The right way and the wrong way to bring Girl Power

I just watched two very different, I suppose you could call them, "girl power" movies - one whose role in history played a major role in the advancement of women and is excellent and the other that played no role in the advancement of women and arguably almost brings them stooping down to the level of the male part of the species.

Before there was Barbie, there was Greta Gerwig's 2019 adaptation of Little Women. Based on the classic novel published in 1868 by Louisa Mae Alcott (I'm just realizing that somehow I've never read any of her other works), at first glance, this remake might seem unnecessary since the 1994 version starring Winona Ryder was so excellent.

But along with Gerwig as an awesome director who creatively plays with the story's timeline, the six-time-Oscar-nominated movie is essential because of the cast. Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet are clearly among the top talents in Hollywood today, likeably playing the roles earlier perfected by Ryder and Christian Bale. When Meryl Streep, Emma Stone, Laura Dern, Bob Odenkirk, and Florence Pugh are relegated to supporting actors, you know a film might be great. 

Little Women is set just after the Civil War, as young people finally get the chance to throw out some of their worries and focus on good times. This means, for most young women, falling in love with a suitable future husband. But Jo, played by Ronan, is conflicted about this and is committed to being alone and chasing her dream of being a novelist. The movie's release was delayed by the Covid pandemic, which ironically must have felt a lot like the time during the Civil War for young people in stunting their development.

5 out of 5 stars

Now we fall to the other end. Other than the cool ending that reveals who the new Charlie is (the old one has passed away), Charlie’s Angels: The IMAX 2-D Experience, also from 2019, is a high-glitz, low-intelligence stinker. I suppose a case could be made for the Elizabeth Banks-directed production as eye-candy entertainment, but life is a little too short. How the otherwise wise-decision-making Kristen Stewart got attached to this as one of the Angels is what offers the true suspense. Yuck. 

1.5 out of 5 stars.

The Count of Monte Cristo is a tour de force of reading adventure

1844's The Count of Monte Cristo by France's Alexandre Dumas (how cool-looking is that author? what a rock star) has stood as my favorite adventure classic novel since my days as an undergrad English lit major. It tells the history of Napoleonic times in 1800s France but wrapped in the added excitement of an action/adventure modern-era-type flick.

I highly recommend the full-length, epic novel for anyone who doesn't know the story. I also just listened to the abridged audiobook from Naxos Audiobooks, which is available to anyone with a library card in the Hoopla app. It's only two hours and suffers by losing all the excellent suspense and character development of the full experience. I listened to parts of the unabridged, 52-hour audiobook and, sure enough, it's a lot better. But it's also 52 hours!

In the story, it's 1815 and Napoleon has just escaped from his exile in Elba, off the western coast of Italy. Edmond Dantès has just been named captain of a ship that makes runs between France and Elba and agrees to deliver some packages back and forth for some Bonapartists. A crewmate is jealous that Dantès gets named captain and, just as Dantès is about to marry his fiancée Mercédès, the crewmate conspires to spread word that Dantès is a Napoleon sympathizer.

Dantès is arrested and sentenced without a trial to life imprisonment at the Château d'If in Marseille. After six years in the dank place, Dantès is preparing to commit suicide when the Abbé Faria, an Italian priest, pops into his cell after digging a wayward escape tunnel. The Abbé helps Dantès figure out the many people who were involved in the constructed conspiracy to lock him up. Additionally, he turns Dantès into a complete intellectual over the next eight years and also informs him of a treasure on the island of Monte Cristo south of Elba.

That's all I really want to tell you. The tale takes off on an extended jam in revenge adventure. His kindness to those who have helped him through life stand in stark contrast to the subtle manipulations which he uses to slowly torture those who have betrayed him - and each are traits that are a joy to see as they unfold. Which way will he go with Fernand Mondego (his old best friend), Danglars (his former ship crewmate), Villefort (the crafty magistrate), Mercédès (his former fiancee), and others?

If I were recommending one ancient classic piece of literature, it might very well be The Count of Monte Cristo.

• Reading the full book: 5 out of 5 stars
• Listening to the full audiobook: 4 out of 5 stars
• Listening to the abridged audiobook: 3 out of 5 stars

Dashiell Hammett gets extra pulpy in his short stories

Ernest Hemingway is largely credited with moving popular U.S. fiction out of the flourishing Henry James/Victorian style of writing into a leaner, more conversational one. And that is certainly true, but Dashiell Hammett doesn't get enough credit in this department.

His pulpy detective stories began their string of popular publication in 1923, while Hemingway's first book In Our Time was published in Europe in 1924 and not in the U.S. until late 1925. Hemingway may not have ever admited it, but he was under the influence of Hammett. 

While The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man are well-known Hammett novels, I wanted to explore his lesser-known short stories a bit.

