2020 Back to the Classics Challenge

Thank you Karen K at Books and Chocolate (please see the link to her website under Blogs I Follow) for taking on the 2020 Back to the Classics Challenge  I was debating about whether I wanted to do the Classics Challenge this year but when I learned a few days ago that the Challenge was on a big smile appeared on my face.

The Challenge prompts us to read great books we otherwise would never have read.  Even those books that weren't my cup of tea I'm still proud I read them.  But also I have read some wonderful books New Grubb Street by George Gissing, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston, The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope, Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder and this year who knows what new suprises await.  So thank you once again Karen K.

19th Century Classic - Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen - This is a book I've been curious about n which Jane Austen pokes fun at the world of gothic novels.  Austen was as far from being a gothic writer as one can get and so I will be interested in what she has to say on this topic.

20th Century Classic -  The Plague by Albert Camus - I read The Stranger two years ago and Brian at BriansBabblingBooks.com said that The Plague is even better so I definitely want to give this novel a try.

Classic by a Woman Author -  Middlemarch by George Elliot - I've never read her before and Middlemarch is not only her best book but one of the greatest  classics ofi world literature.

Classic in Translation - Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant - Ruthiella at Booked for Life chose this book two years ago I think for her Back to the Classics Challenge and she gave it high praise so I definitely want to check it out.

Classic by A Person of Color - Narrative of the Life of A Slave by Frederick Douglass.  A definitive biography of Frederick Douglass has recently been published.  He was a giant of American history but before I read his biography I should read his classic autobiography.

A Genre Classic  - The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katherine Green.  A classic mystery novel written by a woman in the 19th century.

Classic With a Person's Name in the Title - Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald - I've been hearing about this book forever.  It's a slim little book and yet it has gone on to be one of the great classics of world literatur so I'm curious.

Classic with a Place in the Title - To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf - I loved A Room of One's Own but I have heard that To The Lighthouse though a great book is difficult.  My plan is not to rush through a book like this but to take it slow.

Classic with Nature in the Title - The Jungle by Upton Sinclair - When this novel was published at the turn of tne 20th century it alerted the public to the terrible conditions for workers in Chicago's meat packing industry.  The book made quite a splash with Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill weighing in.

Classic about a Family - The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkinton.  Saw the movie which I was quite impressed with and the book won the Pulitzer Prize back in the 1920's so I want to give it a read.

Abandoned Classic - Dracula by Bram Stoker - I've made attempts to read this novel over the years and the parts I've read are very well written but 50 or 60 pages in I end up putting it down amd I'm not sure why.

Classic Adaptation - Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie - A number of films have been made of this novel but I've never read the book.

I wish everyone a Happy and Healthy New Year!

2019 Back to the Classics Wrap Up

Here are the eleven books I was able to read and review this year for the 2019 Back to the Classics Challenge hosted by Karen K at Books and Chocolate:

20th Century Classic - Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Classic by a Woman Author - Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

Classic in Translation - The Wreath by Sigrid Undset.

Classic Comedy  - The Code of the Woosters by P. G Wodehouse

Classic Tragic Novel - Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

Very Long Classic - The Adventures of Augie Marsh by Saul Bellow

Classic Novella - A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Classic from the Americas or Caribbean - Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

Classic from Africa, Asia or Oceania - The Good Earth by Pearl Buck

Classic from a Place You've Lived - A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

A Classic Play - Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

For the 19th century classic category I chose The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope.  I finished the book a few days ago but with the end of the year approaching  I didn't have enough time to compose my thoughts and write a review that would do justice to this great novel and it is great.  Fortunately two of my blogging friends, Brian at Babbling Books and Ruthiella at Booked for Life (please see links to their excellent websites under blogs I follow) have reviewed The Way We Live Now and I urge people to check out their insightful comments..  This is my first time reading Trollope.  It won't be my last!

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

I first read Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare during my sophmore year of high school.  Our teacher, Mrs. Jensen, did a wonderful job walking us through the play line by line.  But after all these years I would probably have been somewhat lost trying to reread this classic play if it weren't for the Shakespeare Made Easy series.  They give you both the original and modern versions of Julius Caesar.  I read both and it made all the difference. What I quote below of course will be the original Shakespeare.

