Old Books, New Readers discussion

Completed: 10 of 10

DONE 1. The Turn of the Screw
DONE 2. A Clockwork Orange
DONE 3. Wuthering Heights
DONE 4. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
DONE 5. The Yellow Wallpaper
DONE 6. Jane Eyre
DONE 7. The Time Machine
DONE 8. Dracula
DONE 9. The Woman in White
DONE 10. Peter Pan

Jon wrote: "1. The Turn of the Screw
2. A Clockwork Orange
3. Wuthering Heights
4. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
5. The Yellow Wallpaper
6. Jane Eyre
7. The Time Machine
8. Dracula
9. The Woman ..."

A significant number of non-reads in this list. I recall reading or starting (and not finishing) just 4 of them before.

Jon wrote: "Completed: 0 of 10

1. The Turn of the Screw
2. A Clockwork Orange
3. Wuthering Heights
4. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
5. The Yellow Wallpaper
6. Jane Eyre
7. The Time Machine
8. D..."

You have some good choices here. Dracula is one of my favorite novels. The epistolary form works well for it. "The Yellow Wallpaper" is another favorite. I'll be interested in your thoughts on it.

Angie wrote: "Jon wrote: "Completed: 0 of 10

1. The Turn of the Screw
2. A Clockwork Orange
3. Wuthering Heights
4. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
5. The Yellow Wallpaper
6. Jane Eyre
7. The Time ..."

I remember starting Dracula but I do not recall finishing it for some reason. I think it was just a read in between school terms, and the new classes started before I could finish. I agree that the epistolary form was excellent to me, too. It was great to capture his gradual insights as he learned more and more.

Jane Eyre is one of my favorites. I read it in high school and I want to read it again in the near future. I read 1,2,4,7,8 last year.

Michelle wrote: "Jane Eyre is one of my favorites. I read it in high school and I want to read it again in the near future. I read 1,2,4,7,8 last year."

Of those four you read last year, which was your favorite?

I would say The Time Machine and A Clockwork Orange.

This is a great list. I read several and want to read the rest!

I am with Michelle, absolutely loved Jane Eyre. She is such a strong character yet very comoassionate. Interestingly, I did not care for Wuthering Heights. Bronte sisters were supposed to be similar, but apart from some stylistic resemblence, they could not have been more different.

Marta wrote: "...I am with Michelle, absolutely loved Jane Eyre. She is such a strong character yet very comoassionate. Interestingly, I did not care..."

I had a similar experience when I read both many years ago. I know the sisters were very compatible in general artistic goals, but they varied widely in so many other things. It will be fun to encounter them again to see if my experience is different. I suspect I will feel differently, simply because I look for so many different things in books now from what I expected in school.

Here is my review of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It gets only two stars from me, with its high points including the atmospheric description of the London fog in many scenes that set the Gothic horror tone masterfully.

1. I consider this story "quaint." I use that term because the description of Hyde as small, agile, aggressive, and somehow deformed (the term replaced later in the book with "ape-like") summons to my mind Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species." That is because Darwin made a strong scientific case for the evolution of humans from an ancestor shared with one of the great apes. So this was well known to the minds of the late Victorian era, and it was even "old news" or "quaint" to them. Religious scholars disputed it, of course, but biologists and most anthropologists accepted it easily. Of course, it would take the advances in genetic and DNA research (in the 1930's) to make the connection to an ancestor common to us and the chimpanzees. Nevertheless, the ape-like evil of Hyde was a perfect corollary to the moral human that was Jekyll, as a way to embrace the animal nature of our genes and yet somehow surpass it.

2. Jekyll intends to break free from the shackles of his "imperfect humanity," (meaning that genetic mess described by Darwin, above) and to improve himself morally, by creating a kind of body double that would bear the blame for the worst "ape-like" aspects he had. I think this was Stevenson's way to summon the discontent of many people with the materialism and other scientific limitations of late Victorian life. Dickens had already exposed some of those terrible social consequences in his own writings. What interests me is that Jekyll used an undefined "transcendental medicine" by chemistry to create this body double split. The severe, conventional scientist Lanyon disparages this so-called science as "unscientific balderdash" despite seeing the transformation from Hyde to Jekyll occur before his eyes. The story never makes the case for or against this "transcendental medicine" so we only see Lanyon's incredulous rejection of it at the end. I would only add that even in our own times we like to rely upon similar fantasies, such as out of body projection, which are just one more form of pseudo-science that no age is immune from.

3. Repression accounts for much of Jekyll's angst. Victorian England did not encourage sexual expression, violence or even expression of emotion. So the more Jekyll's forbidden appetites are repressed, the more he desires the life of Mr. Hyde. He ultimately wants a purely virtuous life, and that is clearly his motive in finding a way to completely escape from the "evil" part of his life. His motive is clear at the end, in his letter: "....it was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered....."

4. All the men in the novel are confirmed bachelors, being lawyers, doctors, men about town, and even a butler. All of them are confirmed purveyors of Victorian morality. But the women are few, and none are prominent. Even the girl in the beginning of Enfield's recount is a loud angry thing shouting for justice. And the maid who witnesses the death of Carew is passive and never given prominence. It seems that Stevenson is intent upon casting the few women as merely passive spectators. I cannot determine what this says, if anything, about the milieu of the story. Of course, other more famous stories with exactly the same milieu. I am thinking specifically of many stories in the Sherlock Holmes stories.

5. Is this story a parable for not trusting the chemistry of our lives? Jekyll says specifically that he loses control of the transformation process because "...I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught." Since Stevenson was addicted in some measure to laudanum and other chemicals, he had a personal story to tell in this particular rendition.

6. With some resistance, I will call this story a kind of tragedy a bit in the Aristotelian sense, with a man plagued by flaws trying to surpass them and to do the right thing, and failing to do so while harming himself and many around him. This summary is a trifle trite to me, because there is as much melodrama, or just Gothic thriller, as anything else in this story. So I will just close this review as I started it, with the summary of "quaint."

Jon wrote: "Here is my review of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It gets only two stars from me, with its high points including the atmospheric description of the London fog in many scenes that se..."

Great to see you join us again :)

Luella wrote: "Jon wrote: "Here is my review of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It gets only two stars from me, with its high points including the atmospheric description of the London fog in many sc..."

I was never gone, actually. My silence has only been due to a long sequence of books of the month that were of no interest to me.

Jon wrote: "Luella wrote: "Jon wrote: "Here is my review of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It gets only two stars from me, with its high points including the atmospheric description of the London..."

Oh sorry, I should have been specific. I meant great you could join us again for the catch up challenge as you had participated last year as well. :)

Luella wrote: "Jon wrote: "Luella wrote: "Jon wrote: "Here is my review of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It gets only two stars from me, with its high points including the atmospheric description o....."
Oh sorry, I should have been specific. I meant great you could join us again for the catch up challenge as you had participated last year as well. :)

Gotcha!

{SPOILERS} Here is my comment on The Woman in White. With luck it will not be as lengthy as the book itself (!). (Thanks to Camille Cauri of Columbia University for her introduction to TWIW in my edition. It helped me on the historical aspects of TWIW).

1. This is a "sensation novel." It is a natural outgrowth of the popular Gothic stories inhabited by ghosts, spirits, and other unworldly things. While TWIW lacks the other-worldly elements, it has all the same elements of mystery, intrigue, and personal challenge that they had. It was also a natural product of the weekly publication schedule in which it was published. Collins and Dickens were friends and artistic collaborators, and Collins published TWIW in Dickens' journal called "All the Year Round." I say it was a natural product of the publishing schedule because such a lengthy work issued in small increments had to sustain the readers' interest over a long time. Hence there had to be a cliffhanger scene near the end of each increment.

2. "This is the story of what a woman's patience can endure, and what a man's resolution can achieve." Thus starts TWIW. Marian and to some extent Laura are the strong women who endure everything that Count Fosco can throw at them. William Hartright (what a great name for a hero!) is the force that exposes Sir Percy's "Secret" as well as extort from Fosco evidence of the plot used to steal Lady Glyde's fortune. We eventually learn the "Secret" but we do not know the conduct that led to Fosco's jeopardy. We know only that his body was marked with the letter "T" denoting "Traditore" or a traitor to the cause of the Brotherhood. Hartright had an indirect but potent role in exposing Fosco to the Brotherhood.

3. One autobiographical or historical note is in order about Collins. He was an adamant precursor to the feminists and women's movements of our own times. He objected fiercely to the legal nullification of married women's rights and existing cases of women falsely imprisoned in mental institutions. Those cases even inspired "lunacy panics" in England. Laura's swapped identity, the misapplied diagnosis, and her utter lack of recourse were all characteristics of actual cases of women's false imprisonment. The Madame do Douhault example in Paris and the ugly conduct between Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton and his estranged wife Rosina all fired public outrage. Of course, Collins took full advantage of that hysteria to promote the sale of his book. But he also had a personal commitment to that cause by never marring the woman he lived with for many years named Caroline Graves. Collins even passed off as real a fictional circumstance that Graves had been imprisoned by an evil mesmerist in a London villa that Collins had been standing near when she escaped wearing flowing white robes in the course of her dramatic moonlight escape. Sound familiar? That was only his embellishment to explain how they met. As a "kept woman" with Collins, she could not accompany him to public events. So Collins observed a strange Victorian compromise that a vocal rule flouter like him would allow a smaller social prohibition to mask a much greater social sin.

