My 100th Post!

Meme of the Day: Reader Questionnaire

Cathy at Kittling: Books cribbed the Reading Questionnaire used with authors at the book trade blog Shelf Awareness. This appeals to me the way Cosmo quizzes did when I was a teen ager! Feel free to copy and post -- leave a link in the comment section so we can see your answers: On your nightstand now:The Spirit of the Place by Samuel Shem, author of the hugely popular novel House of God, a "must read" for those in the medical profession; John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand by Richard Reeves, which I am plugging away at so I can write my IRB review; and The Accidental Tourist by Anne Taylor, because it is never to late to read a popular favorite. Book you've "faked" reading: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser. I never got past page 50 for a Lit. class in college, so faked class discussion and the essay question on the test. Lame. I finally went back and read it last year and thought it was excellent. Book you've bought for the cover: Favorite book when you were a child: Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown. My sister even consented to have a book case tipped over on her, but it didn't make her flat. Book that changed your life: Of course, the correct answer is the Bible, but that's always a trump card that tends to end the game abruptly. So I usually leave the Bible out of any book discussion. With that caveat, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Favorite line from a book: I have several lines I've marked in books, but none are so profound that I could pick one as a life motto or anything. Jim Harrison makes me laugh out loud with lines I remember as, "Food is the main reason most people leave the Midwest" (which appeals to this Nebraska-born Oregonian) and "The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the over-examined life will make you crazy." Top five favorite authors: Kingsley Amis, Jim Harrison, Vladamir Nabokov, Anthony Powell, and P.G. Wodehouse. Right now, Ian McEwan is vying for a spot on the list. Books you recommend as regeneration when people say, "I'm bored by almost all contemporary American writers": I must not run with such a jaded crowd because I've never heard anyone say this. But Postcards by Annie Proulx and most books by Jim Harrison, especially The Road Home, should get the juices flowing. Book you can't believe that everyone has not read and loved: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Book you are an "evangelist" for: A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell. Technically, this is 12 books, although usually published in four volumes of three novels each. This is an all-time favorite of mine and my "desert island" book:

This twelve-volume sequence traces a colorful group of English acquaintances across a span of many years from 1914 to 1971. The slowly developing narrative centers around life's poignant encounters between friends and lovers who later drift apart and yet keep reencountering each other over numerous unfolding decades as they move through the vicissitudes of marriage, work, aging, and ultimately death. Until the last three volumes, the next standard excitements of old-fashioned plots (What will happen next? Will x marry y? Will y murder z?) seem far less important than time's slow reshuffling of friends, acquaintances, and lovers in intricate human arabesques.

-- Time and Anthony Powell, A Critical Study by Robert L. Selig. Book you most want to read again for the first time: Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I would love to recapture as an adult the amazement I felt when I read it in high school. I wonder if it could be the same.

Gadget of the Day: blog roll

OK, thanks to Adam at Letters on Pages, I learned how to add a list of my favorite book blogs to this blog. It is now over there on the right side, below the list of the books I've read in 2008 and the books currently on my iPod. Personally, I am always initially inspired then quickly overwhelmed by lists of hundreds of blogs on blog rolls. So I am going to try to keep my list to my favorite 20 or so. But for now, I only have two -- Letters on Pages and (because I love the name as well as the content) Ramblings of a Misguided Blonde.

Author of the Day: William Styron

I came later to William Styron, only reading Sophie's Choice because it was on the Modern Library list. Styron's books appear on many other "Must Read" lists and have won several prizes.

Here is his bibliography, from oldest to most recent. Those I have read are in red; those on my TBR shelf are in blue.

Lie Down in Darkness

The Long March

Set This House on Fire

The Confessions of Nat Turner

In the Clap Shack

Sophie's Choice (reviewed here)

This Quiet Dust

Darkness Visible

A Tidewater Morning

Havanas in Camelot

NOTES

Last updated April 19, 2012.

Review: Sophie's Choice

In Sophie’s Choice, William Styron does as masterful job of telling a horrific tale in bearable way. Sophie is a Polish Christian who survived 18 months in Auschwitz before the camp was liberated by the Allies. Of course her story is heartbreaking. But Styron unfolds the tale in a way that allows the reader to take it all in without being crushed by the sadness of it.

First, instead of marching out the story of Sophie’s capture and imprisonment in chronological order, Styron layers it on, each layer building on the next. When the 22-year-old narrator, Stingo (a Southerner moved to Brooklyn to write novels), first meets Sophie in the summer of 1947, she gives him only the briefest version of her experience in the war. It is only as they grow closer as friends that Sophie, through a series of drunken encounters, provides more details to Stingo, each time admitting that she had lied to him before in earlier versions of her tale.

By presenting the horrifying particulars bit by bit, Styron seems mindful of the warning, and even quotes Stalin as saying, that a “single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” The reader sees the tragedy of Sophie’s experience because, by offering just a little at a time, Styron allows the reader to digest her story, along with a great deal of information about the Holocaust in general. If Styron had presented her story in full from the beginning, the awfulness would be numbing.

Also, Styron balances Sophie’s tragic past with her tragic present in Brooklyn. In love with Nathan, a brilliant drug addict subject to violent fits of jealousy, Sophie has no chance of building a “normal” life in America. But, given her experiences in the concentration camp, it is impossible to imagine how she could. Rather than present an unbelievable fairy tale of survival, Styron uses the tortured relationship between Nathan and Sophie as the catalyst for her revelations to Stingo, as well as the vehicle of her ultimate, and well-foreshadowed, undoing.

Finally, for all its sadness, there is plenty of humor in the book. Some of Stingo’s failed romantic adventures are downright funny, as are his self-deprecating descriptions of his writing efforts. Again, without these side stories offering a respite from the main narrative, Sophie’s story would be unbearable.


OTHER REVIEWS

Chaotic Compendiums

If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.

NOTES

Sophie’s Choice is one of my Top 10 favorite novels of all times. It won the National Book Award in 1980.  It is on Anthony Burgess's list of his favorite 99 novels.  It is on the Modern Library list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century and Radcliffe's rival list.