Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

This was my first book read on my new e-reader! It made it kind of novel (pun intended).

Had I read it in a more traditional format I'm not sure I would have stuck with it. There were some lovely bits of fancy and fantasy but I was surprised to find myself yawning rather frequently.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who occasionally got lost. Alice takes to doing recitation from time to time to prove how things are just slightly off. But if you are unfamiliar with the recitations (I assume they were fairly standard when the book was written) then you're going to miss the point.


I get that it's just supposed to be fun and nonsense but for me it was just a little TOO much nonsense and not quite enough fun. Generally enjoyable but nothing particularly memorable.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

From Goodreads:

This extraordinary work chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful - but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time. Step by careful step, Sylvia Plath takes us with Esther through a painful month in New York as a contest-winning junior editor on a magazine, her increasingly strained relationships with her mother and the boy she dated in college, and eventually, devastatingly, into the madness itself. The reader is drawn into her breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is rare in any novel. It points to the fact that The Bell Jar is a largely autobiographical work about Plath's own summer of 1953, when she was a guest editor at Mademoiselle and went through a breakdown. It reveals so much about the sources of Sylvia Plath's own tragedy that its publication was considered a landmark in literature. 

To be perfectly honest I fully expected to loathe this book.  It sounds so horribly depressing and I much prefer sunshine and rainbows.

And then I read it in one day (almost to the neglect of my children) and LOVED it.

Esther's descent into madness, to me, didn't feel dark or depressing or horrific. The way she tells her story feels a bit like someone telling you about their recent vacation. It's sort of a personal narrative with feelings and whatnot but without the darkness and dramatics you would expect from someone falling into serious mental illness.

What I really loved, though, is that Plath brought her poetry into her writing. She is probably mostly remembered for this novel, but she was first and foremost a poet and it shines through in her prose. There were a few bits I read over and over just because I loved the wording or the imagery. One of my favorites:

Marco hooked an arm around my waist and jerked me up against his dazzling white suit. Then he said, "Pretend you are drowning."

I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm.

I LOVE that.

Well played, Sylvia Plath. Well played.

Throwing in the Towel: Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

I put Jude the Obscure on my 2010 Classics To-Read list mostly because, for a couple months during my pregnancy, I was working really really hard at getting Aaron to get on board with Jude for Baby 2's name (still love it but Aaron just couldn't do it. Too much like Judy, which is a word he occasionally uses for a certain female body part).

I have been trying for weeks to read this book. I have renewed it from the library as many times as I'm allowed to but you know what?

I hate it. I gave it an honest try but it has killed my will to live and I am giving myself permission to just give up on it and return it to the library and never think of it again.

Apologies to Thomas Hardy and my friends who actually really like this one. I can't do it! I'm moving on.

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

From Goodreads:

Sometimes only remembered for the epic motion picture and "Frankly ... I don't give a damn," Gone with the Wind was initially a compelling and entertaining novel. It was the sweeping story of tangled passions and the rare courage of a group of people in Atlanta during the time of Civil War that brought those cinematic scenes to life. The reason the movie became so popular was the strength of its characters--Scarlett O'Hara, Rhett Butler, and Ashley Wilkes--all created here by the deft hand of Margaret Mitchell, in this, her first novel. 

This was the longest. book. ever. And I loved it so much that I was STILL sad when it ended.

Where do you even start with a book like Gone with the Wind? With how amazingly fabulous and vibrant and well drawn the characters are? Or with how you were constantly amazed at how perfectly the movie went with the book? Or how in love you are with Rhett Butler? Or how just generally AWESOME the whole thing is??

I both love and hate Scarlett. I love her because she's strong and a survivor and I hate her because it took her 1000 pages to let go of stupid Ashley Wilkes. Paul Newman once said of staying true to Joanne Woodward, "Why go out for hamburger when you have steak at home?" Dude. Ashley Wilkes is hamburger. Rhett! There is your steak, my friend. Swoooon.

