Paris in the Spring: Emile Zola on Classics Circuit Tour

I have followed for some time The Classics Circuit, a monthly event in which a particular author's work is spotlighted on a scheduled basis on various blogs.   I have enjoyed and learned a lot from the various posts that have resulted from The Classics Circuit Tour.   One of my reading themes for this year involves reading books by friends and disciples of Gustave Flaubert.   So far I have read Indiana by George Sand and Jean et Pierre by Guy Du Maupassant.     Emile Zola was a disciple of Flaubert so when I saw The Classics Circuit was going to be treating Zola in April I decided it was time for me to join in the tour.    I will be posting on Germinal on April 22, 2010.    (Here is the full schedule for the tour.)    I look forward to reading all the posts that will result from 30 or so participants in the tour.

Zola's (1840 to 1902)    literary output was huge.   I choose Germinal as it seems to be considered his master work.    Germinal is the story of a miners strike in northern France in the 1860s.   I am looking forward to reading it and joining in  the circuit for the first time. 

In May I will be reading Georges by Alexander Dumas for The Classics Tour.      

"The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980, translated from Italian by William Weaver-1998-501 pages)

The Name of the Rose is set in the 14th century in a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy.    Umberto Eco (1932.) is a serious medieval scholar, a philosopher, literary critic and a semiotician.   Semiotics is the study of  any process that involves signs to create meaning.   Signs are seen as any form of communications.    It is also a study of the forms of language and communications.   In literary theory it studies the way in which a work of literary art communicates its meaning and the melding of form and theme.    The Name of the Rose is many things.   It is a study in the way in which books communicate.   The monks in the monastery were in many cases very into the reading life.   Semiotics as literary criticism treats a work as part of a tradition that takes its meaning in  part from the books that come before it.   It  gives us a very good look at life in a medieval monastery.   I really enjoyed the parts of the book where we got a look at life outside the monastery and at the lives of the monks prior to their entry into the order.   It also goes into great detail on the  theological theories of the era in various conversations the monks have with each other.    We also see behind the highly structured theories of the day to the real way the people of the time thought.    We see the barbaric ways of the inquisition, we see what the brothers eat and what it takes to run a monastery.   We get a great look at the library and what was involved in the reading life prior to the invention of the printing press.   Some of the brothers seem to have entered the order not so much out of religious conviction as to escape from the harsh life of the era in a way that allowed them to pursue their love of reading and learning.    There are interesting conversations on a number of topics.   One of them relates to the question "Did Jesus ever laugh and why or why not?".      The monks also talk about whether the love of learning is actually a sin in that if all you need to do is to love God in the right way (as their religion claims) why would you need  to read and learn?     There are some very good things said about the reading life in this book.   

To know what one book says you must read others?

At times this can be so.   Often books speak of other books.   Often a harmless book is like a seed that will blossom into a dangerous book, or is it the other way around:  it is the sweet fruit with the bitter stem.  In reading Albert, couldn't I learn what Thomas might have said?

Books are not made to be believed but to be subjected to inquiry.   When we consider a book, we must not ask what it says but what it means, a precept the commentators on the holy books had very clearly in mind.

 Here in brief is the semiotic view of the reading process:

The good of a book lies in its being read.   A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their terms speak of things.   Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts:   therefore it is dumb.

The plot of The Name of the Rose centers on a series of murders in the monastery.   Our lead character is called into investigate these murders.   In doing so he makes use of the scientific procedures of the time as well as methods of Aristotle.    The book can really be seen as a study of the reading life and how the monks, some very well read in Pagan texts as well as the holy writ, see the world in terms of the literary works they have internalized.   We have seen this topic before in the works of Junichiro Tanizaki and Natsume Soseki.   If you read their works you will come to see the cultured classes of  Japan in the middle ages had much the same relationship to texts that the monks in The Name of the Rose do even though their religious views are totally diverse from one another.   

The Name of the Rose is not a light read.   I found the medieval philosophy classes I took many years ago very useful in understanding some of this work.    I think it has an excellent change of being classified as a classic one day.   This is Umberto Eco's first novel and my first read of his works.   The Name of the Rose seems to be for sure the most read of his books.    I am very glad I read it as I has been on my mental to be read list for a long time.    If anyone has read other novels by Eco, I would love to hear  your comments on them.


Mel u

"The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop" by Lewis Buzbee

The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, a History by Lewis Buzbee (216 pages, 2006-non-Fiction) was one of the books I acquired a few months ago in a book swap. (If anyone in the Philippines wants to work out book swaps please contact me to see if we can work out a mutually advantageous swap). The book looked interesting as it is in part a story of a man obsessed with reading and books. When I did my daily Google Reader browse of the book blogs I subscribe to (now at about 325 and growing) a few weeks ago I found a post by Lesley of A Life in Books announcing the Bibliophilic Books Challenge 2010. The idea behind this challenge is to read books about books and reading. The books can be fiction like The Elegance of the Hedgehog or The Thirteenth Tale or it can be history or a memoir. This challenge was my spark to read this book.

Lewis Buzbee spent much of his life working in book stores in the San Francisco California area. He did this out of a love for books, not out of any wish to make a large or even a decent amount of money. He loved seeing the new boxes of books come in, stocking them on the shelves, talking about books with other store employees and the chance to buy books at a discount and sometimes get free books. He bonded with other employees in the shops he worked for and obtained a feeling of family from them. This was in the pre-Chain pre-Amazon.com book selling days when book stores were owned by people who loved books not by huge stock traded companies with shareholders demanding an ever rising profit. A lot of his favorite times in the book stores were in talking to customers about what books they should read. Those were the days, but I cannot imagine now asking an employee in a local book store (all chains) for a recommendation as to what to read.   At most I might ask them when the next book in the Twilight Series will be in the stores (very big for my teen age daughters). Not to be too rude but I really think if you asked the typical book store employee what Ford he recommends he would say "The Mustang".  If you asked him if they had any Joyce he would say "Yes we have Juice in the coffee shop".  If you asked the shop manager about Dickens, she would say "Oh you mean that movie with Jim Carey?-check back in the video section next month".  Ask about Jane Austin and you will be given a choice of a book about Sea Serpents or Zombies.

