Book Blog Stalking, aka- the HOP

Hellloo hoppers! Welcome to Dead White Guys. Sit down, have a cup of tea, look around, say something judgmental. You'll fit right in!

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, check out the Book Hop hosted by Crazy For Books. It's the water cooler of book bloggers, and a great way to discover new folks out in the interwebs who read obsessively like yours truly.

If you are new to DWG, a little about us: we read and review classic literature, and say all those things everyone thinks when they're reading, but never say because it might make them sound stupid. We're all for sounding stupid here! For example, why can't Dickens stop making out with the semi-colon? You say James Joyce is a genius, we say our dog makes more sense when he rubs his bum on floor and yowls! etc, etc..Though, keep in mind- we love the classics. You'll find no YA or paranormal crappy mc-crapster here. Move along, Twighters, move along! I've got my eye on you...

Library Link-Up

The blogging duo over at Our Year In Books is hosting a library link-up, a virtual party of library shots and accompanying *fake* refreshments. I'm glad they emphasized the fake, which will keep me from sloshing riesling all over my Macbook. So this is my library- I use the term loosely. Note the pic above the television of the ice-skating butler. His name is Charles. He brings me scotch. Scotch scotch scotch. Down in my belly. Not really, I don't like scotch.

You can also see my bike that I haven't used in months because I'm too lazy to inflate the tires. And there under the tv is our Gamecube. Because we're stuck in 1996. What you can't see is my husband's collection of mass market westerns and sci-fi books. Those are in a pile (of shame) next to the HVAC closet WHERE THEY BELONG grumble grumble hatred grumble.

To the virtual get together, I would bring this fantastic orzo pasta salad with feta and baby spinach in a red wine vinegar dressing, and sweet tea. I don't know where you guys are, but I'm in the south, and sweet tea is a requisite at all gatherings above three people.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

OHMYS--- it's so good. It's so good it hurts my feelings. It's so good I would swear off cookies as a pledge of eternal love (but I won't). Fitzgerald's language is perfect. There's not a misplaced or unnecessary word in the bunch.

Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him, too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Wha- YES! That's exactly how it feels to be human! Bravo! Ok, I will stop drooling over the book long enough to tell you slober about it slober. It's a heartbreaking and uber-depressing story about a young man named Nick who moves into a swanky Mcswank swank neighborhood. His next door neighbor is Jay Gatsby, a mysterious and secretive partying type swimming in money. Across the bay lives Nick's cousin Daisy and her husband with the cruel body, Tom. Telling you anything else would be a spoiler, but you can assume that shennanigans happen. It's summer, there's booze, it's the '20s, and everyone's rich. What would YOU do? Exactly.

I think my favorite thing about this book is it doesn't AT ALL smack of rich man's ennui. That condescending tone of “oh it's so hhhhaaaahhhdddd to be rich I have so many pprrooobblleemmss my top shelf alcohol doesn't quite cut the mustard my poodle won't bath in her Evian my wife's nose is slightly crooked SOB SOB SOB Jeeves bring me my Ferrari”. Fitzgerald's characters are rich, or want to be, but he handles them in such a tactful and real way, and gives them real issues, and judges them for their silly greed.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...

It's the best novel to tackle the American Dream, hands down. Tackle it like a linebacker. Like a drunken, wealthy, flapper of a linebacker.

Five stars out of your mom.

Also, I've started The Pickwick Papers by Dickens

In My Mailbox

Welcome to In My Mailbox, a weekly meme hosted by The Story Siren, wherein we insulated book bloggers talk about our weekly finds gathered through libraries, book sales, bookmooch, swaps, or wherever. This is our first week participating at DWG, and I went a little nuts at the thrift stores, so it's a long post. If you're not a blogger participating in the meme, I'd still love to hear about any notable acquisitions in your life.

I like 'em chunky.

I am participating in the 2010 Chunkster Reading Challenge, mostly because my books already qualify, and I love challenges that I'm winning without knowing it. DWG will be participating at the Mor-Book-ly Obese level of the challenge, meaning we will complete six tomes over 750 pages this year. I'm not counting the books we've already done because I'm too lazy to go back and check. Other bloggers with masochistic tendencies can sign up here: http://chunksterchallenge.blogspot.com/2009/12/welcome-to-challenge-2010.html

OkIloveyoubuhbye!

Update- The Great Gatsby

I haven't picked up The Great Gatsby since I was about 16, after which I rushed out and spent a whole paycheck on buying everything else Fitzgerald wrote, looked at, or sneezed upon. So my 16 year old self apparently worships this book, and so far it's kinda slow going. I'm not far, just at the bit where Nick is describing Tom's "cruel body", a concept which made me stop and make a puzzled face, which my cat immediately swatted. He doesn't like me to be puzzled. It unnerves him.

I quite enjoy the whole Lost Generation feel, the hard partying, gin-induced intellectualism. The ennui of being wealthy, smart, and drunk. Oh, the horror! The pain! I'm concerned because last time I re-read a book from high school that I loved then (Catcher in the Stupid oops I Mean Shut the Hell Up You Whiny Punk oops I Mean Rye), I found it less than palatable. I hope this isn't the case this time because I will then have to re-work my whole Top Ten Books list, which is akin to saying I will have to redefine my WHOLE PERSONALITY. I am a person who loves Fitzgerald. What if I don't actually love Fitzgerald? WHO AM I?

Ooo, a cookie!

#ff- Blogroll

Bloggy McBlog Blogs. That's the focus of this week's Follow Friday, which I shamefacedly stole from Twitter. These are my favorite book blogs. Admittedly, I don't read a lot of book blogs because they're either boring, not funny (re: boring), or cover material I don't read. It seems most book blogs are about young adult literature (re: Twilight knock-offs) or heaving bosoms. If you have any suggestions for book blogs you think I would enjoy, please suggest in the comments.

Arukiyomi- This is a speed readin' mama-jamma. Except he's not a mama, he's a dude. He reads a lot of books on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list, which includes many Dead White Guys, along with Christian theology and anthropology books. This leads me to believe he's a...missionary to far off lands, though I'm totally conjecturing here. Is that a word? Conjecturing? Anyway, it's all insightful and often funny.

Awful Library Books- Ohmywordthisisfrickinhilarious. This blogger is a real librarian who posts funny/awful/ridonkulous books she finds throughout her day. Some of the covers aren't exactly NSFW, but the ones from the '70s are the best.

Books I Done Read- If the Gilmore Girls were a little funnier and talked slower and then wrote book reviews, this would be their blog. Straight faced sarcasm, CAPITOL LETTERS INDICATING ENTHUSIASM (which I love) and books that I want to read! Insightful and funny! EPIC WIN!

Also, http://www.crazy-for-books.com/ has a weekly Book Hop wherein Book Bloggers come and mingle around the proverbial water cooler and be generally nerdy and weird together. In a nice way. Take a gander if you want more booky bloggy things, though I can't endorse all the links there because I haven't visited all the links. Because I'm not obsessed. Right this second. Right this second, I have a sandwich, and therefore don't care about anything else nom nom.

picture from Wikimedia Commons

"Wives and Daughters" by Elizabeth Gaskell: A Review

Well, now you see why I picked this particular book to read. It's PINK. And I love pink Victorian novels- it so hides the masculine inner contents. Haha. Ha.

Anyway, Wives and Daughters is aptly named work by Elizabeth Gaskell, who was oh so famous during the Victorian era, but has fallen to the wayside in our time. She huddles in the cold, dark shadows of Austen and the Brontes. She drinks tea and eats bread and jam while working on her needlepoint, in the depths of her un-famousness. At any rate, no one seems to know who she is anymore, and it's a darn shame because she can spin a yarn, though she hasn't the wit of Austen or the Byronic grandeur of a Bronte. She tricks you into caring really deeply about these characters in provincial England, even though nothing really happens for about seven hundred pages. It's an engrossing trick.

The book itself is about Mr. Gibson, a country doctor, and his daughter, Molly. The wife and mother is dead, and Mr. Gibson remarries to a vapidly annoying woman with a pretty and silly daughter Molly's age. Throw in the handsome and rich brothers down the lane, and much fiddle faddle ensues. But it's quiet, country fiddle faddle so appropriate to the Victorian era. There's a bit of moralizing, and even a villain (gasp-heaving-corset-gasp) but his villainy is in being mainly irritating to the ladies. Saying much more would give everything away, but I will warn you: Mrs. Gaskell DID NOT finish the book before she died. It is NOT neatly tied up in the end. Her publishers kindly include the ending they knew was coming because the author told them, but she could have changed her mind on her deathbed and we will really never know. But it's quiet, and entertaining, and I do recommend it.

Three stars out of your mom.

East of Eden: A Review

Anytime I come across a novel that is a “re-telling” of some (usually better) other work, I think- oh. So this author was either too unoriginal to come up with his own stuff, or so arrogant to think that we didn't get it the first time. Steinbeck is obviously not unoriginal, which leaves me wondering- does he think we're all stupid?

East of Eden is a retelling of Genesis, specifically of the Biblical Cain and Abel story. It's a saga of the Trask family, beginning with the Civil War and crossing the century boundary. Cain and Abel isn't a complicated tale, despite what Steinbeck's 700 page embellishments would have us believe. In the Biblical version, brother one kills brother two because he's jealous and rejected and hurt. God warns violent brother one to watch himself, or he's going to end up poking someone's eye out. He doesn't watch himself, he pokes someone's eye out, gets in loads of trouble, blah blah banishment blah.

In Steinbeck's version, the difference is...it's longer? The names are different (sort of)... uh..there's a whorehouse..and an Irish guy, don't think they were in the first one..yeah. Point is, Johny boy here has written an epic, and by that I mean a frickin' long book with war and messy human emotions, but he isn't saying anything you can't glean from the page long original in Genesis. People have a choice between being horrible and being awesome, though some people have to watch themselves a little harder. People don't like rejection, it makes them do bad things. Everyone wants love. No one wants to be responsible for the consequences of poking out the eyes of others.

If you can get past the redundancy of the book, it's really entertaining. You'll get wrapped up in the ridiculousness of most of the dialogue and the silliness of some of the characters. The philosopher-servant Lee speaks in half platitudes most of the time, some of which don't make much sense (“your mind is as facile as a young lamb leaping in a daisy field”..?). Samuel, the wizened Irish farmer, talks like Moses if he had gotten hold of some good whiskey. The only character with any reality, dimension, or dialogue that comes close to how people actually talk is Cathy, and she's supposed to be satanic.

So yeah, the book tackles some big themes. But the themes have already been tackled, and his characters are unrealistic but also unforgettable. You'll enjoy the book if you can stop looking up and thinking “ok, but no one TALKS LIKE THIS it's so F-ING DISTRACTING.” It's epic and grand for it's own sake. It's the literary equivalent of a sophmore philosophy student that just discovered he can get people to listen to him if he speaks like a complete bizarre-o. And wears a cowboy hat, but only for irony.

Three stars out of your mom.

Review: "The Power and the Glory" by Graham Greene, a recently DWG

I approached Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory with fear and trembling; after all, it is supposed to be the man's masterpiece. Plus, Obama likes it- therefore, it must be close to holy. (see that sarcasm thing I did there? That was good). I try to approach all supposed masterpieces that way, mostly because they end up being God awful and boring.

Greene's tale is one of a “whiskey priest” in violent, revolutionary Mexico in the 1930's. The communists have taken over and are hunting down and killing every priest in the southern state of Tabasco. Our nameless hero manages to evade capture for a decade, getting drunk and committing sins of the flesh coughcough what else is new he's a priest cough cough. His arch nemesis is another nameless man- a lieutenant in the police force who had an unspecific bad experience with the church in his childhood, and now hates it with an all-consuming focus. Though Greene presents the lieutenant as blameless, ethical, and ideological, the man takes hostages from every village where the priest goes and shoots them until someone gives details of his visit.

What I Loved

For a catch me if you can sort of novel, the pacing is pretty slow. Greene is masterful at letting tension build slowly; I actually thought of du Maurier's Rebecca while reading this. You don't even realize you're clenching your jaw until the book is over. Also, Greene is almost a Catholic Steinbeck-meets-Hemingway, with his masculinity coursing through every sentence and his sometimes nonsensical metaphors. Of course, this is a Catholic novel by a Catholic, but it doesn't have the tediousness or cynicism of Evelyn Waugh. It's an honest examination of faith under pressure, and the excesses of a church out of hand. Greene is no sheep of a Catholic. He truthfully admits the faults and inconsistencies of his denomination. There is even an interesting conversation with a German protestant, though it does smack of plot device.

What I Didn't Love Because It Sucked

If you don't know anything about Catholicism, this book will be boring and fluffy to you. Never have I read the words sin, redemption, altar, wine, shame as often. In an increasingly humanistic world, books like this are becoming less relevant (or more relevant, depending on your point of view). Greene assumes here that everyone has a crisis of faith, forgetting that some people never have any to begin with. Also, he seems to forget that sometimes, things are pretty. Everything in Greene's Mexico is dirty, sweaty, dusty, smelly, and foul. He even describes children that way. It's unnerving.

3 stars out of your mom.