January 2008 - Page 2 of 4

A Clergyman\’s Daughter

by George Orwell

Having read several of Orwell\’s novels, I don\’t think this is the best of his work. A Clergyman\’s Daughter tells of eight months in the life of Dorothy, a young woman who lives alone with her father. He\’s the preacher in a small town. A very domineering, almost cruel man. Dorothy\’s entire days are spent doing housework and endless jobs for her father and his church. She\’s very dutiful. Her one break from the drudgery is occasional visits to the town scoundrel (who tries to seduce her every time). Then in an unexplained incident, Dorothy looses her memory and wakes up on the streets, far from home. She begins a journey through London\’s lower class society, spending time picking hops with itinerant workers in Kent, teaching in a shabby private school, and attempting to survive living on the streets.

Through all her trials, Dorothy never really changes. She suffers everything in a very docile manner, and it becomes apparent that this novel is not about growth of character but an exposé of social conditions in London. Small town life, gossip, greed, the condition of private schools, the deplorable situations of homeless people. It is not as in-depth on these subjects as Down and Out in Paris and London, but still quite interesting and a good read.

Rating 3/5 324 pages, 1950

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, General Fiction, Past Reads

Zamba

the True Story of the Greatest Lion that Ever Lived
by Ralph Helfer

Ralph Helfer always dreamed of working with animals. From his beginnings as an assistant in a small pet store, he worked his way up to owning his own establishment, a ranch full of exotic animals which he trained and performed with in movies, commercials and other productions. Helfer believed that it was safer and more humane to train animals with affection, communication and trust rather than the fear, domination and force commonly used on large exotic beasts (like lions and tigers in circuses) at the time. He got his chance to prove his methods when a friend brought home a four-month old lion cub from Africa. Named Zamba, the lion was raised in Helfer\’s home (he even shared his bed!) and their bond of love and trust was complete. Zamba was the only lion trustworthy enough to perform in films with child actors. His remarkable story unfolds smoothly in these pages, full of laughs as well as sad moments.

Zamba was a really easy read. I finished it in a few days. I only wish I could have read more about training methods used to teach Zamba his special commands, rather than all the gushing about how much the guy loved his lion. While reading it, many other books came to mind. It made me think of Born Free, the story of a game warden in African raising a lioness, who was remarkably gentle with people. Of Here Keller, Train This!– about a man who trained big cats for the circus without using whips and guns. Of The Man Who Listens to Horses, because in that book the author was the first to use body language communication instead of brute force to tame horses (instead of \”breaking\” them). There is even a vivid scene in Zamba that strongly echoed a scene in Jane Yolen\’s fantasy novel Heart\’s Blood– if you\’ve read that one, I\’ll tell you what it is (I don\’t want to write a spoiler).

Rating: 3/5 …….. 256 pages, 2005

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Nonfiction, Current Reads

Fifteen Rabbits

A Celebration of Life
by Felix Salten

Fifteen Rabbits was written by the same author of the original Bambi. It tells about the day to day life of a group of rabbits in the forest. Naturally, the rabbits face many dangers (Hop, a rabbit featured in Bambi, is the sole survivor of his litter) yet still keep up their hope and zest for life. This book isn\’t a cute children\’s story, it has many serious moments and sober scenes. Even though they talk, their speech is presented so tastefully the rabbits don\’t feel too personified. One of the scenes I remember very clearly was of a rabbit who was caught by a child, taken home and kept in captivity. Salten described very vividly what stress and terrors the rabbit felt in its new surroundings. It is interesting to compare this book to Watership Down; both are a realistic fictional account of what life is like for such a humble creature as a rabbit.

Rating: 3/5 224 pages, 1988

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Fiction, Juvenile Fic, Past Reads

Charlotte’s Web

by E.B. White

I haven’t read Charlotte’s Web in years, but I feel that I know it very well. It’s a classic children’s story about a pig who is befriended by a spider. Wilbur the pig was the runt of the litter and due for death but the farmer’s eight-year-old daughter Fern rescued him. She raised him as a pet. When he got too big, he went to live on her uncle’s farm. There Wilbur soon learned that his life wasn’t secure after all; he was being fattened up for Christmas dinner. But Charlotte the spider came up with a plan to save his life… by creating what some considered a miracle. Charlotte’s Web is a wonderful little story. The spider is calm and wise, and shows off an advanced vocabulary. The pig is charming, sweet and prone to emotional hysterics. There’s a large cast of other animal characters, and the little girl Fern, whose mother worries about her because she claims the animals talk. This was one of my favorite books as a child, and I still like to go back and read it now and again.

