2022 Back to the Classics Challenge

I am so happy that the 2022 Back to the Classics Challenge is on for this year and thank you Karen K at Books and Chocolate for once again hosting the challenge.  Here is my list:

Choose a 19th Century Classic-  Frankenstein by Mary Shelley -  Written by Mary Shelley when she was 19 and staying at a resort in Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Lord Byron's personal physician, John Polidori.  The four challenged each other on a stormy night to come up with a really good ghost story and after a few days of struggle Mary began writing Frankenstein and a classic was born.

Choose a 20th Century Classic - Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington - Saw the movie with Joseph Cotton which I enjoyed and so would like to give the novel a try.

Classic by a Woman Author -  Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier - I've never read Rebecca but have always been meaning to and so this year I will finally check it off my to do list.

Classic Mystery or Crime Book - Laura by Vera Caspary - When it comes to mid- twentieth century crime noir fiction there are not many novels by women but Vera Caspary along with Dorothy Hughes (In a Lonely Place) were two exceptions and the plot of Laura, a detective obsessed with the mysterious woman whose death he has come to investigate has always intrigued me.

Choose a Classic in Translation - Meditations by Marcus Aurelius -  Guido Brunetti the lead detective in Donna Leon's marvelous mystery series reads Marcus Aurelius at night when he's at home to relax.  So I want to try reading him as well.  

Choose a Classic written before 1800 - The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster - A very early American novel published in 1797.  

Choose a Classic from Your TBR shelf - Aylmer Vance: Ghost Seeker by Alice and Claude Askew - The book I believe has been on my TBR pile the longest.  The Askew's were a British husband and wife writing team who wrote novels influenced by Sherlock Holmes but the two detective friends in the Askew's short stories investigate the paranormal.

Choose a Classic from a Place You Would Love to Visit - Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote - Would love to visit New York again.

Choose a Classic Book of Short Stories - Fall of the House of Usher and Other Stories by Edgar Allen Poe - Eager to begin reading these classic stories but maybe not just before I go to bed. 

Choose a Classic Book of Non-Fiction - Silent Spring by Rachel Carson - A classic in environmental literature.

Choose a Classic by a BIPOC author - Passing by Nella Larsen - Been meaning to read this novel and now there is a Netflix film as well.

Choose a Wild Card Classic - Men to Match My Mountains by Irving Stone -  This is another book from my TBR list,  a big, sprawling history of the American far west from 1840 - 1900.  And I have read Irving Stone's historical novel about the marriage of John and Abigail Adams and it was well done.  

So those are my choices for 2022.

The Children's Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin

"It was the right thing to do, she decided; they were already bundled up and ready to go home ... There would be no teaching her disappointed pupils if she changed her mind and kept them all inside.  And there would be no pretending with Tiny, in the snug little farmhouse cooking him the meal she'd planned ... No kisses designed to lasso her cowpoke. 

"Go home," Gerda called gaily over the whine of the wind causing some of the students to halt in confusion ... Homestead children understood weather.  Shelter in place -- wasn't that what they were taught to do in a blizzard?  But they were also taught to always obey teacher" 

The above passage is from The Children's Blizzard by Melanie Benjamin (2021) recommended by my friend Iris and thank you Iris for letting me know about this gripping and very moving historical novel with characters I will not forget any time soon.  

The Children's Blizzard tells the story of a real event, a terrible blizzard, that struck the Great Plains on January 12, 1888.  By the time it was over 235 people had died and many of the dead were children.  No one saw this tragedy coming because the day had started out so well.  The weather had been bad in the week leading up to the blizzard but then on the morning of Jan 12th it was unseasonably warm and the children went off to school miles away dressed in relatively light clothing.  But then suddenly around noon the sky darkened and shortly after a monstrous blizzard descended on the plains states.  Winds so strong they blew out windows and shattered buildings, temperatures plunging to sub zero and snow and sleet so bad that it was impossible for people to see a few feet in front of them if they were unlucky enough to be caught outside.  

And so Melanie Benjamin uses this backdrop to tell a powerful story (based loosely on real life characters) of two sisters Raina and Gerda Olsen. They are also school teachers and very young.  Raina is 15 and teaching in Nebraska and Gerda is 18 and teaching in South Dakota.  These two sisters are isolated in their one-room school houses with their young students when the blizzard hits.  Raina decides to keep her students together, sheltering in place.  Gerda cares about her children but also decides that the weather isn't that bad and so sends them home early when the sky starts darkening.  

