You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Classics’ category.
Since this challenge doesn’t start until July, Trish is having potential participants do the following meme to get to know one another:
1. My favorite classic is Pride and Prejudice. No question.
2. The classic I had the toughest time finishing is Emma. I still haven’t finished it.
3. I would recommend Cannery Row to someone who doesn’t read a lot of classics or who doesn’t generally like classics because it is short and powerful and a good story.
4. To me, a classic book is a book that has withstood the test of time in that it can speak to people of all generations and eras.
5. The type of relationship I have with classics is love/guilt. I love to read them but feel guilty that I don’t read more.
For the challenge, I select Option 1:
Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
Emma, by Jane Austen
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
Dracula, by Bram Stoker
BONUS: Atonement, by Ian McEwan
I’ve lately been reading Emma, by Jane Austen. (Though I was temporarily derailed when I found Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos in the bargain bin at Borders.) Anyway, I started reading Emma in earnest because of the PBS Masterpiece Classic series “The Complete Jane Austen.” I have now viewed at least one movie version of all six of Jane Austen’s principal novels, though I’d only previously read Pride & Prejudice. And, I must admit, viewing the movie version of Emma before reading the book has helped immensely. Actually, I’m not sure if it is the movie itself that is helpful or just knowing the progression of the plot. In any case, I find myself reading more closely, picking up more textual clues about people’s true characters and Emma’s subtle, but important, misperceptions.
This experience with Emma made me reevaluate my reading skills and methods. I’m a compulsive, rapid reader. I tend to read and dump. (Likely a product of college English classes where professors would schedule a mere week for the reading of Anna Karenina or Dante’s Inferno.) I generally don’t read closely. Having just completed a book, I probably couldn’t tell you what color hair the heroine has. I jump over “unimportant” details like that, partly because I like to imagine the characters myself and partly because I’m in a hurry. I think miss a great deal in my hurry.
All of this reflection made me recall a chapter in Francine Prose’s book Reading Like a Writer on close reading. In the very first chapter, Ms. Prose advocates getting back to reading basics and focusing on close reading, paying attention to the words and sentences and paragraphs.
Several websites supply variations on the theme of “how to conduct a close reading.” See websites here and here and here and here. Though lists and suggestions are a good place to start, the lists, I think, are a little too narrow. Most of them anticipate close reading conducted on short works of fiction like poetry or excerpts of longer works. It seems to me that close reading should be applied to all kinds of reading: literature, poetry, newspapers, technical manuals. Rather than a technique used in English papers, close reading should be a method, a form inseparable from our reading.
This definition of close reading sums it up for me: a method in which you pay close attention to a text, either in order to observe striking features generally or in order to answer specific questions concerning that text.
In light of the above, I hereby resolve to amend my reading habits by:
- Slowing down and enjoying the experience, the moments, of reading
- Reading with a pencil in hand
- Looking up words I don’t know
- Pausing occasionally to contemplate what I’ve just read
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.”
Cannery Row is even more than that—it’s people. It’s Lee Chong and Dora and Mack and the boys and Frankie and Tom and Mary Talbot and Henri the painter and the old Chinaman and Mr. and Mrs. Sam Malloy (and Darling) and Doc. Doc is as much the main character as anyone in the story. “And everyone who thought of him thought next, ‘I really must do something nice for Doc.’” Doc and his collecting really inform the whole story and provide a tie among all of the characters. Doc collects sea things as Steinbeck collects the denizens of Cannery Row—with understanding and absolution.
The vignette narration style allows Steinbeck to include dark elements while keeping the overall tone a notch above neutral. The undercurrent of darkness is, though, rather dark. In the first chapter, Horace Abbeville shoots himself on a heap of fishmeal. In the third chapter, William kills himself by shoving an ice pick through his heart. In chapter twelve, a famous writer’s entrails are thrown into a ditch and carried off by a little boy and his dog. In chapter eighteen, Doc is shocked when he finds a woman’s body in the reef. (“The eyes were open and clear and the face was firm and the hair washed gently about her head.”) In the twenty-eighth chapter, Frankie, a young boy with mental problems, is institutionalized for stealing a present for Doc, the only person who was ever kind to him. And, finally, in the penultimate chapter, a gopher builds the perfect home for a posterity of gophers, but cannot find a female to mate with, loses two toes on his front paw, and eventually has to move away “to a dahlia garden where they put out traps every night.”
The quote that perhaps sums up the book for me is: “There is no explaining a series of misfortunes like that. Every man blames himself.” As with most Steinbeck novels that I’ve read, I think the underlying message is that life is hard and heartbreaking, but people are resilient and will not only survive but proliferate.
Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck: (55) * * * * *
Is “Fiction Friday” too trite? Probably. Good thing I didn’t pick it. Plus, if I set up too many weekly features, I’ll have to come up with something everyday.
I have had a book-ridden week. Sadly, that left little time for reading. On Wednesday night, I went out with two women from my church to discuss the intricacies contained in The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. See my review here. Last night, I hosted my regular book club. The book was Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson. We had a very nice discussion over tea. It was a perfect beverage and book for a blustery day. Anyway, I was very pleased with the discussion. It made me realize that there is a lot of redeeming qualities to the book, even though some of the writing was atrocious. See my review here.
My reading horizon is now quite cluttered. I started reading Emma after the PBS Masterpiece Classics presentation on Sunday. Then I put Emma on pause to read The Uncommon Reader, a novella by Alan Bennett universally beloved among booklovers and bookbloggers. See blogs here and here and here. I will finish The Uncommon Reader today, hopefully on my lunch break. Then it’s probably back to Emma, unless I decide to hurriedly devour the next book club selection, The Whaleboat House (also known as Amagansett) by Mark Mills. I also checked out Cannery Row from the library, so I’m going to try and squeeze that in before I have to return it in two weeks.
I like having so much to look forward to.
In The Uncommon Reader, the Queen of England suddenly, and quite by accident, becomes a book addict. This has interesting consequences for both her personal and her public lives. I’ll do a full review this weekend after I finish the book, but I have been thinking a bit about the Queen’s reading methodology. She always reads with a notebook and pencil in hand, jotting down passages that catch her attention.
I haven’t ever really read while taking notes, unless it was a textbook and I was reading it for a class. I have thought for sometime now that it would be interesting to start a kind of book journal in which I record my contemporaneous reactions to books, jot down good (or bad) quotations, and thereby keep a log of my reading activities. This has also been a subject of interest on other blogs of late. See here and here and here. How do you people out there read and record?
After finishing two books in the Gemma Doyle trilogy by Libba Bray (with the last book in the trilogy not available in my local Border’s), I decided that I would take a break from young adult fantasy and take on Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. The description on the back of the new Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition drew me in:
Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer and threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.
I love the idea of the notebooks. I got a mere twenty pages into the nearly seven hundred page tome last night (with not a mention of any notebooks). So far, it all takes place in an apartment. The exchanges between Anna, the main character, and her friend Molly are surprisingly engaging, even though the topics are rather mundane.
I’m exciting to get into the book, especially since it was a staple in the feminist’s library in the 60s and because of the unique storytelling—letting the reader see the protagonist from the first person point of view in the notebooks and from the omniscient third person point of view in a novel within the novel.
We’ll see how it goes.
