5 Stars for Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

 After reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, I turned my china cabinet into a bookshelf. I can't help but think this is a Jane Eyre move that reflects the practical and the individual. It is a small thing, and certainly can't be compared to the choices Miss Eyre made in the novel, but it is a starting point to becoming my own personal heroine. This book is thick with the Victorian Era emphasising the limitations of women during this time which is why Jane is so heroic. She makes honest choices of  spirit, and heart within her strong moral code of ethics. Her choices often deny her happiness, love, and family, but she stands by her choices. She is a lady deserving of great admiration and happiness. I strongly recommend this book to both men and women who wrestle with spirit and love under the scrutiny of ethics. Perhaps you will find yourself Eyre-like. 

5 Stars for The Patient by Jasper DeWitt

 

The Patient by Jasper DeWitt will make you sleep with the light on ...if you sleep at all after reading it. It is a slow boil of psychological horror that will rip your soul from the blanket of illusion that blinds us to the supernatural. Retelling this story is Parker, a young psychologist with real compassion and an insatiable curiosity. He tells the story of The Patient with a mysterious, sadistic history. Out of respect for privacy, Parker doesn't use real names of the people in the story and often people are only referred to with an initial. The authenticity of his tale begins rather ludicrous, but as he unravels the mystery of the patient, it becomes every bit real ending with thick ambiguity questioning the fabric of reality. I am left thinking of my own ghosts. At 11, I swore to my mother a ghost came out of the wall of my bedroom. DeWitt now makes me wonder if it might have really happened. I highly recommend The Patient by Jasper DeWitt. It will scare you back to childhood. 

Four Stars for Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

 

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is beautifully written with imagery bent on heartbreak lingering in your mind long after you read it. I read it years ago, but revisited it recently because I plan to teach it. At 21, I would have easily rated this book a 5, but now I found the POV jumps jarring. I also found the writing gorgeous, yes but a little disjointed. The premise of the book is about Pecola, a young black girl who thinks blue eyes can make her loveable. Pecola defines herself as ugly and this is as far as her characterization goes. She is every girl, white or black, who desires to be something they are not. Of course, at a younger age I related more to her. I hadn't yet accepted my flaws as part of what makes me unique. Funny, at one point growing up, I wished for blue eyes. So, naturally I wanted Pecola to find her inner beauty and accept her flaws as truth and with grace. Pecola doesn't really tell her own story, instead we understand her through well-developed characters existing in her world. Her mother and father's stories were lined with fear, desire, abandonment, and cruelty so much so they failed to love Pecola. Here you start to see why Pecola wants the blue eyes. Towards the end of the story, Morrison throws in a random character, Soapchurch, a sham mystic. Soap is suppose to grant Pecola her blue eyes, and you have to read several pages of Soap's history before you find out whether or not The Bluest Eye will go all mystic and give Pecola her blue eyes or not. Soap was really a creepy character and I wish Morrison could have left his history out. This is the biggest place this story went sideways for me. The Bluest Eye is a journey of self-discovery, but not only Pecola's journey. Everyone in the story is searching for self-acceptance, too many in fact. In the end, Morrison still deserves the notoriety. Her writing makes you examine, analysis, and accept or not the deeper questions about who we think we are. The Bluest Eye is her first book. Since, she wrote other great novels. Her book, Tar Baby is my absolute favorite, but I wonder if I read it now would it have less allure for me because thematically Tar Baby is about a young woman breaking out of the shackles the world often places on women and their stereotypical roles in society, at least that is how I saw it in my early twenties studying art and religion and searching for my place in the world defining my femininity with a new definition with every new nugget of knowledge. Thinking back now, I think Morrison helped me accept myself without Blue Eyes and the Tar Baby within my white shell. So, despite the disjointed nature of her first book, The Bluest Eye, I still highly recommend her novels. As far as Oprah goes, I don't really care. I was reading Morrison long before I even knew Oprah.

Five Stars for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey is a frightening book about alleged insanity and abuse of power. Told by Chief Bromden, the silent Indian in an insanity institution, the reader gets the inside scoop on conman Randall McMurphy and Ice Queen Nurse Ratched. Written in 1859, this book rails against the rules of modern society particularly WASP - White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, or really any kind of institution that cripples the individual. Randall McMurphy is the hero of this book, flawed, yes, and maybe even insane, but his character is so beautifully written one can't help but root for him. However, Nurse Ratched, Big Nurse (Big Brother) is the villain. We are not suppose to root for her, but reading this book for a second time, I found pity for her. She is oppressed by the rules governed by order and routine. She is not an individual but a society stiff in its own oppression. I even found myself not feeling sorry for Mr. McMurphy because part of me found him to be insane and worse in a forever state of despair which is largely worse. In the end, I found Chief Bromden as my personal hero. Yes, great book and one that is not forgotten. 