Julius Caesar is set in 44 BC.  The play opens on the streets of Rome where two tribunes, Flaius and Marullus, are trying to break up a crowd.  They come upon a carpenter and a cobbler and the cobbler tells them that the crowd has gathered because today is a holiday.  Caesar has defeated Pompey (a rival Roman general) and is returning to Rome a hero and the crowd is there to cheer him on as he enters the city.  This infuriates Marullus who is no fan of Caesar:

"Marullus - You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!
                       O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
                       Knew you not Pompey?  Many a time and oft
                       Have you climb'd up to walls and battlements, 
                       To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops, 
                       Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
                       The livelong day, with patient expectation,
                       To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome 
                       And do you now cull out a holiday?
                       And do you now strew flowers in his way,
                       That comes in triumph over Pompey's blood?  
                       Be gone!"

The next scene is a public space where many have gathered to celebrate the Feast of Lupercalia.  The four major characters in this drama are there as well, Julius Caesar, Marcus Brutus, Cassius and Marcus Antonius.  A soothsayer comes up to Caesar famously warning him to "Beware the ides of March".  

Caesar dismisses the soothsayer as a dreamer but then we are introduced to Brutus and Cassius, both of whom are Roman Senators.  Brutus looks worried and Cassius asks why?  It turns out that though Brutus loves Caesar he also fears his ambition.  Caesar is amassing more and more power and Brutus worries that Rome is heading toward one man rule where the rights of ordinary citizens will be gone.

Cassius is unhappy with Caesar as well but with Cassius it's about envy.  He tells Brutus that years ago he rescued Caesar from drowning and Caesar as Cassius sees it behaved shamefully by calling out to Cassius for help.  Now Caesar is about to be crowned and Cassius is furious:

Cassius: Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world?
                  Like a Colossus, and we petty men
                  Walk under his huge legs, and peep about 
                  To find ourselves dishonorable graves
                  Men at some point are masters of their fates
                  The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars,
                  But in ourselves, that we are underlings"

Cassius along with other Roman politicians are conspiring to murder Caesar and they convince Brutus to join them.  The night before his murder Caesar's wife Calpurnia has a dream and begs her husband not to go to the Senate that day but Caesar says he must go.  Caesar heads to the Senate House where the conspirators, including Brutus, stab Caesar repeatedly.  Caesar dies and the city of Rome is in an uproar.  They want the men who killed Caesar to hang but Brutus addresses the crowd with a pwerful and moving eulogy telling them that it was "Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved  Rome more."  

The crowd is ready to hail Brutus and the other conspirators as the saviors of Rome for putting an end to Caesar's reign.  But then Marc Antony, a great general and loyal friend of Caesar, takes the podium.  Antony is a much more powerful orator than Brutus.  He also recognizes that Brutus having swung the crowd to his side he cannot straightforwardly disparage Brutus, calling him a traitor and a murderer.  So instead Antony begins one of the most famous passages in literature:

Antony - Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
                  I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him
                  The evil that men do, lives after them, 
                  The good is oft interred with their bones, 
                  So let it be with Caesar.  

But then Antony goes on to both praise Caesar's bravery, his goodness, his genorosity to the people of Rome and how it must have tore at Caesar's heart when Brutus delivered the fatal blow.   Not that the crowd should blame Brutus, Antony hastens to add "For Brutus is an honourable man".  But by the time Antony finishes his speech, Brutus, Casius, and the other conspirators have to flee the city for their lives. They form an army to take on Antony and his men but they are no match and seeing no way out, Cassius comitts suicide and Brutus does as well, asking one of his soldiers to hold his sword while Brutus runs into it, thus ending his life.

It's a brilliant play and a political one in which many issues are addressed, honor, friendship, envy, loyalty, ambition and the fickle nature of crowds and how they can be with you one day and cheering your successor the next. And sometimes the crowd can be swayed by a powerful orator such as Marc Antony who turns the crowd against Brutus with one speech. 

Back in high school the character I felt the most empathy for was Brutus and that's still true because as Antony acknowledges at the end of the play, Brutus' concern, unlike Cassius and the others, was for Rome and preserving the rights of his fellow citizens and he feared Caesar once crowned would seize all power for himself.  Brutus had a blindspot though where Cassius was concerned and assumed that Cassius was motivated by honor and a sense of duty, which he was not.  Also would Caesar have made such a terrible leader if he had lived?  But to know more I would have to read up on Roman history.  In the meantime I am grateful to Mrs. Jensen for assigning Julius Caesar to our high school class and grateful to Shakespeare Made Easy so I could enjoy rereading it after all these years..