"The Creeping Siamese" (1926): In the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco branch, a tall, leathery man named Rounds, in town from New York, walks in and collapses dead from a fresh knife wound. The employees can't find anything amiss in their hallway or the rest of their building. The wound has a sarong stuffed into it, which leads the detective on a hunt for the killer. He ends up at the apartment of a local movie-theater owner and a woman he claims to be his wife. Through a very sharp eye for detail, the detective determines the woman had actually been married to the dead man and had accidentally stabbed him after he had located her lover. The story gets its name because the guilty and racist couple had tried to blame everything on a mysterious "siamese" who had supposedly broken into their apartment and shot her beau's leg. A minor story but a good glimpse into Hammett's world of crime, and a nice semi-subtle dig against racism. 3.5 out of 5 stars

"Faith" (appeared for the first time in 2007's compilation The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps): This is the tale of a homeless encampment of people in Maryland, A nomad named Feach tells everyone there that everywhere he's gone, something has gone tremendously wrong. He is a religious fellow and thinks it's God's will for him. But when a block of houses burns nearby, it's discovered that Feach was the one who set the fire, leading the reader to believe it's not God but Feach that is the evil one. Interesting conceptually, and thankfully short, but far from essential.  And being overly wordy, it's not very Hemingway-like. 2 out of 5 stars

“The Girl with the Silver Eyes” (1924): This is a bit of a the sequel to another popular Hammett short story published earlier in that year called “The House in Turk Street,” which I would like to read as well. The author practically invented the feline-like, cold-bloody temptress that would be a feature of just about every pulp story by every pulp author to follow. A “fat little” P.I. from the Continental Detective Agency in San Francisco - a running enterprise of much Hammett fiction - is called upon to check on a poet who has given his girlfriend $20,000 right before she had left temporarily and suddenly for Baltimore, writes letters back and forth to him for several days, and then seems to vanish completely. Turns out the money had been stolen from the poet’s wealthy brother-in-law, who tells the detective to find the poet and the money discreetly, without his wife finding out. The poet soon also disappears and the detective tracks him and the girl to a bootlegging operation in Half Moon Bay. Bloodshed follows and, although the woman seems to nearly be working her attraction magic on him, in the end, he deposits her to the Redwood City jail. Before she is locked up for likely a very long time (she had a streak of other killings and also had been disguised as a dangerous redhead in the previous story), she whispers “the vilest epithet of which the English language is capable” into the detective’s ear. It's a very fun, and very pulpy, read. 4.5 out of 5 stars

Sherman Alexie brilliantly explores the lack of integration into U.S. society for Native Americans

Sherman Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation and nearly all his characters are desperate alcoholics, ravaged by poverty and with little hope to escape it, but readers of any stripe can relate to them because so much of what happens in his short stories and novels is centered around the iconic pop-cultural landmark movies, TV shows, 7-Elevens, and popular advertising campaigns that connect us all. 

I fell in love with his writing back in college when I stumbled across a short story in a 1996 Granta collection called “Integration,” which was an excerpt from his second novel, Indian Killer.

Although he enjoyed reading books from the library from a young age and his father was an obsessive reader too, Alexie always thought he had to play basketball to get girls to notice him, but then he discovered poetry while taking his first literature class at Washington State University and when he started writing his own, he noticed that the girls were noticing. That marked the end of any of his hoop dreams.

Actually, even before he could read, he would look through his father’s books and he became fascinated with the concept of paragraphs and how “they had some specific reason for being within the same fence.” He loved Superman comics and realized each of those panels worked much like a paragraph. 

I revisited two short stories that I loved in my 20s:

“Integration:” This excerpt is actually the very beginning of Indian Killer, all about a man named John who is adopted as a baby into a white family but dreams of what his life might have been like growing up back in the reservation. He meets a girl named Marie when they are college age and she is a Native American but doesn’t know much about that culture. Meanwhile, ex-cop Jack is trying to write a book that will reveal what it’s like to be a Native American. This excerpt begins from John’s point of view as he is being born in the tribal hospital under the care of one of the white doctors who works there. He is immediately flown to Seattle where his new adopted parents await. We aren't informed why he is taken from his natural mother. The story shifts to his high-school years at the upscale St. Francis, where he integrates well with the white boys he would never talk to after high school and the white girls he made out with whose fathers would soon discourage them from dating an adopted Indian. John holds his anger in very well, but i's definitely lurking beneath. Re-reading this intro to Indian Killer definitely makes me want to re-read the full novel. 5 out of 5 stars.

“The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven:” Film buffs might recall that this 1993 short story was turned into the acclaimed movie Smoke Signals in 1998. This is simply a beautiful and powerfully sad story about a young man who has left the reservation, gone to college, and begun life in Seattle. Two vignettes occur in the city: one of him visiting a 7-Eleven to buy a Creamsicle and one of him breaking up with his girlfriend who wants to “change the world.” He returns to Spokane and sits around doing nothing, but then he gets sober and plays basketball against a very good white kid who is the son of the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He also talks to his old girlfriend again, and he has vivid and awful dreams about how Native Americans don’t fit in and aren’t welcome in any neighborhood in the entire country. 5 out of 5 stars.