4. The marketing frenzy for the book was incredible for its time. By today's standards it was modest. The combination of the existing "lunacy panics" and the blatant sensationalism of the book whetted the appetite for tie-ins such as bonnets, cloaks, and perfume; the composition of waltzes inspired by the book; and the popularity of the name Walter for newborn sons and the name Fosco for cats. Readers even wagered on the outcome of different plot twists and Sir Percival's "Secret."

5. I think characterization is very weak in this book. I saw a Saturday Review commentary about the characters, a portion of which is: "They are staring listlessly and vacantly like witnesses who are waiting to be called before the court, and have nothing to do until their turn arrives." While I agree that the rigid narrative structure used by Collins is unnatural and a bit affected, it is to me a normal consequence of its journal form, with multiple characters telling increments of the story from multiple perspectives. More on this later.

6. Collins boasted that he had created the strategy of using multiple narrators. This was blatantly false, since this narrative form, called the epistolary novel, had existed since at least as early as Samuel Richardson's "Pamela" in 1740, and maybe as far back as Nicholas Breton's "A Poste with a Packet of Mad Letters" in 1602. The epistolary novel was very popular in the eighteenth century especially for "sentimental novels" such as "Humphry Clinker" and "Evelina" The greatest of them all was probably Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe." But it was not as successful a narrative form in more modern times. It certainly worked well for Collins, especially for the "sensation novel" he helped create, all because it helped divorce him as a writer from being part of the action, and for the way he could drive the immediacy of the action of the action. As a reader, if I do not sense the author as the teller of all truths, then I do not consider him an intermediary between me and the action, and this heightens the frenzy if the plot demands it. I think that was Collins' key contribution and it helped to diminish the weight from the overabundance of unnecessary details and very flat characters.

7. For me, there are five very chilling or haunting scenes that will likely stay with me. They all set the tone, plot action, and pivot points for the characters. A. the scene when Hartright first encounters Ann Catherick; B. Marian Holcombe's diary entry from Limmeridge when she writes about Laura shortly before a marriage that she knows will end badly: "Who else is left you? No father, no brother---no living creature but the helpless, useless woman who writes these sad lines"; C. for the perfect opposition of moral choice versus blunt, selfish aggression, I give you the scene in the boathouse at Blackwater Park (what a great name to signal the oppression there!) about wise criminals, when Sir
Percival tells Laura: ' "Tell him next, that crimes cause their own detection. There's another bit of copy-book morality for you, Fosco. Crimes cause their own detection. What infernal hum-bug!" "I believe it to be true," said Laura quietly. Sir Percival burst out laughing, so violently, so outrageously, that he quite startled us all---the Count more than any of us'; D. probably the most chilling event in the novel is the "Postscript by a Sincere Friend" written by Fosco in Marian's diary. It tells the reader that Fosco has taken the time to read her diary when she is unable to protect it from him due to her typhus and delirium. So he now knows all of the steps Marian has taken to protect Laura from Sir Percival and his plans to defraud her. It disgusts me deeply because he now knows all that she knows as though she had willingly told him. And this is just as the diversions of Ann Catherick, Laura, and Marian are about to commence; E. this one statement by Count Fosco tells you what you need to know about keeping women in abject servitude: "Human ingenuity, my friend, has hitherto discovered only two ways in which a man can manage a woman. One way is to knock her down--a method largely adopted by the brutal lower orders of the people, but utterly abhorrent to the refined and educated classes above them. The other way (much longer, much more difficult, but, in the end, not less certain) is never to accept a provocation at a woman's hands. It holds with animals, it holds with children, and it holds with women, who are nothing but children grown up. Quiet resolution is the one quality the animals, the children, and the women all fail in...." If the demeaning logic behind this is not the best argument for women's rights, I am very surprised; and F. I feel sympathy for the horrible fiery conclusion to Sir Percival's life. The conditions inside that cramped vestry were terrible, and being trapped inside as the fire overwhelmed him is as bad as it gets. Yes, he is despicable and loathsome, so he deserves a miserable end, but that is just ghastly.

8. There is one huge hole in the chronology that Collins tried to fix in later editions, but did not succeed. This was the critical part of the story, namely the date that Laura Glyde left Blackwater Park. This is the key to the entire plot in order to unravel the swapped identity between Lady Glyde and Ann Catherick. Collins' original date was 2 weeks off, but even when he corrected that, he invented a willful ignorance in the meticulous Mrs. Michaelson for not recalling that Lady Gldye left the same date that the housekeeper was fired. This matters because all the successive events are logically impossible, because the variance between Ann Catherick's death and Lady Glyde's departure is so easily verifiable.

9. I have a reluctant admiration for Count Fosco. He is the most fully realized character, between his elaborate gentlemanly behavior to his coddling of his pet mice to his careful attention to the niceties of polite discourse. He even apologizes to Marian in writing for violating her privacy by reading her diary. He has a savage attention to detail in how Marian responds to him. There may be some kind of amorous attachment to her, and he seems to admit as much.

10. The other characters are much flatter: A. Walter has the drive to get the answers about the fiendish plot, but he also fades out of the picture in an escape to South America for no reason other than to speed the plot at Limmeridge along; B. Marian has a lot of courage and is afraid of no one in her effort to protect Laura, but she also fades from the plot for no particular reason; C. Laura herself is quite helpless, as though she has no control over her destiny. She seems even complicit in playing the pawn in other people's plans. I suspect Collins drew her this way as an example of his concern about the fate of all women in marriage. But she also loses any fascination for me because she is so lifeless, inert, and inactive; D. Frederick Fairlie is just selfish, super-sensitive, and hypochondriac. He cannot be awakened enough to save his niece's life because it is just too great a mental and physical effort. That is fine, but he then somehow generates enough effort to write a lengthy narrative at the urging of Walter. He seems to be one more character who serves a mechanical function in the plot for that sole purpose.

11. On balance, I do not rate the book highly. It is way too much overwritten, burdened with lengthy descriptions of unnecessary things, and bizarre cliff-hanger conditions that sacrifice character
development to engineer a devious plot line. It was as often tiring to me as it was a compelling story. However, I will rate it more highly than I would otherwise for its important place in literary history. Its success led Collins to develop his formula further and to produce what is arguably the first detective novel, namely Collins' "The Moonstone.""

(SPOILERS on A Clockwork Orange) This is an astounding story in so many ways. I first read it in college, and re-reading it just magnified my initial reaction. I have broken down the complexity of this story into major themes that helped me work through it, as follows:

1. Manipulation. Everyone seems to manipulate everyone else in this story. It is the source of most of the abusive behavior in many of the characters. Alex manipulates his droog pals and many of his victims; he even enjoys manipulating Dim out of sheer disdain for his intellectual shortcomings. Then the dissident group that F. Alexander forms also manipulates Alex to make him the best case for their cause, especially when they drive him to attempted suicide. Even Alex's parents indulge in some manipulation by the insertion of Joe in Alex's place at home. But for me, the biggest manipulator is the government, and all of its various officials and contractors. Dr. Brodsky helps to implement Ludovico's Technique with Alex, by using on him behavior modification, specifically associative learning. This is little different from many behavior modification treatments we know today, such as treatments for OCD or ADHD. But the key is that Ludovico's Technique is performed under duress, with the only inducement for Alex being the deal to shave time from Alex's confinement. Yes, it is true Alex agrees to this willingly, but he has no intention to become a better citizen under coercion. He has no clue that he will become a cog in the government's plan to empty the prisons to make room for political dissidents.

2. Good and Evil. I think this story is a kind of modernized morality tale, but with an important distinction; it is really about the battle between forced good and chosen evil. The choice is between someone incapable of doing evil (hence only good), or someone who has the freedom of choice but decides to commit evil. Another way to express it is whether a "clockwork Christian" or "clockwork Jew" or "clockwork Buddhist" is more interesting than Alex. And maybe evil Alex is more human than a doer of good deeds who operates mechanically. My own question relates to the prison chaplain's statement to Alex that "The question is whether such a technique can really make a man good. Goodness comes from within...." My own perspective is human beings are good by nature simply because we are born as social primates that look to preserve our social communities as a safety net for ourselves and our families. With that socialized genetic background come defaults that create mental and emotional boundaries between "self" and "not-self." We all live with preferences between the people we know and those we don't. Those preferences are often prejudices that impose higher standards of proof before we confer trust. That is the moment when social and cultural contracts are needed (for minority rights, etc.). Having said all that, I think Burgess gives us no clue what a true, freely chosen act of goodness might be. Maybe F. Abraham's offer to assist Alex after the beating by Dim and Billyboy is an example. But, as we know, F. Abraham eventually turns on Alex to create a victim out of him, all to advance his group's political objectives. So what starts as a genuinely good deed morphs into a selfish, manipulative act.

