Perhaps Edna Ferber and Gwethalyn Graham are going to be my two lost sisters of literature. They, so far are the two most underappreciated and undervalued women writers I have come across since I started this project. I just finished, today, Edna Ferber's So Big. It was amazing! It makes me want to read all of her other books right away(however I'm sitting on a James Alan McPherson and a Booth Tarkington that need to go back to the library...). On a tangential note, when I was living in upstate NY, working at that resort in the middle of nowhere, I looked and looked for novels about farm life, since I'm not so shyly obsessed with farm life and books about it. I couldn't find anything while roaming the search engines at the library. Perhaps I just wasn't plugging in the right words...So Big is a farm novel, as well as a novel about the development of the Chicago area around the turn of the 20th century. It is also a novel about people and their expectations of life and then what they do with those expectations when they truly realize how life is going to go...:) Ferber's main character Selina DeJong is a great character. She grows up with a gambling father who manages to keep her in nice clothes and good schools even when his luck is down, and books are her main source of her companionship. Perhaps this leads to too many romantic notions, but when her father unexpectedly dies, leaving her with no real path in the world, she goes off to be a schoolteacher in High Prairie, IL; the country in what was then turn of the 20th C. Chicago...She gets the job through the father of her best friend Julie Hempel, who is of meat-packing fame and fortune(will hit for a little while a skid during the muckracking of which of course The Jungle will feature). She lives out there for a year and in that time meets a local farmer, who is handsome and sweet but thoroughly unimaginative(very unlike Selina, who when she first goes out to High Prairie with Klaus Pool, the patriarch of the family with which she will board while she is still single, comments on the beauty of the cabbages along the way and calls them "chrysoprase and porphyry" and Mr. Pool cannot help laughing, it becomes a joke between the farmers for the rest of the book, the joke will be on them though.). Pervus DeJong is the handsome bachelor of the area, and the most desirable, but he is also the most unimaginative farmer who is clearly not determined to get ahead and takes Selina's ideas to be folly when she suggests "new-fangled notions" about farming. Selina sticks it out, though, and it is clear that she loves him in her way and he worships her; but her romantic notions, though not quashed are put aside in favor of survival on a Midwestern farm. The couple has a son, Dirk, and it is into him that Selina throws all of her romantic ideals and desires; she wishes for him all the best and will get it for him. This becomes much more feasible when, sadly enough, Pervus dies. It is she who has to take over the family farm and make the money. She is determined and like a shrewd businesswoman, takes advantage of a niche market in selling beautiful, perfect vegetables to wholesalers who then go on to sell to hotels. She never ever loses her zest for life, her excitement for it, even when she is on the farm. She wishes to hear all the stories her son can tell of life in the big city at the fancy parties, what people eat, what they wear. She even travels to Chicago occasionally for a vacation where she explores all areas, even the places where the blacks are starting to become more prevalent and in the novel it is hinted that the area is less savory especially to the likes of the people that her son Dirk, now grown up, hangs out with. Dirk goes to an okay university, and does fine, but conforms to societal standards, living within them and has no real passion for anything. It is this that does not make him or even his worshipper, his mother, proud. What is interesting to think about here is what this means, and how this happens all the time even now...A parent works and works to climb their way to the top and give their children the best, wanting them to be like them, but perhaps because they don't HAVE to work so hard for everything and they aren't forced to work to survive, they have no real appreciation or love for anything. Perhaps when you are put in a situation where you are against odds then it begins to create that passion in you...I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA. All I know is that when Dirk finally does fall in love(even though his childhood playmate as it were, Paula Storm, of the Hempel line and he have a very significant non-affair, at least perhaps not in the sexual way, but they hang out together ALL THE TIME...)with an artist, her main argument against being with him is because he never really had to struggle for what he believed in, and lacks passion. She even tells him that if he HAD worked at the crappy architectural firm he started at before he got whisked into opportunity after opportunity with friends)and worked his way up, struggling with crappy pay to finally make a beautiful SOMETHING that improved the skyline of Chicago, she would admire him more. HE DOESN'T GET IT! He tells her that if it would make a difference he would go back!!! She talks in the same conversation though, of how admirable his MOTHER is. The woman who still holds her head high, and still works the field. And, the characteristics he admires in the woman(Dallas O'Mara), are that of a working girl(nails unkempt, etc.) and that she is proud of those features/doesn't care about them as much as the other uppity society women that he hangs out with. The most interesting bit is the end when Roelf Pool, the only bit of artistic genius that High Prairie has ever seen, who left High Prairie after his father remarried to struggle in Paris and become a world-renowned sculptor, returns to his first real mentor, Selina, after years and years and years. It is bittersweet and beautiful. Selina, who never left the farm, makes such an amazing impact on all she comes across. There's more to think about there...but I'm not going to do it today, I'm tired of typing....What is impressive though is this is the same woman who wrote Showboat, Cimarron, and Giant, and no one today has even heard of her. She is, I guess, known for her strong female characters. Well here's one to think about for a long time.:) She was also considered one of the most preeminent authors for about thirty years surrounding her publications...How come we don't read her anymore???There's a lost sisterhood: Gwethalyn Graham, Edna Ferber, Shirley Ann Grau...I'm sure I'll discover others. Maybe some day I'll be lucky enough to do work in women's studies and make a course featuring all of these women...Until then, I'll just keep plugging away and discovering...:) PPs-44, GGs-37.

On a completely random note, I seem to be having a hard time counting the number of books I've read for this project. I keep highlighted lists in a folder(hard copy style) and I have it through here, I guess, but of course I always have my excel sheet to look at. My last entry said I had read 42 Pulitzer Prize winners, but I just counted on Wikipedia, and unless I'm missing someone, even though I just finished Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, this year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, I'm still at 42. Very very odd.
Anywho...:) I must say that I'm very glad that I have such a diverse wealth of experience. Perhaps not such a huge wealth of life experience, but let's just say this: I know a little bit about a lot of things, and it definitely helps when reading a book like Oscar Wao. It's about a boy who becomes a man, named Oscar Wao, a Dungeons and Dragons playing, comic book reading Dominican fat kid(do all of these epithets go together when talking about a Dominican boy? The narrator seems to say no, but my experience with people from the DR is limited, I have one friend from culinary school who is from there and who returned to work and live there after she graduated, I'm going to tell her about the book and maybe she'll read it...she was pretty unhappy when she read the depiction of the Mirabel sisters in In the Time of the Butterflies, but I dunno, maybe this is truer to life?)who is obsessed with women. And given his rather robust appearance and his inherited not-so-much looks, he can never get laid. He has all the machismo of the Dominican male without the looks to go along with the "player" attitude. To boot, he throws himself into this world of sci-fi/fantasy, writing his own novels, obsessing over comic books and anime and everything else that that dorky world entails. And let me say this fellas, most girls aren't into that shit. Some like parts of it, some ARE D&D geeks too, but I don't think I've ever met a woman who is so head over heels in love with the gamers/comic book world like some men are. I know a little bit about a lot of that stuff because over the years I've had several male friends that are into that stuff on various levels; comic books and comic book superheroes are the top pick for my two closest guy friends, but since I'm a card-carrying lesbian, I have no problem being friends with people who are into that stuff. They're not trying to get into my pants, and I AM CERTAINLY not trying to get into theirs.:) Most women, though, don't care about that stuff at all, though, they'll go to the new Batman movie, because it's the "it" movie of the summer, but they aren't generally going to sit in the car with a boy afterward and talk about the nuances of the differences between Bruce Wayne in the comic book versus his portrayal in the latest Hollywood release. So, if you're morbidly obese, not super attractive, and are constantly spouting gamer lingo, and you're heterosexual, odds are, you're NOT screwed. That's the point. However, Oscar's constant searching for love is endearing, if not depressing as the book progresses. You want him to be in love so badly, which he is constantly, but you want him to be loved back...which he isn't. His propensity for love is so great...The book is not only about Oscar though, it is about the term "fuku"(with an accent aigu over the last u) or "curse" and what that does to a family, if there really is one...and it's about the fuku on the Dominican people and their history with Trujillo, something that I knew very little about until I read this book. In order to make the reader realize how the idea of fuku translates into Oscar's love life, or lack thereof, the narrator, presumably an ex-boyfriend of Oscar's sister, Lola, goes back in time to show how FUCKED the Wao family has been. He travels back to the Dominican Republic in time, to show what it was like during the Trujillo realm for Oscar's mother, whose entire immediate family got annihilated by Trujillo, mainly because her father refused to submit to the dictator's will regarding the virginity of his eldest daughter...Some references are in footnotes, to different people in the Trujillo regime, etc...but a large chunk of the novel is told through flashback to La Inca(Oscar's mother's cousin cum mother)'s life and Oscar's mother's life before she moved to the United States. The book shows us all the time how everyone's life is a spinoff of someone else's life and how interconnected we all are, and how like dominoes, we can be propelled forward by a chain of events that are sometimes out of our control. I loved this book. I love Hispanic culture and how the heat in some of these areas creates tempers that are just as hot? hmm...All I know is that I have a little bit of a thing for the literature from Hispanic cultures, especially that of the Dominican/Haitian/South American bent. There's something about the creativity that comes out when you've been kicked in the head so long by dictators that's really inspiring. More of this book takes place in the DR than you would think, but that's cool too. I think that part of what makes someone "American"(since after all, the Pulitzer is supposed to award people who depict some aspect of American life) is the fact that you're constantly reconciling your past to your present. I loved all the references, the phrases in Spanish, Oscar's obsession with The Watchmen. I felt like I was sharing in this part of a culture that I know nothing about. However, when I was talking to people at work about this book, one co-worker in particular didn't like the book because of all of the references. She felt like it was a secret handshake that she just didn't get or something. She thought the book dragged and was boring as well as hard to follow with all the narrators. I didn't really get that it was hard to follow in terms of narrators, but then again, my love for modernism has compelled me to read many a stream of consciousness novel. I didn't find this to be confusing like that. Though, I thought about this after the fact quite a bit: I started it and almost finished it(was shy by about 60 pages)in one weekend, devoting hour after hour to this book. I think that I had the time to sit with it and enjoy the experience. I'm not so sure this is a good book in the spurts that usually come when you're taking your reading stints where you can get them. I don't know that I would have even heard of this book had it not won the Pulitzer, which is sad, for it is very good...I'm, for some reason, much more with it when it comes to new Canadian literature. It doesn't help, either, that the Pulitzer nominees aren't advertised in advance. I think that would be cool to help hype it up. What I do like is this book may have its uppity characteristics(you can tell the author/speaker is educated), it's about poor people who are of immigrant background of one of the not so desirable racial classes. The Pulitzer is at least, with this book and others, showing that the "American life" that is written about and can win awards is not necessarily the "White Man"'s American life.:) PPs-43??, GG's-37.

