The Night Circus- A Delightful tangent from list reading!

Such a pretty, glittery tale about magic! I alternately wanted to continue reading  and stop reading so the story didn't have to end. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern is a 5 star book in my opinion. I knew I would love the book by the title, but I didn't realize how much.

I named my blog magic and mystery because to me those two things describe my love all things deep and spiritual. For me, magic is real (although not the circus and slight of hand variety) and mystery is what makes life worth living. This book has both elements to it and I just ate it up. I started the book as I started a very fun adventure to visit a friend. It was a perfect book to be reading  while on a journey.

There was a great quote about magic being the way the world is, "This is not magic. This is the way the world is, only very few people take the time to stop and note it"

The book finishes on one of my favorite themes. The magic of story and the healing power of  of deep truths in mythology, fairy tales and old stories. I have always believed that these things contain soul level truth. The book also talks about dreams and how we should all be living to our fullest potential. Both of these themes have always filled me with such glee. I discovered quite early the joy of living for things that make you happy (not hedonistic, bachanal pleasures but the things that make you tick). The things that make you come alive, are the things you should pour your life into. There were several awesome quotes about dreamers and the idea of story

"Someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There's magic in it"

"You may tell a tale that takes  up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose"

I have several of these stories and tales that I have read and shaped me for better or worse. Not all of them are beautiful tales, but all of them involve real life. Some on my list include: East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Doestoyevsky and some of the more recent ones including A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher and About Grace by Anthony Doerr.

I have discovered two things of late. a) that I probably should have taken more philosophy in university because I love finding things in stories that hint at the meaning behind the universe  and b) that I really should have been an English major in university because of the sick pleasure I get from ripping apart a story and finding themes in it.

"The truest tales require time and familiarity to become what they are"

"He reads histories and mythologies and fairy tales , wondering why it seems that only girls are ever swept away from their mundane lives"

"There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path"

There was a lot about dreams and the story of Bailey who is a young boy who stumbles upon the circus is particularly heart warming as he discovers what it is he wants to live for. I love dreams. I would love eventually to do something that would help others discover that in themselves. But what job is that? Career counsellor? That's a piece of it, but so much more I am sure...

"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees dawn before the rest of the world ~Oscar Wilde

The circus in the story was called "Circus of Dreams" in French. I thought it a most appropriate  name given that the majority of the circus was someones imagination made reality.

"But you built me dreams instead"

"Follow your dreams, Bailey...no matter what that father of yorus says, or how loudly he might say it. He forgets that he was someone else's dream once, himself"

"The Bailey he is now is closer to the Bailey he is supposed to be than the Bailey he had been the day before"

I guess that is all I will say about dreams and magic but I'll end this review with a description of some of the most beautiful things in the circus. A room filled with snow, a garden made of ice, a room with bottled scents, feelings and emotions, "unusually talented kittens" that jump through hoops, a star gazing room,  and a circus that appears suddenly in town without warning, is only open at night, dressed in black and white, peopled with victorian era ball gowns and dapper suits and fronted by a huge clock that has a multitude of beautiful moving parts. It is singularly the most beautiful thing I have ever heard of.

I'll leave you with one last quote to ponder. It tickled me pink and left me giggling to myself uncontrollably!

"...Not as one smiles at a random member of the audience when one is in the middle of performing circus tricks with unusually talented kittesn but in the way that one smiles when one recognizes someone..."

Book 25- Invisible Man (38th Book)

Wow! I was not expecting that! I didn't know much about this book but I knew it was a book about the African American experience. I was thinking it would be an interesting story but something that didn't really apply to my life beyond an interesting history lesson. Boy, was I wrong. The book Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is a poetical work of existential questioning. I found myself listening raptly to the story and struggling with my identity right along with the nameless narrator. That is the sign of a good book!
This book, first off, has a great opening and closing line. It starts with "I am invisible" and ends with "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies I speak for you?"

The book follows a nameless narrator through his life as he experiences the various possibilities open to an African American young person shortly after the civil rights movement. He wins a scholarship to an African American school and sells himself out to the vision of it, only to discover, after accidentally showing one of the white donors the underbelly of the poor community, that his beloved leader Bledsoe was a fraud who was selling out his students to further himself in a white world. Expelled from the school he is sent to New York to make his way in the North where a Black man is supposedly more free. As he navigates a factory job, Harlem and the communist group called, "The Brotherhood". He realized, as he states in the opening line, that he is invisible, simply a nameless cog in the great American wheel worthy of nothing but to be spit out and tossed away by his own Black brethern and White people alike. It isn't until the Prologue that the story finally reconciles itself through a beautifully spun  descriptoin of  human nature and what it is like to be a member of society and yet still an individual.