Next on my list from Alexie is his young-adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It’s listed in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, which notes its revered status as a favorite on banned-book lists by school boards. It’s “controversial in the way life itself is controversial: unsettled, uneasy … devastating one day and comic the next.” Alexie also won the 2009 Odyssey Award for his reading of it as the year’s best audiobook.

Things Fall Apart details the agonizing road to being colonized in Nigeria

I have always wanted to read the classic 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, by Nigerian Chinua Achebe. While there have been many other authors who have since told the story of colonization from the colonized perspective, this is one of the originals if not the original. Also, it is a very enjoyable story.

And it goes like this: Okonkwo was once a great wrestler, a tribal war hero, had three wives, and a barn full of yams, and could not tolerate lazy and debt-ridden men like his father, Unoka, who had died 10 years previously. 

It is announced that a daughter from his town of Umuofia has been murdered in a nearby town. His town proclaims that the other town would have to either go to war or offer a young man and a virgin. They choose the latter: the young man's name is Ikemefuna and the virgin goes to the man who lost his murdered wife. 

Ikemefuna joins Okonkwo's family of three wives and eight children. The father is mean to his new son, as he is to everyone, but he does love him. During the week of peace, he beats one of his wives for not being home to make his lunch one day. When the festive New Yam Festival arrives, he beats one of his wives for destroying a tree that was actually still very much alive.

After three years, Ikemefuna has integrated well into Okonkwo’s family, and his once-beaten and defeated younger brother Nwoye has been re-enlivened by his presence. But then an elder visits and tells the father that Ikemefuna will be taken into the woods the next day and sacrificed, as part of the deal that brought him to town in the first place. Okonkwo is the one assigned to kill him with a machete.

Meanwhile, in other vignettes (which this book consists of a lot of) Okonkwo serves on a panel of judges who make up rules about wives and kidnappings and also, a wedding ceremony takes place that includes lots of jostling for gifts of farm animals, one of which escapes from a gated area.

Okonkwo is later found to have caused the deaths of his adopted son (obviously) and one of his wives. Because of this, it is ruled that he must leave the village with his remaining family for seven years. Before they leave, members of his village - even his best friend - proceed to destroy his home and cows as an order from the gods to cleanse that area.

He arrives in his new village and is informed that he is not suffering as badly as he could. He could have been exiled for life, but instead he was exiled from the village where his father lived to the one where his mother was from.

A couple of years after he arrives at his new village, missionaries, including a white man on an iron horse (what we would call a "bicycle") visit and, although Okonkwo thinks they are insane, his first (and who he considers lazy) son Nwoye becomes hooked. The missionaries are given land in the Evil Forest and, when nothing bad happens to them, more villagers begin to go with them.

Before heading back to his former village, Okonkwo has friends rebuild his houses. As the missionaries secure more of his villagers, Okonkwo ends up killing a white man and subsequently hangs himself from a tree, an act considered to disgrace him further in the end. The lead colonizer ends the book by noting that Okonkwo’s story would make for a good paragraph in the how-to colonize book he is writing.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Sherwood Anderson’s lack of plot led to unsatisfying storytelling

Sherwood Anderson is said to have been a major influence on the work of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck. After taking a dive into some of his short stories, I’m still not entirely sure what they saw in him.

Anderson grew up in Ohio and moved all around the Midwest. He became an ad man in Chicago and never actually published his first book until he was older than 40. His most famous work is Winesburg, Ohio, which is a collection of related stories.

“Hands” is one of the stories from Winesburg, Ohio, from 1919. Wing Biddlebaum is a little old man who has lived in Winesburg for 20 years and works in the fields. He keeps to himself and is mostly a mystery to the townsfolk. It turns out his name was once Adolph Myers and he was a school teacher in a Pennsylvania town who was accused of sexually molesting the boys. He denies it and truly doesn’t seem to have been guilty, but nobody believes him and some of the men take him to hang one night before being let go at the last minute and allowed to run away and never come back. This is an enjoyable and short read, but I’m not sure Anderson succeeds in what appears to be some kind of profound metaphor about how the hands perhaps tell the whole story about a person. 3 out of 5 stars

"Brothers" from 1921 tells one of his typical tales of small-town isolation. One man, on his regular walks around his village outside of Chicago, often encounters an old man who people say has lost his mind, and always tells lies and that he is related to famous people. The walking man is nearly totally silent at night when he returns from his bicycle-factory foreman job. But he begins to fantasize about one woman at the factory and then for almost no reason stabs his pregnant wife to death. He is found guilty and later one day somehow encounters the old man again. The old man doesn’t know he’s talking to the murderer but tells the man his brother is the murderer. One of these days I hope to find an Anderson story that clicks, but this is aimless and doesn’t hold up over the past century. 2 out of 5 stars