I thought of it today because of a dream I had last night. In part of the dream, my apartment was covered with spiders and spiderwebs. I snipped the threads to collapse the webs, but couldn’t bring myself to touch the round sticky egg-sacs. I said to myself in the dream: “Wilbur should have crushed the egg-sac on his tongue. Then the world wouldn’t be peopled by spiders. I wonder what it would have tasted like? Ticklish, maybe…” What a strange thing to think of a lovely book!

Rating: 4/5

184 pages, 1952

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Animals Fiction, Juvenile Fic, Past Reads

Annapurna

A Woman\’s Place
by Arlene Blum

My older sister is a climber, and she gave me this book for Christmas. It felt quite fitting to be reading it during the first substantial snowfall of the year in Baltimore. I could look out the window at white coldness and imagine being among the Himalayan heights. Annapurna tells of the American Women\’s Himalayan Expedition that in 1978 attempted the summit of Annapurna I, the world\’s tenth highest peak. At the time, no woman had ever climbed a 8,000 meter peak (26,200 ft. Annapurna is 26,540 ft.)

I really had no idea what mountain climbing is like before reading this book. The amount of planning, logistics, manpower and supplies was staggering. The ten-women team had to overcome male prejudice, disagreements amongst themselves, fatigue, frostbite, altitude sickness, and disgruntled porters. The colorful character of Nepal contrasted sharply with the austere beauty and danger up on the mountain. The last twenty pages were particularly gripping. I was frightened just reading about the dangers they faced. Why exactly do climbers put themselves at such risk? Blum makes it clear that mountain-climbing is not just about the challenge, thrills or proving that women can do it. There is a serenity and peace to be found at high altitudes- they climb because they love to do so, in spite of how difficult it is. I particularly liked this quote at the front of the book:

You never conquer a mountain.
You stand on the summit a few moments,
Then the wind blows your footprints away.

Rating: 4/5 247 pages, 1980

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Current Reads, Nonfiction (general)

Meme: Reviews

Question from Booking Through Thursday:
How much do reviews (good and bad) affect your choice of reading? If you see a bad review of a book you wanted to read, do you still read it? If you see a good review of a book you’re sure you won’t like, do you change your mind and give the book a try?

I\’m rarely convinced to read a book I\’m certain I won\’t like even if it gets an excellent review. It can be a very well-written book, but that doesn\’t mean I\’m going to like it personally, if I don\’t care for the subject matter or genre. So those don\’t make it into my reading pile.

Bad reviews of books I want to read influence me about half of the time. If a book I\’ve wanted to read gets a number of bad reviews and they\’re for reasons I can see myself being put off by too (not just all personal opinion), then I might knock that one from my list.

On the other hand, I add lots of book to my TBR lists that I\’ve never heard of before at all, because they get good reviews that spark my interest. Since I\’ve begun blogging, I\’ve found about fifty books from just reading blog reviews.

So if I\’ve already made up my mind about a book, a review won\’t do much to sway me, unless it\’s very strong and multiple reviews say similar things. But reviews introduce me to many, many new books that I want to read.

Tags: memes

Ender’s Game

by Orson Scott Card

This is one of my absolute favorite books. I still remember when I first read it as a teenager- a youth-group leader from my church named Patty gave me a copy. I was hooked right from the beginning. Card’s easy, precise prose and realistic dialog make the book vivid and quick to read. And the story is like nothing I’d read before at the time.

In Ender’s Game, Earth has faced previous invasions of an alien species, and is preparing for another possible attack. The government has selectively bred geniuses, hoping for a child prodigy that can be trained to command Earth’s armies against the aliens. Andrew Wiggin (nicknamed Ender) is one of their best results. He is sent to “Battle School” in a space station at the age of six years old, where selected children are trained for future intergalactic warfare. Among the most skilled and intelligent, Ender faces enormous pressure to succeed, and pushes himself to the limits. He also faces alienation and bullying from the other children, fears of the coming alien invasion, and doubts about what the government’s real intentions are for him.