Reconciling why something wins a prestigious literary award is one thing, figuring out why some books, in the years that pass, get chucked to the wayside and others get put on high school/college level reading lists for eternity, is an entirely different ball of wax.:) We've all read tons of books for classes that some higher authority, whether it be a high school curriculum or a university English Department, has deemed noteworthy that winds up being a boring piece of shit, or not nearly as interesting as The Da Vinci Code(and with this statement I'm not offering up The Da Vinci Code as the prime example of great American literature, it's just fuel for my fire), or irrelevant to our generation or any other generation's lives.
When I got ready to do this project I was prepared to read several books like the ones I've just described, boring pieces of irrelevant crap. I must say I've been pleasantly surprised. Sure, there have been some duds, books that definitely weren't my favorites, but there's been something of merit almost every novel I've read so far for these lists(and I'm more than halfway now), and an overwhelming majority of them I never would have read unless it was on these lists, books that I had never heard of otherwise or didn't really hold any outward interest for me. In the midst of not really being disappointed by anything I've read so far, I've found some amazing gems, books that are hidden from the general public due to their out-of-date/out-of-print status. I know I've gone crazy over the Gwethalyn Graham novels that won the GG in the late 30's and mid 40's and others from that era that have been sitting in some library's storage facility for the past 30-40 years, but I've got another one that was quite, quite good. This one is G. Herbert Sallans' Little Man. It won the Governor General in 1942. I could find nothing on this book before I began to read it, except, after I scrolled through Google Search Results page after page, I finally found two sentences about the plot, and now that I go look for it again, I'm sure it won't be there...:) The two sentence description said something about the fact that it was about a father and son's experience with war...but it is so much more than that. It is a 420 page tome about a man's life and experience as he lives through one of the most tumultous periods in history. George Battle, the protagonist, starts off in Chapter 1 as a gunner in the trenches in France in WWI, a young guy who has idolized war all his life but has no real clue about what to do once he gets there. Then Chapter 2 shows his son visiting George's brother's grave, his namesake, Hal, who died in France during the first war. Then the book goes back to the very beginning as it were, to George when he is a little kid growing up at the turn of the 20th century. His mother has died and his father leaves him and his older brother and sister with relatives to make money and then returns to claim them and start a new life out West with their Uncle Jim and Aunt Sadie in Saskatchewan. We watch George all through his growing up, and his interactions with Jim and Sadie's daughter Pitch, who will dog George until the end of the novel, she who wants him but pursues him utterly wrong, then when she loses him, she sets herself on trying to destroy his marriage however she can, but it only serves to make her look bitter and pathetic. George goes to Winnipeg to attend university and follow his dreams of becoming a writer, meets his soon-to-become lifelong friend Bo, and then eventually goes off to WWI, following in the footsteps of his brother Hal. George does this while there is a boom in farming and speculation that then comes crashing down like a house of cards in the early part of the 20th century, and the book's background always sets up the other worldly events that came to shape up the first half of last century...George goes to war only to find out that his brother is already dead, ends up running into Bo, and through him meets the woman of his dreams, Josephine Olive Yorke(Joy), an Englishwoman, living in London, who he will briefly court and then marry and who is his lifelong rock and partner. She is amazing, almost like a Melanie from Gone With the Wind...George comes back to Canada after the war, moves to Vancouver and works for a newspaper, writing about the little man and his struggles, for freedom, for equality, for financial security, for the little man to be heard. For, George is the epitome of the little man, one realizes as the book progresses. He can write, surely, but he is not loaded with old family money, he is not rich due to his own career path, he is pretty much an average guy who gets lucky by the situations he falls into. But, he too is not unfamiliar with tragedy, and he too saves his best friend from a shell attack in France, and he too has to watch his family members fall either to old age, illness or accidents. Sallans creates in George Battle not only the Little Man, but the Everyman...which is why I found this book engaging possibly, as well as the style is pretty easy to read and the characters are interesting...:) The other thing that I like about this book is it was written about a time that is so proximate to the publication date. The book ends with the start of World War II, and the book was published in 1942. There is not this long distance hindsight that comes from novels written even after the war and to the present day. When Sallans wrote about the Depression, it was only a few short years behind him. The first World War had ended less than three decades prior. Sallans, like my favorite, Gwethalyn Graham, is writing about the time in which he was living, a tumultous time, a scary and strange time, but with the wisdom of someone who has lived beyond it and since. To me, this book seems timeless and true, and yet the only way I got a copy of it was through interlibrary loan from the Tulsa City-County Library in Tulsa, OK, a far cry from Seattle, WA. It was another book that was sitting in storage before I requested it. And now it is almost two weeks overdue...Yikes! Wanna read a cool, all encompassing book about the first half of the 20th C. spanning all kinds of provinces and countries? This would be a great choice.
There are two quotes I particularly like...One is almost an entire page, 248, in the first edition copy I have from the library:
'"But who would ever write a book about us? And why?' 'Because we're commonplace, George. If you were prominent, you wouldn't be worth mentioning. Neither would I. But we're typical of the herd, so we're good book material.' 'But you've got to give people inspiration. That's all most of them have to live for. What's the use of telling them about themselves?' 'Because you can never lift your little man into the stars by making him feel like a palooka. He may be the poorest heel on earth, but there comes a time when he parts his hair and wants to stand before the crowd as a peer. Do I make myself clear?' 'As clear as mud,' George confessed. 'What I mean is this. We have no national literature worth reading for the same reason that we have no national culture of any value, and no national traditions. We try to ape other people. Outside a few things on forests and streams, and bits about Indians who were here before us, the rest of our stuff is the same old slavish worship of the aristocracy, of which we have none, and of success, which we measure by the length of time it takes the hero to get rich.' 'If you're right, Bo, Shakespeare was wrong.' 'With just this difference, my old one. Shakespeare was the Gilbert and Sullivan of his times. He dragged out his tinhorn dukes and fake top-hats and exposed them for the cheap farces they were. We haven't conceded that yet. That's why any literature we have on this soil can't tolerate the little man, and anyone with perspicacity, like yourself, knows that no worthwhile literature can get along without him. We're too self-conscious. We're so afraid we'll be recognized for what we really are, that we either dress up our little fellow like a god or we clown him and make him a boor.'"

The other quote I liked was much shorter, though also interesting. "'Here is my life,' he whispered to himself, 'reaching another chapter, another clean break-away from the past. Always breaking. Is there anyone whose life has been connected all of a piece, who can look back down the little lane of his years and say, 'This is my life.'--No, that is not so. Our lives are fashioned out of separate links, all foreign to one another, and only memory and sentiment can weld them together. There is no other welding.'" (266)

These kinds of books make me excited, like I'm on this archeological dig of literature and that I now found this super-valuable rare work that no one else knows about...But like I said, it also makes me sad, because if that's true and I AM the only one to know about it, then everyone else is missing out! and what else am I missing out on by having been a student of structured English programs? Well, I'm sure I'll have more opportunities to delve into this idea as I keep on trucking...GG's-38, PP's-42.