"The Club Dumas" by Arturo Perez-Reverte

I first heard of The Club Dumas Arturo Perez-Reverte (1993-translated from Spanish by Sonia Soto-362 pages) when I read all the blurbs the publisher had included in the pages before the title in Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.   The quote from The Washington Post says that if you liked Club Dumas then you will like Shadow in the Wind.   After reading this I did a goodreads.com search on The Club Dumas.   It is about the adventures of a book finder who seeks out books for wealthy collectors.   (Sort of like the father in The Thirteenth Tale that I recently read.)   I never made any effort to find a copy of The Club Dumas, it did sound sort of interesting in that the characters were all supposed to be great readers, as I had other reading priorities.

Last week I was browsing in a local book store looking for Japanese novels and a new to me Atwood and I saw The Club Dumas and I bought it.

There is a genre of literature called "chick lit".   I do not use this term normally as I do not like the expression.   The Club Dumas   then sort of falls in the category of bookish boy's lit.   The characters in the novel are all very into the works of Alexandre Dumas, mainly The Three Musketeers.   There are several female characters in the book.   They all seem to find a man who can recite the plot of The Three Musketeers completely impossible to resist and have nearly to be restrained from removing their clothes at the sight of a musty old French novel no one out side of The Sorbonne would ever have heard about.   One of the women is a kind of Nordic looking Anna Nicole Smith widow whose wealthy much older husband hung himself under mysterious circumstances.   The book dealer came to visit her as her husband had a very valuable book collection as we are told book collections are normally sold very soon after the collector dies.   It turns out the widow is very into old books herself.   In the mind of the book dealer, the widow is having problems controlling herself  in his presence.   We are given references also to a lot of occult knowledge, burning candles in the middle of pentagrams type stuff.   Of course this sort of occult knowledge is central to the bookish boy's genre and plays right into his  fantasy world.    The book dealer later will establish a relationship with a beautiful eighteen year old woman who is also dazzled by his erudition and knowledge of occult lore.

I know all this makes The Club Dumas  seem a bit silly and it is in fact more than a bit silly.    Having conceded this it is also kind of fun.  (Here I am acknowledging that at 12 or so I was a very bookish boy who thought The Count of Monte Cristo was the height of culture).   I think if you pushed this book and analyzed it closely it might well fall apart.   The occult information conveyed is pretty shallow and could be learned by watching some vampire type TV shows. The female characters are pure bookish boy fantasy stereotypes.    There are a lot of comments about books and the  reading life of the characters,  some of which are interesting.  We also learn somethings about old books as regards their physical properties.   The book is ok  escapist reading for bookish boys and those who used to be a bookish boy.   I think if I were in an airport and had forgotten to bring a book with me and saw another book by Perez-Reverte in the newsstand and could not find anything else to buy I would buy another of his books.   The ratings on goodreads.com go from those who thought it was pretty much completely silly to those who felt it was a really interesting and intelligent look into a world most of us know little about.   The plot action does have a lot of twists and turns.   I did not find any of the characters interesting.   I liked Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game much more than The Club Dumas  but I was able to finish it.   I am glad I satisfied my curosity in reading this book  but I do not see it being liked by a lot of readers of my blog.  

Mel u

"The Thirteenth Tale" by Diane Setterfield

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (2006, 456 pages) is just a flat out wonderful book.   The announced theme of my blog is "Twenty First century books about people who read books".  The Thirteenth Tale is the epitome of such a book.   The Thirteenth Tale takes us deeply into the minds of people who love books, old English Classics like Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, and The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes.

The story begins in an old bookstore run by Margaret Lee and her father.   It is the kind of book store that may soon not exist anymore.  The store owner loves books and has passed this love along to his daughter.   The mother of Margaret is disengaged from daily life.   (The reason for this is revealed in due time).   The bookstore makes little or no profit.   The income of the family comes from the father's work as a rare book finder for wealthy collectors.   Some days only three or four customers come in the shop.   The time setting of the novel is not precisely specified (in fact in the study group questions in the back of the book we are asked to guess when it took place) but it is in a time before malls, before TV,  before cell phones.    It was a time when bookstore owners and employees loved books and did not have to answer to stock holders.  If asked to guess I would say in the 1920s (in England).

The story is told in the first person by Margaret. 

The Shop itself makes next to no money.   It is a place to write and receive letters..In the opinion of our bank manager it is an indulgence, one that my father's success entitles him to.  Yet in reality-my father's reality and mine; I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone-the shop is the very heart of the affair.  It is a repository of books, a place of safety for all the volumes, once so lovingly written, that at present no one seems to want to read...And it is a place to read.   A is for Austin, B for Bronte, C for Charles and D for Dickens.

Margaret is a writer.   A writer of biographies of only slightly known figures, people who live in the shadows of the famous and fade into "profound obscurity" upon their death.   One of her biographies very much impressed Vida Winter, a beloved author of many books and a woman greatly venerated.   She has given numerous interviews detailing her life, each of them totally different from the others.    One day Margaret gets a letter from Vida Winter (she is such a formidable person that, even though fictional, I cannot bring my self to just call her "Winter").   Margaret is requested to come to her house.   When she gets there Ms Winter tells her that she wants her to write the true story of her life.

What follows is a very compelling gothic tale of the life and family of Ms Winters.   The plot action was totally compelling and had numerous great surprise twists.   Some wonderful things happen and some heart breaking ones.
We see how the reading life manifests itself in some very diverse (but also very similar) people.   Ms Winters has constructed her self into an iconic character through the internalizing of old books.   She is hiding a terrible secret, maybe we will learn it maybe we will not.   Margaret's father has used his love of books to make a living and to create a sanctuary to retreat from a troubled marriage with its own tragic story.  Margaret loves books totally.   She recasts the things she sees as if they were events in Jane Eyre.   (This aspect of the reading life is also displayed in Some Prefer Nettles by Junichiro Tanizaki and in his Arrowroot).  Margaret does not worry too much about her personal life as she knows as long as she has her books she will be ok.   Charles, an older quite well of man, plays a large role in the plot though he is not center stage very much.   Life has not gone his way.   He completely retreats into his library living in his books.  He is so caught up in The Reading Life that he more or less emerges from the library once every few months to sign some checks to keep his family going but he probably has not bathed in this period.  

