was voted in because I may never have read it otherwise.

Natalie wrote: ""His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen."

I remember feeling the..."

I loved this quote, as well. It's one of the many that made me empathetic toward Newland.

Shannon wrote: "I think the van der Luydens are somehow related to Archer. I thought unread that somewhere around the chapter where the were having a party to meet Countess Olenska. Don't hold me to this, I'm havi..."

The van der Luydens are Mrs. Archer's cousins.

This book has so many witty and thought-provoking tidbits in it. I thought it'd be interesting to see what specific passages stood out to us all.

I shall start, but please forgive me for not citing them. My epub has confused page numbering, so I'm not sure exactly what page anything is on.

"That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger through May Welland's familiar features; and once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas."

"But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow."

"He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?"

I'm really interested in seeing if Ender's Game is going to be any good.

I'm interested in Stephen King's new one; although, I am nervous about him writing a sequel to one of his iconic novels.