“Death in the Woods” comes along later, in 1933, and while it feels like the tale of a more mature writer, it still suffers from lack of action and lack of anything exciting happening. He tells the story from the point of view of a boy who sees the body of a lady named Grimes who has frozen in the snow on her walk home from picking up meat. Her dogs eat the meat out of her bag before her body is discovered. The town tries to pin the death on her rotten drunk husband and son but they have alibis and instead are run out of town. 2.5 out of 5 stars

Anderson wrote an essay in 1924 detailing his method, and it explained quite a bit as to why I’m not crazy about his work. He was interested in form rather than plot, going so far as to call plot “contrived fiction.” In that sense, his stories are more like paintings or simply conversations. He mostly related stories from his own life, but his writing worked to get at the meaning of his life at the possible expense of the facts of his life, which, to me, means the lack of facts and plot in his writing make for some pretty unsatisfying stories.

Finding an entryway into the challenging and rewarding writing of William Faulkner

William Faulkner was always a tricky writer for me growing up as a lit major in college. I loved the more direct, journalistic storytelling styles of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe the most. Authors like Faulkner, James Joyce, and Joseph Heller were always much more difficult to decipher. And can you blame me for gravitating to entertaining reads over ones that sometimes take a lot of mental power to comprehend? 

But knowing that, despite digging pretty deeply into Faulkner's classic Absolom, Absolom! during college and loving The Sound and the Fury (my 49th favorite novel of all time), I feel I never gave the iconic Southern writer enough of my time. So I thought it would be good to give a few short stories my attention.

“A Rose for Emily” (1930): His first published short story is a Southern Gothic powerhouse with similarities to Hitchcock’s Psycho. Miss Emily Grierson lived with her father in their Confederate home in a fictional town called Jefferson, Mississippi, and when he dies, the mayor forgives her property taxes so she can afford to stay in the house. But the next generation on the city council comes along and wants her to pay taxes. She refuses and continues living there without ever going out. She eventually invites a Northern sidewalk contractor into her home to marry her. After her death, those going in to clean up the house discover his skeleton in her bed alongside strands of her own hair. 

What propels the story into the acclaimed spot of Faulkner’s best short story (that I’ve read) is the character of Miss Emily herself. She is complex and fascinating, both proud and fairly pathetic, and both admired and mocked by the townspeople. She is unable to come to terms with a society rapidly changing from the way things were before and during the Civil War.

5 out of 5 stars

“That Evening Sun” (1931): Also taking place in Jefferson, this is about a white family that has a nearby Black woman named Nancy wash their clothes and prepare breakfasts. She has suffered all kinds of indignities in her life, including the town’s banker kicking out her teeth and her madman husband running out on her. She is scared of her husband, Jesus, and wants to sleep at the white family’s house and play with their three children, one of whom is the story’s narrator (a rare instance of a young boy being the narrator in a Faulkner story). The text is a bit jarring because of extensive use of racist language, but it’s also a powerful vignette of how white and Black people coexisted, somewhat, 100 years ago in the U.S. South.

It’s also very sad and a tragic glimpse into the offhanded violent racism and lack of basic human caring during that era. Faulkner’s typically cryptic language makes it a little difficult to understand that Jesus has apparently returned and killed Nancy at the end. About the only clue is little Quintin the narrator’s question to his dad asking who will do their laundry now after they all hear the sounds of Nancy supposedly being murdered. It’s heartbreaking to witness the white adults acting with such little empathy while Quintin and the kids can’t quite figure out why the adults act they ways they do.

Perhaps most notable of all about this story is that it’s a prequel to The Sound and the Fury, as the three kids are same Compson family children who go on to narrate much of that classic novel’s further falling, 20 some years later, of this once prominent family.

4.5 out of 5 stars

"Dry September" (1931): 

This story begins in a town barbershop, where a debate ensues about whether a young Black man named Will Mayes "attacked, insulted, frightened" a 40-year-old white bachelorette named Minnie Cooper. Without anyone having any idea what may have happened, a barber is convinced Will couldn't have done anything while several others get more and more heated in their beliefs that he did do "it." This comes to a head when McLendon, a World War I veteran with a gun, bursts through the doors and gathers people to help him find Will. The barber tries to stop them before eventually getting thrown out of their moving vehicle. Meanwhile, Minnie is out with friends at the movies where she appears to break down and, seemingly too late for Will, appears to suggest that nothing happened.

