Crime and Punishment

It was not an easy read. It was a good read, but definitely not easy, as much for the emotional intensity and theme as the usual Russian habit of giving everyone 6 different names and swapping them in and out at random. (Next time I start a Russian novel, I need to create a cast of characters to accompany me, because half the time I'm not sure who's talking.)

I probably shouldn't have been reading The Secret History of Moscow at the same time, which, although an intriguing book, made for altogether too much Russianness. We are all doomed, so let's drink more vodka.

Still, it was amazing and the scene in which he confesses to Sonia and she sees right through his confusion and misery and inability to repent to the suffering human at the core without the slightest hint of excusing wrongdoing is one of the most amazing things I've ever read.

It was a tough summer (and fall) and not much good for heavy reading. DOB had another new and different health challenge, some new diagnosis and a lot of uncertainty still.

So I'm certainly not going to finish out my Back to the Classics challenge, but I can surely fit in one more before the end of the year. And the dice roller says it will be Jude the Obscure, another one I suspect may be hard to get through.

That only brings me to 5 (having abandoned Swiss Family Robinson), so I'm going to throw in Orthodoxy as a bonus because I can certainly do that before the end of the year and at least make half my goal.

Considering the year it's been, that's pretty good, and maybe I can do the other half next year. 

The Scarlet Letter

It's always risky revisiting a book that one remembers from childhood or adolescence; it may live up to your memories, it may not, or you may realize that you completely missed the point as a young person.

Fortunately The Scarlet Letter and I both survived the test of the re-read. It's a wonderful book, and although I certainly didn't get the full depth of the book at 15 (or now, likely enough) neither was I entirely uncomprehending.

Interestingly, I think the version I read back then must have omitted the author's preface explaining his finding of the story-sparking manuscript, which is largely a personal polemic on the character-sapping influences of a safe government job. I found it pretty entertaining now, from the position of the envious but proud private sector.

Simultaneously, I was reading Games People Play, one of the iconic works popularizing psychology from the 1960s. There was certainly some overlap--you could certainly see Chillingsworth playing a game of Now I've Got You, You Son of a Bitch disguised as I'm Only Trying to Help You while Dimmesdale plays Kick Me. They both get what they want from the relationship. (Psychology from the 60s still sounds far more judgmental than modern works. It's fascinating to begin to feel the distance from an era that I am old enough to think of as not that long ago.)

Psychology is intriguing, but literature will always tell us more, because it shows people from the inside. Only through literature can we get to be Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingsworth and maybe even little Pearl. On the whole, I liked Dimmesdale the least this time around, for his moral cowardice. But then, at least he turned it to kindness which is better than many in his situation do. It was really Pearl he wronged the most, and perhaps that is why Hawthorne shows her the most healed by his final confession.

Also reading: The Queen's Thief series, a re-read after I got Deux hooked on it. Just an absolutely fantastic series. And The Phoenix Guards, a fantasy swashbuckler. And The Genius of Birds, which is intriguing but will not tell me a question I have been wanting to know, whether anyone has found out if rabbits can do math. And I picked up Rachel Ray by Anthony Trollope at the library booksale, and it promises very well indeed. Summer Reading Challenge at the library has started and I intend to at least get the 10-hour book bag, although the 100-hour t-shirt may be a bit ambitious for me.

Next on the classics challenge roll:  Crime and Punishment. Gulp. I'm almost as intimidated by that one as by the Aeneid, but here goes.

The Fall of Arthur and other books

This was nice and short. I didn't realize that about two-thirds of the book was appendices and explanatory material which I do not feel obligated to read as they were not written in the twentieth century. I did enjoy the one explaining in a bit more detail the rules and history of the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse that Tolkien employs. It's far more intricate than initially appears, and it creates a weighty style, all sharp edges and hard corners, that is excellent for epics and marvelously atmospheric.

Not on the list, but maybe I'll pretend it was if I don't get them all in, I read Phantastes by George MacDonald. I think I read it once as a teenager; it was well worth revisiting.

Completely not on the classics list, I'm reading The E*myth Enterprise in an effort to get my head around running the business side of the law practice, something that has become acutely necessary in the past few months. (I can make no sense of the title by the book, by the way, and it annoys me greatly and sounds very cheesy. Still, there are some good ideas in there.)

I'm thinking about ditching Swiss Family Robinson. We've completely gotten away from reading out loud, and I think the book is partly responsible. It's just too implausible and too preachy. Also, it's part of the literature assignments the kids either have or will get to at school, so I feel no urgency to read it. I'm not a quitter, but when a piece of the thing is blocking the whole thing from occurring, it's time to ditch the piece. I'm not sure what to choose next, though. Nothing has lived up to Lord of the Rings, unsurprisingly. I want to read The Sword in the Stone, but I'm thinking of doing a traditional Arthur telling first.

And for my next trick--I rolled a 9, so it will be The Scarlet Letter. I'm really looking forward to it.

Next Challenge

Time for a new book. I'm kind of behind if I'm going to finish all twelve this year, but my first two selections were long, so maybe I will pick up the pace.

And the next selection is:

2. The Fall of Arthur

Time for some more epic poetry. I think I'll find Tolkien more readable than Virgil, though.

In other undertakings, we are ssllllooowwwwllllyyyy reading through Swiss Family Robinson. The twins seem to be enjoying it, but even Dash asked, "Why does the father know how to do everything?" It seems to work best if we envision it as an RPG in which the players are all overpowered, the GM is far too indulgent, and everyone always rolls a 20.

Kristin Lavransdatter, Mistress of Husaby and The Cross

Alas, I finished it. Now I have to move back to reality. I didn't die of the black plague, though, so that's good.

And I find it impossible to sum up. So much life. 

The middle novel details the years of prosperity--Kristin, finding herself mistress of a large noble estate in near-ruins thanks to Erlend's ineptitude, rises to the occasion in between birthing seven sons. Erlend wanders in and out, making himself a decent name as a border governor. They fight and make up, have another baby, fight and make up again.

Undset is incredibly good at showing the tangle of feelings, of desire and resentment, of missed cues and muddled responsibilities of a struggling marriage. Kristin's steadiness that gives her the ability to rise to being mistress of a noble estate--CEO, doctor, brewer, farmer, head of charity and society woman all rolled into one--goes along with a steady resentment that Erlend cannot be more like her even steadier father (though of course she never could love the steady man her father picked out). Only by tossing aside reality can she enjoy a bit of peace with Erlend, and that never happens for long once she has the heritage of her sons to worry about.

After a particularly nasty argument, Erlend has a brief revenge affair, which ends even worse than expected--it turns out he's been leading a plan which, had it gone well, would have marked him down as a hero of his country, but thanks to his idiocy the plan is discovered and he is tried for treason. 

Always at their best in a crisis, Kristin and Erlend reconcile and thanks to the tireless labor of Simon, Kristin's former betrothed (and now brother-in-law), Erlend is freed, but at the cost of land and titles. The family retires to Kristin's childhood home, which is her own property.

In the final book is the fallout. The fragile reconciliation falls to pieces again. Life goes on until it doesn't any more.  At the end, one son takes over the farm, the others scatter to seek their fortune or the cloister, and the widowed Kristin enters a convent. 

I saw one review commenting on the centrality of motherhood to the book and that is a major theme--and as I first read the book over a decade ago, when I was still in the baby stage and now revisit it as my children are entering their teens, I feel it with her--the constant loss, the fears, the joys that are only remembered in retrospect and the pain that is better than joy--even more than the first time through. 

But another theme that comes through is the journey of the soul to God--that all the things of life, the worries, the triumphs, the joys and sorrows--are not the main thing that most people think, nor distractions as people trying to be devout think, but the way through which God himself shows himself to us. On her way to the convent, Kristin gets sidetracked by a crowd of little boys: "And when the moment came that she had longed for all through her journey, when she stood below the cross on Feginsbrekka and looked down on Nidaros, it came not so that she could collect her thoughts for prayer or meditation. All the bells of the town burst forth at that moment to ring to Vespers, and the boys all talked together, wanting to point out all that was before her--"

Or, to put my favorite song with my favorite book, 

"Every heart--every heart to love will come/But as a refugee."

Here is my review from 2006. I will read this book again. Maybe in 2030. 

Kristin Lavransdatter, Book 1: The Bridal Wreath

I don't know if it's cheating or overachieving to smuggle in a trilogy as one selection in the Back to the Classics challenge, but I will do it for Kristin Lavransdatter. If I had a cabin and a pot of soup and Kristin Lavransdatter, then that would be the best vacation ever.

So it is hard with such a book to sum up or critique. I don't read Kristin Lavransdatter; I move temporarily to 14th-century Norway. All the people and the life are so real, shown without romanticism or grotesqueness. The people live in their own world, unastonished at their own life for all its strangeness to us, yet still as real and ordinary as anyone you might know.

The Bridal Wreath gives a bit of background on Kristin's family and then tells her growing up years, from early childhood to her wedding. Kristin's doting and devout father, Lavrans, is a well-respected knight and a skilled farm manager; her mother is dedicated but melancholy, weighed down by many infant losses and a dark secret. In due course Kristin's father arranges her a good marriage to Simon, a perfectly suitable but rather boring young man, but Kristin is not so sure. At Simon's suggestion, she spends a year at a convent school in the south to get a bit more worldliness. What she gets instead is an introduction to Erlend, a dashing, higher-ranking, and not all that young man who is, in more than just Lavrans' estimation, not good for much but seducing women.

Well, things go much as one would expect in any century. Or again, not, because no one here is a stock character. Even the minor characters, like the saintly Brother Edvin, or the enigmatic witch Lady Aashild, are very real. The actions of a 28 year old who seduces a naive 16-year-old girl out of a convent to a brothel are as despicable to the medieval Norwegians as they would be if it started in an online chat room today; yet Erlend does genuinely care for Kristin, after his own weak-willed fashion. And while Kristin learns to lie and sneak and is as utterly short-sighted in romance as a teenage girl can be, yet her devotion has its own greatness and beauty to it.

Two quotes from either end of the influences in Kristin's life:

Lady Aashild: "In this world they call him a fool who wastes his heritage that he may make merry in the days of his youth. As to that, each man may deem as he lists. But that man only do I call a fool and a very dolt who rues his bargain after it is made . . . "

Brother Edvin: "There is no man nor woman, Kristin, who does not love and fear God, but 'tis because our hearts are divided twixt love of God and fear of the devil and fondness for the world and the flesh, that we are unhappy in life and death. For if a man had not a yearning after God and God's being, he would thrive in hell, and 'twould be we alone who would not understand that there he had gotten what he desired."

Next Selection

And now it's time for me to roll again, hoping for a selection a little easier to get through than the last . . .

First I rolled a 5. But that's Swiss Family Robinson, which is a family read aloud (and we've already started). At the rate we've been having read-alouds, it's going to take us all year to get through.

So a re-roll for a personal read, and it's a 4: Kristin Lavransdatter. Which may take me as long to get through as the Aeneid, but if memory serves me right it's a process I will enjoy far more.

The Aeneid

Well, I made it. And it took me the first two months of the year, but it was probably the toughest read for me. I'm not very quick with epic poetry. I keep getting lost and having to backtrack or give up on following entirely. Especially during the battle parts (which was basically the last six books) I was pretty much like Alice reading Jabberwocky, "Well, somebody killed something, that's certain."

I did get a bit of an aha about why ancient poetry is so dang tedious, though. Even though the Aeneid was written, it still takes its form from the oral tradition. And if you really wanted to remember an important war and all the important generals and battles, without writing it down, you'd want to turn it into poetry. Now that we have catalogs and history books we can skip all the lists and focus on the action, but if we didn't no doubt we'd still be recounting the Civil War in a similar fashion.

The parts with the gods and goddesses interfering were more interesting. Basically it all came down to a feud between Juno and Venus; Venus who apparently was Aeneas' mother by a mortal, and Juno who favored Carthage and thus had it in for the Romans before they could even become Romans. (In one scene Venus gets her immortal husband, Vulcan, to make Aeneas special armor. It never explains how Vulcan came to be so chill with the situation, but I suppose they'd had a few decades to work it out and maybe he figured that it was part of the price of being married to the goddess of love. On the other hand, you never see Juno acting so calmly about Jove's sidelines.)

Really the interference of the deities was depressing. If they decide you need to do something, or die conveniently, or turn on your nearest and dearest, then do it you will, whether they have to resort to persuasion, trickery, or brute force.

In other reading, I also re-read the entire Anne series while sick with the flu. It was strange to revisit after quite a while. I don't think I'd read it since the children were tiny. It was a little depressing to realize that after a lifetime of expecting I would grow up to be Anne as a mother with a house as well-ordered and supportive as Ingleside, the best I could hope to emulate was the Merediths, domestic chaos and nearly absent parents with the kids mysteriously turning out pretty OK anyway.

Read The Clockwork Boys (it's by Ursula Vernon, but her adult novel pen name which I can't remember off the top of my head) and was very annoyed to realize Bookworm had tricked me into reading the first book when the sequels weren't out read. Read The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale and liked it once I got into it. Feel like I read some other fun fantasy, but can't remember what right now.

Oh, and I got a whole lot of graphic novels for the kids that were new to us, most of which I didn't read because I find graphic novels hard to follow, but I also realized that there are two sequels to Hereville out now, and was very very happy to read those.

First Post

Well, it is the new year and I have started the Aeneid. Turns out I actually really like it. It's not as gruesome as the Iliad, and not as discursive as the Odyssey, and spends less time on the sunrises.

It's still about the Trojan War, though. Apparently it took several centuries for everyone to get over that one. Only this is the story of the losers. History may be written by the winners, but poetry is written for the losers--or in this case, the current winners who want to remind everyone how they started out as losers.

Besides Troy, the thing these books have in common that is almost impossible for modern retellings to recreate is the sense of the gods as the primary actors. Moderns may try, but we cannot entirely take it seriously; we think they must just be putting it on and revert to cynicism as soon as they are offstage. But it's not really about the adventures of Aeneas; it's about Juno's and Venus's plans to check and counter-check each other and poor mortals just get caught in the middle.

Maybe they were wrong, but then, maybe they had a better appreciation of their limits than we do.

I'm not great at reading epic poetry--there are a lot of allusions to other places and people that I certainly don't want to bother digging out, so then I start skimming and then I realized I missed a key clue as to who is talking or doing something because they will use three or four names for the same entity. Poetic variation is overrated.

In other readings, I'm still finishing up Heretics by Chesterton and Napoleon's Buttons by Penny Le Couteur. And I just got Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency in from the library, but I haven't started it yet.

Back to the Classics Challenge #1: The Aeneid

Taking a cue from Uglemor, I will be rolling a D12 to determine the sequence of my Back to the Classics Challenge reads.

(Exception will be Swiss Family Robinson, which I will start whenever we finish Watership Down.)

And my first roll is . . . 11. I'll be starting with the Aeneid.

Well, get the tough stuff out of the way first has always been my motto. Starting tomorrow.

2018 Back to the Classics Challenge

This blog needs a reboot, and I need some inspiration. For the last few years, life has thrown enough challenges at me that I've just tried to keep my head above water. But I'd like to at least try to choose some of my own challenges this year.

So I'm going to try the Back to the Classics Challenge. And just to make it more interesting, I'm going to restrict myself to books I already own--as much as possible, books I own but have not read or at least have not finished. (According to the rules of the challenge, it doesn't count if you start before 2018, but I assume it's OK if I go back to the beginning.)

And, as part of the rules, I have to post reviews of each book, so that will top my posts this year as a start.

Let's see how it goes:


1.  A 19th century classic - any book published between 1800 and 1899.

The Master of Ballantrae, Robert Louis Stevenson. Picked up at a library sale sometime. Never read.

2.  A 20th century classic - any book published between 1900 and 1968. 

The Fall of Arthur, J. R.R. Tolkien. Recently published, but definitely written before 1968. Gift from a co-worker last year, haven't really gotten to it yet.

3.  A classic by a woman author. 

Unless I think of something else for this slot, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. I started it last year but didn't finish.  I'll have to start over, which will be annoying. Don't remember where I got it; it's one of those nice Barnes and Noble editions, but I'm sure I didn't buy it new.

4.  A classic in translation.  

Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset. I've read it before, but it's been about a decade. Also I think this translation might be different than the one I read first, from the library. Picked it up at a used bookstore a few years ago.

5. A children's classic.

Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss. This will probably be a family read-aloud. I think I read it once as a child, which was about the least number of times I've read any children's book on the shelf. We have a nice annotated one I found at a library sale.

6.  A classic crime story, fiction or non-fiction. 

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Can't get much more crime than that. No idea where this one is from; the print is tiny but the book looks new.

7. A classic travel or journey narrative, fiction or non-fiction. 

Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Dana. Bears all the hallmarks of a long-ago library sale.

8. A classic with a single-word title.

Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott, because I don't think I've ever actually finished it.

9. A classic with a color in the title. 
I was going to pick The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane. I think I tried to read this about the age of 10 and didn't really get it. But then I realized that the copy I have is a Watermill, and my experience of those is that not only are they abridged with a machete, they then lie about it. So not that one.

I'll do The Scarlet Letter instead. I've read it before, but not since my early teens.

10. A classic by an author that's new to you.

Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy. I probably won't like Hardy. But I've never given him a try. Probably library sale.

11. A classic that scares you.

The Aeneid by Virgil. Somehow I've never been able to get into it--not even a retold version. I shall try again. Part of my Great Books of the Western World, which was a wedding gift.

12. Re-read a favorite classic.

Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton. I got in the mood for reading Heretics after watching a Murdoch Mystery in which H. G. Wells featured, and once I finish it I'm sure I'll want to do Orthodoxy. Long-ago Christmas present. I have a lot of Chesterton.