Borrowing Books

Also ... please don't find me selfish, but I just lent two books of mine - the amazing Paris by Edward Rutherfurd, and The Paris Wife about Ernest Hemingway's first wife, Hadley - anyway, I just lent these two books of mine to a good friend. It's always terrifying for me to lend out books, as I tend to like them right next to me where I can see them and appreciate their greatness. However, I feel good knowing I gave her two books that brought me tremendous joy, and I hope she enjoys them. Lend a good book to a friend, and share the wealth!!

Wolf Hall

Finally, FINALLY, I have finished Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. I am now moving on to its sequel, the second book in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies. 

Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. The second book in her trilogy won the same prize in 2012. Yann Martel's Life of Pi was also awarded the prize in earlier years. The literary prize is awarded each year for the best original full-length novel written in the English language. The winner of this prize is generally assured to have international success and recognition and thus, is a very important book for the literary crowd.

I'm not going to lie. I did not want to like this book. When I first picked it up it felt tedious to read. It was somewhat boring, monotonous, complicated, and stylistic. As the book progressed I felt more intrigue into the life of Thomas Cromwell, an important figure in the Tudor dynasty during the reign of Henry VIII. It is extremely interesting to hear about the affairs of King Henry VIII from a different point of view. We've all read stories about his life and his various wives, but we have not heard about Cromwell, a man usually demonized in popular culture for being a vicious and power hungry man from low breeding, but Mantel's book gives us another side of him - a truer side that is extremely captivating. You can't help but admire her version of this complex man.

The book starts out with us seeing Cromwell as he began. A commoner's son who eventually traveled the world and then came back to work with Cardinal Wolsey. Wolsey is Lord Chancellor, the King's chief adviser. And he is the most un-humble man in the realm. He is extremely powerful and Thomas Cromwell's patron. Cromwell himself is a lawyer, and extremely dedicated and loyal to Cardinal Wolsey. The book turns more poetic as it goes on as we see Cromwell rise from Wolsey's humble follower to a man that everyone fears. In one part of the book, a painting is made of him, and he remarks that it makes him look like a murderer, and his son remarks, "You didn't know?"

Again, Wolf Hall gives us a different angle to Tudor life. It makes us care about a man that no one likes. We see him as a caring father, who undergoes various forms of redemption, and extreme familial losses. Above all else though, we see how calculating this man is. The Cardinal loses favor with the King when he fails to procure a divorce for the King from his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. Henry wants to marry Anne Boleyn, but to do so he must prove his first marriage was invalid, and the church (particularly the Pope) don't like this. With the Cardinal fast losing popularity and power, Cromwell stays loyal to his patron but must figure out how to avoid his own downfall. Cromwell makes nasty deals with devilish people, and finally the book starts to get interesting and heat up as the Cardinal whom Cromwell loves so well goes down.

Cromwell loves Wolsey, Wolsey loves the King, and the King, himself, is an inconstant lover. He truly only loves himself. We see the King from Cromwell's eyes as a spoiled child, even though he is a grown man. He likes people who can help him get what he wants, and at this particular moment in history - he wants Anne Boleyn. Henry remarks to Cromwell that "what is the country for, but to support its prince in his enterprise?"

But what happens if that enterprise is cursed? We all know that while Henry got his precious Anne Boleyn - history shows us she eventually gets her head cut off.

Cardinal Wolsey goes down, and dies before they can kill him. Cromwell, however, rises from the ashes like a powerful phoenix. Another courtier remarks to Cromwell that "I know our old fellow in scarlet [the Cardinal Wolsey] almost brought you down. But look at you, eating almonds, with all your teeth in your head, and your household around you, and your affairs prospering ..." Cromwell did something the Cardinal could not. He gave Henry his divorce, and now he continues to rise in Henry's favor, and people, even those who despise him, can't help but admit that if you need something done - you need to talk to Cromwell.

Cromwell can humiliate you, make you, break you, and save you. Cromwell is the man to know, and these books give us insight into his life.