The again typical suggestiveness (Faulkner doesn't tend to spell things out easily for readers) leaves the whole tale as a bit of a mystery, which is probably why people either love the author or don't understand his writing. What is clear is that Faulkner is dropping a serious and very accurate account of the power of rumor and the dangers of mob mentality in the lynch mob-happy culture of the American South in the early 1900s. He does a good job of starting the story showing that (at least most of these) people are not evil but can get swayed into violently taking the law into their own hands via groupthink.

If you're unsure where to start with William Faulkner, before getting to his novels, "A Rose for Emily" and "Dry September" are accessible and beautifully written, and are my recommendations as the top entry points.

4.5 out of 5 stars

"Spotted Horses" (1931): This is the one story here I would not recommend as a starting spot. Although not set in Jefferson - it takes place in Frenchman's Bend, Mississippi - many of the usual themes of Faulkner's recur, namely a place struggling to escape the shadow of the Civil War. The story follows the events that take place after a group of men are tricked into buying a herd of wild horses from traveling salesman Flem Snopes. The horses run wild, and they cause all sorts of havoc in the town. 

This may be the funniest, most slaptick tale of this batch, which contrasts a bit with the downtrodden characters. While it is my least favorite of these five stories, it is still well worth reading if you enjoy the other four beforehand.

4 out of 5 stars

“That Will Be Fine” (1935): This is the story of a boy named Georgie who is involved in helping his Uncle Rodney carry out criminal schemes that his uncle will likely never compensate him for, while he is hoping to make a little money to buy his grandpa a Christmas present. He spends so much time working with his uncle that he runs out of time to get the present so, by the end, he tries to chase a possum to give to his grandpa.

This story comes along a few years after his first published stories, and it shows the development of his distinctive style. The story is told in a stream-of-consciousness style, which allows Faulkner to explore the inner thoughts and feelings of his characters in much detail. Set again in Jefferson, the story provides a glimpse into the lives of the people who live there and how they are being affected by the social and economic changes occuring rapidly in the early 1900s.

4 out of 5 stars

Overall, Faulkner is clearly one of the masters and his work remains powerful, relevant, and entertaining, not to mention challenging.

Geek Love, a great premise, started the wave of Carny fiction

For a literature major, my book reading has taken a backseat recently due to all the magazines I'm currently subscribed to and, of course, all the time I spend tossing the football and baseball with Jackson and doing "play with me" time with Zoey.

That said, I recently made it through a relatively gargantuan modern fiction classic (from 1989) by Katherine Dunn, which took her many years to write while living in Portland.

Geek Love, a National Book Award finalist, was a trailblazer at the time and set the course for all kinds of freak-show entertainment that has followed, from Rob Zombie's filmography to the Jim Rose Circus to American Horror Story to Stephen King's It.

The premise is the best thing about the book: A man and woman (Al and Crystal Lil Binewski) run a circus that has fallen on hard times. In order to take them to the top, they agree that Lil will start taking drugs in order to deform a whole slate of babies they plan to produce. That way they'll have the best freak show (or call it "geek" show) in the land.

The plan works, and they have Arty the Aqua Boy, Siamese twins Elly and Iphy, telekinetic Chick, and the story's narrator Olympia, a hunchback albino dwarf. Arty is the leader and Oly assists him. She actually tells the story from two points in time, when they are all children and just getting started to bring in the crowds and much later in her life, when she reflects on all her family being gone and watches over her daughter Miranda, who has a tail and doesn't know who her mother is, and certainly doesn't know she is the product of incest.

The whole thing is fascinating, but it drags on far too long. There is way too much descriptive language and Geek Love is easily a quarter-too-long. But a great premise takes it far, and it luckily played a major role in starting a horrifying genre that is tough to get enough of, at least for me.

4 out of 5 stars

And check out this great feature from WIRED about the cult of Geek Love lovers.

Classic Reads: A Web of Strange Happiness From George Eliot

George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Ann Evans, loved rural society more than the urban areas of the time that she saw as pushed aside by the Industrial Revolution.

She wrote with a pen name because of fear of rejection. And she wrote the book Silas Marner in a flood of feelings from an unhappy childhood. It is still considered a radical vision of the world, and it teaches the values of honesty, kindness, and courage in an entertaining way.

Silas was a linen weaver who, 15 years earlier, had come to a rural area after being falsely convicted for stealing money back in the city where he was a respected elder in a small fundamentalist sect. His life grew more and more empty and he hated that no one cared for him or loved him.

Meanwhile, Squire Cass was known as the greatest man in town, although he went to parties every night and pubs every day. One of his sons, Dunstan, who was also a drunk, heard that Silas Marner collected gold and one night broke into the weaver's house and stole it.

Time passed, until on New Year's Eve, a little girl came to Silas's cottage. When Silas retraced her footsteps out into the night, she found the little girl's mother dead. Silas announced that he would keep the child as a replacement for his lost gold.

