Lit Bits-1/14/2015 Robert Penn Warren

Aleathia says:

I am working hard at being able to read more books this year.  Last year was the pits and I aim to make time for reading again....even if it is only for 20 minutes.  Presently I am about one third of the way through Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men".  This was a Pulitzer Prize winning book for him and thus on my list of books to read in my lifetime.

I find these episodes of forced reading interesting.  I would have never picked up this book on my own as it does not fall into the usual type of book I gravitate towards.  Having said that, it is a lovely surprise.  Warren has a masterful vocabulary (I have to hit the dictionary at least every few pages) and is spot on with his narrative that is engaging and detailed but not so much that it is burdensome.  I will admit that the dialogue is harder for me as it is set in the 1930's deep south.  Reading in dialect has never been one of my favorite things because I have to hear it in my head in order for it to compute.  Combine this with very small print and you have a slower moving book than I would have liked.  It is slow moving because of me, not because of the content.

In the wee hours last night, when I couldn't sleep and the house was quiet, I sat in my sewing/reading room layered with blankets in negative weather and read this book.  I came across this quote and it made reading the book worth it:

"They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people."--Robert Penn Warren

I had to stop and read these lines over and over again.  There is so much unwanted truth in these sentences.  We want to think that we are the same person no matter who we are around, but in our heart of hearts we know it isn't true.  I am a different version of myself with my child than I am with my lover.  I am a different version of myself depending on which nurses I work with.  I am different at parties than I am at home.  The people in my life and in my environment change me.  We all want to be accepted in the company we keep even if we pretend we don't care.  It is human nature to want to belong to something greater than yourself.  Why do you think religion has such a strong hold in the world?

I look forward to finishing this book and adding it to my list of Pulitzer's read.  The book is about a man in politics from the view of another man who works closely with him.  It is the unraveling of a life.  It is relationships that fall away and leave the narrator as an island.  At least it is so far.  Pick up the book and see for yourself.

Lit Bits-5/21/2014 Wallace Stegner, Herman Koch, Matthew Revert

Aleathia says:

When I was living in Seattle, after getting comfortable in a new big city, I decided to embark on a journey of reading going against the old adage "Don't judge a book by its cover".  I was feeling a bit rebellious and decided that for an entire year I would only choose books based on the cover art.  I would not read anything about them so as to know what I was getting into.

I found that you could judge a book by its cover and that a nice looking one often tells you visually something about your own aesthetic in the world.  One of the books I chose was a book called "Crossing to Safety" by Wallace Stegner.

I had never read any of his work before and I fell in love with his writing style.  Over the years I sought out many of his other novels.  I will never forget the day I finished his book "Angle of Repose" which won him a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  It changed the way I looked at writing and about the human condition.  It solidified my love for pushing west, pioneer, down on your luck stories.  After reading that book I decided that I was then going to read all the winners of the Pulitzer for all time.  I have not completed that goal yet, but I have collected all but 25 of the novels and read about 30 of the 80.

Wallace Stegner shapes characters that you can't help but love.  You want them to succeed even when you know in your heart of hearts they are destined to fail.  You feel their pain as if it were your own.  I close the back cover of his books with a sense of satisfaction, that everything ended up where it was supposed to be.

He is one of my top five authors of all time.  You should check out his work if you haven't already.

Addendum by Joe:

If you want to judge books by their covers, pick up anything designed by Matthew Revert. He is a god of graphic designing and has been doing an amazing job of dressing the small press world in dapper outfits for publication.

Ally says:

I like unreliable narrators.

I like them because I feel like when they’re telling me a story it’s not all altruistic bull. You ever notice that about reliable narrators? They’re just dying to have someone fall in love with them – to have someone root for them. They’re like Tom Brady. Or any quarterback. Just a touchdown behind, seconds unraveling from the clock, desperate for that Hail Mary pass which they pray for and then we pray for and then it happens – sails through the almighty air like it’s guided by the hand of whatever god we’ve conjured up for the time being and lands right in the receiver’s hands who is guided over the line, dance and all. We stand, we cheer, we pump fists.

Everybody wins.

Right?

Sure. Except sometimes isn’t it nice to sit at the feet of someone deliciously deceptive and hear a tale that sounds a little bit more like the kind of thing that we would tell? Mostly truthful. A bit of a lie. We’ll pepper it with misconceptions - small things that bend the favor toward us. Altruism is a word we do not understand and therefore we do not obey.

Is it an American thing? Our constant need for happy endings even when life itself dishes up nothing but?

Herman Koch wrote a book called The Dinner. Here’s what it’s about:

A summer's evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. Between mouthfuls of food and over the delicate scraping of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of politeness - the banality of work, the triviality of holidays. But the empty words hide a terrible conflict and, with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened... Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act, caught on camera, and their grainy images have been beamed into living rooms across the nation; despite a police manhunt, the boys remain unidentified - by everyone except their parents. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children and, as civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.

Except it's also about so much more. Cue vicious curdled laugh. Mwha-ha-ha!

Besides chances are good some of your favorite narrators are already unreliable. Hello? Holden? Huck Finn?

It’s easy to love the good guy. Let’s all fall in love with the decidedly complicated human guy for a change. Come on, he's just like you and me.