TBR Challenge
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Charming Billy
Billy Lynch, alcoholic, romantic, kind and loving man, has died. His friends and family come together to comfort his widow, and to celebrate his life. And Billy’s life seems to have two stories to it. The sad story of his alcoholism, which his friends and family tried again and again to guide him away from, with no success. And the sad story of his first love, an Irish girl whom he intended to marry, but who goes back to Ireland and dies. At least, that’s what Billy is told. The truth is, she took the money he sent her for her passage to America, bought a gas station…
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Run
Run begins with the story of Bernadette’s statue, an heirloom especially treasured by the women in her family. The statue is of Mary, Mother of God, and looks remarkably like the women in the family. The daughter who looks the most like the statue inherits it, and the others bitterly wish it were theirs. Now that she has died, with three sons and no daughters, her sisters show up, demanding that her husband give it to them. We hear the history of the statue, which is sweet and sad and full of lies. Bernadette and her husband Bernard had three sons. They both wanted large families, and though they had…
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No Country For Old Men
What you might think of as a blessing is often a curse, and if you’re going to pick that curse up and put it in your pocket, do so fully, and don’t look back. These are words that might have been helpful to Llewelyn Moss before he went out hunting antelope one hot afternoon. While following the antelope herd on foot, he comes across the horrific remains of a drug deal gone wrong. Several trucks out in the middle of the Texas desert, shot full of holes, blood and bodies all around, and a big block of heroin in the back. There is one man still alive, barely, and it…
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The Bluest Eye
Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that marigolds did not grow. A little examination and much less melancholy would have proved to us that our seeds were not the only ones that did not sprout; nobody’s did. Not even the gardens fronting the lake showed marigolds that year. But so deeply concerned were we with the health and safe delivery of Pecola’s baby we could think of nothing but our own magic: if we planted the seeds, and said the right words over them, they would blossom, and…
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Sightseeing
“…I held my breath because it seemed the only sound left in the world and all around me then was an extraordinary silence. It made me feel light, that silence, as if I might float to the ceiling, as if I might be able to open my arms, flap them, and fly with the sparrows. I don’t know how long I sat there holding my breath in the dark, but I thought then of how loud the world could be, so much clatter and noise, and of how lovely and rare was a moment like this when one need not listen to anything at all.” I read about Sightseeing on…
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The Abstinence Teacher
“I’ve made a few mistakes in my life,” Ruth began. “Some of them have involved sex, and at least a couple have been pretty big. “It would be all too easy to pick one of these errors and tell you what I should have done differently, and how much better my life would be if I’d been mature and responsible enough not to have made it. But I’m not sure I believe that. I think it would be more accurate to say that we are our mistakes, or at least they’re an essential part of our identities. When we disavow our mistakes, aren’t we also disavowing ourselves, saying that we…
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The Great Divorce
The Great Divorce is the story of a man, a man dreaming of an exploratory trip to Heaven. He arrives on a bus with many other riders, all of whom are approached by angels, who are trying to help the people to overcome their issues and fears, so that they can enter the kingdom of Heaven. They are all pretty much given the options of Heaven or Hell, Hell being not so much the fiery pit described by Dante, but more a matter of Not Heaven. The title refers to William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which C.S. Lewis refutes, saying “If we insist on keeping Hell (or…
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Belong to Me
We think our parents are in charge, right? Like they know what they’re doing? But the truth is, they’re making it up as they go along, just like we are. Just like everyone. If we judge them by their worst mistakes, they’re all, like, gargantuan failures. Maybe you should try judging your mom by her intentions, by whether she, like, loves you and is doing her best. Such is the young teen wisdom of a minor character in Marisa de los Santos’ new book, Belong to Me. It is wisdom that spoke to me in my particular moment of grief, and made me think that perhaps my mother might want…
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Plainsong
Plainsong, by Kent Haruf, is the kind of book that you read feeling like you kind of know what’s coming…there are no great surprises in plot, no great mysteries. Yet the telling of the story is so beautifully done, the characters so real and true and honest, that you don’t mind that you’ve pretty much figured out how things will turn out. Plainsong is a story told from many different angles and edges. There is the schoolteacher, Maggie Jones, who is a kind and giving woman, who turns out to be the fabric that binds the other narratives together. There is Guthrie, the father of two young boys, also a…
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The Book Thief
The Book Thief is a tale of World War II told from a different point of view than any other book I’ve read on the subject…and at the same time, it’s just like the other World War II books I’ve read. I’ve read the Diary of Anne Frank, Number the Stars, The Snow Goose, and at least several others. I’ve seen many WWII movies, including The Thin Red Line and Saving Private Ryan. All of these books and films are told from the point of view of the allies, or that of people fleeing the tyranny and death camps of the Nazis. The Book Thief is the story of a…
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TBR Challenge
Well, it’s a new year, and apparently in the book blogging world, that means, time to take on some new challenges. Amongst the select few books that got to stay when we purged our bookshelves recently, one shelf is full of books that I want to read, but haven’t had a chance to get to yet…in other words, To Be Read books, TBR. This challenge can be found here, and the rules are: ** Pick 12 books – one for each month of 2008 – that you’ve been wanting to read (that have been on your “To Be Read” list) for 6 months or longer, but haven’t gotten around to.…