So, it's been a while since I've blogged, but it's also been a while since I've finished a book, which will be especially evident when I return this one, The Champlain Road by Franklin D. McDowell. It won the GG in 1939, and this copy that I just finished last night(finally!) was from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. It was due June 13th, and what is the date today? July 1. I am charged 25 cents a day for overdue fines. I'm not excited about getting the final tally.:( The Champlain Road ended up being not too bad, although it was certainly boring for a lot of the time, until about the last 100 pages. Although that could have been because I was compelled to finish it on my days off this week so that I could return it. I'm in library hell right now! I have another book that I just started called Little Man which won the GG in 1942, and it's due TODAY at the library. It is from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I have my first book club meeting next Monday(in 6 days!) and I haven't read that book either. Not to mention the scads of other books taking up space in Keren's closet that have various due dates. All of this put wicked pressure on me to finish The Champlain Road. I was actually a bit dismayed, too, because my parents decided to come, for the first time in over 3 years, to visit and I'm so inundated with the books that I really just wanted to spend the weekend reading. But, I finished it...And now another one is crossed off the list. The Champlain Road is one of the books on the GG list that I had a really hard time finding out anything about it. There are quite a few of the early winners that there is NO information about at all, except that they won the award in a particular year. I finally found something on the book buried in someone's thesis on someone else. I hit Ctrl+F to get at it in the University of New Brunswick student's paper. I think it's interesting, and also somewhat sad that there are so many of these books that just get forgotten. The Champlain Road was kind of on the boring side, but it made some interesting points, and referenced a time in history that we definitely don't talk about much. The book takes place for the most part in between the years of 1648 and 1650, when the Iroquois extermination of the Hurons was at its peak to final conclusion. I know nothing about any of the Native Americans and their relations at this time and any time we spent on this in history class growing up was focused on the U.S. relations with the Native Americans, not the Canadian. The title of the book, The Champlain Road comes from the name of a "road" about 700 miles long of waterways and portages that Samuel de Champlain used to go from New France to Huronia in 1615. It was the northernmost passage of three routes and by the time the book opens, it has been all but closed off by the Iroquois. The back story on the fight between the Iroquois and the Hurons is that the Hurons used to be part of the Iroquois nation(what is now New York State is for the most part where the Iroquois lived, the Hurons lived up by Georgian bay in what is now Simcoe County, Ontario.), but they chose to ally with the French who came as missionaries to their land and trade with them. The French began to convert them to Catholicism and the Hurons also became wealthier because of the lucrativeness of the fur trade that the French were engaging with them. The Iroquois were pissed off and thus started war on the Iroquois. The book takes place long after this war has begun and focuses on the Frenchmen, for the most part priests, but also one or two soldiers or traders, who are trying to preserve the Huron people and their way of life, in the face of almost certain extermination. What amazed me were these missionary priests who came from France to the New World completely sold on the fact that they would become martyrs for the cause, several of course did. It is their passion for God and their passion towards the safety and health of the Natives that is heartbreaking in this book, as they systematically are slaughtered or burned at the stake or tortured and then meeting these fates, all the while praying to God for the salvation of the Huron people. Then there are the civilians, Godfrey Bethune, a soldier in New France who is stationed with troops in Huronia(Ouendake)to defend Fort Ste. Marie against Iroquois invasion. He is looking for a seigneury, but he befriends the priests and the Hurons and lives amongst them. Diana Woodville is the clear heroine, named Hinonaia, by the Hurons, or Little Thunder, she was captured by the Iroquois as a young child and they, believing she was the descendant of one of their gods, would never trade her back to white people, no matter what the price offered. It is her defect to the Huron people, to live with Godfrey at Fort Ste. Marie, that eventually gives them some victory. She escapes to no longer be part of that Iroquois world, to no longer be the goddess behind battle, but creates much dissension in the Huron camp because of Arakoua, a Native princess who sees Diana as stealing her man Godfrey's heart after Diana rescued him from the Iroquois camp and ran away with him. Diana has to go to war against the Iroquois herself to prove where her loyalties lie, and as well, she provides the true insight into the minds of the Iroquois warriors that hitherto the Hurons and French have not had. It finally, though it is the evening of war, rapidly approaching the end, gives them a leg up in battle. Diana and Godfrey fall in love because of or in spite of all of this too, which is sweet as it is condoned by the priests who witness their passion for the people that they all share. A couple of really great quotes from the end stood out: "Diana looked at the grey faces. 'Ahouendoe is behind us, Father. It is a day that is gone.' 'The past is that which is part of us. It is something peculiarly our own. It makes us what we are,' Father Ragueneau admonished her. 'And what we shall be in the days to come,' Father Le Mercier added. 'If there were no living past, my daughter, there could be no true religion.'" (309) The other quote from the book that I thought was interesting, may be an explanation for why there is a cross sitting on top of Mount Royal in the city of Montreal...:) "The voyageurs skirted the Island of Montreal to sight a low group of buildings on the flatlands by the river, with Mount Royal rising majestically in the background, its tree-clad heights surmounted by a great white cross. Godfrey pointed it out to Diana. 'That was carried up by Maisonneuve[governor of New France] less than a year ago. The river overflowed and threatened to sweep away the fort. He vowed that if the waters receded without doing further damage he would carry that cross himself up the mountain and plant it there. The river fell back and he carried out his vow.'" (316) There is still a cross(an electric one) on top of Mount Royal in Montreal to this day. This book was interesting in that it filled in some gaps in history that I knew nothing about, and the author in this "Huronian edition" which was published in 1949 talks about what has been excavated in terms of old Forts from this era, especially since the book was published and created interest in this area of Western Ontario. This is an era of history that should not have been forgotten(as no history should be forgotten)and it is a pity nothing can be found about this book. It wasn't always super interesting, but it values a part of history that made a huge difference in the making of the Canadian nation. GGs-37, PPs-42.

The Pied Piper of Dipper Creek by Thomas H. Raddall, winner of the GG in 1943, is the first interlibrary loan I've gotten in a really long time. I was feeling the itch to get a book from elsewhere, just because it's fun to see where books come from when an interlibrary loan. This one didn't come from that far at all, Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA. (just about an hour away), but the interesting thing is PLU is where Hilary Clinton spoke when she came to the Seattle area, so that's why I'm familiar with the school, the only reason why I'm familiar with the school. The book was in crappy shape, binding was totally shot, and the last few pages kept falling out every time I opened the thing. Oh well. Another interesting tidbit is John Buchan, aka Lord Tweedsmuir, the first Governor General of Canada, absolutely loved this book. John Buchan himself was an author, of The Thirty-Nine Steps(a novel), which later became the basis for a film by Alfred Hitchcock.
All this to say that Lord Tweedsmuir is supposed to be a pretty good judge of writing abilities. He didn't make a bad choice with Raddall's book. It's a collection of short stories, which focuses predominantly on the people and countryside of rural Nova Scotia. Like with many of the short story collections I have read thus far, there are good stories and "meh" stories in this collection, but it wasn't an unenjoyable read. I particularly liked the title story, about a guy who is so obsessed with the Scottish Prime Minister of England coming to Nova Scotia having an awesome bagpipe performance to welcome him that he resurrects the bagpipes himself(even though he's not that great at it)and ends up doing a bagpipe version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin with the children at the local school. It is funny and witty and makes you smile a lot. "North" was the story I liked the least, it was about travelling in the arctic circle and the exposure that one doctor had with the Inuit up there. It was okay, but it just wasn't that exciting. "The Taming of Mordecai Mimms" was great. It was all about a guy who decides to play nature-man, in a very destructive non-caring kind of way. He hurts trees by cutting away all their bark, shoots animals for pure sport just to leave them there with no respect for their lives. He's basically a huge dumb-ass, who is the thorn in the side of the local park ranger. Well, the ranger goes away for the day and Mordecai goes deer hunting, leaving his son in the canoe they used to get to this remote place, and ends up getting lost in the dark and scaring himself shitless. It's really harrowing for him, but it's definitely KARMA. The park ranger ends up saving his ass, and Mordecai moves to the city.:) "The Courtship of Jupe M'Quayle" was also a good story, about a guy who for 25 years has been unhappily single, searching and searching for a "help-mate", or a wife. He finally lands a woman, he thinks, through wooing her with chocolate and sweets and then the town, in their desire to welcome this new bride(who mind you has lived in the backwoods of rural Nova Scotia all her life, in a lot of respects as untamed as a wild animal), scares the bride off. It is then that Jupe realizes(Jupiter is his real name)that he's gotten along this far without, he's really going to be okay, and won't push his new wife into marriage..."Lady Lands Leviathan" was also good about a man who is searching and searching for the biggest tuna to catch(he is a sport fisherman), so that he can keep up his social status and live off of people's parties and attentions, and in the end, it is his wife, who only fishes to be with him, who catches the big one. Also very good. There are only 12 stories in this collection, but each is pretty long. It's a different look at a small province, a rural province, a province that has daily interaction with Natives and Scottish heritage. I wonder if I'm the only person in this country to have read this book this year????

