Lowriders

I have a hard time with current trouser styles.  The low waists are a problem for me.  I am long waisted and find that my shirts frequently do an inadequate job of covering my abdomen, back, and underwear.  Today Kent made an uncharacteristic comment about my attire.  Said he,

"When you bend over in those pants, I can see your ass . . . ets."

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

To quote Renée Zellweger in Jerry Maguire, this book had me at "Hello."  The first chapter is so funny, I almost want to include the whole thing here, but I won't.  I will include the first paragraph, however, as a small  taste of what a great writer Louis de Bernières really is.

Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse.  He had attended a surprisingly easy calving, lanced one abscess, extracted a molar, dosed one lady of easy virtue with Salvarsan, performed an unpleasant but spectacularly fruitful enema, and had produced a miracle by a feat of medical prestidigitation.  

Isn't that wonderful?

The last book I read, Birdsong, was about World War I.  It was sad.  I have moved forward a war.  Captain Corelli's Mandolin is set on the Greece island of Cephallonia during World War II.  It, too, was sad, but so funny too.  I cried as I rode my bike (again), but chapters were so amusing I had to read them out loud to Kent.  The characters are wonderfully well developed and the story enlightening (I knew nothing about Greece during the war).

I turned down corners of several pages, moving and delightful passages about children, love, and death.  Here are a couple of quotes, in brief.

Children see more than we do.

Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected?

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides.  And when it subsides you have to make a decision.  You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.  Because this is what love is.  Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body.  No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths.  That is just being "in love," which any fool can do.  Love itself is what is left over when being in love has been burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

When loved ones die, you have to live on their behalf.  See things as though with their eyes.  Remember how they used to say things, and use those words oneself.  Be thankful that you can do things that they cannot, and also feel the sadness of it.

I think this is a great book.  I would love to read it as my choice for our book group, but I'm not sure I can.  There is a fair amount of bad language and graphic descriptions of wartime atrocities, plus talk of sex although no actual sex scenes, and I'm not sure it would be "appropriate" considering the book group started out as a Relief Society sponsored thing.  I did love it though.  I need to have someone else read it and tell me if I can select it.

Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon

http://xfinity.comcast.net/articles/news-national/20110427/drives.grand.canyon/

The link is to a story about a man who drove his car into Grand Canyon and survived.  The car fell about 200 feet and then got lodged in a pine tree.  Having read Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon, I can tell you that the man is very lucky.  Very lucky indeed.

I picked up this book at a yard sale last year.  It seemed something of a macabre sort of read, but the subtitle claimed to contain "gripping accounts of all know fatal mishaps" that have occurred in Grand Canyon, and how can anyone resist that?  It was also part of my goal to read as many non-fiction books as fiction.  I didn't get it finished last year.

The authors do provide detailed stories of those who have died in the canyon from falls, air plane crashes (including helicopters), drownings, suicide, and murder.  I was amazed at some people's stupidity and/or rotten luck.  The stories are interesting, especially appealing to those who find others' immortality less painful to consider than their own.

A Guide to the Birds of East Africa

There is a segment on Classical 89 called "Bookbeat."  A woman who works at the Bookstore at BYU gives a book review each week.  I like Bookbeat and Linda Brummett, the reviewer.  She is insightful and selects a wide range of books to literature to discuss: children's and young adult works, fiction and non alike.  

A Guide to the Birds of East Africa was a novel she reviewed, and based on her review, I thought it would be a fun one to read out loud with Kent.  She compared Nicholas Drayson's writing to that of Alexander McCall Smith's, one of my favorite authors, so I was eager to read it.  Although the premise of the story is engaging, the actual writing isn't, at least initially.  Kent and I are not nearly as consistent with our reading as we were 3B (before baby Brandt), and even less consistent now that we are 2K2B (KentKatherineBrandtBlythe), and this book was just not engaging enough to make us want to read every night or even every other night.  Kent especially couldn't get into it.

That said, I did finish reading it on my own and I enjoyed it.  The story is this: Mr. Malik, a quiet widower, has a crush on Rose Mbikwa, the leader of a weekly bird walk he attends.  He wants to ask her to the Nairobi Hunt Club Ball, but is too shy to act.  A man whom Mr. Malik knew in his youth, Harry Khan, returns to Nairobi and also takes a liking to Rose.  A bet is wagered between Mr. Malik and Harry Khan: he who can identify the most individual species of birds in one week wins the right to ask Rose to the Hunt Club Ball.  

After a bit too much ground-laying, the story becomes very engaging, and perhaps had Kent and I endured a bit longer together he would have gotten into it.  As it was, I found the book charming, but it took a number of chapters before I was really excited to read it all the way through and not just jump to the last chapter to see how it ended.  It isn't really a very long book and is a quick read (if not reading out loud), and without any objectionable subject matter or bad language.  

100 Books the BBC Thinks I Should Have Read

The BBC thinks that the average person has only read six of these 100 books.  I'm not sure who at the BBC compiled the list, and quite frankly, I think the list is heavily biased towards British writers.  That said, I do think many of these books are great pieces of literature.  I am always sort of looking for books that will challenge me intellectually, and so this year, I am working my way through this list, reading those I haven't read before.  I began the year having already read 57 (take that BBC compiler!), have bumped that number up to 77, and have requested a number through Paperback Swap I am going to read.  Those in bold are ones I have read.  Those in italics are ones I read a portion of but didn't finish (for whatever reason).  I will update this list throughout the year.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen  (read it lots and lots of times)

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien 

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (read this aloud to Brandt)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (read multiple times)

6 The Bible  

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (yes, I've read it all!)