The book is cheeky, and oftentimes very humorous. Dialogue truly makes all the difference in this novel, it makes the book come alive and move faster. Through all its complexities, and moments where you want to tell the author to "take a breath, woman and stop writing!" if you can suffer through some of the confusing moments of the book, and particularly if you're an avid lover of English history as I am, then this is a book worth suffering through, because in the end you want it to continue ... and, oh wait! It does. The second book in the trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies, which I'm reading now, as I mentioned before, ALSO won the Man Booker Prize in 2012, and the third book in the series should be coming out sometime in the future. At the end of this first book, we find out why it's entitled Wolf Hall. Wolf Hall is where the court is headed in the second book, and home of the infamous Seymours. A great foreshadowing to what happens after Henry's inconstant loves strikes down Anne Boleyn, the woman he thought he loved, but alas another woman who could not give him a son. Anne is still alive and well in the book, but we can see in the future that Lady Jane Seymour will soon be coming into his sights. Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn overturned all of Christendom in England. It starts a new chapter in English history. Now I go on to a new "chapter" of Cromwell's life; I go on to read about the Tudor's history, from a powerful man's point of view. I'll let you know when I've finished Hilary Mantel's second, award winning, book.

Working

I'm working on another historical novel now - hopefully it will be finished by tomorrow, but I've still got about 300 pages or so to go. Keep reading!

The Descendants

After reading Rutherfurd's Paris, I decided to read a much shorter novel that had somewhat of a similar theme. Kaui Hart Hemmings wrote a novel based in Hawaii called The Descendants. You may be more familiar with the film version which starred George Clooney. The book is about a man, Matt King, who faces the grim reality that soon his wife is going to die, and he will be left alone with his two daughters - who both terrify and repulse him.

This novel is innocently beautiful. It explores the basic feelings of human nature in their most honest form. It starts with overall feelings of negativity which mask the basic human emotion of fear. This middle aged father expresses his resentment over living in a beautiful place, Hawaii, while his wife is lying in a cold hospital bed in a coma after suffering from a boating accident. He mentions how people always assume that the people who live in Hawaii should always be happy, because after all, they're in paradise. His response to these assumptions is fuck paradise. A person isn't "lucky" to live in paradise, because in all seriousness they're still just living, and living is hard.

Matt has two daughters, Alex and Scottie. Scottie is still a "baby" but she's rather messed up. She doesn't know how to react to things so she emulates the actions of her father, or her sister, or her sister's maybe-maybe-not boyfriend. She refuses to talk to her comatose mother, refuses to believe that there's any possibility in her dying, and in order to deal with her feelings she slams her hands down on the spikes of sea urchins, or swims with gigantic colonies of Portuguese Man-Of-Wars. She manipulates boys into peeing on her wounds, she tries to make others feel just as uncomfortable or vulnerable as she feels watching her "sleeping" mother fade away.

Alex gets picked up by Matt and Scottie from her boarding school where she was sent away for being drinking and doing drugs. Really, Alex is unconsciously emulating her mother - her crazy, alcoholic mother who parties it up and who everyone loves. Alex takes on a mother role in the book, trying to help her dad become a dad and get Scottie on some sort of path of normalcy.

This book is filled with dark humor and attempts at dodging the grief that comes with losing someone you love. The book is also filled with the question of what to do when the worst you could imagine is revealed to be true. Matt King has the idea that his wife is cheating on him since the start of the book, and soon comes to find out that his paranoid fears are in all actuality true. So he goes on a journey - a journey to become a real father to his two girls, to forgive his wife, to open himself up, and to find the man that his wife loved, so that he can say goodbye to her. On the family's way to find the man who his wife cheated on him with, Matt once again lets his annoyance come to the surface. At the airport, Matt remarks that the security line is longer than it should be, but most of the people still seem content, which is irritating. "There's nothing worse than being angry and seeing tranquil faces all around you." Then Alex remarks that security, who is checking every person's bags, even though they're just hopping islands, are doing this to just feel like real security, which isn't something to aspire to. Matt reflects that "thank God my daughter isn't a happy person."

I can identify with this invasive pessimism. The irritation at other people's happiness, and the solidarity one can find with other miserable people. This book starts dark and goes to the light. It's like knowing your fate, and just trying to get there in the least painful way possible, and then finding yourself along the way. Like slowly walking in to the ocean, knowing you will drown. You struggle, until you just give up and find some sort of morbid peace in the knowledge that eventually you will sink, and then float up again.

The end of this novel made me cry. Not overflowing sobbing tears, but just a sneaky little wetness leaking out of my eyes, and that tickle feeling you get in your nose when you know you want to let some emotion go, but still you hold back. The book asks a good question, "Why is it so hard to articulate love yet so easy to express disappointment?" We go through our loves hating one another, despising family members, not understanding our children or our parents. We go through live full of criticism, not realizing that it's the small moments where you show love that make life worth all the hassle. And really, revenge is futile. Through the pain of realizing that his wife cheated on him, through the sick satisfaction that her lover didn't really love her, through the forgiveness and crash course in being left in charge of his own children, Matt eventually learns to let love in and let disappointment go. He learns to be an actual father, and though it's hard to say - he discovers that his wife dying may be the best thing to happen to him and his girls, in a difficult and honest way.