The second half of the Children's Blizzard deals with the aftermath of the storm and the different choices Raina and Gerda made.  There are other interesting characters in the novel.  Raina for example is boarding with the Pedersen family while she teaches school and the father of the household, Gunner Pedersen, is a piece of work, seducing 15 year old Raina.  Also living with the Pedersens is one of Raina's students, Annette.  Her mother sold her to the Pedersen family and Anna Pedersen, Gunner's wife, takes her frustrations out on little Annette treating her like a servant.

And in a separate storyline that later will link up with the other characters in the novel we have the newspaperman Gavin Woodson who writes for the Omaha Daily Bee.  He hates it.  He had a great job in New York working for The World but due to an argument with the owner, Joseph Pulitzer, he was let go and is now stuck out in the middle of nowhere as he sees it.  Woodson longs to be back in New York and he feels guilt as well because his articles for The Bee are not real reporting.  The advertisers demand he write articles that sugarcoat what life on the prairie is like so as to attract immigrant families and families back east and urge them to sell their belongings and head west.  Gavin Woodson feels guilt about this and so when the blizzard hits he knows he has the story of his career but also a chance at redemption.

Guilt and the search for redemption factor big in this book and ultimately this is a story about two sisters, the dreams they had planned and the journey they saw their lives taking until that fateful day.  I heartily recommend The Children's Blizzard.

My January 2022 Reads

A new year of reading has begun and I was thinking of going with a wintery theme for my January 2022 choices but best to tackle my TBR list instead which is one of my New Year's resolutions.  So, here are my January 2022 choices:

The Next Century by David Halberstam - published in 1991 about what the 21 century would look like.  This is going to make for fascinating reading when you consider all that's happened since the book was published that no one could have seen coming.

Charlotte and Emily by Jude Morgan  - A novel about the Brontes which has received a great deal of critical praise

The Girl of his Dreams by Donna Leon -  A wonderful mystery series set in Venice and featuring Guido Brunetti as the detective tasked in each novel with solving the case.  We are really in a golden age right now when it comes to the mystery genre.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - I will be curious to see how this classic novel differs from the film.

The Staircase by Ann Rinaldi - A YA historical novel set in 19th century New Mexico.  I saw a movie of this story that I was really taken with in which a group of nuns, led by the mother superior portrayed by Barbara Hershey, hire a mysterious architect to build a beautiful staircase for their chapel.  The staircase is an amazing piece of architecture that continues to attract visitors from around the world to this day.  

Those are my picks for January 2022 and I wish everyone a Happy Year of reading!

Becoming by Michelle Obama

A First Lady has to be somewhat cautious when writing her memoirs because how candid she chooses to be could effect her husband's legacy far into the future. So a balanced approach between being careful and letting one's guard down needs to be struck and Michelle Obama in Becoming (published 2018) has pulled it off very well.  Becoming reveals a thoughtful, accomplished woman with a very nice conversational writing style.  Michelle has lived an extraordinary life and there is much to be learned in her memoir particularly for young people who are looking for guidance in these troubled times.

Becoming is divided into three parts, Becoming Me about Michelle Obama's childhood growing up in Chicago.  Becoming Us about meeting Barack Obama, starting a family and entering into politics and Becoming More about their years in the White House.  Michelle's childhood years resonated the most with me and what stands out is that though she grew up in a wotking-class family on the south side of Chicago, Michelle would go on to graduate from Princeton University and Harvard Law School.  Her brother Craig is also a Princeton graduate with a successful career and family.  

Michelle makes no secret in Becoming of how much it matters to children to have a support system around them and she stresses how blessed she has been to have the mentors she has had in her life, colleagues, teachers, aunts, uncles and above all her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson. Her father died at age 55 .  He was diagnosed with MS when he was in his 30's but as Michelle tells us he put that diagnosis to the side, never talked about it and was there for his family 100%.  Michelle's mother Marian also incredibly supportive and strong and her brother Craig continues to this day to look out for his kid sister.  

It was a loving and close family but then again as Michelle and Craig have proven, you can have all the support in the world but you still have to go out and work hard and set a plan for your life.  Luck enters into it too and in Becoming, Michelle tells the story of her college roomate Suzanne who was a free spirit as opposed to Michelle who as she describes herself is more of a box checker.  But Suzanne died at 26 from cancer.  Michelle was devastated and it was a lesson she never forgot about how enjoying the here and now is necessary because you never know.  

Part Two, Becoming Us involves Michelle meeting Barack Obama. Michelle had already graduated from Harvard and was working at at a top law firm in Chicago when they hired an intern from Harvard Law School.  They asked Michelle if she could be his mentor for the summer.  Barack was 3 years older than Michelle but he had taken a break between college and law school to work as a community organizer.  Michelle fell for him right away and she was also intrigued: 

"I sensed already that he was more at home with the unruliness of the world than I was, more willing to let it all in without distress.  I woke one night to find him staring at the ceiling ... he looked very troubled as if he were pondering something deeply personal.  Was it our relationship?  The loss of his father"?  