The Thirteenth Tale shows a deep love of books and The Reading Life.    It is beautifully written.   The characters in the book were very real for me and I cared about each of them.   Margaret's father gave his daughter a great love of reading and a love for books.   She grew up as a reader.   The story line is just so much fun and so clever.   The Thirteenth Tale made me want to reread some books I read long ago, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and read Rebecca and The Woman in White for the first time.   The Thirteenth Tale is a work of subtle and exquisite intelligence by a great story teller.    As I finished this book I had a vision of The Bronte Sisters eagerly pressing The Thirteenth Tale into the hands of Wilke Collins who will advise Arthur Conan Doyle that he has found a mystery that would challenge Sherlock Holmes.   The book does have some darker elements and it requires your attention as there are a lot of twists and turns in the plot.  

I endorse this book without any reservations at all.   It is Ms Setterfield's first novel.   I hope there are many more.  

Mel u

"People of the Book" by Geraldine Brooks

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (2008, 449 pages)   





People of the Book is about the attempt by a skilled book conservator, Hanna Heath from Australia to preserve in as pristine a condition as possible a very famous mauscript which gives the history of people of the Jewish faith in Sarajevo during the middle ages. Sarajevo is under near war conditions at the time. Part of her job is  to trace the history of the illuminated book, to find out as much as she can about where the book has been in the last 500 years or so. In her examination of the book she notices an insect wing, a wine stain, a cat hair and a saltwater stain. From these clues she is able to reconstruct the paths the book has taken all over Europe. The story line then goes into a narrative about other people who have had the book. We go back to Sarajevo in 1940 and see the heroic efforts it required to keep the Nazis from burning the book   I confess I did not know that the Nazis had employed a large number of people lead by "art experts" to seek out and destroy Jewish artifacts. Thousands of amazing old books were burned. We go back to Vienna in 1894, portrayed as a period of decadence. Each "flash back" section of the book is interleaved with current events in Hanna's effort to conserve and understand the book. We also see her interactions with museum directors, other book conservators and her very brilliant neurosurgeon Mother. Her mother looks on Hanna's profession as a waste of brain power. We also get to know about and see some of Hanna's love live. We go to Vienna in 1609. We go inside a harem in Seville in 1480.

Along the way we learn a lot about the art of book conservation. We learn how illuminated books were made. I was fascinated by the account of how the hairs of Persian Cats had a role to play in the creation of the Sarajevo Haggadah. ( I do not know if these and other details are correct but they sounded plausible throughout.) She makes skillfull use of historical detail. The level of research goes way beyond simply watching a couple of History Channel programs.

Some of the "flash back" sections did seem to go on a bit long. At times I sort of wished the character of the mother could be deleted as it did not add much to the story and was kind of a distraction. At times I also felt Hanna's quarrel with her mother sort of humanized her a bit so it was not a big negative for me.

People of the Book tells us some things about the reading life of those who collect books as artifacts. People read to get historical information to help them appreciate books as art objects. They feel a continuity with other owners of old books.

When I read of Hanna's attempt to trace the previous owners of the book I could not help but recall when a few years ago I found in a second hand book store a large number of the early volumes of the Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence. A number of the books were over 50 years old. They had a lot of character. To me they were beautiful. On the inside cover of each of the twenty or so books was written, in what looked like a very old hand, the letter numbers that a previous owner of the book had liked most. I still wonder who that might have been. I imagine the person treasured those books for many years then one day somebody took them to a second hand book store. The book store clerk told me they had been on the shelve there for many years. As I left the store I saw her call the manager over to point out the person who for some clearly senseless reason had at last bought these books.

People of the Book is entertaining, makes good use of historical research and teaches us a lot of things we might not know too much about. The author has written two other historical novels, for one of which she got a Pulitzer prize.
Mel u

"Leaving Home" by Anita Brookner-Woman UnBound Reading Challenge

Leaving Home by Anita Brookner (2005) is the second of her novels that I have read.   In August I read and posted on A Start in Life.   I loved the opening sentence of that book.

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.

Some people, even those who enjoy reading Brookner's novels, say they are all sort of the same.   The all deal with older (or prematurely aged younger people, mostly women) lonely bookish people who live cautious closed in lives.   The women in both of these works have issues with their  mothers.   Both do research of fairly arcane academic matters, one on women in the novels of Balzac and Emma Roberts of Leaving Home studies and is writing a book about 17th century garden designs.   Both spend a lot of time in libraries.   Both spend a lot of time reading.   

Emma, at 26, decides it is time to leave home.   She leaves London to go to Paris to study.   She leaves behind her mother (who spends most of her time reading) and her dominating Uncle.   The family is financially comfortable but not rich.   Emma meets and slowly becomes friends with a lady working in the library she frequents.    Unlike Emma her new friend, about her age, more interesting looking that pretty, has men friends and a love life.   She persuades Emma to move from her small apartment into a hotel, thinking she might have an opportunity to meet men that way.   There are men in the library, we see their bent over gray heads.

Francoise, her new friend, is pleased to see Emma develop a friendship with a young man down the hall.   In the world of Francoise women are defined by their relationships with men, be they fathers, husbands, or lovers.   Emma subjects here own feelings to microanalyses but does not come to any conclusions that might direct her to a course of action.    Life will start for her when she finds a man.   Her ability to pursue her studies and her writings comes not from anything she has done but from money her father made in commerce.    Without her father's money, we cannot quite fathom what Emma would do and for sure she would not have had the leisure time to develop the interests she did.   These interests define and also limit her life.   If  the male professors who dominate her research field approve her work then her book will be published.     Emma moves back and forth from Paris to London, each  city has a strong meaning for her.  Some times it feels like Emma is a character in a 19th century novel.   Emma does seem to care less about what others think than an early 19th century heroine might.   

The language in the book is beautiful.   Some of the turns of phrase are amazing.   There are some interesting plot twists.   As you read this book  you can feel the loneliness of Emma.   In fact I thought if Emma could simply get involved in book blogging or blogs on 17th century history her life might have been much happier. She then would have not been so effected by a feeling she was disconnected from the world by the seeming narrow range of her interests.   Emma is involved in a very beige toned search for a suitable mate, not so much that she wants one as she wants to seem ordinary.