Julius Caesar fulfills the category - choose a classic play - for the 2019 Back to the Classics Challenge.

Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Though I have been a fan of the TV show for years I resisted reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books.  I figured the time to have read them was when I was young.  But then last year in response to the 2018 Back to the Classics Challenge I decided to give Little House in the Big Woods (the first book in the series) a try and I loved it.  I vowed that I would go on to read book two Farmer Boy published 1933 and now that I have I once again marvel at the quality of the writing.  Its the kind of writing that on the surface looks simple and effortless but in reality must have taken a tremendous amount of talent and hard work to accomplish.

That said I preferred Little House in the Big Woods to Farmer Boy.  I knew going in that Farmer Boy was a detour.  Unlike the other books in the series which center around Charles and Caroline Ingalls and their daughters Laura, Mary and Grace, Farmer Boy focuses on the author's husband, Almanzo Wilder growing up on a farm around 1870 in upstate New York.  I didn't think taking a break from the Ingalls family would matter that much to me but it did.  Laura Ingalls Wilder after all knew her own childhoood much better than she knew what Almanzo's early years were like.  I'm sure Almanzo shared his memories with his wife Laura but its not the same as writing down one's own story.

Farmer Boy takes us through a year in the life of the Wilder household.  We are introduced to Almanzo Wilder, age ten, his parents, his older brother Royal and his sisters, Eliza Jane and Alice. We learn a great deal in this book about running a farm and about the specific tasks the Wilders must complete each year based on the seasons, spring for planting and fall for harvesting but throughout the year there is constant work to be done, planting, hoeing, chopping wood, sewing, mending, breaking in horses, milking cows, house cleaning etc etc and then there is the food:

"Almanzo washed as quickly as he could and combed his hair.  As soon as Mother finished straining the milk, they all sat down and Father asked the blessing for breakfast. There was oatmeal with plenty of thick cream and maple sugar.  There were fried potatoes, and the golden buckwheat cakes. as many as Almanzo wanted to eat, with sausages and gravy or with butter and maple syrup.  There were preserves and jams and jellies and doughnuts.  But best of all Almanzo liked the spicy apple pie, with its thick, rich juice and its crumbly crust.  He ate two big wedges of the pie.

Almanzo and his family are well off, not only in comparison to the Ingalls but farmers in general. They own quite a bit of land with separate barns to keep their horses, cows, chickens, pigs.  In one scene Almanzo's father sells his crop of potatoes for $500.00 which in 1870 would have been a fortune.  This is a family that works hard from sun up to sun down and at one point Almanzo's parents decide to take off for a week's vacation miles away leaving their kids at home to run the farm.  That kind of shocked me and the first decision these kids make once their parents wave goodbye is to make candy.  Once the maple candy is made Almanzo sees no harm in feeding his little pig Lucy some of it but the next morning when he wakes up he discovers what a mistake he has made:

"Where her white teeth should have been, there was a smooth brown streak. Lucy's teeth were stuck together with candy!  She could not eat, she could not drink, she could not even squeal.  She could not grunt.  But when she saw Almanzo coming she ran ... she tore through the peas, and squashed the ripe tomatoes and uprooted the green round cabbages ... At last they cornered her.  Almanzo held her down.  Alice held her kicking hind legs.  Royal pried her mouth open and scraped out the candy.  Then how Lucy squealed! She squealed all the squeals that had been in her all night and all the squeals she couldn't squeal while they were chasing her, and she ran screaming to her pen".  

It's not an easy life working on a farm and for Almanzo's older brother Royal we learn that he wants no part of it and he tells Almanzo that when he grows up he wants to move to the city and open a store.  But for young Almanzo farming is in his blood.  That would remain true of the real life Almanzo Wilder and Farmer Boy is Laura Ingalls Wilder's loving tribute to her husband and the continuation of a truly wonderful children's series as well.

Farmer Boy fulfills the 2019 Back to the Classics category - choose a classic from the 20th century.

The Good Earth by Pearl Buck

I first read The Good Earth by Pearl Buck when I was in my early teens and
the novel made quite an impression on me.   And so when the 2019 Back to the Classics category came along  - choose a classic set in Africa, Asia or Oceania, I knew it was time for a reread.