"Hey, what're you thinking about over there"? 

"He turned to look at me, his smile a little sheepish.  "Oh", he said, "I was just thinking about income inequality".  

That's funny and touching but it's also how you would want a young man who would one day be President to be thinking.  

Part Three, Becoming More is about Barack and Michelle's time in the White House and Michelle writes about her role as First Lady, meeting with soldiers and their families at Walter Reed which moved her a great deal and also planting a vegetable garden at the White House and starting a campaign to encourage schools and food corporations to provide more nutritious meals.  It continues to be an important cause.  Michelle also talks about her daughters Malia and Sasha who along with Barack are the most important people in the world to her.  Both Michelle and Barack tried hard in the White House to give their daughters as normal a life as they could but it wasn't easy, the White House being a fish bowl. 

I finished the book curious about other First Lady's biographies and also missing the Obamas in the White House.and I am worried about 2024.   

2021 Back to the Classics Wrap-Up

Here are the 12 books I completed for the Classics Challenge this year: 

Choose a 19th Century Classic - Middlemarch by George Elliot

Choose a 20th Century Classic - Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammet

Choose a Classic by a Woman Author - So Big by Edna Ferber

Choose a Classic by an Author New to You  - Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemmingway

Choose a Travel or Adventure Classic - Here in New York by E. B. White

Choose a Classic about an Animal - Call of The Wild by Jack London

Choose a Children's Classic - Ramona by Beverly Cleary

Choose a Humor or Satiric Classic - The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

Choose a Classic Play - Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde

Choose a BIPOC Classic - House Made of Dawn by N Scott Monaday

Choose a Classic in Translation - City Folk & Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya

Choose a Classic by a Favorite Author - 7 Best Short Stories by George Gissing

It must have been a long year because I look at some of the books I read  at the start of 2021, Here in New York by E. B. White and Red Harvest by Dashiel Hammet and it feels like I read them more than a year ago but it was actually this year.  

Two books stand out for me on the above list, Middlemarch by George Elliot and Call of The Wild by Jack London.  They are two very different writers with very different stories to tell and I loved both books.  

Middlemarch by George Elliot of course needs no introduction.  It is a masterpiece, a classic among classics but also a very readable Victorian novel and what made the novel special for me was Dr. Tertius Lydgate.  I finished the book infatuated with him and wanting a sequel.  

Call of The Wild by Jack London was my second favorite book. And for people who might be hesitant to pick up Middlemarch (it is over 800 pages), the Call of The Wild which is less than 70 pages might be a better fit and boy does Jack London pack some brilliant writing into those 70 pages!

Thanks as always to Karen K for hosting the 2021 Back to the Classics Challenge and if there is a 2022 Classics Challenge I will be sure to sign up.

Have A Happy and Healthy New Year! 

City Folk & Country Folk - Sofia Khvoshchinskaya

When I was in my twenties I read Crime and Punishment by Fydor Dostoyevsky and I have been a fan of 19th century Russian literature ever since.  I went on to read Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev and I am now pleased to add City Folk and Country Folk by Sofia Khvoshchinskaya (1863) to my list. It's a well written novel about Russian life in the 1860's and the translator, Nora Seligman Favorov, does a fine job in making this book accessible.  City Folk and Country Folk is also a rarity, a 19th century Russian novel by a female author.

And so when City Folk and Country Folk begins it is the summer of 1862 the year after the emancipation of the serfs, a momentous event in Russian history.  The novel centers around Nastasya Ivanovna Chulkova and her 17 year old daughter Olenka.  Mother and daughter own a modest estate in the country that they manage quite well.  Nastasya and Olenka are hard working and unpretentious.  

But then into their lives arrives Anna Ilinishna, Nastasya's cousin who moves in with them and does nothing but complain.  There is also their neighbor Erast Sergeyevich, who has returned home after years of spending and partying abroad and finally we have Katerina Petrovna, a wealthy society woman who is determined to marry off Nastasya's daughter Olenka regardless of what Olenka thinks about the matter.  

These three, Anna Ilinishna, Erast Sergeyevich and Katrina Petrovna are the city folk.  They have lived a good part of their lives in Moscow, have traveled to Paris and London and they look down on Nastasya and Olenka's country ways.  But as Prof Hilde Hoogenboom writes in the introduction to this novel

"The comedy turns on the fact that everyone depends on Nastasya's well-run estate, traditional Russian hospitality and Christian virtue for shelter, food, loans and kindness.  Although they are all poor and indebted, they are so blinded by their relative noble wealth and status that none of them feels any gratitude toward Nastasya.  Nor does she feel deserving of thanks".