Anita Brookner wrote her first book at age 53 and has since then written 22 more of them.   As I said, some people say all her books are alike.   I would say read an extract of one of her works on line and see if the writing style appeals to you.    Her books do tell us a lot about the dynamics of power in relationships and the struggle of women to define themselves.    I could see myself reading one every 3 or 4 months.  They do have a kind of claustrophobic feel somehow and some Goodreads reviewers have found her work depressing.

Mel u

"Arrowroot" by Junichiro Tanizaki-

Arrowroot by Junichiro Tanizaki (1931, trans. by Anthony Chambers is kindly included by Vintage Press in the same book as The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi.  (This is a decision of Vintage unrelated to the works or the intentions of the author but it does add a lot of value to the book and I appreciate it.)

Arrowroot is now the oldest Japanese work I have posted on, published for the first time 78 years ago.    It is about the search of a man whose parents died when he was quite young for his maternal roots.   The story is set in Japan in 1910 in Tokyo and Osaka.   The narrator is deeply involved in The Reading Life.   He sees the world through the classic dramas and epics of 15th to 17th century Japan.    Everything is somehow formulized through that prism for him.  When he sees something or meets someone he is reminded of a play he has seen or a poem he has read and then launches into an internal monologue linking one literary work to another then another.    We learn of a number of the great works of classical Japanese literature.  

The narrator is an extremely cultured man who can only marginally relate to those below his level.   When he does relate to them, he sees them as minor characters in a Kabuki play.   The narrator was orphaned and raised by relatives starting at a young age.   He decides one day to seek out his maternal roots in Osaka.    When he goes back he finds out that at about age 13 his mother was sold by her parents to a business he can identify only as being in the "pleasure quarters" of Osaka.   This might mean she was sold to a tea house as a kitchen worker or was to be trained as a Geisha but most likely it means she  became a prostitute at age 13.   Somehow through a great stroke of good luck his mother married a wealthy man.   She died only a few years after having her son, our narrator.   He finds out his family were makers of fine paper, from arrowroot.   He sees a girl in her late teens making paper and he tells her family he wants to marry her.    She reminds him of a selfless heroine in one of his dramas.  

To me the fun of this work is that it shows a man living completely The Reading Life in a literature in which I have no home but I can totally relate to the narrator nevertheless.   You feel his love for reading and you know it is the most important thing in his life.   Like other characters whose Reading Life I have posted on, he is both shielded from the world by his reading and allowed to experience the world more deeply by it.  

There is a good bit of information about Japanese religion in this story (40 pages).  We are treated to a wonderful series of fox images while being given an education in the role of the fox in Japanese culture.   The treatment of the religious beliefs of the common people of Osaka (I think Osaka was seen as more true to classical Japanese ideals than Tokyo in this narrative) also seems an oblique commentary on the sterility of Confucian dictates.   Magic permeates throughout the world of the story.   The extreme antirealism of classical drama in which the narrator is absorbed allows him not just to reinterprert events as a No Play but see them that way in the first place.  

Arrowroot a wonderful story about a lover of The Reading Life.    What our narrator reads maybe alien to most of us but he is a brother in the life.  Yesterday I bought three more novels by Tanizaki.  

He lived 1886 to 1965.   He published his first work in 1910 and at once was considered a major literary figure.   He even worked briefly in the silent films of the era as a dramatist.   He was exempt from military service in WWII due to his age.   At his death he was considered the greatest living Japanese writer.   

"Powerbook" by Jeanette Winterson

PowerBook  is my first Jeanette Winterson novel.   It  will not be my last.  PowerBook is a 21th century story of the reading and writing life.   It is also about love, sexual possession, the Isle of Capri, the internet, the nature of history and a good bit more.   It is not a straightforward story and can be very much enjoyed just for the beautiful writing and the many thought provoking things said in the book.   The story line is not real hard to follow just give it a bit of time to develop.  

In my comments on the book I will just take a look at some of what it says about the reading life.  The central character, Ali or Alix (the sexes blur a bit here) is a professional online writer of stories, sort of custom made to enliven the lives of her customers who can be the leads in the stories if they like.   The only catch is once the story begins they cannot control how it will end.

The sign on the door says VERDE, nothing more, but everyone knows something strange goes on inside.  People arrive as themselves and leave as someone else.   People say that Jack the Ripper used to come here.

Reading seemingly brings freedom

This is where the story starts.   Here, in those long lines of laptop DNA..This is an invented world.  You can be free just for one night.

Stop for a portion  of a second to think about all the  books about prisoners set free by reading-from the Count of Monte Cristo on.

The  book spends some time in ancient Antioch

 Antioch was an aqueduct city...a civilization built on an aqueduct is a perilous ..one barbarian with a pickaxe can drown thought...There is always a city.   There is always a civilization.   There is always a barbarian with a pickaxe.  Sometimes you are the city..to become the city , that civilization, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand

Reality is not fixed in the world of PowerBook.  

 Nothing is solid.  Nothing is fixed.   These are images that time changes and that change time.

  

When I read this passage about automatic writing I wondered what Mr and Mrs Yeats would think of it:

There is always the danger of automatic writing.   The danger of writing yourself towards and ending that can never be told..There is a fatefulness and loss of control that are somehow comforting.   This was your script but now it writes itself. 

Science is a story.   Reality is a story.

We are people who trace with our fingers a marvelous book, but when we turn to read it again, the letters have vanished.   Always the book must be rewritten.

There are many fascinating historical allusion in the book, many of them almost as throw away lines.   You have to pay careful attention or you will miss the best part of the show.

There is other thematic veins one could mine in this book.    Much of the language of the book is beautiful.   The book tapped into my own story lines, which is no doubt one of the reasons I liked it so much.  Maybe the notion that we create  the world with our stories is escapist fantasy.   On the other side, maybe the  old Hindu masters were right.   Both of these ideas can and to me are true at the same time.    

The primary theme of my blog is the literary treatment of the reading life.   If I meander away from that I always have it in mind.   I see Powerbook as a core very early 21th century reading life book and endorse without reservations.   Read it slowly.

Su [shu] has an a very interesting post on the book that goes into some of the other themes.

