Sunday Caught My Interest

My house seems to be in total disarray. We have the bench coming together in the workshop in the basement, new storage in the office, and we are painting the loft upstairs. So all the office stuff is in the dining room and all the loft stuff is in Youngest’s room. Thankfully I have escaped all this – once to the movies and other times reading fun stuff. I saw The Butler Friday and it was a very good movie and from the trailers I saw, this is going to be a great Oscar season. As for books, I did end up finishing The Art Forger by going to the library and reading it there which was a waste of time.However, I wanted to see if I was right about certain things and I was. Then it was onto fun reads. I finished Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan and The View From Penthouse B by Elinor Lipman both very enjoyable. And I also found time to start The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe which, while not as light as my other reads, is managing to keep me engaged.

Here is what caught my interest this week:

I have often thought of reading Canadian author Margaret Laurence and reading Kevin from Canada’s review of The Diviners has only reinforced that thought. Laurence wrote a series of novels that were semi-autobiographical with The Stone Angel (1964) being the first and The Diviners (1974) being the last. After watching The Butler, my friends and I discussed the need for succeeding generations to know what happened to previous generations and this series, particularly The Diviners, seems to fit that bill describing the life of a woman who came into her own in an era where doing so wasn’t so easy. And the fact that the main character in The Diviners is an author just reinforces this notion for me personally as my grandmother was an author as well. The Diviners is a long book, but it does sound worth it.

One of the other themes in The Butler is the dissonance that can exist between generations. If one generation copes with life in a certain way, having their children cope in a different way can be very disconcerting and the children can often not understand why their parents do not see things from their point of view. Between the Covers reviews a book published this past March with a similar theme saying that In the Land of the Living by Austin Ratner is “a story highlighting the differences and misunderstandings between generations.” This novel is a coming of age story of two people, a father and then his son. There are “mythic” fathers, tragedy as well as how do you live up to your father’s expectations. And there is a road trip also thrown in there in the last part of the novel.

One reason I think The Butler was such a good movie is that I keep seeing parts of it in the books that have caught my interest this week. The movie opens in the 1920’s on a cotton plantation in the south with black sharecroppers and white landowners. Obviously there is a distinct difference between the “haves” and the “have-nots”. So then I am reading Mary Whipple (Seeing the World Through Books) review of Harvest by Jim Crace and come across the following:

Guilt vs. innocence, the use of raw power to control outcomes, the callous manipulation of resources (such as land) at the expense of human beings who are dependent upon it for their very survival, the question of one’s responsibility to a small community as opposed to one’s responsibility to uphold the truth, the question of vengeance, and ultimately, the question of how it is possible to define “right” in a community which has no religion and no legal system are all important themes represented in this largely allegorical novel.

Harvest has been longlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize and is set in rural pre-industrial England . It is the story of farm workers struggling to make a living, strangers who come into the mix, and a landowner who represents everything in the remote area in a time with change simmering in the air. This doesn’t sound like an easy read but it sounds like an important read.

Finally, Danielle of A Work in Progress has a list of thirteen novels with an academic setting to celebrate Back to School and The Capricious Reader has a list of favorite dystopian  novels.

Happy Reading

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