Godfrey, the Squire's other son, had known all along that the dead woman and her daughter were his child and wife. But he had been interested in potentially marrying another woman. Nevertheless, Godfrey grew more and more sullen because of this secret. He often left money at Silas's cottage to help support the growing girl. Godfrey and his wife could not have children and his wife would not hear of adoption, so he continued to spiral into disappointment and feeling he was being punished.

One day, Dunstan's skeleton is unearthed along with Silas's stolen coins from the bottom of a quarry. This inspires Godfrey to reveal the truth to his wife that the girl was his. She surprisingly expresses the desire to adopt her. Silas was thrilled that his lost gold was returned to him. Godfrey and his wife showed up at Silas's door proposing to take his daughter from Silas. But his daughter, named Eppie, would have none of it.

Despite the complications of the characters' webs, the story ends with Godfrey and his wife and Silas all living their lives out in acceptance and love. Godfrey supplied the funds to enlarge Silas's tiny cabin and also host Eppie's marriage feast. She ends the story by saying that nobody could've been happier than she and Silas.

Classic Reads: Great Expectations May Be Unlikeable to Some, But It's My Favorite Dickens Novel

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens was one of the first great classic novels I remember reading.

While the book does have its problems ...

Facebook friend Rebecca Brown notes: "I disliked all the characters, so I didn't really care what happened to them. I can't remember why I even finished it, honestly."

I think the combination of mystery and moral values within the story contributed to turning me onto a life of being interested in literature. Also helping in this regard, I think the characters are great (even if mostly unlikeable). Pip, in particular, is memorable in building our compassion for him before he destroys that trust with his obsession of climbing the social ladder, which Dickens clearly finds to be a distasteful way to live one's life.

Seven-year-old Pip is brought up in his sister's home after his parents and five brothers have died. He gets hired by Miss Havisham to be a play partner for her adopted daughter Estella. Pip loves Estella from the beginning but finds Miss Havisham very eccentric. She had all of her clocks stopped, for one example.

Facebook friend Lynn Davis adds" "Miss Havisham is a hoot. I think of her when I see a lot of cobwebs (not in my house, of course :o). She fascinates me too."

Estella goes off to school and Pip's sister gets badly assaulted by a convict Pip has coincidentally once helped. Her new caretaker Biddy falls in love with Pip. These events cause him to increasingly become disenchanted with his status in life.

Four years later, a lawyer named Mr. Jaggers comes and buys Pip from his sister's house, noting that a secret benefactor claims he is a boy of "great expectations." He is taken to London to try to learn gentlemanly ways. His sister, his poor sister, is murdered and then, at age 21, Pip inherits a large amount of money. He is soon visited by a weather-beaten stranger and is horrified to learn that his longtime benefactor was not Miss Havisham but instead has all along been a convict named Abel Magwitch, whom he had encountered in the story as a child. Coincidentally again, his co-criminal had jolted Miss Havisham years earlier.

A series of characters and soap operas ensue, resulting in the death of many characters and the eventual maturity of Pip.

I would say that if there is one Dickens book to read, even more than A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations is the one to pick.

Classic Reads: Ibsen Ponders Whether Life Means Anything in Peer Gynt

Peer Gynt is a man in Norwegian Henrik Ibsen's 1867 play of the same name who is trying to discover whether he's a good modern man or a bad one.

Despite not being much interested in a girl named Ingrid, Peer decides on her wedding night that he's going to try to steal her from the groom. This does not endear him to the community so he simply runs off into the forest.

While searching the woods, a girl named Solveig hears Peer's mother Aase talking about what he's like and falls in love with the young scamp. Peer falls in with some trolls in the woods and has a riotous night with some farm girls. He considers staying with the trolls but decides he has to go home.

After making a bit of a life with Solveig and witnessing his mother on her death bed, Peer journeys far from home. He makes a fortune in the American slave trade and selling idols in China, then loses his business riches in Morocco. He briefly becomes an Arab sheik as well. While pondering what he views as his wasted life in Egypt, he eventually is placed in an insane asylum.

Surviving the asylum, Peer makes it back home to Solveig. Although he is convinced he's bound for Hell, Solveig confuses him by saying that he is a good man and that's where the story ends, with Peer perhaps no wiser about the mysteries of man than when he started his many adventures.

The play remains one of Ibsen's most famous, along with A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler, with many films and adaptations (and Ibsen is the second-most-performed dramatist behind Shakespeare). Roger McGuinn of the Byrds even wrote music for a pop version of the play that has never been released. Several of those songs appear on Byrds' albums in the early 1979s however.

Classic Reads: Don Quixote Goes Nuts ... and for the Jugular of Laughter

Don Quixote became one of the greatest novels of all time even though Cervantes intended it to just be a bit of a joke about the over-the-top romanticism of his time.