Sometimes I find it hard to write about the books that win the prizes. It's not that they aren't good, they just aren't, I don't know, spectacular or something. What has been nice is that the past two books I've read, Ringuet's Thirty Acres(GG 1940) and Alison Lurie's Foreign Affairs(PP 1985) were both great, engaging reads, books that I wouldn't have read otherwise most likely, just, like I said they weren't awe-inspiring or anything like, say, All the King's Men or something. At this point I'm going to write about both of them so that I can remember them later on.
One of the best parts of Ringuet's novel Thirty Acres is the fact that it takes place in the Laurentians area of Quebec, a little north of Montreal. It is a bit further up the province than I have been, but in Quebec, farmland is farmland. When you drive to Montreal from Vermont, you go through quite a bit of farming communities before you get to the "big city." While I was reading this novel, I could envision this man's farm, at the turn of the century into the 20th century. I could imagine the parish church and the people who lived and worked in that community. Perhaps that's what made me enjoy this book all the more, or maybe it's because I'm really into farming novels. This book is about farming, sure, but it's also about progress. It's about what happens when you try to get in the way of progress, sticking your head in the sand and ignoring it as it comes towards you. It will MOW YOU DOWN. In Thirty Acres that exactly what happens to Euchariste Moisan. Through the metaphor of seasons, (the book starts in Spring and works its way through)Euchariste moves through the seasons of his life. First, his "spring" in which he gets the farm from his aging uncle and marries and starts his family, continuing through Summer, the prime of his life in terms of wealth of his farm and growth of his family, but there is eventually a Fall or Autumn, in which his wife dies and his sons begin to take charge of the farm and value his opinion less. At the end of the novel, he is portrayed by fellow townspeople and others as a doddering, crazy old man, who is not really of use to anyone. In that regard, the novel is rather tragic; a depiction of what it can be like when you age. You think you're invincible until it's way too late. Euchariste is the most powerful layperson(the parish priest is always the most important person in a village like that)in the village and then his senility(suing his neighbor over land, losing his money to a notary that is a thief because he favors the "old way")gets the better of him. The book reminds me of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth in which another farmer(this time in China)rises to wealth and fame also to become shameful in his old age. What is interesting, is Ringuet's commentary on the US, whether intentional or not. One of Euchariste's sons moves to the US to work in a factory after meeting Euchariste's long lost cousin who moved down to Lowell, MA(big mill town, been there through National Parks)and seeing his success. Euchariste spurns this decision and does not like the U.S., is distrustful of this vast country. A quote that I particularly liked is when Euchariste's cousin comes to visit and tells why he changed his name, because people couldn't pronounce it. "He made this declaration in an amused tone of voice, as if to show his cousins from the back country of Quebec that he belonged now to the American nation, to that terrifically vital race which is composed of the overflow from all the other nations, like those colourful patchwork quilts made up from scraps sewn together anyhow."(116) It is this country, which Euchariste has disdain for, which is not as pure as French Quebec, though, that he is forced to live in when his second eldest son(his first son Oguinaste died of consumption after being a parish priest in a small, impoverished parish)takes over the farm. And he finds some renewed friendships as he discovers other families who have left Quebec for better things. Of course then, this doddering old man becomes a major breadwinner for his son's family when he becomes a security guard in the start of the Depression. He is not so useless anymore. But this is the end of winter...According to the introduction, this is the last of the great farm novels...But, as we can see in the book with the birth of the modernization of the family farm, the farm was in the beginning of decline as well. Sad, but interesting. The final paragraph/section of the book sums up the point of this book quite well, methinks. "Euchariste Moisan-old man Moisan-sat smoking and coughing in his garage at White Falls.[para] His sight had been getting worse for some time now, and his hearing too. But it was his legs that had begun to fail him more than anything. So now he could no longer go to visit the little wood right down at the end of Jefferson Street. [para] He hadn't given up hope of going back home to Saint-Jacques; giving up hope would mean he had made up his mind about it and that was something he hadn't done and probably never would do, would never have to do. [para] Circumstances had decided matters for him, that and people ruled by circumstance. [para] With November the rains came again and he lit a fire in the stove. [para] Every year brought spring...[para]...and every year the valley of the St. Lawrence, which had lain asleep under the snow for four months, offered men its fields to plough and harrow and fertilize and seed and harvest...; [para]...different men...[para]...but always the same land." (Ringuet 249)
Alison Lurie's Foreign Affairs was a really great read, though even when I finished it, I didn't feel like I had enough to write an entire entry about it(same with Peter Taylor's A Summons to Memphis), interesting fact about Lurie's novel, though, is that it won the Pulitzer Prize the same year that Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale won the Governor General, only the third time in both prizes' history that two women won in the same year. What a difference in subject matter, tone, everything. Lurie's book is a great look at university professors abroad, and it is at once tragicomic. It has the backbiting wit of Jane Austen combined with a great storytelling. I loved every page and couldn't stop reading it, it just didn't end up MOVING me. It was very enjoyable, though, and I highly recommend it.:)

Shirley Ann Grau, for me is right now the American equivalent of Gwethalyn Graham(remember that Canadian author that I love, that wrote about the Swiss boarding school and the Jewish man and WASPy woman falling in love during WWII?). Grau (b.1929), who is still alive, writes of the DEEP South, with what, at times in The Keepers of the House, seems to be some scalding truth. Keepers, which won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1965,(even though the front of the copy that I borrowed from the library says it won the PP in 1964, that's a typo. No award was given in 1964.) tells the story of a wealthy Southern aristocrat(in the sense of coming from OLD money, Reconstructionist money at that)who meets a young black woman, hires her to be his housekeeper and then fathers 3 children with her and creates a 30 year "marriage" of sorts with her. She is his best friend, companion, lover, his equal in his eyes, though not of course in the eyes of anyone else. He does all of this in the early to middle of last century, when segregationist tendencies(like the Klan) are just starting to come to a head. Nobody really cares that much, I mean, people talk of course, but since he is by far the wealthiest man in the area, and powerful because of it, people just leave him and his "mistress" alone. The children are sent away to the North to be educated in boarding schools because they can "pass for white" there, since apparently Northerners are not looking as hard to see if they can find "Negro" blood in people as born and bred Southerners do. Through the eyes of the main character, the aristocrat's legitimate(and pure White)grand-daughter, we see a South that is not integrated but averts its eyes to things that may not be completely "kosher" as it were. Everything seems to go okay, even after the death of Abigail(the protagonist and narrator)'s grandfather, until one of the aristocrat's illegitimate children goes to the press about the truth in his parents' relationship because he is upset to be out of his late mother's will and also because he has read about Abigail's husband, an up-and-coming politician, and the distasteful things he has said about black people. He is angry and he is out to destroy. It is his will that changes the course of everyone's life: Abigail, her husband, the children of William Howland(her grandfather) and even the townspeople of Madison City where William owned so much land. What he reveals is that his father, this white Southern aristocrat, MARRIED his mother, a black woman, and gave his children his name. This Southerner did the right thing, he married the woman he loved, and provided her with a home and provided for THEIR children. When the townspeople find this out(and when Abigail's husband finds this out), it's a big FUCKING problem. The South at that time was full of Klansmen and not ready for something like that. And on the eve of possibly having the first Black candidate for President(or at least the first real possibility of one), who knows if the South and the rest of the nation for that matter are ready for true integration. Grau's book is amazing for what it tackles and how it does it, especially for the fact that it won the Pulitzer at a time when the civil rights movement was just getting really underway and the South was still full of such unspeakable civil rights violations. Grau does not offer any solutions, she doesn't even make the characters into martyrs for a cause, she makes them real people who live in a real time, who are tackling with the world in which they live and what that feels like. It was an impressive feat. (On a somewhat irrelevant note, I found it interesting that she mentions the Huey Long in Louisiana as someone who Abigail's husband, John Tolliver, looks up to, when a fictionalized Long is the subject of Warren's All the King's Men, a great novel of the CORRUPTION in politics, etc.). What was interesting to me in reading Grau's novel, though, is that when people asked me what I was reading today, when I went out to coffee with Keren and some of her grad school friends(they were grading papers, I was reading), is that NO ONE knew Shirley Ann Grau's name, nor had they heard of the book at all. The Pulitzer awards to authors who write a novel that deals with an aspect of American life, and surely interracial marriage, amongst the other themes in this book, is an aspect of American life that one should write novels about, and the novels should be read, like this one should. This brings me back to my original statement, why I think Grau is the American version of Gwethalyn Graham. Graham wrote at least two(I've only read two) ROCKSTAR novels, but no one today even knows about them, novels about desire for social justice and change and just dead-on portrayals of her time. Grau also wrote an incredible novel, that deserves recognition beyond the Pulitzer it won more than 40 years ago. It brings me back to my eternal question...how does a society pick what is considered timeless and cast aside other works? If it was up to me, this book would have a revival.:) PPs-40!!, GGs-35!!!

Last night, as I watched the primaries of Texas and Ohio(and Vermont and Rhode Island)unfold, I finished Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams which won the Pulitzer prize in 1922. It didn't take me long to read when I actually sat down to it, maybe only 3 days. And, it was okay. I'm not saying it was the best book I've ever read(by a LONG SHOT), but it wasn't too terrible at all, a fairly fast read actually, and maybe I'm just coming down off of a high of finishing All the King's Men. Keren was a bit worried that Alice Adams would appear to be sexist. It's about a family in a small Midwestern town in which the wife is constantly nagging the husband to be better and make more money so that his family can have more nice things, and is constantly telling him how much of a failure he is because after all these years he hasn't done anything about bettering the welfare of his family. This is juxtaposed with Alice Adams, the title character of the book, but also the daughter in the family, trying to keep up with the rich girls she wants to be like and attract a rich eligible bachelor, in this case the highly-sought-after Mr. Russell. By pretending too much and, I guess the old-fashioned expression is "putting on airs,"(as well as saying QUITE often, "people may talk about me" and either asking if they have or downplaying it...it makes Mr. Russell nervous, this constant preoccupation of hers with wondering what others think about her) she doesn't give him the most accurate picture of herself, and when Mr. Russell is at lunch with his rich cousins and hears some trash-talking about her and her family, he becomes uneasy, thoughtful and especially after the climactic disastrous dinner her family has for him, he is permanently out of the picture.
In the midst of this, Alice's father decides to actually get off of his extremely sickly ass and DO something since his wife won't quit harping on him. He decides to open a glue factory by using a recipe that he shared with his very wealthy boss, but up until now had not been acted upon. He does it without his boss knowing and then the boss squashes him, like a bug. Though in this process, Mr.Adams stands up for himself and being the poor, forgotten man. It is a pathetic speech, but reminds us all of what it is like to be the underdog trying to compete with the extremely wealthy.
Alice, though the heroine, is rather annoying. I felt myself constantly wanting to scream BE YOURSELF!, but it is not even today uncommon for women to act a certain way to try to attract a man, or be popular or whatever. The most interesting character, who unfortunately becomes a major player in the family's downfall, is Alice's brother Walter. Now the book I don't find to be sexist at all, even from an historical standpoint. Women's roles were definitely different in 1922, but I don't think that this book contributes to that outlook, it just depicts it. There are still nagging, social-climbing wives out there and there always will be, there are always women who will pretend that they are something or someone else to make a man fall in love with them, especially if they feel that their chances are running out. But what is interesting is the depiction of Blacks in this book. Now, this book takes place in the Midwest, where there never was slavery. But here there is still a dichotomy between the blacks and whites, something that will continue until even the present day. Walter, Alice's brother, has fun with "the coloureds" and interacts with them, causing much consternation for his family members, especially Alice, who tells her Mr.Russell that her brother is writing a book on them so he must observe their habits. Also, the depiction of the maid they hire for the dinner and other black people that are onlookers to the families demise are not depicted very well, but you get the picture with Tarkington's writing that this isn't necessarily his opinion, rather the opinion of the people of the time. Which when you read the novel, you are more likely to believe.
I was surfing around on the Pulitzer prize website last night to see how they decide on the award given in that particular year(esp. since as the farther you go back you don't have any way of finding out what other novels the winners were up against)and there wasn't much information to be found in that respect. What was interesting was in the FAQs, there was this question:
23. Why in some years was there no award given in a particular category?
According to The Plan of Award "If in any year all the competitors in any category shall fall below the standard of excellence fixed by The Pulitzer Prize Board, the amount of such prize or prizes may be withheld."