When our loved ones die, we can't revere them for being something they weren't. We can miss them, we can still love them, but "we need to come to terms with the dead and the people they truly were." We can't let the dead rule our lives forever. We have to move on.

Part of the reason I loved the novel Paris was that is told the stories of family lines going from the 1200s to the 1900s. It let us see families evolve and grow, change and follow old paths, it let us see how history repeats itself. In this novel, it also talks about how we descend from a long line of people that we can never truly know. Matt reflects on some of his ancestors, and remarks about how "it's funny that I think of them as the beginning, because they were also descendants of somebody, generations of prints on their DNA, traces of human migrations. They didn't come out of nowhere. Everyone comes from someone who comes from someone else, and this to me is remarkable. We can't know the people who are in us. We'll all have our moment at the top of the tree."

Read this book and go on the tremulous journey with the Kings. You will find yourself remembering your own family, your own faults, your own secrets, your own legacies. How did we get here? Where are we going? How do we, honestly and bravely, move on and say goodbye? This book is poetic, it's peaceful, it's sad and funny and disturbing. It's a good reflection on life, love, and yes ... disappointment.

Brilliant Paris

I have just finished reading Edward Rutherfurd's Paris. A brilliant (over 800 page) book that details not only the history of Paris from 1261 to 1968, but that entangles and details, entwines and develops the family histories of 6 different Parisian families, entirely fictitious, and entirely engaging. We hear of the Le Sourd family - mostly disreputable from The Paris Cat Killer Le Sourd who is a thief and a Parisian leader to Max Le Sourd of the 1900s who helps form the Paris resistance to the occupation of Paris by the Nazis along with his father, a longtime proponent of socialism. Then we have the de Cygne family - a long line of aristocrats who go from being selfish entitled people who have long served their monarchs diligently and thus earned the favor of the Kings of France, to becoming a family who also fights against the Nazi regime by harboring a young Jewish girl, and ending the family line with a bastard son of two resistance heroes - Charlie de Cygne - a leader of the resistance, and Louise Blanchard, known as Corinne, an informant to the resistance and madame of the most famous brothel house in Paris - both killed in their efforts to stop Hitler.

Then we have the Renard family - whose family dealt with the prejudices of religion, going back and forth from Catholicism to Protestantism and facing the bloody battles that lie between choosing one of those sides over the other in Paris' tumultuous religious history.

The Blanchards started out as renowned doctors and then shifted into owning one of the most successful department stores in Paris. Here we meet an aunt who is friends with artists such as Giverny and Monet, and Marc who becomes an artist himself, and has a bastard daughter (Louise) who is sent to a family in England - although she soon returns to her ties in Paris as she grows up. Then there is Marie, a woman who knows how take care of herself, and herein we have one of the strongest love stories in the book - as she must choose between an American artist she has fallen in love with, an aristocrat (de Cygne) who must leave her, but who she finds again in old age, and then Mr. James Fox - a descendant of the Renard family, who takes her away to England for a time, but she too returns to Paris - a place not to be forgotten once experienced. We also have the Gascon family of Montmartre. Thomas - who meets the engineer Gustave Eiffel and helps him build not only the Statue of Liberty, but the famous Eiffel tower itself. Then there is his brother Luc, a deviant and lying delinquent, who has friends in high places as he sells cocaine to important clientele, and provides any other services one may require - as long as you can pay him. We also have the Jewish Jacob family, who faces discrimination early in France's history, as the Jews are driven out, and then again at the end of the book's account when the Nazis come to take them away and steal their precious collections of art, including works from the artist Degas.

All of these stories are connected to one another, building up alliances and creating enemies among one another; building up secrets, and falling in love. These families realize the importance of love and family; they must suffer through history as it repeats itself. They deal with many different forms of government, and the issues of religion and politics often thrust the greatness of France into chaos and turmoil, but France also sees ages of great artistic achievements, and of gilded palaces and sweeping avenues. We see the Moulin Rouge in all its finery, and visit Versailles, we see the Louvre and hear of the changing uses of the Conciergerie. We see people drinking to the idea of revolution at Le Lapin Agile, or artists talking and writing at Les Deux Magots.  We hear of people dancing and eating the Moulin de la Galette - immortalized in a painting by Renoir. One of the families become friends with Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley, a couple I read about in the book, The Paris Wife. At the end we see Jean-Paul Sartre rushing down a Parisian street.