5 Stars for Don Quixote

I started this book in March and finished it in August. It is indeed a long book, but one that I often put on rewind, because "Knight Errant" Don Quixote and squire Sancho Panza's adventures were an unbelievable buffoonery. I love it! He did what? Quixote thought an inn is a castle and windmills giants. Really? It reminded me of Monty Python's In Search of the Holy Grail. I could not stop laughing and reread much of it just to laugh again at it.

Further, I often tell my students that nothing is original. Everything stems from the Bible, Homer, or Shakespeare, but now I have to include Cervantes. The puns on Panza's parables and general speech were so familiar to me in movies and books I've read. This story generally felt like an old friend and darkly humorous.

After awhile in the book, Panza's buffoonery wore on me and was not as funny, and my feelings of Quixote became admirable because of his intense insane sense of doing right against the wrongs in the world. He was genuinely a good guy despite being crazy. Not to spoil, but I was not happy with the Duke and Duchess. How dare you?

I fell in love with this book and will read it more than once. Yes, it makes fun of knights but it doesn't make fun of what they stand for and it is that irony that makes Cervantes brilliant.

A big thanks to my brother-in-law for this recommendation!

4 Stars for The Power by Naomi Alderman

The Power by Naomi Alderman takes science fiction to a level of realism that looks like a Francis Bacon painting. The particular Bacon painting that comes to mind is "Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X," painted in 1953. Without the history behind this painting, it is a man who is fading in power. The Power is like that. Men lose their power as women become stronger, shooting lightning with the flick of their fingers. It's beautiful, mesmerizing, but terrifying. I did not see this book as particularly feminist despite the concept, but a book about power and what each individual does with it. I love how Alderman analysis power outside of gender, "The shape of power is always the same: it is infinite, it is complex, it is forever branching." I was also intrigued by the biblical references of the snake(aka skein), the rescue of Israel, and Mother Eve. It definitely makes the reader ponder rooted ideas about the beginnings of power in the same way I did when I read Margaret Atwood's poem, "Quattrocento". Despite, the excellent concept and plot making, I enjoyed Roxy's character the most. She is a Joan Jett bad ass singing Love Hurts through the novel. I greatly appreciated her resilience. Overall, this book was close to a five star review from me, but the beginning dragged with exposition and I did not get into some very onion peeling worth characters until much later. I absolutely recommend this book to men and women because we all need to question what power means to each one of us.

4 Stars for The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood

The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood by Coral Ann Howells was recommended to me by a friend and colleague who teaches Atwood poems to advanced students. I plan to teach The Handmaid's Tale this year and wanted more insight into it. I also want to use more of Atwood's poetry that is not easily accessible with a quick online search. Often students will look up the meaning of a poem or novel and this squashes their initial critical thinking. Generally, I like to read a novel first with only my third eye. 

I enjoyed the essay, Blindness and survival in Margaret Atwood's major novels, by Sharon R. Wilson. Wilson illustrated an insightful approach to novels like Oryx and Crake and Cat's Eye. I will have to read Oryx and Crake now, but I still did not connect with Cat's Eye. I really didn't like the narrator, Elaine, despite the interesting survival journey Atwood presented. I just don't like an emotionless character, even when the writer picked a palette of greys that lead to a marble in a red pocketbook, an insufficient ending. Offred in Handmaid's Tale also seemed void of emotion, but the situation made her character work for me rather than Elaine's. Offred had a reason to become indifferent. Her choices were eliminated. Elaine seemed to have too much choice. 

Novels aside, I also enjoyed Branko Gorjup's Margaret Atwood's poetry and poetics. I adore Atwood's poem, Quattrocento. The line, "The kingdom of god is within you/because you ate it." Gorjup says, "Eve is metamorphosed into a true protean self as the whole of a diverse creation disappears into her and she is a free agent now, alive with possibility."

Eve as a free agent is fantastical. 

I ended up with a four star rating for this, because some of it I did not understand as well as I would have liked on a first read, but I've only read three Atwood novels and a few poems. I will have to change that.