Hmmm. What does this mean? I find it particularly hard to believe that out of the thousands of books published in any given year the committee can't figure on one that depicts American life well enough to give it an award. I hope that when I'm done with this project I will be able to interview or at least speak with some members of the committee to see how it all really works. Same with the Canadian side...though they didn't award far less times than the U.S. did. I just don't know. PPs-38, GGs-35.

I'm sitting here, listening to James Taylor sing "Country Road" in a public television concert, and it makes me think about my travel out West, a literal coast-to-coast journey along major highways and also small country roads. It was an awe-inspiring trip and I'll never forget it. This project too has been even thus far an amazing journey through Canadian and American literature, through the cities and small towns that make up these two great countries, discovering authors that I would have never ever known about otherwise and reading some of the "classics" that I probably should read at some point but haven't yet. I'm almost half-way through both lists(actually just about half-way on the Canadian side) and there's still so much more to go, but it's books like the last one I read, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men that make me excited to keep going, to see what still lies ahead. I decided to read Warren's book because of the timeliness with all of the excitement swirling around the presidential election coming up in November. It's only a few days away from two big deciding states on the democratic side, Texas and Ohio's primaries and caucus. Robert Penn Warren's novel is supposed to be THE political novel of American literature, about a well-meaning attorney who at first is blindly led to the slaughter of politics in Louisiana and then, only a few years later, takes the gubernatorial election by storm and becomes the great, but as the years add on extremely corrupt, Governor Willie Stark. Stark's character is based upon Huey Long, a real-life famous governor of the same state. I have to admit, politics have always fascinated me, I voted in my first democratic primary (at the state level) only days after I turned 18, and have followed the road to the White House in these past months and will continue to follow it rapt. It is kind of sad that two of my new favorite shows are Charlie Rose and George Stephanopoulos. But, I eat that stuff up. So, I was looking forward to this book, though apprehensive too, because even though it had garnered great reviews, I have been deceived on that front before. Boy, was I pleased. This is probably(and I've already said this more than once this week)one of the best books I HAVE EVER READ. Not only am I talking at the enjoyability level, but also in terms of how well it is written. Warren was named as the first poet laureate of the United States and has won two Pulitzer prizes for books of poetry, being the only writer in the history of the prize to win in both categories. Michael Ondaatje(my author that I LOVE to hate) and also Margaret Atwood won Governor General's for poetry and the novel, but even though I haven't read Robert Penn Warren's poetry, I can surely say that this man writes a truly poetic novel. The descriptions are luscious and dripping with the sweat in Governor's house and the humidity of the Louisiana bayou. I clung to every word, aching to read more, and that's just because of his choice of words and phrases. The story too is complicated and rich, as complicated as all our lives are. The title of the work makes reference to the nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" in which after Humpty Dumpty falls, "all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again." This book is supposed to be about the rise and fall of Governor Willie Stark, but it is so much more than that. It is about the narrator himself, Stark's right-hand man Jack Burden and his life, as well as all of the people that he and Stark touch or destroy along the way. This book has echoes of F.Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in which an unreliably biased(possibly experiencing homosexual desire and love)narrator depicts the rise and fall of a tycoon named Jay Gatsby. Warren blows Gatsby away. You see not only the rise and fall of Stark, but of all of his cronies and every one he touches, and come to realize that one's life is shaped so very much by the relationships that one has with other people; children can be borne out of relationships, but so also is experience born and depending on the kind of experiences one has is how one's life shifts and changes. Politics obviously plays a huge part in this book and shapes everyone surrounding Gov. Stark, and it made me think of the candidates that we have now...Obama, for example, still seems wide-eyed and not as calculating as I presume Hillary to be, but I know he's got his calculating side as well, and how far is he really from backroom deals and screwed up spending? I would like to think that he is above all that, but then you can look at Willie Stark and see how quickly one can run down a slippery slope...I also, for whatever reason, seem to have a penchant for books about the deep South and this book is so great for that, perhaps I like books about the South so much because it seems to have a dreamy quality to it. I've only been to Florida in terms of travelling to the South, which is full of magnolias and gardenias, azaleas, live oaks and cypress. Soon, though, in about a month, I will travel to North Carolina as well, and even though it will just be early spring, I'm hoping to enjoy some of the landscape. But, I digress. What I also really liked about the book is that EVERYONE is flawed. There is absolutely no perfect character in Warren's book, which is, of course just like in real life.:) I'm not sure why this book grabbed me so, I just have to put it on the list of top reads next to Faulkner, To Kill a Mockingbird and Gone with the Wind. Funny, all those books take place in the South as well...I've got a lot of favorite quotes from this book, and I hope by reading these you can see a little bit about how well Warren writes, though the brevity of them doesn't do him justice...
"That was why I had got into my car and headed west, because when you don't like it where you are you always go west. We have always gone west.[paragraph] That was why I drowned in West and relived my life like a home movie.[paragraph] That was why I came to like on a bed in a hotel in Long Beach, California, on the last coast amid the grandeurs of nature. For that is where you come, after you have crossed oceans and eaten stale biscuits while prisoned forty days and nights in a storm-tossed rat trap, after you have sweated in the greenery and heard the savage whoop, after you have built cabins and cities and bridged rivers, after you have lain with women and scattered children like millet seed in a high wind, after you have composed resonant documents, made noble speeches, and bathed your arms in blood to the elbows, after you have shaken with malaria in the marshes and in the icy wind across the high plains. That is where you come to lie alone on a bed in a hotel room in Long Beach, California.(464-465)

Also..."I dismissed the question finally. Perhaps the only answer, I thought then, was that by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it is too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made? At least that was the way I argued the case back then (529).

And,
"This is not remarkable, for, as we know, reality is not a function of the event as the event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from other events which, likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this do we live, for our own identity is dependent upon this principle" (578).

This too:
"So I went back down and stood in the garden among the black magnolia trees and the myrtles, and thought how by killing my father I had saved my mother's soul. Then I thought how maybe I had saved my father's soul, too. Both of them had found out what they needed to know to be saved. Then I thought how all knowledge that is worth anything is maybe paid for by blood. Maybe that is the only way you can tell that a certain piece of knowledge is worth anything: it has cost some blood" (647).

And finally, two quotes from the same page...The first "I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was not future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future"(656). And, the beginning of the end, where Jack Burden(what's in a name after all? his is fitting since he has such a burden of a story to carry with him...)begins to wrap it up..."This has been the story of Willie Stark, but it is my story, too. For I have a story. It is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way. The change did not happen all at once. Many things happened, and that man did not know when he had any responsibility for them and when he did not..." (656).

We have no idea how even the minutest events will affect us until they turn us down the path on which we now walk. I could quote Robert Frost, but I think you get the point. This book is all about roads taken and not taken and the sometimes horrific consequences that ensue, all written in an extremely beautiful lyrical way. This is what American literature is all about and why we give out a prize like the one it won. I'm so glad I read it. PP-37, GG-35

One of the things that has been really great about this project is that I've discovered some authors that I probably wouldn't have otherwise, they are the unsung heroes, the forgotten ones. One of these is Gwethalyn Graham, the author of Earth and High Heaven which is the book that I finished this afternoon. Gwethalyn Graham is an amazing writer: one of the few women to win the Governor General, and one of the even fewer women to win it multiple times, first for the novel Swiss Sonata(GG in 1938)and then again for Earth in 1944. I read Swiss Sonata right when I started pursuing this project seriously and fell in love with her then, thankful that I had this projects to make discoveries like that one. I got Swiss Sonata through an interlibrary loan with the Seattle Public Library. The book came from Pomona, California. What a jewel of a novel. It takes place pre-WWII in a Swiss boarding school. This Swiss boarding school becomes the microcosm for what is going outside this 1930s version of Mean Girls. I wrote a review about it on Amazon.ca and here it is:

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

A rare and outstanding jewel, Mar 7 2006

By	Pastry chick (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

Graham's novel was an amazing look at the world pre-WWII, written with such insight and foreshadowing as I have only seen in novels written post-war, when one has all the time in the world to have hindsight. Written in 1938 about 3 days during 1935, it turns a Swiss "finishing school" into a microcosm of pre-war Europe and abroad. Sometimes while reading, I couldn't see how the book pertained to a kind of Canadian experience, which I thought might be fitting as it was the 1938 winner of the Governor General, but I realized that it chronicles several human experiences, loneliness and loss among them, that make it universally worthy of any award presented to it. A must read for anyone who likes to think, but also enjoys good prose.