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger 

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens 

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostotebsky 

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck  

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (Read several times, most recently aloud to Brandt. It is difficult to read aloud and cry at the same time.)

34 Emma – Jane Austen (more than once)

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen (more than once)

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini 

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere (This has become one of my favorite books.)

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 

52 Dune – Frank Herbert 

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (more than once)

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth (This one should count as more than one book because it was a whopping 1,368 pages making it the sixth longest book written in English!)

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon 

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding  (While I really loved this book, I certainly don't consider it "great" literature.  Funny though.)

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville  

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 

75 Ulysses – James Joyce  

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome 

78 Germinal – Emile Zola  

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 

80 Possession – AS Byatt 

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens  

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell  

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry 

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White 

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery  (In French!) 

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks  (Read a review or two of this one.  I'm not going to bother.  Ever.) 

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl  

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (And just to brag, I read the unabridged version.  On a less self-vaunting note, it was only because it was the copy we happened to have in the house, and I self-abridged, flipping past whole chapters when I couldn't bring myself to read them.)

I wonder how many the BBC compiler has read.  

Birdsong

Although I have finished reading several other books since I finished this one, it has been on my mind.  It is a piece of literature that stays with you, that causes reflection, that has made me think--a lot.  This is another book from the BBC list (which I am going to post) I am working through, and I am glad I read it. 

The cover of the copy I have reads Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War.  It certainly begins as a romantic novel.  The main character, an Englishman named Stephen Wraysford, goes to France for work and stays in the home of a man who owns a textile factory.  He falls in love with the man's wife, Isabelle, and they have an affair.  As a side note, there are several erotic passages; Faulks leaves little to the imagination.  They run away together, but after a time together, Isabelle leaves Stephen.  

The story then takes us several years forward to WWI.  Wraysford is in the army, fighting in the trenches in France.  Faulks introduces us to the men fighting alongside him, and again, in vivid detail, describes life during that terrible war.  I have yet to read All's Quiet on the Western Front, but I imagine much of this portion of the story--the death, disease, loneliness, heartache, injury--is very similar.  It is distressing and at times very difficult to read.  

Part of the plot centers around Wraysford's granddaughter who wants to know more about him and what his experience during the war was like.  This part of the story is really secondary to the main plot line, but it provides an added depth to the overall narrative that I thought was touching.

I have been thinking about the subtitle, A Novel of Love and War.  I have not been ignorant of the events of WWI, nor the awful conditions endured by those who fought and died or survived that time.  Faulks, however, made it all very real to me.  He is a powerful writer and, I felt, truly evoked a time and place in so detailed a way that I could see the scenes so clearly.  In many instances, it was horrifying.  

There was a different sort of war being fought too.  Several of the characters seem to be at war with themselves.  Wraysford feels deeply and passionately about Isabelle, he feels strongly about his men and colleagues, and struggles with his motivations to fight, and he is not really able to resolve any of those feelings. He had great difficulty finding peace, even after the war.  Isabelle, as a woman, is at war with social mores.  She is trapped in an abusive marriage and wants more for herself, but can't see a way be greater freedom.

This novel is also about love in a variety of forms: erotic love, love of one's comrades in arms, love of country, and parental love.  There is a touching passage near the end of the book when a man describes his love for his son.  The son has died and the father is going to die too.  He says,

I loved that boy.  Every hair of him, every pore of his skin.  I would have killed a man who so much as laid a hand on him.  My world was in his face.  I was not so young when he was born.  I wondered what my life had been about until he came along.  It was nothing.  I treasured each word he gave me.  I made myself remember each thing he did, the way he turned his head, his way of saying things.  It was as though I knew it wouldn't be for long.  He was from another world, he was a blessing too great for me.

This just made me weep.  Actually, several passages throughout the book made me weep.  I read large portions as I biked on my trainer, and I would add, again as a side note, that it is difficult to bike and weep at the same time.  Hard to breathe adequately.  This is a moving book.  I consider it a fine piece of literature, but as with many pieces of fine literature, it is difficult to read (not literally, but figuratively).

General Conference

I love General Conference.  I am always so spiritually uplifted by the messages from our prophets and leaders.  I am rejuvenated and recommitted to being better: a better wife, mother, neighbor, and servant of my Heavenly King.

Sunday afternoon's session was particularly meaningful to me.  Elder Holland said that the speakers have a challenge in that they speak to members and non-members alike.  They also speak to a widely disparate demographic within the church; those with children and those without, married, single, children, youth, adults, the elderly.  But each of us will glean something if we are truly seeking inspiration and direction.

I clearly felt direction from Lynn G. Robbins about dealing with children and parenting.  I loved his concrete suggestions and his encouragement.  I need to be a better parent in many ways, but I can do better, and I will.  I was also moved by the talk by C. Scott Grow about the Atonement.  Again, so encouraging.  I always love Elder Holland; he moves me to tears each time he speaks, and Elder Scott's talk about marriage and treating our spouse with kindness was a touching, sweet tribute to his wife.  He, too, made me want to be a better wife.  I loved President Monson's talk about the temple and felt a renewed commitment to go to the temple more often.  I love being in the temple and feeling God's presence there.

It was a wonderful weekend.  I need to figure out a way to make it more meaningful to our children, but I suppose they are a little young yet.  Am I making excuses?  Truth be told, they are Bedlamites, as Elder Holland said, and I'm not sure how to rein them in and help them be more reverent.  I think I need to focus an FHE lesson on how to be more reverent.