Character awesomeness aside, it was fun to suddenly side with the South during the Civil War. History class can only help you understand so much. I remember learning about how the South was fighting to preserve their way of life and I sort of got that but it was reading about how much things changed from that first barbeque at Twelve Oaks to trying to keep Tara afloat to the fall of the "Old Guard" that really drove it home to me. I even sympathized with the South. I GOT why the Civil War was so devastating. Finally. I'm a little slow.

There are few books I bother buying because, hi, that's what the library is for. But this? This I must own. It's one of those books that totally sucks you in and spits you out emotionally drained and a little dazed because, whoa.

I'm now going to go watch the movie. And then I'm going to read it again.

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

From Wikipedia:

Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a comment on women's independence, packaged as a romantic comedy.

Who DOESN'T love this story?? It's been a long time since I've seen My Fair Lady but now I'm itching to rent it.

Pygmalion is just a fantastic play. There's a quote on the back cover of the copy I got from the library that really sums it up for me:

[George Bernard Shaw is] The most influential writer of his age...His plays can scarcely prove other than lastingly delightful since they are the product of vigorous intelligence joined to inexhaustible comic invention.
-J.I.M. Stewart in the Oxford History of English Literature

Exactly. It's witty and funny and the characters are so likeable and the whole thing is generally delightful. And I can't read it without singing, "Just you wait, Henry Higgins, just you wait!" which just improves the experience. This one goes on my hypothetical favorites list.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

I'm ashamed to say that my sole knowledge of Treasure Island comes from the muppet version. And I happen to LOVE that movie, which is part of the reason I added the book to my list.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it off-screen. It's a fairly quick read but full of adventure and swashbuckling and general awesomeness. Long John Silver (who was so well embodied by Tim Curry in the muppet version that I couldn't envision him any other way throughout the book) is such a perfect villain. Charming, with a real streak of humanity, and a sort of shifty-eyed-ness that makes it so you're never really sure which way he's leaning.

I listened to the book on Playaway which I think was the way to go. I wasn't tripped up by all the sailing terms like some of the reviewers on Goodreads mentioned and all the pirates had appropriately pirate-y voices. Plus the narrator was a good one, and that always makes such a difference.

It didn't even occur to me when I added Treasure Island to my 2010 Classics List that it might also be a fitting addition to my Boy List. But, by golly, I am really looking forward to listening to this one again with my boys in a few (ten) years.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

The Goodreads description is not actually a description of the book, so if you'd like a synopsis you can find a good one here on the Wikipedia page.

I wanted to like this one so much more than I did. I mean, it's WUTHERING HEIGHTS, a book that must be discussed only in tones of hushed reverence with proper respect.

And really, it was fine, just not amazing. The writing itself is exceptional but I struggled with the story. I never felt an ounce of love or admiration or anything positive for Catherine or Heathcliff. They were pitiful, self-involved creatures and Heathcliff was just plain violent and nasty. What is there to like?? Their only redeeming attribute was their love for one another and it's hardly portrayed at all before moving on to all the death and vengeance and whatnot. And, except for Hindley, none of Heathcliff's victims deserved what they got, especially since he mostly went after the innocent children of his supposed tormenters. I just felt like there was so little to redeem the story.

A major part of the problem here is one of incorrect expectations. Wuthering Heights is so often portrayed as a love story but it really is not a love story at all. Like .0126 of the story is anything to do with love while the rest is about violence and abuse and weakness and revenge. Sure, all this comes about because of love, but it is not a love story. And I sort of knew that but I still expected more than there actually was.

I did enjoy the ending though. Heathcliff (spoiler alert) really really needed to just die. I was so done with him. And I was glad that Cathy and poor Hareton had a happy ending. It left a better taste in my mouth there at the end than I was expecting. It would be even better if that obnoxious servant Joseph died at some point as well. Every time he opened his mouth I skipped over what he said because a. it was unintelligible and b. he never had anything of worth to say.

I can see why this book is a classic though. The story is haunting and the writing is beautiful. The setting is stark and unforgettable. The 1939 film adaptation is one of my mom's favorites and I'm looking forward to watching it. Probably not a book I'll read again though.