As I read the remarks about aqueducts I thought of Oriental Despotism  by Kurt Wittfogel.   It is a very interesting historical work that attempts to explain why civilizations often begin in deserts rather than more seemingly welcoming places.   

"The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"- Sunday Salon

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society  by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Borrows (2008, 278 pages)

I have read a number of very good reviews of this book in the book blogs to which I subscribe.   All the reviews have one thing in common.   Everybody
loves this book and so do I!



Suko's Note book has an excellent review.


Age 30+-A Life Time of Books-has a very perceptive review as well as a list of other posts on the book.
I see no need for me to do another general review of the book.

I do want to talk about what I liked about the book.   Some of the dialogue
of members of the society also affected me in ways that surprised me.   One speaker made me ashamed of the man who I always considered the greatest English language poet of the 20th century and one speaker reaffirmed my negative feelings on a  much admired ancient Roman thinker.

I learned a lot about life on the island of Guernsey during much of WWII when it was occupied by the Germans.   I never knew before I read this book that 1000s of Eastern European slave workers were sent to the  island to build massive fortications while starving to death.   You really feel like you know what it must have been like to be on the island during WWII.

We see people past middle age that have never read a book for pleasure find great joy and comfort in the books they are introduced to by the island's literary society.   It is never too late to get into the reading life.   Sometimes all it takes is the right book deeply read.   We see how books island residents survive some very harrowing times and accept the joy of the transcendent moments.  In this marvelous book we experience both of these on one page.

We come to know and care about the people of Guernsey.  We may not like it but we find it a little harder to hate all the Nazis also.   We must accept the fact that the occupying commander is very much a reader as are numerous of his officers.    The German occupation lasted nearly five years so there was interaction between the English residents and their occupiers.   

I want to share a couple of particular things.   Clovis Fossey is a middle aged farmer that served in the trenches in WWI.   We should listen carefully to what he says.

"At first I did not want to go to any book meetings.   My farm is a lot of work, and I did not want to spend my time reading about people who never was, doing things they never did".

He falls in love and asks the local book seller for a book of love poetry to help him in his courting.   He is not much impressed with poetry until he comes upon the work of Wilfred Owens, a poet of WWI who fought in France just like Mr. Fossey did.   Mr Fossey comes to appreciate the poetry of William Wordsworth and learns many of his poems by heart.   One day a friend loans
him The Oxford Book of Verse-1892 to 1935, the poetry being selected by William Butler Yeats.  To me Yeats is the greatest English Language poet of the 20th century.   I have read in his work on and off for forty years.   His lines will often come unsolicited into my mind.   I knew that his politics was at best silly and and worse dangerous.   His philosophical musings are incoherent.   I always shrugged this off in the face of the beauty of his work.   Mr Fossey has another view on Yeats.

"They let a man named Yeats make the choosings.   They shouldn't have.  Who is he and what does he know about verse?
    I hunted all through the book for poems by Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sasson.   There weren't any-nary a one.  And do you know why not?  Because Mr Yeats said-he said 'I deliberately chose not to include any poems from WWI.  I have a distaste for them.   Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry'.
    Passive suffering?   ...I nearly seized up.  What ailed the man?  Lieutenant Owens, he wrote a line, 'What passing bells for those who die like cattle?  Only the monstrous anger of the guns'.   What is passive about that, I'd like to know.  That is exactly how they do die.  I saw it with my own eyes, and I say to hell with Mr Yeats".

I felt ashamed for Yeats when I read this.   Ashamed for the dishonest shallow venal vanity that  was really behind his remarks.   I wonder how he would have done during the war years on Guernsey.   I began to wonder how much my liking of Yeats work maybe comes from my own vanity.  I always sort of knew what Mr Fossey said but I never really felt it before


Mr Jones Keaton, another middle aged farmer (all the young men were gone to war) shared my opinion of Marcus Aurelius.   I read his Meditations once in an 
ancient philosophy class.   He talks about how he tries to deal with the great trials and tribulations of his life.   Mr Keaton does not accept this.  He can see that Marcus Aurelius is head a of a slave empire as cruel as that of the Nazis.  Millions die in chains while he mediates on the misery of his life.  I was so happy when Mr Keaton spoke out.


"Marcus Aurelius was an old woman.  -forever taking his mind's temperature-forever wondering about what he has done..was he right or wrong.  Was the rest of the world in error?   Could it be him instead?  No, it was everybody else who was wrong, and he set matters straight for them.   Bloody hen that he was, he never had a tiny thought that he could not turn into a sermon".   


There is so much to love about this wonderful easy to read book.  The production values are very good.   It is very uplifting and moving without being maudlin at all.   I endorse this book without reservation.


Mel u

"Gourmet Rhapsody" by Muriel Barberry-

 I was so happy when I saw Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barberry  as I knew I had found a book I was probably going to love.    Gourmet Rhapsody,  published in 2000 (before her marvelous The Elegance of the Hedgehog) but not translated until 2009 is about the world's leading food and restaurant critic.   He lives  in the  apartment house made famous in The Elegance of the Hedgehog.   He is on his deathbed and he is probing all his conscious memories to discover the one supreme gastronomic experience of his life.

The story unfolds in short sections.   We hear not only from the critic but from his grown children, his long suffering but still in love wife, his grandchildren and even his cat.  All the  speakers have their own voice.    We learn why every one hates Pierre Arthens, the critic, and we do not much like him either.   We get a feel for what it would be like to be the world's most highly regarded food critic.   Most of all in the book we are drawn into Pierre's experience of foods.   His descriptive powers are awesome.   We can see why a good word from him would make
a restaurant or an article send everyone to the market  looking for the ingredients required for a vain attempt to recreate a meal he describes.


Here is how Pierre sees himself.   "When I took possession of the table, it was as supreme 
monarch....I am the greatest food critic in the world".


I will share with you a few of my favorite lines from Pierre's food descriptions.


"Early man, in learning to cook fish, must have felt his humanity for the first time.....Meat is virile, powerful, fish is strange and cruel....The Raw Tomato,devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush  in one's mouth that bring with it every pleasure...slicing into raw fish is like cutting into stone. "     

Who of us could bite into a factory farm produced tomato after this or relish a meal of fish sticks?


"Tasting is an act of pleasure, and writing about that pleasure is artistic gesture, but the only true work of art, in the end, is another person's feast".