The foolish knight was a touchstone of impractical idealism, but he is now largely perceived as a symbol of nobility. It's difficult to dislike Quixote because everyone else in the story seems insane and he is so sincere. Starting as simply a Spanish country gentleman, he is addicted to reading about books of chivalry. He does not sleep much, however, and it soon dries his brain up and makes him go mad.

He constructs a suit of armor in his house and he finds a dilapidated old nag to become his horse. He claims at that point that he will be known as Don Quixote rather than his given name of Alonso Quejana.

Before taking off to roam the world to right wrongs, he chooses country girl Aldonza - who is well-known for her method of salting pork - as his great love. His first stop on the road is an inn that he imagines to be an enchanted castle.

Back home, several men decide they will chase Quixote to cure him of his madness. They also burn his books. The men capture him and beat him up. Quixote returns home and finds a barber name Sancho to become his squire.

In the presence of others, Quixote usually embarks on long-winded dissertations that his listeners find either hilarious or annoying. After countless adventures, the pair returns home. They learn later that a best-selling book has been written about their adventures.

As Quixote dies at the end, he denounces the books he had read. Finally settling on a belief that nonsensical stories are a bad thing, he appears to be sane.

It's one of the best endings of a book ever, and is perhaps history's most hilarious adventure story.

***** out of *****

Classic Reads: The Old Man and the Sea Shines With Classic Man/Beast Symbolism

The Old Man and the Sea is where Ernest Hemingway's work begins and ends. Straightforward sentences and words easy enough for a child to understand, but the themes are deep.

The ocean is not just a money pit of fish to catch for Santiago. He looks at it with love and respect, for all its creatures. This is a battle between man and nature and Santiago understands that his chances are not good.

Eighty-four days have passed since Santiago has caught a fish. Despite the ridicule this brings from many younger fisherman, Manolin, a young boy, enjoys talking to him about American baseball. Santiago also tells Manolin about his days as a boy sailing to Africa and seeing lions on the beaches.

One day a huge marlin pulls Santiago's boat far out to sea. After it slashes his face with the fishing line and leaps out of the ocean, Santiago is stunned to see that it's the biggest fish he has ever laid eyes upon.

He becomes resigned to his eventual death and his thoughts return to baseball, lions, and Manolin. He wonders if the Yankees' DiMaggio would stay with the fish as long as he had. He thinks about the arm-wrestling match he engaged in over 24 hours as a young man and won.

On the third day, he harpoons the marlin perfectly and it dies. But he knows his problems are far from over, as he is still a long way from home, with the marlin's blood sure to attract sharks.

This is my 22nd favorite novel of all time.

***** out of ***** stars

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Classic Reads: The Battle of Good and Evil Summed Up in Moby Dick

Moby Dick is probably the greatest tale of good versus evil ever written.

Herman Melville wrestled throughout his epic novel with how man fits into the universe and, while the white whale may seem like the evil one for the book's generations of young readers, Captain Ahab is certainly far worse for his over-the-top obsession to kill the whale.

The story begins with Ishmael, a schoolmaster from Massachusetts who is left empty by his job and heads to New Bedford to find a new one on a whaling ship. The night before setting sail, he meets and befriends a bizarre fellow named Queequeg. They both set sail on the Pequod, a Quaker-owned whaler from Nantucket.

Starbuck and Stubb are in command at first because the mysterious captain remains in his cabin. But then, after a few days, the harsh Ahab appears, not with a wooden leg but with one made of whale bone. He is also scarred along his face down into his collar, making it look like it runs the length of his whole body.

Ahab announces that he will give a prize of gold to the first person on the ship to spot the great white whale Moby Dick. Starbuck and Stubb think Ahab is crazy and that he is bound to lose more than just his one leg to the sea monster. Not to mention that the whale would probably kill them all.

The Pequod encounters other ships whose captains warn Ahab not to seek out the whale. One English captain even has a fake arm also made of whale bone. Finally the crew receives enough clues that "there she blows" is soon uttered and, almost just as soon, the whale dives under the ship and splits it to pieces.

As the men engage in a torturous battle with the creature, Moby Dick becomes more and more listless. The rope from Ahab's flung harpoon coils around his neck and rips him into the water. All the crew is lost except Ishmael, who incidentally tells the tale.

Moby Dick is no doubt a must-read for everyone.

Classic Reads: Beowulf Teaches Us That Striving Doesn't Have to Be All About Success

It didn't take reality TV for people to want to be famous.

In college, as I studied English literature, I focused more on the significance of the mnemonic devices used by Northern Europeans to translate Beowulf over generations.

Taking a look back now, the morals of the story from a vicious time in the Sixth Century are perhaps equally as interesting. We learn that it is striving rather than success itself that "reveals and ennobles the true hero."

Beowulf is a warrior and principal advisor to the king of the land of Geats, located in what is today south Sweden and Denmark. He learns of a monster called Grendel that is devouring groups of humans. Beowulf travels to battle the monster. He fails to kill him but rips off his arm before the monster escapes.