3. Power. The government is the one entity that exerts the most power. It uses physical, psychological, and emotional suppression against its citizens, all to increase the state's stability and to ensure its own survival. It will distribute propaganda, censor publications, and use morally doubtful techniques to "cure" so-called recidivist criminals. It decreases the number of street patrol cars at night, even though that time is the most dangerous, all to enhance its need to exist. It seems to thrive upon the fear of its citizens to enhance its status as the last resort for law and order and to minimize the complaints of those with civil rights complaints. Furthermore, this story presents its evolution from a standard law and order culture to a "reformative" culture to even become a repressive totalitarian state that throws all political dissidents in prison. To me, the government is the primary "Clockwork Orange."

4. Transformation. I think I saw somewhere that Burgess said, in effect, that a book without some hint of moral progress has no reason for being written. I certainly see a hint of that moral progress when Alex gets bored and starts to think of higher goals such as raising a son in some kind of family of his own. And his choice is very free, considering all that has happened to him. He may also have reached a level of maturity that was totally absent earlier, and this is why I doubt the sincerity of his motivations in the last chapter. Alex's transformation seems sudden and superficial to me, and definitely not natural. But I have considered whether the book could end without that last chapter and still maintain the hope for moral transformation that Burgess wanted. I think so, simply from two other examples of transformation we see in the book. One is F. Alexander, who is transformed by circumstances from an aspiring gifted writer with a loving wife into a bitter, vengeful political dissident. He will likely die in prison. The other transformation is the government itself, when it realizes that it can maintain its strength by adopting different crime-fighting methodologies. This is all for cynical self-preservation, of course. So the transformations in the story (without Alex) are kinds of degradation, not aspirations. But to me this a normal consequence of the way life can harden anyone over time. So these other transformations are not good or bad, but merely a normal consequence. Yes, I want Alex to emerge from the horrors of his own life as a better man, but I question his motive as being bored with his existing life, mixed with a bit of jealousy at the stable love life that Pete has. Maybe others can see his motive more clearly. But for now, I think we can lose the last chapter.

5. Music. Burgess was a musician before he starting writing books. His father was a pub-pianist, so he was exposed to music from the beginning, going to concerts all the time, and writing symphonies, concertos, operas, musicals, chamber music, choral pieces, and film music. He even said once, “I wish people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.” I see many ways that he creates a musical structure in the story and the language. For example, it begins with the words “What’s it going to be then, eh?” and concludes it with the same words, as though we the readers have finished listening to a sonata with its typical structure of introduction, exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda. The use of Nadsat is also a brilliant verbal foray into the beautiful sounds of distorted language, such as “eggiweg,” “appy polly loggy,” “oddy knocky,” “skolliwol,” “jammiwam,” “guttiwuts,” and many others. The internal alliterations of those words capture a sense of harmony and unity in the thought, plus a child-like repetition that brings a kind of charm to all the savagery in the book. In fact, it is difficult for me to find a passage that does not included a sounded event, such as this from Part 2, Chapter 1: “Then he picked up the big book and flipped over the pages, keeping on wetting his fingers to do this by licking them splurge splurge.” Music also infests Alex in his most violent moods, almost as though Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is an afterburner to accelerate his actions. Finally, don’t forget the name of his brainwashing treatment: “Ludovico’s Technique.” For me, it is no accident that it draws its name from Ludwig von Beethoven. The correlation is frightening but quite deliberate by Burgess.

Overall. I rate this story very highly as both a tremendous dystopian world view and a source of some hope to bring the fight to the “Clockwork Orange.”

(SPOILERS for PETER PAN) 1. I will give Sir James Barrie some credit for synthesizing two of the most basic kinds of children’s literature, meaning the fairy story and the adventure story. I cannot count the number of harrowing adventures that he describes. My own list includes numerous encounters with Indians, pirates and wild beasts, and violent acts of nature like Wendy being shot by an arrow, Peter being abandoned on a rock with rising water around him, their capture by the pirates, Tinker Bell being poisoned, and the very real threat to being put to death by walking the plank. In each case there is a dramatic climax with a cliff-hanger. Even the departure from the nursery by Wendy and the boys, as they follow Peter Pan, causes an immediate panic in the Darlings and Nana as they helplessly see the figures flying through the air. So I give Barrie some thumbs up for the great story telling.
2. To me, the theme of this story is the possession of Wendy as a mother. It is important to remember that Peter refuses to grow up due to his disappointment at having been “abandoned” by his own mother. His version of that horrible event is simply that he was “absent” from home, that his mother “forgot” about him, and when he returned, there was another boy sleeping in his bed. Of course, Peter forgets everything (even things he did today!) because he is such a creature of the moment. In short, he is the quintessential young boy. But I think the drama, such as it is, revolves around the ambivalent attitudes that children have toward their own parents. I remember building a “fort” outside the house as a young boy, all to escape my own parents. It was a matter of pride for me, showing a bit of the cockiness that Peter shows. But to summarize all of this, the story presents to me a great idea of the conflict between a desire for freedom and the equally enormous need for being part of a family. The “mother” in Neverland is Wendy, and she plays a vital “motherly” role in keeping house for the lost boys and Peter. They naturally follow Wendy to the Darling home because they can now be adopted into a real family outside Neverland.
3. The appeal of the story for me is that Peter stays in Neverland, never growing up, and having forgotten most of the adventures he had with Wendy and the others. There is neither past nor future for him, and only the immediate moment. I think that condition is the appeal of the story for both children and adults. Peter’s condition is a delightful place to stay before returning to the real world where children grow up and parents age.
4. But there is also a very bleak side to the story, and it is important too, I think. As I mentioned before, Peter’s refusal to grow up arises from the sincere desire not to repeat the abandonment by his own mother. His desire to stay forever young comes from that earnest desire not to place himself in a world where commitments, especially adult commitments, are made and then arbitrarily broken. He has no commitment to Wendy, but he likes her as a reminder of the comfort that real commitments provide. He seems almost amoral about it because he likes to call the shots, but not also exert the steady leadership that adults look for in their own children. That is a very sad circumstance to me, especially with him also having nightmares. And that is why I think this story is all about loss and exclusion. The opening sentence is also the same as the end: “All children, except one, grow up.” I also wonder if the narrator is ambivalent and enigmatic, by design, to enhance those feelings of loss and exclusion. I will expand upon this point later. Of course, the mere act of growing up carries with it a necessary departure from many if not all children’s activities. The loss of those activities seems to stalk many of Peter’s actions, at least to me.
5. I am simply baffled by the narrator of Peter Pan. The narrator seems to identify with both children and adults, which is fine per se. But I am stuck as a reader as to his perspective, the way he floats in and out of those roles, talking to the readers and to the characters. I will apologize up front for the literary expectations I developed growing up, but the narrator’s position in the text is at best erratic. Is it the same narrator which, at the end, bitterly says about the reunion, “However, as we are here we may as well stay and look on. That is all we are, lookers-on. Nobody really wants us. So let us watch and say jaggy things, in the hopes that some of them will hurt”? Or instead is that narrator the one who whispers in Mrs. Darling’s ear to stir her awake before the children return home? Or instead, is that narrator the one which tells the reader directly, “You always know after you are two”, or “Let us now kill a pirate, to show Hook’s method. Skylights will do”, or the narrator which speculates about which story to use for the Neverland ending in Chapter 7? In short, I do not know if the narrator is the teller of the story, or the creator of the story, or both.
6. It may be that Barrie created this confusion in order to transfer the audience interaction from the original stage play into the novel. It can certainly engage the reader as though he or she is a direct participant in the action. Or it can also simply be bad, even sloppy writing that merely plays tricks on the reader for no other clear reason. Many critics have opined at length about the merits and deficits of this shifting narrative. But for me, it is a very annoying feature that forces me to downgrade the value of the story. I gave it two out of five stars. If it came with a clearly designed internal narrative control, for example as you see from the boy’s perspective in Faulkner’s story “The Bear”, I would rate it much higher.

I am reading 7 books simultaneously, mainly to see if I can really do it. I am so far unsure, but Dracula has me really wired right now. I am only through Chapter 3 so far. It is a quick read, and I am impressed by Stoker's depth of research on the history of the Count. All fictional, of course, but it is definitely tied closely to the history of warfare there, and to the pride of the Szekelys boyars in defense of the frontier of "Turkey--land." I see a lot of boyar pride in the Count, especially when he laments "The war-like days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told." I sense a great personal loss of that pride here. He seems quite human to this point, at least in that respect.

1. (SPOILERS) This is part of my 2017 Catch Up reading list. The text I used for The Turn of the Screw was the one I got in school. It is a Norton Critical Editions issue, edited by Robert Kimbrough, complete with the authoritative text, background and source materials (such as excerpts of letters from James to many significant sources such as H. G. Wells, F. W. H. Myers, and W. D. Howells, plus excerpts from prefaces he wrote for his collected works), and also many essays in criticism. I looked at some of these sources, and have drawn from a few of them where I indicate.
2. I consider the Turn of the Screw (“TTS) to be the most cleverly devised literary “trap” in English literature. There are other equally crafty traps written by excellent writers, such as “Murder on the Orient Express” by Agatha Christie. But for sheer economy of effect, terror, shock and dismay, with an incredible paucity of plot and character, I think TTS stands as a supreme example of that economy. I should add that James himself, in one of his prefaces, characterized TTS as “a trap for the unwary.” And I think it is the very sparseness of the characterization and the restricted narrator viewpoint that springs such a trap upon the “unwary reader.”