The book, simply put, is brilliant. And if you've ever loved hearing about good stories filled with fascinating people and events, as well as ever been interested in Paris as a whole, this book will expose you to more history than you've ever been able to handle before, and it will not only inform you, but intrigue you to want to find out more. The family trees at the front of the book will be referred to often, as you try to keep track of which family member you are hearing about now, as the book jumps frequently between time periods. You may be reading about one of the first de Cygne's in 1261, and then here you are in 1875 as you meet one of his late descendants.

One example of this is that as we approach WWII, having just survived the accounts of WWI, we are thrown back in time to 1794, after the French Revolution. King Louis XVI has just been beheaded, as well as his Queen, the infamous Marie Antoinette. Now we are in the Reign of Terror - a bitter foreshadowing of a soon-to-be reign of terror - that of Hitler's Third Reich. We hear of the Widow Le Sourd getting ready to send the young de Cygne couple to the tribunal as enemies of the state of France. Robespierre, convinced of their guilt, sends them to the conciergerie to be killed. Blanchard, their family doctor, hoping to save them, convinces the "court" that Sophie de Cygne is pregnant, hoping to delay her execution. Miraculously, she ends up being pregnant - preserving the line of de Cygne's, and stopping herself from being killed for lying. She names her son Dieudonne, or gift from God. But again, this incident reminds us of the bitter rivalry between the Le Sourd's and the de Cygne's. Each generation never seems to realize that their families have known each other for centuries, and always in some form betrayed one another, until the 1940s, where WWII brings the young Max Le Sourd and the young Charlie de Cygne together to form the resistance and fight against evil.

The Le Sourd's discuss the need to get the Nazis out of Paris, but Max's father reveals something to his son in the quote that states "Yes. I want the Nazis out, of course. But my ultimate goal is to complete the Revolution, for France to reach her true destiny. And I hope it may be your goal as well." The whole book seems to come back to this point, this theme of getting France to reach her true destiny. Each leader of France, whether it be Napoleon, a King of France, or even the short-lived Paris Commune, wants France to be great, and they want the whole world to recognize the greatness of France.

Themes of Paris, government, politics, religious persecution, love, but mostly history does repeat itself - both in the personal lives of the people who live through it, and in the great city itself. Facing the possibility of French Jews being rounded up and sent away to who knows where, Jacob reflects that perhaps, if he had not known the long history of his people, he might have remained like so many in the Jewish community who refused to believe that a French government could be so evil - but being an art dealer who knows the stories of art and their characters, and the men who commission their beauty - Jacob is keenly aware of the terrible possibilities that lie within the human spirit. We see, early on in the book, that the French government at one point did in fact round up all the Jews and expel them from their country, and any promises made to the Jews by one monarch, were easily expunged by another.

The love stories repeat themselves as well. Marie wanted to marry her American lover and go away with him, but was kept in Europe. Her daughter, Claire, however, falls in love with this American's son and goes away with him as well - only to return to Paris later, just as her own mother returned to Paris after moving to England with her husband when Claire was not yet born.

I know I'm delving too deep into this giant book, but I can't seem to curb my own enthusiasm for its greatness.

The book details the evolution of families, intermingled with one another at various points in time. We start at the time of the Templar Knights, we see their downfall (which occurred to feed the greed of a King). We revel in love stories, forbidden, secret, discouraged love stories. We hear about Parisian culture, art and we experience heart breaking cruelty, and also courageous love and mind-boggling cowardice. These families bend to the times as they witness Paris growing to something magnificent, and also as they see Americans fleeing to Paris to escape a country already so free, but which lacks the rich history that France can offer their young and impressionable young minds. We see monarchists looking down upon the real people of Paris, who always seem to be fighting ruthlessly for a more free, more equal government they can't really achieve.We see people question their moral integrity as they either band together as powerful mobs or disband to save their own asses. We see honor, and liberty. Fraternity. Equality. As Charles de Gaulle liberates Paris from the Germans, thus restoring France to some sort of shaky equilibrium we recognize where this book is heading - France is an eccentric place, filled with idealists who are more than willing to fight for some crazy idea of what will be the BEST destiny for the great France. That will never change, and has never changed from the 1200s to today.