Now this is a bit disturbing.."No one will ever manage to banish from my thoughts the notion that raw food with mayonnaise is somehow deeply sexual".


I came to see my proper  attitude toward Pierre was to humble myself and learn from a master.
Pierre's character, that of his wife, children  are all very well articulated.   Pierre was a terrible husband and a worse father but once he begins to talk about food we forget all that.   (He was good to his cat!)



My hopes for this work were very high and they were at least met and maybe exceeded.    


Pierre also has refined literary tastes, Dante, Proust, Tolstoy.   His reading  may not be the center of his life but he has read deeply and correctly.   This is no accident.   It is almost as if
Proust restricted his writing to food only, as if Dante created a special circle for restaurants he disliked, as if Tolstoy  creates the world as he describes a well cooked duck.



The production qualities of this book are high and the print of decent size.   It was a lucky day for me when I found this wonderful book.




I will let Pierre have the last words.

"If I go back to my earliest memories, I have always liked eating....Infinite, cruel, primitive, refined ocean:  between our avid teeth we seize the products of your mysterious activity".

Two Very Different Ladies That Love Balzac-

I recently read two very different novels worlds apart in their setting, style, and characters but with a common theme.
They both center around women who love the novels of Balzac, whose lives have been radically affected by a reading of his works. One is an English Academic and the other is a Chinese seamstress in the time of Mao's re-edification programs in rural areas of China.

A Start in Life by Anita Brookner(1982-176 pages)

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress Dai Sijie (2000, 172 pages, trans. from French by Ina Rilke)

Dr Ruth Weiss, the central character in A Start in Life and the little seamstress (that is how she is always designated)
in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress are as different as two women from the same planet can be.

Dr Weiss is a literary academic who lives a very beige colored life. Her only striking feature is
her beautiful red hair. She lives in cramped quarters and is alone a lot. She is very careful and cautious.
Her real life does not begin until she is between the pages of a book or in a library or bookstore. She has published a book called Women in Balzac's Novels and has a second volume in the works. She basically gets paid to read what she wants to read, write about it and talk about it. Before we say, wow this sounds great, we must linger over
the opening sentence of the book: "Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature". I will admit the book had me at that point. I wanted to know why and I wondered if mine was also somehow and I can already see my middle daughter, 13, retreating into a world of books one day.

The little seamstress works for her father, a traveling tailor, in rural China during the period of Mao's re-edification programs. She is young, full of life, pretty and has many suitors. All she has ever read in her life are works approved by people's committees and the sayings of Chairmen Mao. Two late teenage cousins of affluent families have been sent from the city to do very hard work among the peasants in order to re-edify them. Both of the cousins become infatuated with the seamstress and one of them begins an affair with her. The cousins come into to possession
of a magic suitcase full of 19th century novels, Gogol, Dickens, Flaubert, Melville. The biggest treasure in the suitcase is a number of Balzac novels. (All the novels have been translated into Chinese.) The cousins at once set about reading and rereading these works. They are most taken with Balzac, maybe because they have more of his works but we are never told why they like him so much but maybe we can figure it out. One of the cousins decides to read Balzac to the little seamstress. She falls in love with his stories and they shape her life in ways no one can predict in advance. A lot of exciting things happen in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. We get a good feel for life in rural China. We feel like what it is like to go from the life of a son of the most famous dentist in China to hauling manure in the country side as part of a re-edification program from which you have little change of graduation. Unless you are a saint you will really enjoy the revenge enacted on a village headman. Their attempt to make the little seamstress a more refined girl friend back fires on them in a big way. There is a lot to be learned and thought about in this book. We take for granted our ability to read what we want. It made me think again how great the 19th century masters are, to see that they are not just books you have to read in school or because someone says they are good for you. There are also a number of exciting scenes in the book. You always want to know what will happen next. You really feel like you are in rural China.

Dr Ruth Weiss, the central character of A Start in Life, has no suitors at her door, has never done any physical work in her life and for sure has never had an outdoor romantic encounter. She does have beautiful red hair and we are somehow thankful for that. Her life and her appearance is all shades of beige with maybe a tan suede jacket for the cold.
She fits right into the world of libraries and lecture halls. The book is written with great stylistic economy. Sometimes it seems Dr Weiss is a minor character in a 19th century novel. Dr Weiss has her loves and tragedies but she always has Balzac to retreat into. My guess is that as Dr Weiss ages she won't make any big changes in her life but she will always have her Balzac and her increasing refinement will increase her loneliness. As the little seamstress ages she will do things we can never imagine and she cannot either. I do not think she will do a lot more reading in her life, she will be busy and she has already done the reading that will set the course of her life. "She said she had learnt one thing from Balzac: that a woman's beauty is a treasure beyond price."

I endorse Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress without reservation. It is a fun easy to read book and the production value of the paperback edition are high.

A Start in Life is an book of exquisite economy. It is what one might call academic fiction.

Dai Sijie has two other books translated into English. He was himself in a re-edification program and resides in France.
Both of his other books deal with reading life issues and I hope to read them by year end 2010.

Anita Brookner has written twenty four novels, one a year since she started writing twenty four years ago at age fifty.
It seems most are about somewhat lonely reflective a bit bookish people. I will read more of them also.

Maybe I need to read some more Balzac also!

Mel u

"Age of Innocence" by Edith Wharton-Reading as Deliberate High Culture Sunday Salon

My first reaction to a book as wonderfully written as The Age of Innocence is simply to let the words flow over me, to bask in the beauty of the language and to allow my sensibility to be controlled by beauty of the work. Some of the sentences in the book are so well crafted I reread them several times just for the sheer pleasure of doing so.

I think here the form of these sentences is part of the meaning. Age of Innocence tells us a lot about how one can live within the beauty of the written word, with no concern for its meaning. The lead male persona in the book,
Newland Archer, has a deep relationship with the books he reads and does retreat into them.

There are several themes one can mine in this book (and mind). It tells us a lot about the relationship of men and women, America to Europe, old culture to new, parents to children, passion to practicality. In accord with the theme of my blog, I will post a bit about what it tells us about the reading life of the characters of the book, how they use books to create culture, to see refuge, to create bonds and exclude others.