3. What is that trap? When I first read this in college, I posed myself with the same question that many other readers have likely done, namely that “either the ghosts are real or they are not.” But when I finished it this second time, I realized that this question is the very trap that James tried to set for the unwary reader. This time through, I saw many examples of the terror that account for the governess’ resolve under profound pressure, with poor sweet Flora being reduced to hysteria, and Miles being frightened to death. These events all have a very real, even a kind of hypnotic effect, upon me. Their power is in the way they structure such a good story, because they heighten the impact of such unimaginable evil. So the presence of profound evil pervades ever page.

4. This time through, I tried to read it from the children’s perspective, as did a critic named Harold C. Goddard. Some of my comments here derive from his critical essay. His primary focus is that fear, like faith, ultimately creates what at first it only imagines. And it amazed me how easy it was to see that the children are both basically normal children who gradually become strange and unnatural. That happens for the sound reason that the children gradually become conscious of the strangeness and unnaturalness of the governess’ own attitude toward them. They become deathly afraid not so much of the ghosts as they are of the governess herself. She does not try to terrify them, but she begins to react to those ghosts with darting, furtive glances into thin air, wild gestures, and also the terror in her own face. She gradually grows into a monster as they watch the process happening. They cannot put it into words; they have never heard of nervousness, let alone insanity. But they sense it and grow afraid. And she accepts the abnormal condition into which their fear of her has thrown them---all as proof of their engagement with the ghosts. In this way her madness and their fear augment each other, until the situation produces several scenes of sheer terror.

5. One such scene is when the governess goes to Miles’ bedside, asks him about his experiences at school, and then tries to wring from him some confession of his satanic doings with Quint (Section XVII). I tried not to read this scene from the governess’ own accounting, but rather from Miles’ viewpoint. Keep in mind he has already been thinking about her strangeness, and that he has already told her “To let me alone.” That is because he has already sensed in her behavior an odd suppressed excitement that he does not like. That excitement continues to rise until she finally drops to her knees by his bed and pleads “I just want you to help me to save you!” Keep in mind that he is just a hapless 10-year old unable to comprehend the terrifying thing from which she claims to want to save him. He sees that he may be in the clutches of an insane woman on her knees trying to grab him in a hysterical embrace. If I did not know better, I would consider this scene a perfect environment for a dog-and-pony act at a spiritual revival show. So what is his reaction? A full-throated shriek by the boy. And what does the governess next think? She interprets that shriek as strong evidence of the presence of the ghost she wants to exorcise from him. In short, his reaction is quite normal; hers is a self-fulfilling fantasy.

6. The scene at the lake (Scene XX) is equally dramatic for its contrast between the young girl’s normal reaction to bizarre behavior and the governess’ ongoing delusions. It is no accident that Flora eventually has to tell the governess and Mrs. Grose at the lake “I don’t know what you mean. I see nobody. I never have. I think you’re cruel. I don’t like you,” and then finally, “Take me away, take me away—oh, take me away from her!” Flora certainly has memories of Miss Jessel, including the crude language and behavior that we associate with Miss Jessel (as Mrs. Grose had already identified). So those memories, whatever they were, are linked to her fear of the aberrant behavior of the current governess. It is only logical that Flora would revert to the language used by Miss Jessel. To poor Mrs. Grose, this language is final proof of Flora’s indoctrination into some diabolical influence from Miss Jessel. And an unwary reader will also draw that inference. But to me, it is proof of absolutely nothing except Flora’s delirium brought on by the governess’ own behavior.

7. Nor is it an accident that Miles tells the governess on the way to church (Section XIV) “Well----I want to see more life” and “I want my own sort!” and that he wants her to contact his uncle to find him a new place to go. And I appreciate the sense of despair in his mind when he steals and opens the envelope he asked the governess to send to the uncle, and he finds nothing in that envelope at all. Does he suspect that he is in the hands of a woman gradually descending into madness? I do not know, but when I read that final scene from his perspective, I realize he is desperately looking for whatever is causing that bizarre behavior, and that she has an almost religious frenzy in her effort to somehow exorcize Quint’s ghost out of him. Recall that she sees the ghost of Quint at the window, and that she wants to break through the barrier that she thinks Miles has erected to protect Quint. But she never says the word “Quint.” It is only Miles who does that, and he does that because she has maneuvered him with the statement “It is not Miss Jessel!” He knows fully well that Quint is dead and that he has seen no ghosts, and yet the governess claims to be seeing Quint. He frantically looks around for the cause of her delusion. He says, “Where?” and never sees anything. But he has no rational way to deal with that, and I think he is frightened to death by that terror and by her own crazed behavior.

8. Let me add that I have absolutely no doubt that the governess sees those ghosts. They are very real to her, or rather as real as she can conjure them from the few scraps of detail she uses to get what she thinks is a confirmation of their identity from Mrs. Grose. But I recommend looking at how she induces Mrs. Grose step by step to pronounce the name of Peter Quint in Section V. Some readers use that scene to justify their confidence that the ghosts are real, and that they are truly menacing the children. This is a critical scene because she has so far been unable to comprehend what she is witnessing on that secluded estate, with her supreme control over the children, and her frustrated love for the uncle leaving her in angry rejection. So she needs Mrs. Grose to provide her a fix or a solution, in part to confirm her need to protect the children, and also to escape her feelings of romantic rejection by their uncle. As a reminder, the governess has already seen the ghost (soon to be identified as Peter Quint) twice before, so she has what may seem to be a very reliable description of him for Mrs. Grose. But is it reliable? She describes him as: “like nobody,” he “has no hat,” he has “red hair, very red, close curling, and a pale face, long in shape, with straight good features, and little rather queer whiskers.” He also has eyebrows that are “somehow darker, they look particularly arched, and as if they might move a good deal.” There are similar details about his face, and she then says, “He gives me a sort of sense of looking like an actor.” This is an important part of her description, because she tells Mrs. Grose also that she has never seen an actor, but that is how she supposes them to appear. And then she says, “He’s tall, active, erect, but never----no, never!---a gentleman.” And when Mrs. Grose then asks her if he is handsome, the governess says “Remarkably!” Finally, she tells Mrs. Grose he is dressed “In somebody’s clothes. They’re smart, but they are not his own.” This information all seems to add up to a comprehensive profile of the ghost. It also seems fatal to my idea that the ghosts are only delusions devised in the feverish labors of the mind of the governess. But is it a comprehensive profile, when you consider how Mrs. Grose responds? Or, to put it another way, what details trigger her specific memory of Quint? The answer is the very prosaic, non-characteristic detail that he has no hat and that his clothes look as though he was wearing someone else’s (specifically, “missing waistcoat”). Is there some decorum for ghosts that specify that good ghosts only wear hats and their own clothes? More importantly, Mrs. Grose responds to those police line-up descriptions at the intellectual level that her education and cultural experience support. She is trained to look for the class distinctions that originate with clothing and outward appearance only. She cannot identify him in terms of acting skill or dynamism or outward behavior. In short, the governess finds the few non-essential details that give Mrs. Grose her suspicion about Quint, but this exercise unwittingly unleashes in the governess’ mind all the necessary information to formulate the jet fuel for her passionate protection of the children.