Earth and High Heaven is also a gem. Graham tackles a social unmentionable: the possible mixed marriage of a Jew and a Gentile. Interestingly, this book takes place DURING WWII, while Canadians and the rest of Europe were fighting against Hitler and Nazi Germany. At the heart of the novel are two people, Erica Drake and Marc Reiser. Erica is from a wealthy family who has seen their wealth slip a bit during the Depression, but they still cling to their WASPy status wholeheartedly(at least her parents do). Marc Reiser is a Canadian Jew, born to Austrian immigrant parents, who practices law in Montreal. Erica and Marc meet at a party at her parents' posh Westmount home, and you could pretty much say it was love at first sight. But, what ensues is a battle for that love as Erica's parents fight wholeheartedly against the relationship, because to them marrying a Jew is pretty much the worst thing in the world, at least they claim it will be for her, since her social status will diminish and after all, this man is only "using" her to get ahead. The love that Marc and Erica share grows despite all of this though, and even despite Marc misgivings that HE will ruin Erica's life with the prejudice she will face with a mixed marriage. Questions arise like "How would they raise their kids?" and the fact that Erica's father wouldn't be able to have his son-in-law come to his club(something that matters to him a great deal, to Erica not so much). What lies at the heart of this novel is prejudice and how blinding that prejudice in the face of stubbornness it can become. Erica's father is already not too pleased by his son's marriage to a Catholic French Canadian, this, especially given the fact that Erica is his favorite child is too much. It takes the second generation, both Marc's brother and Erica's sister to show parents some sense(though Marc's parents seem more amenable to the idea; Marc's mother's only worry is that when people are married for a long time they can fight and say things they wouldn't say to anyone else. She's afraid that Erica would throw Marc's being a Jew back at him). This, to an extent can be applied to any situation involving prejudices towards something someone doesn't or can't(because of lack of desire)understand. I know that when I began dating Keren, my mother got extremely worried. This is a woman for whom Christmas is a literal explosion all over her property every single year. The fact that I would possibly never celebrate Christmas again bothered her terribly. I still don't think she's completely over it, but at least she's willing to work with it and is not trying to prevent the relationship from continuing like Erica's father, especially, tries to do. Erica's father feels he knows what's best for her, but of course the only one that knows what's best for her is her, and he doesn't get it at all...Some phenomenal quotes come out of this book: "That human beings, regardless of their own merit, should take upon themselves the right to judge a whole group of men, women and children, arbitrarily assembled according to a largely meaningless set of definitions, was evil enough; that there should not even be a judgement, was intolerable" (Graham 32).
And in reference to Erica's father: "What he was saying was of no importance in itself, it had all been said before so many times, repeated parrot-like but with an air of acute perception and originality by one person after another, in one country after another, all the way down through history. After all, even Hitler was unable to think up anything really new on the subject of the Jews; he merely said what everybody else had been saying, only of course he said it louder and oftener, and put it a bit more strongly.[paragraph break] The importance lay, first, in the fact that it was Charles who was saying it, and second, in the fact that if he believed what he said, if he believed that even half of what he was saying applied to Marc, then, whether or not her father ultimately came round, it would make no real difference. He might put up with Marc, he might even endure him for her sake, but he would never like him. He would never even get near enough to Marc to find out whether he was likable or not. [paragraph break] (and MY FAVORITE PART RIGHT HERE) You might just as well try to see a man through a brick wall as try to see him through a mass of preconceived ideas" (149).
What I particularly loved was the foresight that Graham's characters had towards AMERICAN government. something that seems particularly fitting seeing as we are in an Election year moving towards FINALLY electing a new President. "'Do you think the people who are in a position to do all the talking really know?' asked Erica. [paragraph break] 'Maybe a few of them do, but all we seem to have got so far is a kind of mass consciousness of the way things are changing or ought to change, if we're really going to get anywhere after the war. At least the English masses seem to be getting the hang of things, and I guess we are too, though naturally not to the same extent yet, because we haven't taken anything like the beating they have. I don't know about the Americans, though I'd be willing to bet that when capitalism is a dead duck in the rest of the world, the Americans will be the last nation to admit it.' 'Why?' asked Erica. 'Because their attitude toward Government seems to be fundamentally different than ours. The further you get from unrestricted capitalism the more Government you have to have. So far as the war is concerned, for example, the Americans apparently get production in spite of their Government, half the time, and not because of it. It's their individual industrial geniuses who work the miracles, not Washington. They still believe in rugged individualism and don't believe in 'government interference,' so rugged individualism works and Government doesn't. Most of the Americans I know talk about their Government as though it was on one side of the fence and they were on the other. Good old-fashioned capitalism is the only economic system that suits that point of view'" (157-8). Hmmmm....
The novel gets its title, one discovers, from The Shropshire Lad by A.E. Houseman, which contains the lines 'Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle.../Earth and high heaven are fixed of old and founded strong.' That makes me think of today even, that in some regards things haven't changed, or at least not as much as we would like. My mother worried about me dating a Jew, but not as much as she worries about what our lives are like as being a lesbian couple. There is an entire part of the country(ultra-conservatives)that are afraid, much like Erica's parents in the novel are, of people who are different, and there are also a lot of people who claim to be enlightened, but when push comes to shove...
"When I was just a little girl" I wanted to be Jewish so bad. I thought it was cool, that it would make me different. This book made me think about how hard it must have been, to preserve one's faith and culture in the face of sooooo much adversity. One night while I was reading the book I asked Keren about whether sometimes it had been hard for her to be Jewish in this country. Her answer made me think. Have we really come that far as a nation, as a world? This impending election has raised a lot of those questions, since the democrats have either a white woman or a black man as possible nominees. How ready are we really, and are our preconceived notions like the wall that stretches across China, or like the one in the former East Berlin? GGs-35. PPs-36.

Since my last blog, I've read two more winners...Home Truths by Mavis Gallant and Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. I feel slightly bad, because I didn't do any writing about Home Truths. I thought it was easily one of, if not the the best, short story collections I have EVER read. But, even though each story was very well crafted and highly enjoyable, I didn't find any of the stories to be particularly memorable. This is not to detract at all from Gallant's writing ability at all, though. Her collection of short stories, though shorter than Katherine Anne Porter's, was so much better.:) Gallant explores what it means to be "Canadian"...Her depiction of Canadians is not always good, she sometimes demonstrates them as close-minded, but others as explorers of their world. Perhaps this is to show that just like in the US, despite sometimes international thought depicting us differently, it takes all kinds of Canadians to make, well, Canada.
The book I finished early this morning is Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. It was 945 pages long, and at first, I was like "this book is FUCKING long." But, especially in the last 300 pages, it became quite amazing. Larry McMurtry is one of the most successful American writers, not only because he has published a crazy amount of books, but also because he has had those books turned into screenplays(Terms of Endearment, etc.)and also written several screenplays of his own, including the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain(adapted from E. Annie Proulx, short story). Lonesome Dove is also about cowboys, lots and lots of them, though absolutely NONE of them are gay, unfortunately. 945 pages and NO ONE IS GAY? Come on! Women too are scarce in the novel, only a handful show up of any real note and less than 5 women would be considered main characters(probably really only 2, Clara and Lorena). That was also disappointing, but then I had to really think about what the West was like...
I will completely, and totally, readily admit that the West has been a fascination of mine since I was probably about 7 years old, when I first read Little House in the Big Woods and all the books that followed. I have, for at least the past twenty years, scoured libraries and bookstores for anything about the West and pioneers, mostly women and pioneering, which is pretty rare. Willa Cather whom I adore(especially since she was a lesbian) talked about establishing the Midwest and living and working the land, but she always used male protagonists(arguably because then she could write more freely about the love for a woman). Cather's only Pulitzer prize winner also has a male protagonist. But, anyway, I've always thought the West and travelling the West was pretty interesting, though I always focused much more on the pioneer aspect and less on the cowboy aspect. There are quite a few books, interestingly enough, in the Pulitzer list, that are about establishing the West, which makes sense because the Pulitzer is supposed to be about the American Experience, a huge part of which of course is the never-again paralleled Westward Expansion. I will have many more books to read about the West and hard farming lives in the Midwest, which is great! Why didn't I have to read this stuff in school? Why are all the early books pushed aside and put away? I can't wait to read almost all of them, especially women writers writing about prairie experiences.
Back to Lonesome Dove. When the book opens, we are thrust into the small town of Lonesome Dove, Texas, with Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call and all the other characters who will forever stay in my memory. The novel follows these two mean as they lead thousands of cattle north to Montana, loves lost and gained and also all the peripheral stories of other people and how the world is such a truly small place. My favorite character, besides Augustus(Gus) McCrae, is Clara Allen, who is Gus's long lost love, from twenty years prior. She only figures in the book in memory, until around the last few hundred pages, when the cattle trip stops by her house in Ogallala, Nebraska. Then, her life without Gus is revealed and when he comes to visit, he brings Lorena, the whore that he rescued from Indians(up until that point the only real female character in the novel). She winds up living with Clara through the duration of the novel, helping to raise Clara's two children as well as the baby son of a young sheriff who is half-heartedly searching for Jake Spoon, a cowboy that Gus has known for years, who is on the run from the law and spent quite a long time with Lorena, who is on the trail to Montana because of him. See what I mean? In the novel of Lonesome Dove, it's truly a small small world.
It is fortunate that for the most part all of McMurtry's female characters(what few there are)are quite strong-minded survivors. That makes me appreciate them so much, despite the presence of them. However, I have to remind myself that the West certainly had a limited female population anyway and what women survived HAD to be strong in body AND spirit. Even Louisa, a woman farmer that Roscoe(July Johnson the sheriff tracking Jake Spoon's deputy sheriff)encounters on his way west is a hard-working, takes no prisoners, kind of woman, a fact that surprises Roscoe greatly. I wonder what I would have done if that opportunity had been available to me back then. Would I have gone and taken my chances with the men? It was appalling to see how limiting the career options for women were. You were either a schoolteacher, married or a whore. How would I, if I was as I am now, a lesbian, have handled myself and would I have taken advantage of my desire to see the West and explore, or would I have stayed East and NOT risked my life. It was crazy enough to move out here on my own now, over one hundred years later with the amenities such as car and cell phones. I'm not sure what I would have done back then. My dream would have been(especially when I was single)to open a restaurant in a town and cook for the men who would have loved homecooked meals, but I'm not sure whether there was a real possibility of me then being raped or forced to marry. I'm sure I wouldn't have been allowed to be single for too long. And then, where would I meet other women and/or have had exposure to books and education? As one found out while reading Lonesome Dove, when Clara talks about how long it takes for her to get her magazines that she sends away for, and one discovers how illiterate the men were, it would have been hard for a big reader like me. However, the description of the landscape on the way north from Texas to Montana made me want to get in the car and do a long-distance drive right away and see Wyoming again, not to mention the land I haven't seen, Montana, which to all accounts is supposed to be absolutely stunning. There is so much to write about with a 900+ page novel, but this has already been super long. I can say, it is like the Gone With the Wind of the West. Perhaps that will give you a better idea...:) Pulitzer prize-35, GGs-34.