In the High Society of New York State late 19th century it was important to read the right books

"In an unclouded harmony of tastes and interests they cultivated ferns in Wardian cases, made macarame lace and wool embroidery on linen, collected American revolutionary glazed ware...they liked novels about people in society, whose motives and habits were more comprehensible, spoke severely of Dickens, who had never drawn a gentleman"

This displays the use of reading to reaffirm our beliefs, to read the books proper to our station in life.

Books can also be used as part of a mentoring relationship.

"the shy interest in books she was beginning to develop under his guidance".

Books are also physical property. One of the great pleasures of the Reading Centered Life for many of us is to get new books. Every week there are dozens or more blog posts about new books one has gotten in the mail.
Imagine how this feeling was magnified when the books had to cross the ocean on long voyages.

"That evening he unpacked his books from London. The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently.
a new volume of Herbert Spencer, another collection of Guy de Mauspassant's incomparable tales, and a novel called
Middlemarch ...he had declined three dinner invitations in favor of this feast: he turned the pages with the
sensuous joy of the book lover".

Every one seriously into The Reading Life can relate to how social obligations become a burden that gets in the way of our real life, our reading time.

"he built up within himself a kind of sancturary...little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities, thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him...Outside of it he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency".

Newland Archer's books becomes more real to him them than what the world thinks is his life. Who among us that has done time in the corporate world or academia has not ended a long meeting lost in thought among the books we love, with no idea at the end what the meeting was about. (But we have learned to fake it.)

There is a lot more about the reading life, about how history books create what we think is history out of the mass of events that take place, and much more in Age of Innocence. To me personally, the deepest meaning is in the beauty of the words. Listen for a moment to this sentence and think about why Edith Wharton used the word
retailing" rather than retelling like very one else would:

"The queer cosmopolitian women, deep in complicated love-affairs which they appeared to feel the need of retailing to every one they meet, and the magnificent young officers and elderly dyed wits who were the objects of their confidences..."

Life recasts it self as a story, not as a newspaper article. The Europe created in the mind of Newland Archer (a first name worthy of Pynchon) is also a literary construct out of the books he cherishes.

I am embarked on two long term reading projects-the novels of Henry James and those of Edith Wharton. It will take me several years to complete this project. I hope in time, maybe after my one year blog anniversary in July 2010 to host a James/Wharton challenge. (I guess that would attract a rowdy crowd!!)

"The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery-Reading Through The Hedge

Yes Renee does somehow reduce the people she sees in the building to stereotypes just as she reduces herself to one. I think a reader needs to see through this as part of the effects of the limits of Renee’s mind and education. The Irony is in her mind she mocks the occupants of the building for not seeing her as a whole person whereas she does the same thing to them without knowing it. As to the worship of Japanese culture-I think this is also to be taken in a kind of ironic mode. I did find the character of the 12 year old girl not really convincing in terms of her profound utterances-But then again Anne Frank was 13.
What I liked best about the book was its depiction of how a life of reading can shape a person. Anyone who is into the reading life and has worked with or worse for those that seem way inferior culturally will love Madame Renee!

Renee’s self respect and self image comes from her ability to see those she works for and must be subservient to as stereotypes-cartoon characters or characters in a soap opera almost, not real persons with a rich interior life such as she has built for herself over the years of reading serious books. She carefully hides her reading and intelligence as she knows it may make her rich employers uncomfortable (Renee and Barbery know of Hegel’s master/slave reading of history and knows why slaves were not allowed to learn to read in most cultures.) Also, if Renee does somehow open up the carefully hidden aspects of her personality she may find those she looks down on are not the shallow fools she sees them to be. Renee needs, in part, to hide in order to protect herself image, maybe. As to her initial bonding with the Japanese man over Tolstoy, this is very interesting. The Japanese man does not fit easily into her stereotypes nor she into his. He may well be the richest person in the building thus, in her projected ethos of the building dwellers, above her employers in status. Tolstoy is an interesting choice here as he creates a whole world, he is hardly pro French. Whenever he writes in French in War and Peace it seems the speakers are banal, at best. Husserl, her philosopher of choice (ok here
I am leaning on reading I did 40 years ago) is saying everything is perception. To me one of the big points of Elegance of the Hedgehog is that we are all in part trapped by the stereotypes we project on others and those we let them project on us. Madame Renee sees her employers as half educated materialists and they see her as what she likes to pretend she is. Another big point to me is that reading enlarged the world of Madame Renee-she can see farther into the ironies and pleasures of life. Notice she never thinks of her cleaning lady friend in condescending terms. I need also to rethink my reactions to the child character. Super bright children are into math, science, gadgets etc not profundity but maybe I am missing something here with the example of Anne Frank in my mind now as I just read her diary for the first time. Any way, I really like Hedgehog a lot and wish I could read it in French.

I did not like the ending as a novelistic device and I did not like it as a way of closing the story. Of course we are curious what might become of Paloma. My guess is she slowly develops into another Rich Person in the apartment but will always be somehow detached. I think there is a lot in this book on the reading life and I think one of the points is that it can detach you somehow. Sometimes the detachment allows you to rise above the banalities of life and sometimes it leaves you out. I think Paloma will be able to be honest with herself as she ages. Do you think as she ages she will be caught up in the “reading life”? As an adult will she end not seeing beyond stereotypes or is she already totally caught up in them? Or is that all there is?

To me, Hedgehog does not really idealize Japanese culture itself, it uses Madame Renee and Paloma’s adoration for Japanese culture as part of its treatment of the effects of stereotypes. Renee and Paloma know next to nothing about Japanese culture and it is this lack of knowledge that allows them to project reading induced stereotypes on the Japanese character in the novel. I really like “The Elegance of Hedgehogs” (ok I love it) for its account of the reading life. It also tells us a lot about the effects of stereotypes.

incurablelogophilia.wordpress.com has a great review of The Elegance of the Hedgehog-my post here is partially based on comments I made there. Most of the negative remarks on the book have to do with the notion that the book some how stereo types Japanese culture. To me this misses one of the biggest themes of the book.

Hedgehogs (I love the title) tells us a really lot about the reading life. One of the things it shows us is how it leads to stereo typical perceptions of others and ourselves.

