Celebrity Collage by MyHeritage

MyHeritage: Family tree – Genealogy – Celebrity – Collage – Morph

Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper

Picoult, J. (2004). My Sister’s Keeper. Prince Frederick, MD: Recorded Books.

I actually read My Sister’s Keeper a couple of years ago. When I was shopping, the name and the book cover caught my eye. I read the back cover and found myself immediately requesting this book through the library. Recently, I saw that the movie was to come out and I checked out the audiobook.

The main story is that of thirteen year old Anna Fitzgerald.  The Fitzgeralds has Anna to save the life of her leukemia-ridden sister, Kate. Through the years, Anna gave Kate platelets, bone marrow, and stem cells. Anna draws the line at donating a kidney. With the help of attorney Campbell Alexander, Anna sues her family for the right to her own body.  Throughout the book, the reader glimpses the points of view of the various characters. This includes Anna, Kate, their parents – Sara and Brian, brother Jesse, Campbell, and guardian ad litem Julia. The reader sees the thoughts of these characters and their motivations.

When reading the book, I found I could barely tolerate Sara Fitzgerald – a mother so involved in the survival of her beloved Kate. She neglects her other children and, to some extent, her husband. When listening to the book, I realized she had a one track mind and was quite ruthless. In the parts of the book where she narrates, it becomes clear she’s stuck in the past. The second time through, I nearly pitied her.

My heart went out to Brian Fitzgerald, the firefighter trying to keep together his family. He cared about his kids and could see things in a more lucid way than Sara. I did not envy him his plight.

If nothing else, My Sister’s Keeper brings about many questions. What would you do to save your child? When do you cross the line? Should a sibling feel obligated to donate so? Is one child’s survival above that of your other children?

While well-written, I was angry at the end of the book. In fact, I was mad throughout my reading of the book. At least, I was not comatose. I have yet to see the movie and I thought Cameron Diaz was too sweet and likable to play Sara Fitzgerald. Also, it looks as though it’s more about Kate than Anna. Not cool!

All in all, three out of five pearls.

Places: Providence, Rhode Island

For more on My Sister’s Keeper:

AllReaders.Com Reviews

Good Library System

Check it out!

http://www.avsphere.com/2009/06/good-library-system.html

Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Spark, M. (1999). The prime of Miss Jean Brodie. New York: Perennial Classics.

When reading another book recently, I saw a reference to Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. My interest piqued, I looked up some information on it and found that this read was less than 200 pages. That and the teacher narrative caught my attention.

Miss Jean Brodie teaches at a girls’ private school, Marcia Blaine,  in 1930s Edinburgh, Scotland. She works at the Junior School where she handpicks six girls to be what will become known as “The Brodie Set” or “The Brodie Girls.” They are Monica, Rose, Eunice, Sandy, Jenny, and Mary. With these girls in particular, Miss Brodie discusses her travels and politics as well as her amorous relationships with Mr. Lloyd, the school’s Art Master, and Mr. Lowther, the Singing Master of Marcia Blaine. She fawns over Il Duce and constantly reminds her students that she is in “her prime” and they shall benefit.  Most of her coworkers and the headmistress, Miss Mackay, detest her.  Using the prolepsis (flashfoward) technique, Spark definitely shows the reader that Miss Brodie leaves her mark on her students. Yet has she scarred them for life?

After finishing the book, I watched the movie with Dame Maggie Smith. While I found the performances amazing, I felt the film didn’t pack the wallup which I found in the book. The prolepsis was not in the film (this was pre-Lost days) and this left me disappointed. The flash forwards offered much into the psyche of Miss Brodie and her students. Seeing how these six girls landed as women was huge in the book.

In addition, the book was scarier. Themes from The Wave must have come from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.  Much of the Brodie technique falls under mind control and manipulation. The dangers of letting others do all of the thinking are huge here.

I also think Spark borrowed a little from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. For fear of spoiling the story, even one chock full of flash forwards, I will leave that for readers to decide.

All in all, on level of prolepsis and precautionary tale, I give this 3 out of 5 pearls.

See also:

Original Time review

Big Read Texas

Check it out! This is one of my favorite books!

http://www.bigreadtexas.org/

Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Book Cover

Díaz, J. (2007). The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books.

All the Pulitzer buzz proved irresistible. Then, I saw Díaz on CBS Sunday Morning and in Criticás. Initially, I liked hearing and reading that there was another writer out there grateful to libraries and librarians.  Learning that Oscar Wao was actually a mispronunciation of Oscar Wilde and that the characters were from part of the Dominican diaspora increased my interest.

My fascination with the D. R., a place narrator/watcher Yunior “Yuni” de las Casas describes as being very “sci-fi,”  stems from Dominican American writer Julia Àlvarez. Àlvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies was even referenced in one of the many footnotes in this book. My mom requested the book and I read it in a week.