Grendel's mother is furious and goes to find Beowulf. She almost succeeds in killing him, but he reaches for a sword nearby and plunges it through the monster's heart. He then beheads Grendel.

The story picks up many years later when Beowulf is an old man and king of the Geats. One day, he kills a dragon, but in the process, the dragon bites Beowulf in the neck, which kills him as well. 

Beowulf's ability to step up when needed and provide heroic acts is what endeared him to his people, and their love of him has powerfully been translated through all these years. At his funeral, his people said, "Of worldly kings, he was the mildest of men and the gentlest, most kind to his people, most eager for fame."

Find the other parts of this ongoing series of "Classic Reads" in the Books section.

Classic Reads: The Ancient Mariner Turns On Generations of Fantasy Readers

If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “an albatross around one’s neck,” which pertains to certain levels of guilt, then you’ve been touched by one of the most famous long-form poems in history, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The 1798 poem was released to mixed reviews but has since become a staple of high-school and college classrooms. Some of the popularity for that age group is no doubt due to Coleridge’s opium addiction and the wild, fantastical, even trippy visions he presents.

Opium was a difficult topic for Coleridge, who probably wrote the Rime in response to his feelings of haunted remorse from his addiction, which he initially picked up as a pain reliever in a hospital stint.

His high-seas tale is a quick read and was well worth revisiting for me all these years later. It’s the story of an old-gray haired mariner who stops three young men on their way to a wedding to tell them his tale.

The old man and his crew leave port without a care in the world when the wind soon grabs the ship and forces it towards the South Pole. However, a bird, the albatross, appears and seems to guide the ship out of its southerly current and back northward.

The mariner grows tired of the bird’s presence and shoots it, which leads to a feeling of great loneliness in the man. Once the ship reaches the equator, it again stalls. The crew becomes famished and thirsty, and angrily hangs the albatross around the mariner’s neck as a symbol of his guilt.

Still stranded, a mysterious skeleton ship pulls alongside their own and Death boards, killing more than 200 men, all but the ancient mariner, who has to live on to contemplate his sin against nature. 

The dead crew haunts him until, one day, he comments about the wonders of the animals he watches from the ship. The spell is broken, the crew reawakens, and the ship resumes its journey. Another round of fantastical mysticism occurs - arguably not necessary - but eventually the ship is destroyed and the mariner is saved by another boat.

Find the other parts of this ongoing series of "Classic Reads" in the Books section.

Classic Reads: Cooperstown Presents Setting for a Sad Ending in Native-American History

Most people today – when they think of The Last of the Mohicans – might cite a reference to the 1992 movie with Daniel Day-Lewis or the fact that the Hawkeye character from M*A*S*H was nicknamed that by his father as a tribute to the book.

That book is a real powerhouse and was published way back in 1826 by James Fenimore Cooper, who can safely be called the first major novelist in U.S. history.

Cooper notably came of age on his father’s huge property along the Susquehanna River in Upstate New York. As more people moved in around this land, the village eventually was named Cooperstown – now home of today’s baseball Hall of Fame museum.

Cooper grew up around both Indians and pioneers, so he brings a great first-hand knowledge of what life was like in the area during the war between France and England that had spilled into North America. 

A small group of British settlers is trying to make it from one British fort to another before French troops can attack them.

Hawkeye, a brave and savagely civilized white scout is recruited – along with some of the dwindled Mohican tribe – to lead the group on their dangerous journey. At one point, they are trapped in a cave by the enemy when Hawkeye and the Mohicans are persuaded by two British sisters Cora and Alice to escape by swimming underwater down river.

Cora and Alice are captured, by Hawkeye and the Mohicans survive and track their captors, led by Magua, a displaced Canadian Huron Indian who had once been beaten by the sisters’ father. He swears to capture them and take Cora as his wife and slave. Cora, a tough chick to say the least, wasn’t buying it, and just as Magua is about to massacre his prisoners, Hawkeye and the Mohicans swarm in, killing all the Huron gang except Magua, who escapes.

They make their way to their intended destination and the women are reunited with their father, but it is not long before Magua and the French invade and a bloodbath ensues. Again Magua kidnaps Cora and Alice and takes them into the woods. Again Hawkeye retrieves them and also saves Uncas, who is the “last Mohican” of the title. Believe it or not, there are more back-and-forth kidnappings of Alice, Cora, and Uncas before this epic tale ends.

Magua and his cronies kill Cora and Uncas before Hawkeye is able to use his rifle to shoot and kill Magua as he dangles precariously at the edge of a cliff. A sad ending and, as we knew it would happen, “the last of the Mohicans” expires.

Except for the slightly wordy and outdated language within the book, frontier tales don’t get much more important, adventurous, and rollicking than this.

****1/2 out of *****