Dracula is one of the selections on my 2017 Catch up Challenge list. {SPOILER ALERT} My comments have a few spoilers, so please proceed with caution reading this.
1. I rated this with 3 stars out of 5. In general, I found Stoker’s story had strong historical research behind it, in part for the depth of Dracula’s background, and also for Stoker’s allegiance to the late Victorian mores of his time. His breadth of design in creating the multitude of different characters was quite good. And he told a good story, which is the first thing I look for. This story could have easily bogged down due to its epistolary novel structure, but Stoker managed to avoid that most of the time. Let me expand these ideas.
2. Foreignness is a significant theme in Dracula. The story was written near the end of the expansion of the British empire, and it was very much a fear (at least as expressed by the extremist British colonialists) that retribution for the years of colonial pillaging would happen, and that it would happen with foreign influences, immigration, etc. Stoker builds on that fear by drawing Dracula as having an accent, and that he needs Jonathan's guidance when it comes to negotiating British cultural norms and legal procedures. His aloofness and odd behaviors like disappearing during the day just add to that sense of foreignness. It is no accident that he comes from Transylvania, which was embedded deeply in history at the very outreaches of Europe’s boundary with the hordes of the Ottoman Empire. That history imbues Dracula with a strong taste of the danger he personally endured, and it marks him in the reader’s eyes as a palpable threat even to the very civilization of the Empire.
3. The factor of foreignness, along with the epistolary novel form of Dracula, also reminds me of another book from about the same time as this, namely The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. Count Fosco, the villain in TWIW, is quite well realized compared to the other characters in TWIW, and I have a higher regard and even respect for him compared to the other characters. His foreignness lends him an air of mystery and intrigue, precisely because he is very well imbued in European intrigues. I think the same applies to my feelings about Dracula himself.
4. The log of the Demeter, describing the horrifying events on board the ship as it traveled from Varna to Whitby, is for me a tremendous accounting of the sailors confronting Dracula. Their exposure is piecemeal, of course, due to a variety of unexplained events like an oppressive fog, manic behaviors of the sailors, massive hysteria, bizarre weather, and unexplained deaths. That piecemeal experience is a tremendous factor in heightening the terror in both the participants and in the readers of this book. And it also gives the readers a foretaste of the coming piecemeal terror later shared by Mina, Jonathan, Van Helsing, and the other members of the team. In addition, I think a short reminder about Demeter’s significance in Greek mythology is important to recognize. She was the goddess of the earth, of agriculture, and of fertility in general. She was also the one with a direct command over life and death. These are themes we certainly see with the arrival of the ship into Whitby, because it brings new life to Dracula as he comes to modern Europe, and his own life also comes at the cost of many other lives.
5. I admire Dracula more than any other character in this book. As strange as that may appear, I support that statement by saying that Dracula is a man caught in the struggle between adhering to his glorious and valiant history as a warrior and preserver of civilization against the infidels, and now having to endure the transition to a new home in totally foreign circumstances. He is in this transition because his country is now dead to him due to the strictures of political boundaries, landed gentry, and the destruction of the feudal estates he once knew. He also tells Jonathan Harker: “I am no longer young; and my heart, through weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth.” (Chapter II) And in Chapter III, Dracula recounts his family’s exploits in wars many years before. “We Sekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship….Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?” And then, later on, he tells Jonathan of battles and events with exceptional clarity, and Jonathan writes: “In his speaking of things and people, and especially of battles, he spoke as if he had been present at them all. This he afterward explained by saying that to a boyar the pride of his house and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of his house he always said “we,” and spoke almost in the plural, like a king speaking.” And as Dracula recounts many battles with and incursions by the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar, and the Turks, he tells Jonathan: “Ah young sir, the Szekelys—and the Dracula as their heart’s blood, their brains and their swords—can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. The warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told.” In this one set of scenes, we get a good measure of Dracula. There are no more wars for him to win. He lives now with only a “dishonourable peace.” He can no longer fight for the pride of his “blood.” So I find the summation of his history to be a passionate and despairing plea to learn new routes to invade and countries to conquer. He is very much a warrior of the old ways, and yet he also wants to learn the new ways and adapt his power and intellect into new channels. In effect, he has the power of a King Lear, without the recourse to use it. I find him very heroic, and if anything tragic too. A modern analogy to him in today’s movie culture might be Khan, who first appeared in the Star Trek episode called “Space Seed” and then appeared in the movie “The Wrath of Khan.”
6. There are no sex scenes in the book. But sex or sexual power invades every interaction the good guys and ladies have with Dracula. Jonathan, for example, is quite attracted to the brides of Dracula, and his descriptions drip with their voluptuous qualities. I suspect this is because he tries to lead a solid Victorian life in which sex is just a dry function to perform and not an expression of love. So he can easily divorce the sex with those brides from the genuine devotion he feels to Mina. And devotion, in the Victorian mode of thinking, is quite sexless. Also, the differences between Lucy and Mina are quite interesting when it comes to sex. Lucy becomes much more voluptuous over time as Dracula weakens her, and yet her committed lover (Arthur Holmwood) seems almost repulsed by her. On the same count, Mina seems devoid of strong physical attractiveness, and her contact with Dracula seems to re-create her as somehow tainted or impure. If I see one thing that unites the two women, it is simply that female sexuality is to be suppressed at all costs, in keeping with late Victorian standards. So that is why Arthur must lead the charge in Lucy’s death. And of course it is Jonathan who makes that lethal assault upon Dracula’s throat at the end, to get the release of Mina from Dracula. It is as though only the men can enforce those rigid Victorian standards upon their own women.
7. The numerous transfusions in the novel seem to suggest some kind of sexual release. For example, Arthur thinks that the transfusion of his own blood into Lucy will somehow consummate his “marriage” to Lucy. And both Seward and Van Helsing anxiously avoid telling him that they have preceded him with their own transfusions of blood into her. It is stupidly as though they worry that he will consider them to have defiled her first. And on Dracula’s side of that equation, he very much wants to share with Mina as much blood as possible, all to preserve her for his long range goal of keeping her as a wife. Has he “raped” her by doing that? I do not think so, but the Victorian standards of no-sex-before-marriage might well be a factor in how Stoker’s readers reacted to it. In the meantime, with Mina you have the entire crew trying to keep Jonathan and Mina separated, as though to preserve Jonathan from defilement until after Dracula’s influence upon her is gone. These various motives to protect Mina and Jonathan all seem very silly by today’s standards, or at least to me.
8. This story is bloody. Of course, blood includes both what we need to maintain our health as well as the surge of family honor that Dracula mentions to Jonathan in Chapter 3. But I will ignore Dracula’s passionate speech to Jonathan about the pride of his own family’s blood, and focus on the blood sucking. That blood sucking is all part of the restoration of life to others. Renfield, the insane inmate inside Seward’s asylum, states it quite clearly, in one of his few sane moments: "I tried to kill him for the purpose of strengthening my vital powers by the assimilation with my own body of his life through the medium of his blood—relying, of course, upon the Scriptural phrase, "For the blood is the life." This is from Chapter 18. But I think people tend to understate what this really means. To me, it means that everybody, even the good guys, is a blood sucker. By that, I mean the Christian ritual of Holy Communion, which is a kind of reenactment of Jesus's last meal with his disciples the night before he was crucified. He ate bread and had wine, and shared it with his friends. But he then told them that the bread represented his body and that the wine represented his blood, since he knew he was about to die. And he also instructed them to remember him whenever they had wine and bread. As a result, some version of Communion is observed in almost every Christian sect, although some like the Catholic Communion rely upon some kind of “transubstantiation” that transforms the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus. Of course, this ethic strongly dictates how morally repellent is Dracula’s behavior, even though everyone else is a blood-drinker too, at least symbolically. But I am very amused how there is a “correct” way to drink someone’s blood. This is my non-religious belief system speaking here. I know it is important for Christian followers to observe such preposterous rites, and I do not intend to demean them at all.
9. Speaking of holy wafers as being part of Jesus’s body, I became increasingly amused as I saw a venerable scientist like Van Helsing being reduced to instructing the good guys into the necessity of prying off every lid from any casket of Dracula’s just to insert those wafers. I realize it was critical to the plot to cut off Dracula’s escape hatches one by one, all to force him to escape back to his castle for safety. But the silliness of it all was just hysterically funny to me. I mean, think of it: Dracula, with the strength of 20 men, is afraid of a cracker. Yes, I admit that that is just my own non-believer spin on it.
10. As I mentioned, this is another epistolary novel, much like TWIW. That form of narration is tricky for me, because I have no centralized neutral third person observer to explain to me what is happening. I am given just the facts of the case, written out by the people who experienced the events directly. This narrative technique puts me in the position of a judge or jury (or both): I hear the evidence of a variety of different eyewitnesses, and I’m supposed to interpret it as best I can. But with that narrative confusion also comes to me a good feeling that it creates a lot more realism for me, almost the way I read a newspaper.

Jane Eyre is one of the selections on my 2017 Catch up Challenge list. {SPOILER ALERT} My comments have some spoilers, so please proceed with caution reading this.

1. I rated this with 4 stars out of 5. In general, I found the story had a strong historical focus with Jane Eyre’s fictional experience duplicating Bronte’s own experience as a governess and teacher in very humble circumstances. Her background and in her depictions of life at Lowood had a strong realism that I enjoyed a great deal. She managed to show “plain Jane’s” experience in early Victorian times as legitimately perilous. For example she only barely managed to escape the typhus contagion at Lowood that killed so many of her companions there, including her close friend Helen Burns.

2. I always expect to get a good story when I read a classic like Jane Eyre. That is the first thing I look for. Overall, the book delivers on that score. However, I thought the story often got painfully bogged down in the tortured angst and incessant internal deliberations Jane went through, partly with Rochester and even more with St. John. And there were also many plot devices that simply strained credibility and left me wondering when the next absurdity or silly circumstance would test Jane’s ability to endure more nonsense. I will expand a bit on these “silly circumstances.”

3. I include these occurrences from the book in the “silly circumstances” I have mentioned: A. the manners of an aristocratic life, especially as to the gatherings at Thornfield (about which Charlotte Bronte would have no idea); B. the notion that a man can house a raging lunatic in the attic of his house for years, while the servants are all kept obliviously ignorant about it, especially when that lunatic is under the care of a gin-tippling attendant whose frequent stupors enable that lunatic to escape numerous times; C. having Rochester dress up in the skirts and shawls of an old gypsy fortune-teller all to let him woo Jane in that guise in his own house; D. to have Jane stumble in utmost despair and hunger up to a lonely house one night, only to discover that the inhabitants are her cousins whose very existence she did not know; E. to have Jane inherit a fortune; and F. to have the entire story turn on an act of mental telepathy that brings Rochester and Jane to their bitter-sweet embrace at last. I mean, really, this stuff does not even rank with the cheapest, flimsiest romance novels. More than once, I considered tossing the book aside as an affront to my gullibility for trashy nonsense. But you know what? I kept reading, for the reason I found in Chapter 12.

4. I admire Jane Eyre for a very basic reason. Bronte gives Jane Eyre a character that is intensely rich in spirit, courage, strength in standing up for herself, and her willingness to endure what she must to make a place for herself. She knows the odds are stacked against her in part for her looks, in part for her circumstances, and in part for so many things she learns after the fact. Her thought in Chapter 12, upon reaching Thornfield, is the most impressive statement of women’s equality and access to rights in any book I have read prior to the women’s suffrage movement. It is so moving to me that I will restate it here now, simply because it is the most coherent humanitarian plea for women’s rights in English literature up to the time of the book’s publication date. “It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions which ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a constraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and to knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.” This is precisely what a Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan would state in the nineteenth century.

5. There are no sex scenes in Jane Eyre. But Jane’s hormones are on full display nonetheless. I think those hormones are even a driver for her instincts in speaking to the various men in the novel, including Rochester and St. John. The fire behind her passion is at least in part due to those hormones, and the story does nothing to discount or diminish that influence. But I think it is also important to say that her passion is the key to her character, and that it is mainly the passionate sense of the right of her own integrity to be and to co-exist with others. There is no stronger motive in human beings that I know of, and I applaud Charlotte Bronte for her intense, clear statement of that motive.

6. There is another fictional character in a story that has some of the same personal features as Jane Eyre. I am thinking of “Moll Flanders,” by Daniel Defoe. For example, both stories use one of the oldest conventions in English literature, namely the idea of presenting itself as fact through using a memoir of a supposedly real person. This story was published with the title “Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, edited by Currer Bell.” The name Currer Bell was of course a pseudonym that Bronte used to publish her poems, and was simply a clever method to disguise her initials. In the case of Moll Flanders, the full title is “The Adventures and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Who was Born in Newgate, and during a Life of continu’d Variety for Three- score Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Years a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest, and died a Penitent, Written from her own Memorandums.” The titles of both these stories have a ring of truth, if only because they sound autobiographical. Of course, Jane Eyre and Moll Flanders share few other personality traits, but the convention allows for things in both stories to happen simply to happen, and they do not have to happen. Events are not linked causally but rather circumstantially. Both stories are very loosely put together. Most importantly, though, they each feature a woman alone, making her way in a hostile world, and making that world submit to her ways.

7. I think the use of tense shift in the story is profoundly good, and I give Bronte the highest distinction for the placement and use of it. What I mean is that the story is strictly a past tense depiction of Jane’s life as lived, but there are shifts at key moments into present tense that dramatically personalize a given experience. There are also moments when Bronte shifts from the narration of her life to address the reader directly. One example is the beginning of Chapter 11 with Jane’s arrival in Millcote, where she waits to be picked up. She says: “A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play; and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you see a room in the George Inn at Millcote….Reader, though I look comfortably accommodated, I am not very tranquil in my mind…” Suddenly the reader is now given stage directions to follow as though the story is now a melodrama on stage. And as for the tense shift to present tense, I think the scene in Chapter 17 was the most dramatic shift. Jane has been describing the assembled guests at Thornfield, where the ladies have come into the parlor and await the men. Just as the men come in, then Jane lapses into present tense: “At last coffee is brought in and the gentlemen are summoned. I sit in the shade…..” This tells me that Jane feels an immediacy of moment because she knows she will now witness how Blanche Ingram interacts with Rochester, and she can observe the sincerity of their behavior with each other. It is as though she is giving the reader a camera lens to make the same observations.

8. The story is infested with morality. That is not good or bad, but it is evident that Bronte wanted to create a heroine with the strongest ethical motives which give her strength of character beyond the usual coming of age epic. I do not think the story is a morality tale, or at least not a conventional one. For me, the moral lesson for Jane is not that it would be unethical for her to be Rochester’s mistress, but that it would be unethical for her to be St. John Rivers’ wife. I say that simply because her love for Rochester is a morally sound love, in part for the restoration it brings to both Rochester and Jane, and in part because she could not adopt the title of wife for St. John Rivers without the love it needs for nourishment. Love and ethics are closely bound together in this story, for the personal fulfillment that Jane expressed in Chapter 12.

Wuthering Heights is another one of the selections on my 2017 Catch up Challenge list. {SPOILER ALERT} My comments have some spoilers, so please proceed with caution reading this.

1. I rated this with 3 stars out of 5. In general, I found the story had a strong local perspective that duplicated Emily Bronte’s experience growing up in the bleak Yorkshire countryside. That background and in her depictions of life at both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange had a strong realism that I enjoyed a great deal. Bronte showed the commanding oppression of all the people trying to survive the hardscrabble life they had to live there. I saw everything from routine hard-drinking, hard-living, and savagery to pompous fundamentalist religion. Torture is routinely portrayed as a commonplace fact of life such as with the hanging of various dogs or the enjoyment by Linton in pulling the claws and teeth of kittens. I draw the line at torture of any of those animals, of course, as do all sane civilized people. But it occurs with such frequency that I take it to be Bronte’s most basic premise about the harshness of Yorkshire life. And it sets the stage for the drama, knowing that such savagery is so common. The reader cannot appreciate the plot without acknowledging that savagery as a fact of life.

2. As I have said before, I always expect to get a good story when I read a classic like Wuthering Heights. That is the first thing I look for. There is no question for me that the book delivers on that score. There is only one story here, and that is the development of the Heathcliff-Catherine love interest. Nothing else really matters, at least to me. For that reason, I was a bit dragged down by all the machinations of Heathcliff to seize more and more power, influence and real estate over time. I know why Emily Bronte developed the story this way. It was often just to set off the suffering of his numerous victims (Isabella, Cathy, Hareton Earnshaw, and Edgar, plus all of his numerous servants) against the hardness of his own heart. But that hardness of heart comes from years of abuse at the hands of his adopted family, especially Hindley. I have a weird sense of that old adage “what goes around comes around.”

3. Love is a beautiful, splendid, inspiring thing. Except when it isn’t, and there are plenty of much uglier forms of love in Wuthering Heights. If you like love overloaded with incest, manipulation, necrophilia, betrayal, psychological slut-shaming, violence, alienation, jealousy, hallucination, revenge, digging up corpses, greed, and guilt-ridden hauntings by ghosts, then this story has the kind of love you will like. But for all that, I rate this book nearly the best love story I have read, outside “Romeo and Juliet” and maybe “Jane Eyre.” I have always maintained that you can’t really love someone unless and until you come to know them really well, warts and all. And oh brother, there are warts to spare in this story!!

4. There are many forms of love in this story that do not qualify as what I mean to call real love. The love between Edgar and Catherine is really more of puppeteer show, with Catherine pulling the various strings to manipulate Edgar one way or the other. The love between Heathcliff and Isabella starts as both a childish impulse of Isabella to show Edgar what a big girl she is, and also a clever device by Heathcliff to yank a few of his own strings upon the upright family values of Edgar. Heathcliff, to his credit, does not pretend to affirm any love or respect for her, and he uses no artifice or devious design to conceal his true feelings. In fact, Isabella and Heathcliff are united in only one way, and that is the motive to put it to Edgar. Then there is Catherine’s love for Edgar. She definitely calls it love, but I question if she even knows what that is. She confesses to Nelly that she is really just marring him for his social status. But if there is one relationship that actually has a chance to succeed, it might be Catherine Earnshaw Linton’s and Hareton Earnshaw’s. We do not know enough to confirm that success, but it manages to slough off most if not all the terrible motives that infect the others.

5. What kind of love does the “happy” couple Heathcliff and Catherine have? Well, it first has all the most positive things you can say about Catherine: she derides his abject social standing, she loves the nonstop romping on the moors with him while detesting his piggish behavior there, she seems to relish the talk in the countryside about Heathcliff’s dark features as “an imp of Satan,” but then tells him he is too low for her. What is not to like about such a vindictive, patronizing woman? Furthermore, she is a master manipulator, because marriage to Edgar Linton is the means through which Catherine becomes the "greatest woman of the neighbourhood" while, as she tells Nelly, "Did it never strike you that if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars? whereas if I marry Linton, I can aid Heathcliff to rise and place him out of my brother's power." (Chapter 9) And then Heathcliff has too many sinister, manipulative features to memorialize. But his mysterious background is what intrigues me. Mr. Earnshaw says he picked him up in the streets of Liverpool, and that is a port town where immigrants entered England. A lot is made of Heathcliff's appearance; the contrast between his swarthy, brooding looks and Edgar Linton's creamy, soft skin is dramatic. So Heathcliff is an outsider in two ways: not only is he not related to anyone at Wuthering Heights, but he is also marked as racially different. He is described as a "dark-skinned gipsy." And Heathcliff's foreign appearance might explain why Catherine thinks he's so attractive.

6. As a reminder to one and all, Catherine and Heathcliff are brother and sister, in name if not by blood. The big bad concept of incest infests their relationship any way you may choose to interpret that.

7. So, having summarized the two of them, what a lovely couple, and who would not want the best life for them? Yet for all that, I think they end up at the end exactly where they started, as children of the Yorkish moors. And as ghosts, too. They are where they belong.

8. No suffering surpasses that of Heathcliff and Catherine, and they blame each other. One of the last things Heathcliff says to Catherine, as she lies dying in his arms is this: "Misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart—you have broken it—and in breaking it, you have broken mine." (Chapter 15) Pretty powerful, and I think he is correct. It is also a bit histrionic, but then everything she has put him through is on this kind of an epic scale.

9. The slimiest character in the book, for my money, is Mr. Green. He is Edgar Linton’s attorney, and has a prior client relationship with Linton that precedes any dealings with Heathcliff. This means, in plain legal ethical terms, that his obligation is to protect and secure Linton’s estate from any attempt by Heathcliff to acquire Thrushcross Grange. But he never tells Linton of these actions or the final form of the will. To me, Green is far worse than Hindley, and that is plenty bad.

Might have a shot at finishing the ten books I put on the list for this year. Well see.

The Yellow Wallpaper is one of the selections on my 2017 Catch up Challenge list. {SPOILER ALERT} My comments have some spoilers, so use caution reading this.
1. I rated this with 5 stars out of 5. In general, I felt that for all the brevity of this story, at the end I also felt a profound immersion into the life of one artistically gifted woman in the late 1800’s. That life was insanely limited if not dictated outright by the whims of Victorian men in power. The one line I saw over and over in the story was variations of her statement “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency---what is one to do?” That statement, and many similar statements, sounds like an insistent percussive chord throughout the mental degradation that she undergoes. As terrifying as the process seems to you and me, there is always that nonstop drumbeat that “He must know what’s best for me.” So it is little wonder that she fantasizes about the wallpaper, if only to escape such an obscenely ridiculous dictate. Having said that, this story also calls up the plight of many women of that time period, who were condemned to menial occupations and not taken seriously unless they were well-behaved wives and good housekeepers. The Bronte sisters and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) all published works using male pseudonyms in order to escape the reluctance of all publishers to take their work seriously.
2. Is this a good story? I always ask that question when I read a piece of fiction. That is the first thing I look for. So I will answer yes to that question but with a big proviso: it is also a very troubling journey of the mind looking gradually more and more into itself, and being unable to find its way back to sanity. This makes the story for me as deeply horrifying as anything Edgar Allen Poe might have written. It rates for me as genuine Gothic horror fiction. Also consider what her fate at the end of the story might be. More on that particular Gothic horror later.
3. One very intriguing part of the narration is in the very beginning, when she writes “John is a physician, and perhaps ---- (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) ---- perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.” What does she mean by “dead paper”? I took it first to mean that she was dead to the world of her love for writing because her husband forbade her to overwork herself during the recovery process. But I think the "dead paper" has a double meaning, if not a triple meaning. Yes, it represents her decision to stop writing in her journal. But I think a much deeper symbolic meaning exists in the “dead paper.” This story is all about freedom of expression and the entrapment of women at that time period. So I take it to mean that the "dead paper" is also the death of her individuality. When she stops her journal writing for the first few weeks of seclusion, she gradually loses her freedom of expression, and with that loss she also loses her individual voice and even her identity. So I think the journal is nothing more than "dead paper" in which her own identity as a woman and individual has died. I also understood it to mean the paper she was physically writing upon. She was likely using both the paper she had with her as well as the torn off scraps from the wallpaper itself. So it is a “great relief” to her mind when she thinks she can be an obedient wife by saying farewell to her artistry, creativity, and everything that makes her unique.
4. Literature in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the healthiest means of self-actualization. So what happens when your creative instincts are suppressed by all the people around you? We see the answer in all the simple journal entries. The patient cannot suppress those creative instincts and starts to apply them to the patterns she sees in the yellow wallpaper. This is a kind of projection of her wants as she sees barriers form within the outer patterns which confine a woman, and eventually many other women, all imprisoned within those barriers. The patient eventually identifies closely with that imprisoned woman and wants to assist her in her escape. She even cares for her safety by keeping a rope on hand that will allow her to safely scale the climb down. Of course, the ultimate escape at the end is when she becomes that escaping woman, and creeps over her husband as he is passed out on the floor. The victory she proclaims at the very end is her successful immersion into her own mind, where she can creep around as she pleases free from the inordinate social constraints she knows so well.
5. The story remains as ambiguous about the narrator’s illness as it does about her identity. We cannot say what, exactly, is wrong with her, except for what we might consider today to be postpartum depression. The Victorians knew something about it, but even Sigmund Freud was at a loss to explain it. Still, we know mental illness is going to be an issue right from the first page because we get an explicit description of the treatment: “You see [John, the narrator’s husband] does not believe I am sick! And what can one do? […]So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to "work" until I am well again.” The difficulty for her is that she gets physically stronger over time all the while her mind is beginning its difficult escape from the controls of her husband and her own family. As a result, her husband sees a lot of improvement in her, and considers her various statements about changing to the downstairs room and wanting to see her family as being rational but precipitate requests, given her nervous disposition. So he sees steady progress, all because he is a medical doctor without the training to recognize cognitive or mental derangement. Back in those days, of course, psychology and psychiatry were just budding new disciplines that many doctors claimed to understand (from within their own skill sets).
6. To follow up on my point no. 2, the early Victorians had what we would now call a hideous form of treatment for women with any mental health issues. Women were frequent residents in Victorian asylums. A lot mental healthcare back then was still in private houses, and they were often run by nonmedical men who did little more than keep patients locked away. With their livings coming from the profit of the operation of these asylums, there was little incentive to discharge patients who could be detained indefinitely. The conditions in early asylums were horrible; they were brutal places where the most disturbed patients were chained in windowless rooms with straw bedding. Women were confined for reasons ranging from “puerperal insanity” (what we now call postnatal depression or postpartum depression), epilepsy, “insanity caused by anxiety” (whatever that means), insanity caused by overwork, insanity caused by childbirth, or even infidelity. Cases of melancholia associated with menopause were treated with leeches to the pubis. Women were also treated with mercury or antimony, both known to be quite toxic. Anyone who could persuade two doctors to sign certificates of insanity could put away inconvenient or embarrassing relatives in a madhouse. Women – with lower social status, and usually less power and money – were the most vulnerable. In short, there was very good reason for the Victorian “lunacy panics” that occurred in the 1800’s. These panics often involved the pattern of women being falsely imprisoned in insane asylums by their husbands out of spite, financial gain, promoting the husbands’ affairs with other women, or a mix of all these motives. This is the very real Gothic horror of this story.
7. In my readings this year, I have encountered two insane women from the Victorian era. One is of course the unnamed narrator in this story, but I condition my claim about her insanity with the fact that she writes to the very end like a well-bred society lady. There is no cursing and no random thought process that is completely disconnected from reality. Instead, it is a broadly developing obsession over the wallpaper that seems to give her some kind of mental strength to tell her narrative in the face of overwhelming suppression. It gives her a personal and moral view of the world that keeps her integrity fragile but still intact. She should not be making any kind of sense, and yet she is right to the end of the story. I think that is because Charlotte Perkins Gilman wants her to be an “every woman” with a character to summarize and heighten the plight of many other Victorian women of her own time. So she is not really insane at the end, so much as she is trying to find her own voice that has been denied to her for so long. However, the other woman is Bertha (Rochester’s insane wife in “Jane Eyre”). She comes from mysterious circumstances in the Caribbean culture that suggest an inherited family trait. In her case, she eventually exhibits the same traits of madness that caused her own mother to go mad. She has no voice to speak of. Bertha is mad to the point of not speaking, but instead raging loudly. She also has the intelligence to know how to escape her attic space and walk around the house setting fire to people and furnishings. Rochester could certainly confine her to an insane asylum, but with no assurance she would get the care she needs. So these two women each face different expectations, but much the same fate, namely seclusion, confinement and little therapy.

The Time Machine (TTM) is one of the selections on my 2017 Catch up Challenge list. {SPOILER ALERT} As always, my comments have some spoilers, so use caution reading this.

1. I rated this with 4 stars out of 5. In general, I felt that this was by far the bleakest look at humanity that I had read for quite awhile. Maybe the Yuggoth invasion from H. P. Lovecraft is darker, simply because the hideous Shoggoth creatures from the Cthulhu Mythos are typically summoned, intentionally or not, with human intervention. But in TTM, I see a grinding evolutionary force that originates in the Victorian dichotomy of the “haves” versus the “have-nots” (or capitalist versus laborer, in the Time Traveler’s lingo). That evolutionary force leads to permanent exile from each other for those two classes, and it makes them violent enemies. I think HG Wells had a well-founded concern for the best social and political pathways to address the dichotomy he saw in Victorian society. I will explain that concern in a separate note, but for now, I will say that we see signs in the U.S. of a very similar division asserting itself in the Tea Party movement, the White Nationalist movement, and other extremist groups. The U.S. is supposed to be the land of opportunity for all who come here, but the reaction to that policy, which is positive inclusion, has left those people wondering where the opportunity is for them, with stagnant wages and a sense that the people at the top are getting all the benefits. This is a perfect situation for authoritarian figures like Trump and many others to blow dog whistles that summon the inherent racism of those who are left behind. In short, this book is an excellent reminder of how inherent disorder can lead to complete social and political breakdown. Quite bleak, I think.