Oscar is a sad, obese New Jersey “ghetto nerd” (Díaz, Chapter One) of Dominican descent. He voraciously consumes all the Sci-Fi the Paterson, NJ libraries can offer; they and his sister Lola are the only ones who do not reject him. Instead of being in Middle Earth, he must do his best in the real world. However, he and his family seem doggedly ill-fated, being heavily pursued by an old Dominican curse of “fuku.” Fuku haunts Oscar’s family since his erudite grandfather said the wrong things about the D.R.’s former despot, Trujillo. Yet, the romantic temperament of Oscar does not keep him from avoiding the grips of “fuku.”

Immediately, I liked the authentic characters and the believable depictions as given mostly by our watcher, the womanizing Yuni. I also felt as though I experienced the true life of the first generation in the US through Oscar, Lola, and Yuni.

I had a love/hate relationship with the Spanglish of this novel. My limited understanding of Spanish drove me to my language dictionary often.  Nevertheless, it made  Yuni and the rest of the characters completely real. By the end of the book, I was convinced I could meet up with some of the characters. Another love/hate relationship derived from the multitude of footnotes. While I liked the context offered, it also distracted from the story.

The language definitely earns this novel an “R” rating.  I was particularly  troubled by the constant use of the “n word.” While I understand it’s both permissible and commonplace amongst these characters, I didn’t like it and I refuse to even type the word in my blog.

One of the most impressive feats Díaz manages is creating a Fantasy novel. In the strictest definition, the parallel universes of late Twentieth Century New Jersey and the Trujillo days of the Dominican Republic offer the reader a work of folklore-laden Fantasy and contemporary Historical Fiction.

All in all, I’m glad I read his book and I quickly requested Díaz’s collection of short stories Drown via ILL.

Four out of Five Pearls

Places: The Dominican Republic; Paterson, NJ; New York, NY, New Brunswick, NJ

For More on The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao :

• “The Importance of Being Junot – A Pulitzer, Spanglish, and Oscar Wao”
• Authors@Google: Junot Díaz

Caldecott, Newbery and other book awards announced

Please check out the following link: Caldecott, Newbery and other book awards announced

John Updike, Prize-Winning Writer, Dead at Age 76

John Updike, prize-winning writer of ‘Rabbit’ novels, dead at age 76

By HILLEL ITALIE

The Associated Press

NEW YORK

 

 

For readers and writers of a certain generation, it’s hard to imagine that they will have to grow old, or at least older, without John Updike.

“He’s certainly been on the screen of my life since I was a teenager,” says fellow author Richard Ford, 64, speaking just hours after he learned of the death Tuesday of the 76-year-old Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-novelist and man of letters who had been ill with lung cancer.

“He’s a person who dedicated his life to writing, who wasn’t a teacher, and, most importantly, wrote very serious books that a lot of people read,” Ford said.

Dependable as time itself, Updike released more than 60 books in a career that started in the 1950s, winning virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest,” and two National Book Awards.

The tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir “Self-Consciousness” and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams, with its immortal line about the surly slugger who refused to tip his hat to his fans: “Gods do not answer letters.”

The first few lines of the essay, in which he described Fenway Park as a “lyric little bandbox of a ballpark,” were inscribed on the walls of the arena’s front office. “He will be missed,” said team president Larry Lucchino.

Updike’s literary home was the American suburb, the great new territory of mid-century fiction, white-fenced compound of sex and anxiety. Born in 1932, Updike spoke for millions of Depression-era readers raised by “penny-pinching parents,” united by “the patriotic cohesion of World War II” and blessed by a “disproportionate share of the world’s resources,” the postwar, suburban boom of “idealistic careers and early marriages.”

He captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation’s confusion over the civil rights and women’s movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Updike was called a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the establishment. His characters, complained one younger author — David Foster Wallace — had no passion but for themselves.

“The very world around them, as beautifully as they see and describe it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self,” Wallace wrote in 1997. “Though usually family men, they never really love anybody — and, though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don’t love women.”

On purely literary grounds, he was attacked by Norman Mailer as the kind of author appreciated by readers who knew nothing about writing. Last year, judges of Britain’s Bad Sex in Fiction Prize voted Updike lifetime achievement honors.

But more often he was praised for his flowing, poetic writing style. Describing a man’s interrupted quest to make love, Updike likened it “to a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached.” He might rhapsodize over the film projector’s “chuckling whir” or look to the stars and observe that “the universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass.”

Born in Reading, Pa., raised in the Protestant community of Shillington, Pa., where the Lord’s Prayer was recited daily at school, Updike was a lifelong churchgoer influenced by his faith, but not immune to doubts.

“I remember the times when I was wrestling with these issues that I would feel crushed. I was crushed by the purely materialistic, atheistic account of the universe,” Updike told The Associated Press during a 2006 interview.

“I am very prone to accept all that the scientists tell us,” he said. “But I can’t quite make the leap of unfaith, as it were, and say, `This is it. Carpe diem (seize the day), and tough luck.’”

He received his greatest acclaim for the “Rabbit” series, a quartet of novels published over a 30-year span that featured ex-high school basketball star Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom and his restless adjustment to adulthood and the constraints of work and family. To the very end, Harry was in motion, an innocent in his belief that any door could be opened, a believer in God even as he bedded women other than his wife.