Her daughter, though, sees things differently and as Prof. Hoogenboom points out, Olenka is a different sort of young heroine than one is used to encountering in 19th century Russian novels.  Olenka is pretty but not a great beauty.  She is intelligent but not an intellectual.  She doesn't read much and  that's particularly true of the articles that Erast Sergeyevich has been submitting to journals about his thoughts on the new Russia and how it is up to the nobles like himself to show the peasants the way forward.  Erast presses Olenka to read his writings and she is pretty much openly laughing at him.  

In many ways Olenka represents the new Russia.  She is unimpressed with class and sees through hypocrisy and she is furious at the way their snobbish neighbors treat both her and her mother.  A minor crisis arrives at the end of the novel which answers the question will Nastasya take her daughter's advise and finally stand up to Anna, Erast and Katrina who have been making her life miserable.

I enjoyed City Folk and Country Folk and it has been receiving critical praise including a starred review from Publisher's Weekly.  As for the author, Sofia Khvoshchinskaya came from a family of literary sisters (Sofia, Nadezhda and Praskovia) and they have been compared to the Brontes although the Brontes to be fair are without equal.  But Sofia Khvoshchinskaya has talent and critics have pointed out that her style resembles Jane Austen and I can see the resemblance.  

Sofia and her sisters published under male pseudonyms and Sofia left instructions that her work not be republished.  She died young.  Another talented 19th century author lost to TB.  She was hard on herself as a writer, as she once said "never does one see the faults of one's pen so well as when one sees it leaving a bookstore".  That's both funny and kind of sad.  But today Sofia Khvoshchinskaya is finally being republished and hopefully a new voice is being added to the study of Russian literature.

City Folk and Country Folk fulfills my final category for the 2021 Back to the Classics Challenge - choose a classic in translation.

House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

"The landscape of the American West has to be seen to be believed and has to be believed to be seen" - N Scott Momaday

For the 2021 Back to the Classics Category- choose a classic by a BIPOC author, I knew I wanted to go with a Native American writer but all of the writers I wanted to read, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Linda Hogan, David Heska Wanbli etc are contemporary and to conform to the classic's rules the books we choose have to be at least 50 years old.  And so after a bit of research I came upon N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and it truly is a book worthy of all the praise it has received over the years.

House Made of Dawn is set during the mid twentieth century and centers around a young Kiowa man named Abel who returns to his hometown in Jemez, New Mexico after serving overseas in World War II.  As the author tells us in the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the book, Abel is a composite of many of the Native American men he knew when he was growing up in Jemez New Mexico.  Young men who had grown up on the reservation.  It was the only world they knew and then suddenly they were pulled out of that world, drafted and sent overseas.  They were not prepared for what they saw and experienced during the war.

Many came home suffering from PTSD and they turned to alcohol, violence, suicide.  When Abel's grandfather for example meets his returning grandson at the bus station the grandfather is shocked and saddened to discover that Abel is drunk.  Abel tries to settle back in to his old life in Jemez but he is haunted by flashbacks from the war and one night during a festival in the village he drunkenly kills a man thinking he is killing a demon.  

The next time we meet Abel it is 1952.  He has been released from prison and is living in Los Angeles.  He has a job and a fellow Native American roomate named Ben Benally, and a girlfriend, Millie.  The three friends form a bond going on picnics, telling each other about their lives, sharing dinners but Ben worries it can't last: 

"He was unlucky.  You could see that right away.  He wasn't going to get along around here.  Millie thought he was going to be all right, I guess, but she didn't understand how it was with him. He was a longhair, like Tosamah said.  You know, you have to change.  That's the only way you can live in a place like this.  You have to forget about the way it was, how you grew up and all. Sometimes it's hard but you have to do it.  Well, he didn't want to change, I guess, or he didn't know how."

Abel is caught between two worlds.  In years past he would have stayed in Jemez New Mexico where he grew up, hunting, fishing and taking part in the Kiowa traditions and customs as his ancestors did.  But the 20th century changed all that and a central question House Made of Dawn poses is can Abel find a place in the modern world and if not can he go home again, return to Jemez and the world he once knew?

Normally I don't go in for too many nature scenes in novels or non-linear story telling but here it works.  The descriptions of life and nature in Jemez, New Mexico are so well done and a spirituality infuses this book.  You will finish House Made of Dawn wanting to know more about Native American culture, traditions and there are so many really fine Native American authors writing today but House Made of Dawn is a very good place to begin.