Claire, Marie's daughter, the young woman who followed the path her mother could not by marrying a young American, returns to France and revels in its romance. She loves France, and states that even after living in America all these years, she'd always followed the happenings of this country. Acknowledging not all of it had been happy (the World Wars, for example), Claire express her gratefulness that it has been returned to democracy - and "given the deep richness of France, its economy would bear fruit under almost any government." Despite some embarrassing historical moments, France is still considered by many to be a great empire. The French, and particularly the Parisians, are proud. And change is always inevitable.

Even in the 1960s, Claire witnessed young students, displeased with university conditions, tearing up the old street cobblestones and hurling them at police in protest. They are the students, the workers, the philosophers, the people of Paris - planning a new Paris Commune, and like their ancestors hoping for a new and better world. They are the heirs of the French Revolution ... and it is here in Paris where these young people will always fight to see their Paris reach its great destiny.

You must appreciate the traditional regional chaos of old France, and as de Gaulle had said "How can one govern a country which has 246 kinds of cheese?"

Read this book. As someone who first experience the greatness of Paris in the month of August, the month of holiday in France where many Parisians take vacation, and where the city itself is mostly quiet, I did not understand the deep history of France. I could not understand it at fifteen, but I did feel it. I felt the impressiveness of Notre Dame, and the wonder of the Louvre. The breathtaking views from the top of the Eiffel Tower, and the calm serenity of the Seine. I reveled in the wines and the food, and adored Versailles, where chills ran down my spine. I stood in the Hall of Mirrors and thought of the many famous aristocrats who walked down that hall, and then of the gates being stormed by the people of Paris, demanding change.

Years later I returned to France, but lived in the South - a land very different from the capital city. In revisiting Paris, however, I was reminded of why I fell in love with that city in the first place, and I can understand why Americans, like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein ... I can understand why they flocked to Paris - to live in its complicated, chaotic, poetic, tragic and beautiful confines. This book will draw you into that chaos, and you may find yourself never wanting to leave - in fact, you'll find yourself wanting to do something great with your life. Find love, find happiness, make change. Bonne chance et au revoir mes amis.

3 Days Until Summer 2013 Book Reading Marathon Begins

I realize that I am a chaotic person. My college papers were often well-written, but chaotic and haphazard. My book reviews in this blog are haphazardly written, and often are not structured at all, but free-flowing thoughts. My desk at school is a disaster zone of papers, folders, binders, books, teacher's editions, student papers, post-it notes, and pencils, markers, and smart board pens. My classroom has no reason or rhyme to it (decoratively that is), and my students have gotten used to my compelling yet "messy" teaching style - often interrupting the intro to new material with discussions and checks for understandings that go deeper than perhaps they should. I'm proud of my crazy ways - my acting was done much the same way. I never felt that I really ever hit my all-star performances until I was actually on stage in front of an audience. I fed off their energy, whereas in rehearsal it was more difficult for me to invest myself.

The reason I am describing my string of consciousness writing style and personality is because I want people to understand me. Doesn't everyone at one point wish for the world to understand why they are the way they are? I have no idea why I am this way, but I do know that it works for me, and hopefully this blog and its reviews have been working for you (and by you, I mean whoever might be reading this). My writing "voice" resembles a kid jumping around in puddles excitedly, passionately, and that's how I feel about books. I tell my kids to write about things that excite them, and often urge them to read books that they will soon find they can't put down. I encourage organized chaos in my kids. To be so excited and interested in something that they will soon become excited and insist on telling me about it. When one of my students is really eager about something they've read or done, they often can't wait to describe it to me. The way a child describes something very important to an adult is often like my writing style - a kid jumping around from puddle to puddle.

I only have a few more days with my fifth graders, and then they leave me to go on to bigger and hopefully better things. I've grown quite attached to them, and I've relished our moments in class together. I will miss hearing them analyze, critique, and ask questions about books and stories. I will miss their excitement during debates, and their passion for writing about something that they care about. I will miss that ecstatic joy a student gets when they finally understand a math problem, or spell a difficult word.

That being said, while I will miss every one of my students, I am excited for the summer. I anticipate much reading will be done by me. I have stacks of books on the glass desk by my bedside just waiting to be read. I relish the feeling of opening a book for the first time and smelling the clean, fresh pages, touching the words which will soon fill my mind with images and adventure. I am over 500 pages into the 805 page book I'm reading now. I look forward to writing about it.

So soon the summer book marathon begins. Keep reading, friends! And let me know if you have any new suggestions of books I should add to my pile.

...Almost forgot!

Another reason to read Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is if you loved Roald Dahl's book The Witches as a child. They have similar things - monsters hiding in plain sight. Again very very good. Give it a shot!