The Good Earth begins around 1880 in the rural farming village of Anhwei, China.  At  the start of the novel we are introduced to Wang Lung.  He is a poor farmer and it is his wedding day.  A bride has been chosen for him by the old mistress who rules the House of Hwang, the wealthiest family in the district.  Wang Lung's bride, O-lan, works as a kitchen servant for the Hwang family.  She was sold to them by her parents when she was ten years old.

Wang Lung is hoping for a pretty wife but O-lan turns out to be rather plain. She is a hard worker, an excellent cook, never complains and Wang Lung is very pleased.  Olan doesn't talk much though and certainly not about herself.  But early in the novel she does open up to Wang Lung when he suggests that they go back to the House of Hwang to find a midwife since their first child is about to be born:

"None in that house!" she cried out at him ... When I return to that house it will be with my son in my arms.  I shall have a red coat on him and red-flowered trousers and on his head a hat with a small gilded Buddha sewn on the front and on his feet tiger-faced shoes.  And I will wear new shoes and a new coat of black satin and I will go into the kitchen where I spent my days and I will go into the great hall where the Old One sits with her opium and I will show myself and my son to all of them".  

The Good Earth will take us through the next fifty years in the lives of Wang Lung, his family, their children, relatives and neighbors.  They endure much hardship.  There are births, deaths, marriages, drought, war but always there is the land which Wang Lung and O-lan have a reverence for:

"Moving together in perfect rhythm, without a word, hour after hour, he fell into a union with her which took the pain from his labor.  He had no articulate thought of anything; there was only the perfect sympathy of movement , of turning this earth of theirs over and over to the sun, this earth which formed their home and fed their bodies and made their gods".  

The Good Earth is the first book in a trilogy, The Sons and A House Divided are books two and three in this series but its the book that Pearl Buck is most known for, a huge bestseller when it was published in 1931 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.  It held up very well upon my rereading it and I would also recommend the movie The Good Earth starring Paul Muni and Luise Rainer and Ms. Rainer is particularly touching as O-lan. 

Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

"The plot of the novel, which is quite slight, is rather hard to tell, but it concerns a young man and his wife, members of the club set, and how the young man starts off the Christmas 1930 holidays by throwing a drink in the face of a man who has aided him financially.  From then on I show how fear of retribution and the kind of life the young man has led and many other things contribute to his demise.  There are quite a few other characters, some drawn from life, others imaginary, who figure in the novel, but the story is essentially the story of a young married couple in the first year of the depression".  - John O'Hara

Appointment in Samarra is the eighth book I have read for the 2019 Back to the Classics Challenge (hosted by Karen K at Books and Chocolate) - choose a classic from the Americas or the Carribbean.  Originally I had planned on reading A House for Mr. Biswas by the great writer V. S. Naipaul but 140 pages in I wasn't connecting with Mr. Biswas' story.

Appointment in Samarra has been on my radar since early this year when I read Will Schwalbe's very fine memoir The End of Your Life Book Club.  The plot revolves around a reckless and impulsive act commited by a wealthy young man, Julian English.  At a Christmas party he throws a drink into the face of another much wealthier and well connected man, Harry Reilly.  Reilly has done nothing to warrant this behavior except that Julian is sick and tired of having to once again listen to one of Harry's rather boring stories.

And so what interested me about this novel is that we all live by certain norms.  Sure we have fantasies for example of walking off our jobs in the middle of the day and never coming back but we don't do that because after the first hour or two of freedom comes the repurcussions.  How will we be able to list the job on a resume after we pull a stunt like this?  And so my curiousity regarding Appointment in Samarra was what happens after Julian so recklessly disregards the norms?

Harry Reilly is not someone to make an enemy of and Julian owes him alot of money.  Plus Harry is socially well connected in Gibbsville PA where the novel is set.  He has wealthy friends who have been frequenting Julian's Cadillac dealership but when the story about how Julian behaved at the party circulates around town Julian and his wife Caroline begin to lose standing in the community and eventually their financial well being would have taken a hit.  I say eventually because we never get that far.  The novel is set entirely over the 1930 holiday season, about three or four days.  But in those three or four days we learn a great deal about Julian, his wife Caroline,, the snobbish social set they are a part of and Julian's father who Julian has always felt judged by but who in reality is worried about his son.  All of this is leading towards tragedy and I was a bit suprised by the form it took, although I shouldn't have been since we are given clues.

Appointment in Samarra is a rather depressing book which touches on a number of themes.  It's an interesting portrait of a marriage and O'Hara does a good job of  letting us know who Julian and Caroline are, not simply as a couple but as individuals. Appointment in Samarra has been compared to the Great Gatsby and some critics actually prefer this novel.  Having never read the Great Gatsby I can't judge.  John O'Hara's biographer Frank McShane would later say that Appointment in Samarra written ten years after The Great Gatsby and set in 1930 is a novel that belongs to the "hangover generation".  The young people who had a great time living through the jazz age when things were good but didn't build up their defenses when the Great Depression hit.

Appointment in Samarra is well written but I wouldn't say the writing is great and yet it is considered a classic so much so that Harold Bloom included this novel in his history of the Western Canon and Modern Library lists it as one of the 100 Best English Language Novels of the 20th Century.  Book lists are very subjective though and so if you are curious you might want to give Appointment in Samarra a try and judge for yourself.

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

One of the great things about book blogs is that you are introduced to some interesting novels that you otherwise would never have known about.
Thank you Lark for introducing me to Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
published 1949 and please check out Lark's excellent book blog at larkwrites@blogspot.com.

I found Earth Abides to be a thought provoking read, a post apocalyptic classic in which a pandemic kills off most of the earth's human population.  This virus does not affect the rest of the planet's ecosystem and so a central theme of Earth Abides is what happens to the animals, plants, trees, forests, and all that man has built, when humans are not here in sufficient numbers to keep things in check?  What happens to civilization?

And so in part one of Earth Abides we meet Isherwood (Ish) Williams, a young grad student who is travelling through the Sierra Nevada mountains.  Disaster strikes when Ish is bitten by a rattlesnake but he miraculously recovers. However, when Ish gets back to town he grows increasingly uneasy.  Why no other cars on the road and why no people?  Ish will discover that during the weeks he spent alone in the mountains a deadly plague came out of nowhere rapidly killing most of human life.  Possibly Ish was spared because the snake bite venom destroyed the virus within him but over 95% of the rest of humanity was not so lucky.

Ish tries various methods to cope with this new world.  He goes in search of other survivors but the people he encounters are either emotional wrecks or dangerous.  Ish then wonders if maybe he could live out his days in isolation.  But panic sets in when the electricity goes off and it's only when Ish meets Emma, the woman who will become his wife, that he begins to see a future:

"And now he would not be the lonely spectator, at least, not merely that.  He could read.  He was equipped with the background of much knowledge already.  He would extend that into technics and psychology, into political science, if that were needed.  There must be others that he could find also to join with them - good people who would help in the new world.  He would start looking for people again.  He would look craftily trying to keep away from all those who had suffered too much from the shock, whose minds and bodies were not what one wanted to build up the new society". 

Ish and Emma do find other survivors and part two and three of Earth Abides takes us through the next twenty-three years and beyond as this little group, their children and grandchildren build a community.  There is tension in that Ish is interested in the human race having a future and that involves teaching the children to read, teaching them about history, math and trying to inspire everyone to begin growing more food, developing an irrigation system, trying to find alternatives for gunpowder and matches which are necessities in this new world but will eventually become useless and dry up and then what? Ish is right of course and yet I felt the other group members, content to live in the present, had a point as well because civilization as it once was is gone and not coming back.  Ish too notices this when he is observing the children:

"The children, he came to realize, were not only children, but they were also unsophisticated and inexperienced as children in the Old Times had rarely been. None of them had ever seen more than a few dozen people.  Though their lives, he believed, had been happy, they had been happy with the simplicity of a few satisfying experiences, repeated again and again. They had not suffered the continual shock of change which had so affected children in the old days, both for good and for bad, making them nervous on the one hand, and yet alert on the other".

I was very impressed by Earth Abides.  It's well written, philosophical and really caused me to think.  I finished the novel curious about George R. Stewart the author as well.  He was a professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley.  He wrote a number of books on diverse topics.  His most well known novels are Ordeal by Hunger about the tragic Donner Party expedition, Storm about a hurricane named Maria and here is an interesting fact.  It was Storm that caused the National Weather Service to begin giving hurricanes personal names.  Stewart's great novel is Earth Abides and though it is not environmentalist literature exactly one is reminded of the fragility of civilization and today may be even more timely than when it was published seventy years ago.  The classics have a way of staying relevant.