In all of the fiction I’ve read, it’s hard to find a more lonely and distressed kid than Ender, who has a good heart and yet can’t help doing things he regrets. Even his siblings are engaged in rivalry with him- for they’re just as smart and have their own ideas and plans about the future of Earth. If they work together, they just could possibly save the world, even though they’re only kids. Card makes it pretty believable. I feel like this book really transcends its genre; even if you don’t really like sci-fi, there’s a good chance you’ll like this one. It’s a lot about human dynamics and destiny; the manipulation and control of one very precocious child’s life.

This book won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for fiction in 1985 and 1986.

Rating: 5/5

226 pages, 1977

Read more reviews at:
Trish’s Reading Nook
A Striped Armchair

Tags: 5/5- Loved It, Fantasy / Sci Fi, Past Reads

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur\’s Court

by Mark Twain

I never heard of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur\’s Court until I chanced across it on a library shelf. It is quite different from Twain\’s other novels. It tells of a 19th century engineer who gets hit on the head and inexplicably wakes up in medieval England during King Arthur\’s time. A knight finds him and takes him to court, where his manner of dress and speech arouses suspicion and he\’s going to be burned at the stake. But he remembers an eclipse will occur on the same date, and uses this knowledge to make himself appear powerful and magical, frightening everyone and landing himself a position as King\’s advisor. Before long he\’s practically taken control and uses his ingenuity to introduce technological advances. He attempts to teach the whole country things like the use of soap, democratic ideas, and the falsehood of superstitions. He runs up again Merlin, who is portrayed as a charlatan and fool, but dangerously in the people\’s favor. More than an adventure story, this book is a satire on English society, criticizing the power of monarchy, poking fun at the knights, ridiculing the ignorance and squalor of medieval society. I don\’t know how accurate it is historically, and I really questioned if one man (even if he is an \”ingenious Yank\”) could have had in his head all the knowledge needed to \”re-invent\” and build everything he did (like railroads, printing press, gunpowder, electricity and dozens other things) but it is very funny with lots of tongue-in-cheek type of humor.

Rating: 4/5 307 pages, 1889

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Historical Fiction, Past Reads, Speculative Fiction

Alive

the Story of the Andes Survivors
by Piers Paul Read

I cannot say much about this book. It relates the harrowing experience of the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes mountains in 1972. They were traveling to Santiago, Chile: fifteen teenage boys from a Catholic school headed for a rugby match, along with twenty-five relatives and other people who went along for the passage. When the plane crashed high in the cordillera, it landed in deep snow in an area totally barren of any plant or animal life. Of the forty passengers and several crew members on board, thirty-two survived the crash. At the end of their seventy-two day ordeal, only sixteen were left alive. They managed to live by consuming the bodies of those who died in the crash. The details are gruesome and it can be difficult to read. After their rescue, many of the survivors\’ attitudes towards life had been irrevocably changed. Reading Alive, it\’s hard to avoid wondering: if you were in a similar situation, would you resort to the only means of staying alive? It is so difficult to imagine, I don\’t think anyone can ever know unless they are faced with such an extreme ordeal.

Rating: 3/5 318 pages, 1974

more opinions:
Shelf Love
Farm Lane Books Blog

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Current Reads, Nonfiction (general)

The Giving Tree

by Shel Silverstein

My three year old has just discovered the Shel Silverstein books on our bookshelf, so I have read The Giving Tree to her about ten times in the last six days, and its been on my mind. It is a simple story about the friendship between a tree and a boy. At first the boy comes to the tree to play and eat her apples. As he gets older, he has different desires and takes her fruit, branches, etc to use for things. In the end, the boy is old and the tree is just a stump. When I was younger, I thought this was a beautiful story about selfless, unconditional love like that of the Christ story or a mother for her child, always giving and never needing anything more than love in return. Now I\’m not so sure; reading it again as an adult it makes me pause. It could also be seen as a one-sided, almost abusive relationship; the boy takes everything and what does he do for the tree? Why does she have to say she\’s sorry she has no more apples or branches? He took them all away! It makes me feel kind of sad; but I guess that\’s how life is sometimes. Love isn\’t always evenly reciprocated; sometimes it\’s sad, and sometimes there\’s peace in the end anyways.

Rating: 3/5 64 pages, 1964

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Inspirational, Juvenile Fic, Past Reads

Month: January 2008

RATINGS / SUBJECTS: