Book Review

When was the last time you wrote one of THOSE?! 8th grade? Yeah me too. 

However, recently, I read an incredible book that definitely deserved some attention and acclaim. As someone who greatly admires words and the power and impact they can have as well as ancient myths, this book completely captivated me.

Ransom by Davild Malouf is an astounding novel. Malouf’s poetic prose is so fluid and powerful the novel is a true piece of art. I highly, highly recommend it for a delightful, inspiring read.

On the surface, Ransom is a story that unfolds between two men on opposite sides of the war for Troy. However when peeling back the many layers of Malouf’s poetry there is so much more to the story.  The novel is a “moving tale of suffering, sorrow, and redemption.” There is much to learn from the morals and lessons in the pages of this book. It is a truly timeless piece.

Some of my favorite lines:

“One of the chief concerns of a good king is the image he presents, and most of all, as he grows older, the image that other men will keep of him when he is gone. That is what I am concerned with now, in these last days of my kingship.”

“It seems like such a simple thing to a big strong fellow like me — a breath. You’d think you could just give it to them, free, even if it meant a little tightening in your own chest.”

“Ah, there’s many things we don’t know, sir.  The worst happens, and there, it’s done.  The fleas go on biting. The sun comes up again.”

“Even the ghostly recollection now of what he had never in fact allowed himself to see made his old heart leap and flutter.”

“We’re a long time in the earth, father. Plenty of silence there.”

I realize this wasn’t much of a review, my English teachers would probably be disappointed. 😉 I hope I made a strong enough case for you to give it a try.  If not, read this NYTimes review from when the novel was first released.

One author’s take on the future of books.

Monday’s daily “Letters of Note” was a letter from a little woman who wrote a big book.  Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, wrote the following letter to Oprah back in 2006 regarding her opinion on books.

(Did you know, Harper Lee only wrote ONE book?)

Dear Oprah,

Do you remember when you learned to read, or like me, can you not even remember a time when you didn’t know how? I must have learned from having been read to by my family. My sisters and brother, much older, read aloud to keep me from pestering them; my mother read me a story every day, usually a children’s classic, and my father read from the four newspapers he got through every evening. Then, of course, it was Uncle Wiggily at bedtime.

So I arrived in the first grade, literate, with a curious cultural assimilation of American history, romance, the Rover Boys, Rapunzel, and The Mobile Press. Early signs of genius? Far from it. Reading was an accomplishment I shared with several local contemporaries. Why this endemic precocity? Because in my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read. A movie? Not often — movies weren’t for small children. A park for games? Not a hope. We’re talking unpaved streets here, and the Depression.

Books were scarce. There was nothing you could call a public library, we were a hundred miles away from a department store’s books section, so we children began to circulate reading material among ourselves until each child had read another’s entire stock. There were long dry spells broken by the new Christmas books, which started the rounds again.

As we grew older, we began to realize what our books were worth: Anne of Green Gables was worth two Bobbsey Twins; two Rover Boys were an even swap for two Tom Swifts. Aesthetic frissons ran a poor second to the thrills of acquisition. The goal, a full set of a series, was attained only once by an individual of exceptional greed — he swapped his sister’s doll buggy.

We were privileged. There were children, mostly from rural areas, who had never looked into a book until they went to school. They had to be taught to read in the first grade, and we were impatient with them for having to catch up. We ignored them.

And it wasn’t until we were grown, some of us, that we discovered what had befallen the children of our African-American servants. In some of their schools, pupils learned to read three-to-one — three children to one book, which was more than likely a cast-off primer from a white grammar school. We seldom saw them until, older, they came to work for us.

Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it.

And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up — some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.

The village of my childhood is gone, with it most of the book collectors, including the dodgy one who swapped his complete set of Seckatary Hawkinses for a shotgun and kept it until it was retrieved by an irate parent.

Now we are three in number and live hundreds of miles away from each other. We still keep in touch by telephone conversations of recurrent theme: “What is your name again?” followed by “What are you reading?” We don’t always remember.

Much love,

Harper

I think Harper Lee’s recount of her childhood and the importance and value of books to her as a child is touching and so untainted.  Do children still have childhoods as innocent as this? I hope so.

While I’m constantly debating whether to get and iPad or Kindle, I love Lee’s sentiment towards boks and how they will never be replaced.

While I’m big on convenience and will most likely get an electronic reading device someday soon, I will never stop reading books as well. My book collection is one of my most prized possessions.