Divisadero and The Road. What do they have in common? A few things. They were both written by men who are extremely famous writers with many accolades to their credit. They both are populated by stark dialogue and overall sparse prose. And, they both won an award in 2007. Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje(MY FAVORITE! NOT!) won this year's Governor General award, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy won this year's Pulitzer Prize. Both books also held their share of surprises. But, even though Ondaatje's book won later in the year(November), I want to talk about him first, since I owe a blog about him(my blog about Anil's Ghost was unfortunately lost by blogger in a combination with firefox) to the blog.
Michael Ondaatje. I am not a big fan. I've been thinking lately about why that is. Perhaps it's because he's one of the only Canadian writers that Americans are familiar with and that makes me just a little bit bitter because there are so many other fabulous Canadian writers out there. Also, I know that he and Margaret Atwood are always linked together as the "Margaret Ondaatje" phenomenon(at least her name comes first)and yet though I think she is both a better novelist AND poet, he always seems to clean up at the big awards. I don't like the feeling that I get when I open an Ondaatje book(and I feel I can be a pretty good judge of this, I've read 4 of his novels and two books of poetry)I feel like I should be basking in this overwhelming sense of AWE. I feel like when I open the book this voice speaks to me that says "YOU ARE READING A MICHAEL ONDAATJE NOVEL, WRITTEN BY ONE OF THE GREATEST CANADIAN WRITERS, NO, WORLD WRITERS, EVER. JUST TRY AND UNDERSTAND WHAT WILL BE THE MOST AWE-INSPIRING READING EXPERIENCE YOU HAVE EVER HAD. YOU ARE NOT MEANT TO UNDERSTAND, BECAUSE CLEARLY YOU ARE NOT MICHAEL ONDAATJE, THE GREATEST WRITER, EVER." A book, no matter in what esteem I hold it in, is still a book. I don't want anyone, especially an author, making me feel like a book is going to be a certain way before I even get past page 5. Let ME read it and see what I think. That being said, I am, to an extent, a fan of Ondaatje's poetry. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is still one of my favorite poetry books, because I love the combination of words and use of found poetry, as well as Ondaatje's pursuit of the outlaw theme that runs rampant through Canadian literature. However, with his novels, I've had a little bit different experience. Though the books are interesting enough at the time, I have never found one to be particularly memorable. Ironically, I CAN remember what was going on in my life whenever I read one of his books, and that WAS memorable, so perhaps that is why his books don't cling to me as much. The English Patient I read the summer I had major jaw surgery. I was so doped up it was hard for me to focus on anything, and Ondaatje's elongated prose poem style of writing, not to mention the fact that the main character was also heavily medicated, made the book a challenge to follow at times. I thought it was an interesting read, but wasn't compelled to read any more of his novels. In the Skin of a Lion I read because of someone, which is what made that memorable. I met a guy, through a friend at school, and began dating him. The reason I was dating him was because I found out that my two best friends had fallen in love, and I was supremely jealous and freaked out because I wasn't sure that I was gay(I knew I was, but I was still in denial)and I wanted to prove that I wasn't. In the Skin of a Lion was one of his favorite books. I bought it because of him and read it much later(the relationship was extremely short-lived for a few reasons). I don't remember much about that book either except that it involves a bridge and immigrants. Out of the 4 Ondaatje books I've read, it's also the one that hasn't won a Governor General. Anil's Ghost I read this past summer(2007). It wasn't as terrible as I'd heard it to be, but it wasn't that great either. It doesn't help that I was depressed much of that time because Keren was in NZ and I was lonely and work was super stressful. I spent much of my free time watching Gilmore Girls episodes and any book that I read kind of got the shaft in terms of my attention commitment level. I just felt a major MEH when I read it, perhaps it's some anticlimactic reflex from the build-up of reading an ONDAATJE(can't you just hear some deep announcer voice saying his name and the room vibrating?)novel. So, since my experiences with his novels have not been super great, you can only imagine my chagrin when he won this year for Divisadero, his latest novel. Chagrin doesn't begin to describe it. I was PISSED. First of all, I was looking forward to the announcement, like counting down the days, of who would be the winner of this year's GG award for fiction. I was also crossing my fingers because I didn't want him to win. Not only because I was tired of reading Michael Ondaatje novels, but also because there were quite a few new novelists(Heather O'Neill for example)who I wanted to win to spread the wealth and bring in some new blood. The day of the announcement I was SOOOO excited and then subsequently SOOOOO disappointed. I had a gloomy face for a few days and if anyone asked why, they were sorry, because I told them. So, I put a hold on it at the library(it was extremely popular) so that it would be a long time before I would read it....Someone at the library must hate me because I got it only a few weeks later. Kate thinks it's because everyone who was on the list found out how shitty it was and took their names off the list. Ha. Well, I read it, started and finished it on my trip back to Seattle from Vermont, when I visited my parents this year for a birthday surprise for my mom. Yet again, even though I just finished the book a little over a week ago, the trip is memorable, the book is not so much. I remember liking it while reading it, surprisingly, but not being overly drawn to any of the characters. Ondaatje's writing style is so, poetic, which I do admire, and the book was short, which was helpful. I finished it going, what was the point of that? The first part was about three people(even four if you include the father)and their interconnected lives and how the past continues to haunt them, the part about the writer in France, that one of the protagonists is studying, I'm not sure where exactly that fits in, and especially since the book ends with that writer's point of view and just seems to stop, I felt like I was left hanging. I flipped back through the book for clues, and the one that I found was perhaps in reference to the choice of title....It's a thought line of a character, but it could be interpreted as straight from the author's mouth: "This is where I learned that sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us. Just as there is, in the real landscape of Paris in Les Miserables, that small fictional street Victor Hugo provides for Jean Valjean to slip into, in which to hide from his pursuers. What was that fictional street's name? I no longer remember. I come from Divisadero Street. Divisadero, from the Spanish word for 'division,' the street that at one time was the dividing line between San Francisco and the fields of the Presidio. Or it might derive from the word divisar, meaning 'to gaze at something from a distance.' (There is a 'height' nearby called El Divisadero.) Thus a point from which you can look far into the distance. [paragraph break] It is what I do with my work, I suppose. I look into the distance for those I have lost, so that I see them everywhere. Even here, in Demu, where Lucien Segura existed, where I 'transcribe a substitution/like the accidental folds of a scarf.'" (142-143) He's a beautiful writer, don't get me wrong, but perhaps, now reading the quote that I chose over again, the reason why I'm not is biggest fan is because I feel he DOES create that distance, and it separates me as the reader from the book with a wall of either inability to understand, or not enough to depth in character to make me want to.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy, on the other hand, can be considered one of my SURPRISE!s of 2008(even though 2008 is still very young). The premise of the book did not interest me at all. It's about a man and son traveling west in the post-apocalyptic US. I can't think of anything in that description that would make me put the book on my must-read list. I am so glad I did. The book's prose is stark, dialogue sparse against the page, but the relationship between father and son is so compelling possibly because there is nothing else to focus on for them but survival(survival for their physical but also relationship health). These two men are working so hard to get to the West Coast, why, it is never really explained, but one hopes/assumes that it is in the desire to find something better...The road they travel is full of possibilities for scariness and threat of death but still they persevere. What is interesting to note too is that the son still has, even though this is the only kind of world in which he has lived, a sense of looking out for the good guys and helping people along the way...he still maintains some sort of innocent samaritan-ness. It is he who has to convince the father to help out the few that they do along the way and who thinks constantly about the ones that they choose not to help, wondering where they ended up. The father, though possessed with his own pre-apocalypse memories has such amazing love for his son, despite the fact that he is a jaded adult who for his own survival must focus exclusively on his and his son's life. The only thing I didn't like about the book is that the world is so bleak and hopeless in so many ways, that I had terrible nightmares at night over the three nights or so that I read it. I could only contribute it to the book because the horrific landscape always figured in somehow. It is totally a worthwhile read, though, it really made me think about how I would respond in a situation like that, what would I do, where would I go. You have no way of knowing if anyone else you know is alive or dead, there is absolutely no way to communicate, the entire US is full of blackened, burnt landscape and long-abandoned homes. In reading the novel, you assume that things have been like this for quite awhile due to the character's comments. Remember that movie 28 Days? It's kind of like that except imagine that the world has now calmed down a little and now you're just left in the wreckage, the open, empty wreckage. Like Ondaatje's book the prose was extremely sparse, but it made sense given the landscape and the character's situation. It actually drew me to them much more. I couldn't put it down. I'm actually happy this won, because maybe people will read it and it will encourage them to think. Isn't that what the Pulitzer is is all about? I could have bought this at a store in Port Gamble on my birthday this year(first edition hardcover)but I didn't. Too bad. But, I guess I have enough books as it is. GG's-33, PP's-34.

