April's Books

Reading-wise, I did a lot of messing about this month--picking things up and putting them down, sometimes for good, sometimes for no good reason at all--and this is the second month in a row that I haven't made my 13 book quota. *Sigh*  I also did a lot of television- and movie-related book reading, quite inadvertently. (I had hoped it would shape up to be a polar exploration kind of month actually.)  But here is what I did manage to get read:

1. True Grit by Charles Portis

My god, I wish I had read this book when I was a girl. I wish I had read it instead of seeing the movie for the first time--but, no. No, that's not entirely true. I loved the movie--the original movie, the John Wayne version--from the very first time I saw it on late night television back before you could conjure up any old movie on the internet at any hour of the day or night. I was perhaps nine years old--the movie and I were the same age, just about-- and I sat in the dark in front of a flickering television, transfixed by Mattie Ross. I remember so well the scene where she chooses her pony Little Blackie, and the scene where she tells Rooster about LeBoeuf, "Look at him grinning like a skunk. He'll cheat you for sure," and the scene where she falls into the pit of rattlesnakes and breaks her arm.  I loved that movie. 

I loved Mattie in part because I was starved for young women who acted as the agents of their own stories. I loved her the same way I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder, but I loved Mattie even more than I loved Laura because Mattie was smarter and more outspoken, strong enough to stand up to and even best John Wayne's salty old Rooster Cogburn. I truly loved that movie. 

When the Cohen brothers remade it, I was determined not to like it, but I liked it anyway. It wasn't a great movie, but it was a very, very good one, and against my better judgement I liked it. When they were mocked for the celluloid sin of remaking a movie, the Cohens squawked about its not being a remake but rather a more faithful accounting of the novel. (Which: Yeah, right. Let me assure you: It's a remake.) But the novel--My god. 

The novel is a fine and beautiful thing and the Mattie of the novel is even better than any Mattie ever put on film. I appreciate her now more than I ever did, perhaps because the Mattie that narrates the novel is the same age that I am now.  It's rare that a male author can (or will) write a female narrator that gets it right, but Portis does. He nails it. Definitely a keeper to be re-read.

2. I Await the Devil's Coming by Mary MacLane

What do you do when, like Mary MacLane, you are born with the heart and mind of a warrior, a conqueror, but are also the butt of the cruel joke that made you a woman and confined you to the late nineteenth century when your only outlets are likely to be marriage and child-rearing? You rail against fate as well as you can. But it is ever enough?

3. Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure by Admiral Richard E. Byrd

I love a good polar adventure and this is almost that. I love a well-written nineteenth century narrative and this is also that. Byrd spent almost six months (March through August) alone in a small cabin in the Antarctic, cut off from anyone by the inhospitable polar winter. Only a few weeks in, the heater in the cabin malfunctioned and poisonous carbon monoxide gas became his constant companion. He survived, just barely, by going without heat for much of the day (even when temperatures dropped below -170) and living with the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning the rest of the time. He was eventually rescued by a group of men who risked their lives to save his.

4. An Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett 
 
Cute, I guess. A quick read.

5. Journals: Captain Scott's  Last Expedition by Robert Falcon Scott and Max Jones^***

Scott was kind of a jerk, but these journals have been edited with an eye toward crafting a more inspiring explorer. Lots of nuts and bolts stuff about the expedition, but also some interesting stories. (One of my favorites is about a group of eight killer whales that broke through a two-foot thick ice floe while hunting a group of staked sled dogs). Scott of course died on his quest to be the first to reach the South Pole, but his greater disappointment was probably the news that reached him only days before sailing for Antartica: Roald Amundson, a Norwegian explorer, had planted Norway's flag at the pole. Scott went anyway, died there anyway, and his journals were retrieved and sent to his widow.  I bogged down in this book and abandoned it about 300 pages in, when they hadn't even started for the pole. I'll pick it up again though, I'm sure.

5. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout***

I bought this because it won a Pulitzer Prize. (That'll teach me.) It is a collection of very well written but not very interesting stories that reminded me of the British TV show that starred Martin Clunes, Doc Martin. I abandoned this book about a third of the way in.

5. Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times,
6. Call the Midwife: Shadows of the Workhouse,
7. Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End by Jennifer Worth

Worth's trio of autobiographical books have recently been turned into a hyper-nostalgic series on the BBC that I watched based on the recommendation of an online stranger. (I like the series, despite the sometimes sappy sentimentality.) The books are, of course, far better than the TV series. They paint an unfamiliar picture of a familiar time in history: Just after WWII a young woman becomes a nurse and midwife and goes to work with a group of similarly trained nuns in the overcrowded, poverty-stricken East End of London.  We hear many stories about the after-effects of the last world war on young men, but we almost never hear about how it affected young women. This book gives a glimpse of that. I'm also ever-curious about London's East End as it existed in that time in history, as a Cockney stronghold.

8. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

I loved it in so many ways, but I think Cheryl Strayed must be (must have been then?) kind of hard to take in person. A relatively quick read--I stayed up all night to finish it--but I will admit that I skipped right over the part where she and her brother have to kill her dead mother's aging, ailing horse.

9. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald*

Yes, of course I've read it before, many, many times. In fact, had a great love affair with the works of Fitzgerald when I was in my late teens/early 20s.  Still, it's been almost 20 years since I read it. Fitzgerald can turn a phrase and do it deftly enough that if you follow the curve of the sentence you might almost miss the deeper sentiment behind it. I still like him, despite his fascination with the amoral rich. (That mirrors our own generation's fascination with the amoral rich, I guess.)

10. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim^

I'd seen the movie (twice, actually) and really liked it. I had no idea it was a novel though and was pleasantly surprised to find that out--and also to find that it was a free download from Amazon. I'm about half-way through it now, but it is a quick, pleasant read.

*-Re-read
**-Finishing a previously shamefully abandoned book
***-Begun and shamelessly abandoned
^-Kindled