The series “to me is the tale of a life, a life led by an American citizen who shares the national passion for youth, freedom, and sex, the national openness and willingness to learn, the national habit of improvisation,” Updike would later write. “He is furthermore a Protestant, haunted by a God whose manifestations are elusive, yet all-important.”

Other notable books included “Couples,” a sexually explicit tale of suburban mating that sold millions of copies; “In the Beauty of the Lilies,” an epic of American faith and fantasy; and “Too Far to Go,” which followed the courtship, marriage and divorce of the Maples, a suburban family.

After graduating from Harvard University in 1954, he accepted a one-year fellowship to study painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts at Oxford University. During his stay in England, a literary idol, E.B. White, offered him a position at The New Yorker, where he served briefly as foreign books reviewer. Many of Updike’s reviews and short stories were published in The New Yorker, often edited by White’s stepson, Roger Angell.

By the end of the 1950s, Updike had published a story collection, a book of poetry and his first novel, “The Poorhouse Fair,” soon followed by the first of the Rabbit books, “Rabbit, Run.” Praise came so early and so often that New York Times critic Arthur Mizener worried that Updike’s “natural talent” was exposing him “from an early age to a great deal of head-turning praise.”

In recent years, his books included “The Widows of Eastwick,” a sequel to his “The Witches of Eastwick”; and two essay collections, “Still Looking” and “Due Considerations.” A book of short fiction, “My Father’s Tears and Other Stories,” is scheduled to come out later this year.

His standing within the literary community may never have been greater than in 2006 when he delivered a passionate defense of bookstores and words, words on paper, at publishing’s annual national convention. Responding to a recent New York Times essay predicting a digital future, he scorned this “grisly scenario” and praised the paper book as the site of an “encounter, in silence, of two minds.”

“So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts,” he concluded. “For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.”

 

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Copyright © 2009 ABC News Internet Ventures

John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman

* 1001 Books Book

Fowles, J. (1969). The French lieutenant’s woman. Boston: Little, Brown.

A coworker recommended this book to me. Then, another coworker suggested I read it. At long last, I embarked on reading the nearly 500 page book. Before I realized, I had actually read the whole book.

Twentieth century writer John Fowles looks upon his Victorian characters and times in The French lieutenant’s woman. Fowles and the reader see these late Nineteenth century events from a Twentieth century point of view. The novel is interspersed with poetry of the day and discussions of politics, Darwinism, and Existentialism.

In the small Southwestern English village of Lyme Regis in 1867, the pretty young heiress Ernestina Freeman resides with her widowed aunt until her planned march down the aisle. She is engaged to a gentleman and amateur paleontologist Charles Smithson. Charles stays at a local inn, awaiting his marriage. One day, Charles and Ernestina walk along the coast. Inadvertently, they stumble upon the town’s own Hester Prynne, Sarah Woodruff (a.k.a. Tragedy, the French Lieutenant’s Whore/Woman, etc). Ernestina manages not to rubberneck but Charles is intrigued by the enigmatic, sad woman who was jilted by a French soldier not so long before the novel begins.

Later, Charles learns Sarah’s real name and that she now works as a companion to the legalistic and cruel Mrs. Poulteney, the richest woman in town. With each pages, Charles becomes more and more fascinated by Sarah and her story. She makes him second guess and question not only his engagement but everything in his life. The biggest question of all is this; will Charles give up everything else to pursue something good and true or will he continue his life of pretense.

I can say that I had never read a novel like this. While I may have read poor imitations of Fowles’ interjectory style, this book is one of a kind. I easily saw that Charles supported Darwin’s arguments but I also saw him as a dying breed – a gentleman who did not have to work. His kind found itself dependent on wealthy heiresses seeking titles. Yet, his gentleman’s gentleman, Sam, has the survival instinct, of a cockroach.

One big question the book raises is Sarah’s motives. Surely, she represents truth and honor while Ernestina stands for the gilt beloved by Victorians. Yet, Charles’ feelings for either one of these women is debatable. When all is said and done, I think it was less about which corner of the love triangle prevailed and more about Charles doing what is right.

I hope I’m not breaking my own rule about spoilers but Fowles offers us three different endings. The first one is debunked by Fowles himself. This reminded me of “Choose your own adventure” books but I did find it authentic and worth pondering which way it would have truly gone. Nonetheless, thank you, Mr. Fowles, for giving your characters, and readers, some free will. Perhaps it’s enough rope to hang ourselves, characters and all, but it makes for a worthy read.

The only complaint I have will make me sound like a complete plebian; all the foreign language. I did not take French and I had not the foggiest notion what the characters were saying at times and this frustrated me.

I must say, however, this is a Five out of Five Pearls book.

Places: Lyme Regis, UK; London, UK; Exeter, UK; Europe; US

For more on The French Lieutenant’s Woman:

All Time 100 Novels

Imminent Victorians

FlagCounter.com