It's a new year, a new look at the Pulitzers and Governor Generals.  I realize, as I did towards the end of last year(wow, that's a weird thing to say), that I still have a long ways to go, and like everyone who has their New Year's resolutions, I too, have mine.  I think the plan has always been to complete these lists as soon as I could; this morning I woke up and decided to try to complete them before I turn 30.  That's only about 2 1/2 more years to go.  And, if I want to write a book about all of this as an experiential review/memoir, I'd like to do that sooner rather than later as well...Mmm...Since I last wrote in this blog, I've read 2 Pulitzer Prize winners: Katherine Anne Porter's Collected Stories back in the middle of December, and Bernard Malamud's The Fixer.  Malamud's book I finished just yesterday now, my mom's birthday.  

  Katherine Anne Porter's book is interesting in the sense that it took me almost 5 months to finally finish.  I started it back when Keren went to New Zealand.  But, I was lonely and distracted from so much work, that I couldn't get through the around 500 page book.  I put it down and resolved to read it another time.  I finally picked it up again around Thanksgiving and just persevered through it.  I ended up not hating it as much as I did in the beginning, but I'm still not totally sold on the book.  I did however, like the story "Noon Wine" a lot, it was engaging and the characters(a husband and wife, their hired man and an encounter with an outsider)were absolutely fascinating.  That was a story I couldn't put down.  The rest of the stories were interesting, but not gripping.  I think that so far the short story collections that are my favorites are The Roaring Girl and The Interpreter of Maladies.  But, I read it, I've now been exposed to another author that I wouldn't have normally read, since I no longer take classes in English literature, and I have another book off the list.  This book also is important to note because it and A Jest of God won in the same year, 1966.  There were only 3 times in the entire history of both awards that two women won in the same year(PP and GG).  It's also a book that I picked up while Chris and I were on our two day nine movie marathon that we had for his birthday almost two years ago.  It's one of the many books I've picked up in this quest that until now had gathered a bit of dust on my shelf.  

  Bernard Malamud's The Fixer was a much different experience.  I started reading The Fixer when I was waiting for blood work at Swedish Hospital in Ballard, after a physical, way back in October.  But, I didn't really feel like reading it then.  It has languished on my shelf all this time, until I picked up again last week.  It was due at the Seattle Public Library back in early December.  I may have amassed the most amount of overdue fines yet for this particular book, but I didn't want to give it up, postponing the reading of something that was in my grasp for so long.  So of course literally I will have to pay the price.:)  It was a great book.  I was really surprised, because the premise was not something that I thought I was going to enjoy.  It's about a Jewish man who is wrongfully accused of murder during the last few years of Tsar Nicholas II's reign when anti-semitism was rampant and disgustingly tortuous and frightening.  Yakov Bok spends the nearly the entire book in jail, awaiting his INDICTMENT, which takes forever to come.  It's a HELLISH purgatory, waiting, wondering, losing his mind, but never ever does he deny his innocence, regardless of what is put before him in the form of tortures or promises of release if he confesses.  This book made me sick to my stomach and very proud.  I was sick because of all the horrible things that Yakov has to face, but proud because he continues to stay his ground and never waver.  Yakov's thoughts are what take prominence in this book and there were some very amazing quotes:  "Nobody can burn an idea even if they burn the man" (61).  "'There's something cursed, it seems to me, about a country where men have owned men as property.  The stink of that corruption never escapes the soul, and it is the stink of future evil'" (172).  I find this quote to be particularly interesting because not only was slavery commonplace in Russia before the Emancipation of the Serfs, but of course slavery plays a HUGELY prominent role in US history.  This quote to me seems extremely prophetic for our future as well.  The only difference in the case of the US vs. Russia is the color of the persecuted's skin.  The final quote makes reference to Jews, which in this particular novel is very salient, but I think applies more generally to all who are in some state of persecution or discrimination.  "Why? Because no Jew was innocent in a corrupt state, the most visible sign of its corruption its fear and hatred of those it persecuted.  Ostrovsky had reminded him that there was much more wrong with Russian than its anti-Semitism.  Those who persecute the innocent were themselves never free" (315).  This book is about humans and human rights.  I agree with the writer of the introduction, it makes you want to DO something about all of the injustice in the world, and interestingly enough, the novel, even though at times it seems so terribly bleak, offers hope for some of the members of humankind.  This is one of the books that makes me glad I do this project.  I'm glad that it is the first winner of the new year that I have read.  I was so moved by it that I told my mother(I'm home in Vermont now for my mom's birthday, I surprised her:))about it, and she's expressed a desire to read it.:)  We'll see.  It's not exactly a light read, but a very rewarding one.  PPs-33, GGs-31.

So, I'm not sure how I feel about war novels. I don't think that I've read a war novel, other than Gone with the Wind that I've ever actually LOVED. I think, though, that war books by men are not particularly my scene. I get bored, I get distracted, mostly with all the writing about maneuvers and planes and boats and weapons. Maybe I'm just a total girl, but that part is just so dry to me, my eyes and mind both tend to wander. The one thing I do like about war books are the people and their experiences. I remember when I was younger(maybe late high school early college) I read Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy. In case you haven't read it (which you probably haven't, since who would read Tom Clancy who wasn't a male war vet?) it's about World War III between Russia and the United States. THE ENTIRE BOOK is about planes AND bombs AND ships AND MANEUVERS. BOOOOORRRRIINNNGGG. But, one of the side plots of the book is this story line about two American soldiers in Iceland who have rescued an Icelandic woman who was raped and spend the rest of the book trying to get back to safety with her. In between all of the war crap, I kept hoping that they would get back to the small group in Iceland. That's a bit how I felt about James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, Pulitzer prize winner in 1948. First of all, I was a bit skeptical because all of Michener's books, though bestsellers, are gi-freakin-normous, and I've been told, are full of DESCRIPTION. I wasn't sure about this one, since it was less than 400 pages and his first book, I was hoping he hadn't gotten long winded...yet. Well, overall I think I enjoyed it. What is interesting to note here, too, is the musical South Pacific was supposedly based on the book. Funny, but when I think "Inspiration for a musical," this book does NOT come to mind. However, when I think "book most likely to be made into a television series/movie like MASH", this book DOES come to mind. The characters in this book are what make it great. Michener can write great characters, I'll give him that. I also liked the fact that the stories were interconnected, so some of your favorite characters come back again and again, viewed through a different narrator's eyes. Being on the front lines of a battlefield is something that I hope I never have to experience, but I think Michener, who himself was a veteran of the 2nd World War(the war which the book is about), gave an accurate picture not only of the men while in battle(though ironically for me that was the boring part), but of the longing, for home, women and for action on the warfront, and then all the activities that ensued. I had a lot of stories that I really loved, "Passion" was probably my favorite, though. It's about a doctor who is trying to write a letter to his wife about how he's feeling playing his part in the war, and also how he feels about her. He's having a really hard time doing it, when he's interrupted by someone who wants a second opinion on how to censor a Navy mechanic's letter. When he reads the letter, he is overcome by the passion that this man conveys to his wife, in such explicit detail. Then, he reads another letter, that of the person who wanted the second opinion. He's been cheating on his wife the whole time he's been in the South Pacific, but he uses a mundane outing in a boat in an extremely elaborate form(basically creates a nonexistent battle)to show his love for his wife. These men both make the doctor rethink the proprieties that bind him and he ends up writing a much more "from the heart" letter. It's great, and reminds me of one of my favorite songs, a song from The Civil War soundtrack, called Ashokan Farewell. In one of the versions of the song, a soldier, dead after the first battle of Bull Run, writes the most powerful, loving letter to his wife, not knowing if it would be the last one he would ever pen. It almost makes me cry every time. Another story that's amazing is "Fo' Dolla'" about a Lt. Joe Cable and his love for the daughter of a foul-mouthed female Tonkinese street hustler, who will sell anything to the GIs and often scream at them in the inappropriate language they themselves taught her, if they don't buy from her. Her daughter is sweet, beautiful and intelligent, but the relationship between her and the Lieutenant is doomed because he cannot bring himself to marry outside of his race...There definitely were a lot of boring stories, too, but I was definitely surprised that I wasn't groaning the whole time. The other thing that was cool about this book was that even though it's a Reader's Digest version, it is the original complete text AND has beautiful color illustrations. AND I picked up at Jean's church book sale for only two dollars Canadian(which is now like $6 US!)! Well, as Queen says "Another one bites the dust." It's a tie: 31-31. I still have a helluva ways to go.