2. Is this a good story? I always ask that question when I read a piece of fiction, especially science fiction. That is the first thing I look for. The answer is yes to that question but with a big proviso: it is also a science romance, which is for me an odd term that places it squarely inside the science fiction genre. HG Wells himself used the term “science romance” to group both his science fiction and his fantasy stories together. Over time, however, he seemed to drop the division for fantasy stories and group them all together under the term science fiction. I think a case can be made to retain that distinction for fantasy since it is not dependent upon the knowledge of science or scientific theory. For example, “Alice through the Looking Glass” has a clear fantastic feature that is very distinctive from any science theory or speculative science. But I understand that over time, the book reviewers of HG Wells developed a special meaning for the term science fiction based upon a strict reading of evolutionary or astrophysical theory. I fully agree with that interpretation. It is very possible to describe as “science romance” any work characterized by long evolutionary perspectives; by a focus on long vistas brooded upon by meditative protagonists. That is certainly the case with TTM. But I would add that for all the massive dystopian ruin in TTM that occurs 1 million years and more in the future, it is also a kind of morality tale that rang as true to the Victorian readers of HG Wells as Pilgrim’s Progress did to fundamentalist Christian readers in the 1680’s. I think it is also on the scale of genuine Gothic horror fiction, only updated to include key issues from the late Victorian science standards.

3. I notice that almost all readers of TTM, at least on Goodreads, apply a strictly literary premise on which to base their understanding. They seem to recoil, as it were, from discussions of biological science and evolution in particular. But TTM is deeply ingrained with both Darwinian evolutionary ideas as well as many other scientific disciplines. So I think it is a serious oversight to ignore those scientific issues, and far better to look at TTM from the perspective of the science of Victorian knowledge at the date it was written in 1895. First, it is very important to know that HG Wells studied at Britain’s Royal College of Science at Kensington, and at London University, where he graduated with honors. He also taught science for five years, and then turned gradually to journalism and finally to writing books. His repertoire over time included novels, stories of scientific imagination, character novels, histories, and social and political commentary. I will add more on his social and political commentary separately. Second, scientific events of 1895 included: (i) the first rolling lift bridge; (ii) the first electrically operated rapid transit system in the U. S, was installed in Chicago; (iii) the world's first portable handheld electric drill was developed; (iv) the telediagraph was invented (the forerunner of the wire photo); (v) the cinematograph motion picture film camera was developed; (vi) the first practical application of electromagnetic waves was developed (important in astronomy); (vii) X-rays were discovered; (viii) ecology was founded as a scientific discipline; (ix) quantified data about the sensitivity of global climate to atmospheric carbon dioxide was published; (x) the atomic weight of helium was determined; (xi) the Linde cycle used in the liquefaction of gases, especially for air separation, was determined; (xii) an important condensation chemical reaction called the Fischer-Speier esterification reaction was confirmed for how esters are formed; and (xiii) a parasite called Trypansoma was discovered in the tse-tse fly. In short, many important events in chemistry, medicine, natural science, physics, and technology were in progress in his day, and he was probably alert to most of them. They certainly assisted him in developing the picture of ecological ruin that he provided in TTM.

4. HG Wells was an evolving socialist over time. He was for a time a member of the socialist Fabian Society, but he broke with them as he intended them to be an organization far more radical than they were. His most consistent political ideal was the World State. He stated in his autobiography that from 1900 onward he considered a World State inevitable. He projected that this World State was to be a planned society that would advance science, end nationalism, and allow people to progress by merit rather than birth. He was a strongly anti-Marxist socialist but he did consider some actions of Lenin and Stalin to be appropriate for what he hoped would become the new World State. But he rejected the Soviet Union because he considered Stalin's rule to be far too rigid, restrictive of independent thought, and blinkered to lead toward the World State he hoped for. He also favored eugenics for awhile, even saying, "I believe... It is in the sterilisation of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies." He witnessed many failures, such as the uselessness of the League of Nations in preventing World War II. And his political star waned during the 1920’s and 1930’s as the terror of the oppression in the Soviet Union and Germany spread, and he died in relative obscurity in 1946. He grew quite pessimistic as he even wondered if the idea that humanity being replaced by another species might not be a bad one. He also came to call the post-World War II era "The age of frustration.” As the ultimate insult, Wells had stated that his epitaph should be: "I told you so. You damned fools." However, his wish was not granted as he was cremated and his ashes were later scattered at sea. In summary, his biography is a fascinating look at what drove his story-telling impulse. I think he was very much a believer in the strength of scientific applications to improve human life, but also an extreme skeptic as to any improvement in the curbing of greed and self-aggrandizement in human culture over time. His world view in the year 802,701 for the human race, with its split into the useless Eloi and the dangerous Morlock, describe that world view. It is a world of human social ruin, brought on by deep class and social segregation of each from the other.

5. The philosophical, scientific, and sociological hub of the book seems to be in Chapter 6, and I recommend readers take the time to go through that chapter to be acquainted with the reasons for HG Wells’ skepticism about human culture. The segregation of the classes that he describes will lead, over thousands and thousands of years, to distinct speciation changes. It is likely that the forebears of the Morlock interbred with the forebears of the Eloi and thus kept a reliably human genetic grouping intact. But as the division sharpened, the opportunities for genetic sharing disappeared, and they each developed many differences from each other and likely no longer could now produce surviving offspring from each other. This is a basic Darwinian evolutionary process well documented with cichlid fishes and many other species. This creates a permanent self-enforcing separation that cannot be breached unless enough compatible genetic “accidents” or mutations allow for it. In the absence of similar conditions between the upper world and the lower world, there is little ecological impulse to encourage interbreeding.

6. HG Wells makes a curious reference to a writer named Grant Allen in Chapter 8. In that chapter, the narrator wonders at what he sees as “white figures” moving furtively as though they are “mere creatures of the half-light.” Then he writes, “They must have been ghosts,” I said; “I wonder from whence they date. For a queer notion of Grant Allen’s came into my head and amused me. If each generation dies and leaves ghosts, he argued, the world at last will get overcrowded with them. On that theory they would have grown innumerable some 800,000 years hence, and it was no great wonder to see four at once.” (Grant Allen, by the by, was a very popular science fiction and Gothic horror writer of HG Wells’ time.) But the narrator says “this jest” is unsatisfying. He then completely forgets it as Weena begins to occupy his time and interest. What I find interesting is that in some allegorical or at least symbolic ways, the Morlock are indeed the “ghosts” of very bad class organization, segregation, and racism over many years. As “ghosts” from that earlier time, the Morlock are only now developing serious skills in the methods of retribution against the Eloi. They certainly have the planning skills to set a trap for him when he finally returns to the time machine inside the White Sphinx. Of course, he does not realize that until the end, and he has no way to warn the Eloi before he escapes.

7. HG Wells has a journalistic narrative approach. It creates an automatic detachment from the events he describes. That viewpoint does not particularly stress me as a reader, but it has the effect of creating events that seem personally perilous, and yet also removed from immediate peril for the reader. Its main downside, for me at least, is that the characters all seem fairly flat. There is no perspective that makes them special or unique. I think the narrator makes some attempt to fill out Weena’s hopes of some kind of permanent attachment to the narrator, but he does not recognize that need until it is too late. We have no clue as to where his next trip in time is to take him, but I think it is reasonable to assume he will find a way that helps her stay safer. The fact that he does not return for over three years suggests he has found a home of sorts in the future. At least that is my thought. Other readers probably have very different ideas about his next destination with the time machine.

Woo hoo!

I got my catch up challenge for 2017 reading only for 10 books. I will slack off now.

For this year's readings, I found three books that I rated 5 out of 5 and merit a return reading later because of their depth. They are Clockwork Orange, The Turn of the Screw, and The Yellow Wall-Paper. The others had one or more problems that bothered me, more or less.
So I recommend those books to anyone, and also recommend they look at my reviews of them too.

Jon wrote: "For this year's readings, I found three books that I rated 5 out of 5 and merit a return reading later because of their depth. They are Clockwork Orange, The Turn of the Screw, and The Yellow Wall-..."

Congratulations Jon! I enjoyed The Yellow Wallpaper from this year's catch up too and I would like to read A Clockwork Orange in more depth again sometime in the future. I was more focused on getting through the slang first time around.

Michelle wrote: "Jon wrote: "For this year's readings, I found three books that I rated 5 out of 5 and merit a return reading later because of their depth. They are Clockwork Orange, The Turn of the Screw, and The ..."

The slang was a problem for me too. But I got up to speed pretty well 20 pages into it.

Congrats Jon! I think you are the only one to have completed the challenge, so you will probably win the prize (and the glory) by default!

Thanks. But that is only because I gave up on starting War and Peace.

Hello all I am back! Jon please message me your choice and I will send it off right away.

OK. I will get back to you shortly.

Let's go with Complete Stories (of Dorothy Parker), edited by Colleen Bresse and with an introduction by Regina Barreca.

I have always liked her acid commentary, which is on a par with Oscar Wilde. But I have not read her stories, only her commentary.