"The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova-Vampires and The Reading Life

Vampires are often portrayed in films and novels as creatures of great erudition. Deep readers
lurking in musty collections of obscure lore in which dark secrets can be found. Carefully
selected new acolytes can be admitted to their kabbalistic realm, the cost only being their soul.

These are some of the themes mined in The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (2005-909 pages). Why do readers evolve into vampires? Does reading drain our life force?

The Historian is a very long book. I love long books as long as the content helps the book. Some of the historical aspects of the book are interesting and shows the author has watched some History channel programs on the Baltic and the Biography Channel show on Vlad the Impaler. The descriptions of Istanbul and other cities are also interesting enough. The conflation of Dracula and Vlad the Impaler was also dealt with on The History Channel. To me there is a good bit of duplication in the historical narratives and travel log parts of the book. The characters are not that well developed. A lot of the conversation seems stilted. The central love story is not real convincing.
The book does get better as you go on and I really enjoyed the last fifty or so pages.

The book does show us somethings about the reading life. it show how reading can lead to obsessions that can drain other aspects of our lives from us. It also show how a shared love of common reading interests can create immediate bonds.

I think maybe the book is set in preinternet post world war two Europe in order for scholars and academics will be required to do all their research in books and special libraries rather than on line. The lore of the Vampire seems much more recondite when it is in a private library in Romania than when it is on The Guttenburg Project

The Historian to me seems worth reading as a suspenseful vampire mystery (it did take a while for something exciting to happen) I still do not know why we accept the notion that Vampires are deeply read but it makes us thing about some Reading Life issues. The central characters are nearly all book centered persons. I enjoyed The Historian. It is a clever take on the Dracula story. This was the author's first novel. I will look forward to her next one.

Mel u

I AmThe Messenger by Marcus Zusak-a warning tale about the reading life

Cover of I Am the Messenger

I Am The Messenger by Markus Zusak


After loving "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak I was very happy to find another of his books, I Am The Messenger, in a local book store. The books central character and narrator is a nineteen year old cab driver named Ed who lives in a shack with an old dog named Doorman.

"no real career.
No respect in the community.
Nothing"
Like The Book Thief there is a lot in I AmThe Messenger". The book shows us, among other things, how a reading centered life can lead us away from the world. We can decide for ourselves if this is a rationale for lack of worldly success or a rising above it. This may well seem strange to most readers but Ed kind of brought to my mind Ishmael of Moby Dick. In the opening pages of Moby Dick Ishmael talks about why his lack of worldly success means nothing in the grander scheme of things. He speaks like a man who has read deeply into lots of deep books. Way more than a whaler should have. His reading has left him fixed on a deeper reality and he can retreat at any time into his books. He is also a man who has no possessions, no family, no life on shore. Did the reading life protect Ishmael or elevate him or did it in part lead him to have nothing? In "I Am The Messenger" we can see the same thing starting to happen to Ed.

"I was reading when I should have been doing math and the rest of it"
"Have you ever noticed that idiots have a lot of friends"
"I have read Ulysses and half of Shakespeare. But I am still hopeless, useless and practically pointless"
"A man like me thinks too much"
"I think his real name is Henry Dickens. No relation to Charles"
"I have read Joyce and Dickens and Conrad"
"Only in today's sick society can a man be persecuted for reading too many books"
"I didn't know words could be so heavy".

As the book progresses we see Ed Receiving a series of message in the form of playing cards. These cards give him instructions to intervene in the lives of those around him. Some he knows some he does not. The story develops as Ed tries to carry out these mysterious instructions. I do not want to give away to much of the plot as it is very inventive and a fun read. As the book ends we begin to wonder if Ed will one day be an old man in a shack surrounded by his books, maybe the only real constant in his life. We wonder if the books will keep him in the shack
or will they show him a shack is as good as a palace in the end. Like Ishmael floating on a coffin will Ed float through life in his cab? The reading life helps Ed see through the vanity of life (just like my own brings up to me the echo of Samuel Johnson) and at the same time gives him his excuse to live out his life in a shack.

I Am The Messenger is also a neat love story and a buddy book and has a lot of action scenes. I learned some Aussie slang from it. The book can tell us a lot about the reading life and it is also a bit of a warning.

I totally liked "I Am The Messenger" (2002-357 pages). It is a lot of fun and makes me hope Markus Zusak will write a lot more books. I have his first two books on my Amazon wish list.

"The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak-a wonderful account of a reading life

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

This is a wonderful book. It has won a host of prizes and been praised in the print media and in numerous book blogs. It is classified as a young adult book but please do not be put off by this. It is written in a way that will for sure appeal to age 10 or so up readers. Over all the vocabulary and sentence structure are not difficult. You will learn a few new German words along the way but that is ok. The production quality of the book is great, easy to read with at times changing type face. There is even a book within a book.

"The Book Thief" shows us a lot about the reading life, how a love and obsession with reading effects the main Character Leisel and those around her. There is an old saying about deep books-"The book reads you at the same time you read it". The narrator of the book is Death. This is a daring conceit pulled off perfectly. I even came to Like Death and felt in sympathy with him at times. The book is told in a time and place of great evil. You know it is there, you cant forget it but it does not get in the way. Leisel gets her first book, "The Grave Digger's Handbook" by stealing it, hence the book title. Leisel and her step father bond from reading the books she steals. One of the seemingly very unsympathetic characters in the book is the Mayor's wife. Not wanting to add any spoilers, Leisel and the Mayor's wife end up bonding over books in a very unexpected way. We see Leisel begin to see the humanity in other people through her reading of the books she steals. As you would guess, some very sad things occur in this book but some wonderful things also.

Least we think the effects of the reading life are all wonderful we can see in "The Book Thief" that it is not. One can be into the reading life-seeing life via the prism of the effect of the books we read on us by reading 1000s of books or by reading one book as the supreme clue to all things. In the world of "The Book Thief" for far too many people that meant "Mein Kampf", not flat out evil people but people who might have read only one book in their life are guided by it. Even if they cant read it, they carry it around and pretend to read it. So there maybe another idea at work here, maybe the book thief is really Mein Kampf and the millions of lives stolen by the ideas in it, lives of those loved the book as much or more than anyone else. Maybe reading 100s of books stops the power of one book.


Mel u