The book uses African American folk culture to show what it is like to be a minority in America. Some of the African spirtuals clearly show the nature of a repressed culture in their focus on death and irony.

One of the snippets of song that comes to the nameless narrator at a particularly difficult moment was "Well they picked poor Robin clean". Through his difficult experience he finally realized that the song was talking about how it was a reflection of the African American experience of constantly being torn down. One of the most poignant experiences in the novel for me was a trivial incident where the narrator runs into a cart selling yams. The smell tempts the narrator but reminds him of his "backward ways" back home.  He eventually caves and buys a few filled with memories of home but also shame. The silly line he creates to reconcile his two selves has biblical overtones to it, " I yam, what I yam".  One of the lines that shows me clearly what it must be like for a minority living in a dominant culture is this:

"You could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us what something we liked"

How horrible to hate yourself because you liked something different from everyone else. This is a truth that can span so many minority issues including race, sexual preference, religious differences etc, etc, etc.

The book also focuses on the competing pulls on man in general. The pull to be part of a whole, and also the pull to be an individual set apart from everyone else. There was one quote in particular that made me realize that minorities frequently only have identity as a member of a group. I suppose as a member of the "majority" the thought had never crossed my mind:

"Our task is making ourselves individuals. the conscience of race is a gift of its individuals who see, evaluate, record"

"I saw not a crowd , but the set faces of individual men and women." It was finally after the funeral of one of his collegues in the "Brotherhood" that the narrator could finally see his brothers and sisters in Harlem as individuals and not as a collective that behaved in  a certain way.

The book is series of brilliant existential questions about "Who am I? what am I? how did I come to be? What do I make of the life around me" ~ Ellison quoted in The Novel 100. I love most existential thoughts and have always been okay with the fact that I don't have the answers to all of them. The anxiety we all face in facing the unknown nature of these questions thrills me rather than causing me anxiety. The narrator ends the novel recognizing that though he is invisible he still has a responsibility to come out of hibernation and play a role in existing amongst others. Here are some great quotes in that vein:

"You ache with the need to convince yoruslef that you do exist in the real world, that you're part of the all the sound and anguish"

"step outside teh narrow borders of what men call reality and you step into chaos...or imagination"

"live is to be lived, not controlled"

"None of us seems to know who he is or where he is going"

"I have been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself"

"Once you get used to it, reality is as irresistable as a club"

"I was my experiences and my experiences were me"

Lastly, the book also hints at sin (both communal and personal), but also talks about the true meaning of life being that of Love. I loved that about the book.

"The fact is that you carry part of your sickness within you, at least I do as an invisible man"

"I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all I find that I love."

This project has been good for me to expand my horizons and read books that I never would have picked up in my life. Some lead for pleasant suprises and some lead to a new perspective. The next book on the list is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. I am excited to read it since I enjoyed Ulysses

The Nine Tailors (37th Book)

Oops!  I forgot to review this book on my blog although I did a super quick review on Goodreads. This is a classic british murder mystery. My favorite! This one was just as good as any of the others I have read though I am not sure that it is any better although it is on the list of 1001 books to read before you die. Keeps you guessing until the end which I always like. The predictable ones although fun and fluffy aren't as much fun. This book is set in the Fenlands in Eastern England and have some definite biblical flood references in it.  There are two mysteries to solve in this novel, one being the theft of some jewels many decades ago and the other being a more modern murder tied in with the jewel theft. The novel is a stuffy British Lord and his manservant who get trapped in the small town of Fenchurch St. Peter during a snowstorm. He stays in touch with the church rector and comes back to solve the murder when it happens.   The Nine Tailors is a reference to the church bells that are always present in the novel. They toll out significant events in the town and you get to learn a lot about bell ringing and the importance of what they are used for. I had no idea that there was so much to it. I would love to actually hear church bells run by an actual human being. I don't think it is something I have ever heard before and it sounds complicated, fascinating and beautiful. Anyways, I think that is about all I have to say about this novel. I was excited to read something by  Dorothy L. Sayers who is one of the founders of the modern mystery.

Book 24-Vanity Fair

It took me forever to finish Book 24 which is Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray but in the end the feat was accomplished and I actually enjoyed the process. I didn't doubt that I would, because although I didn't know much about the content of the book, by the title it seemed like my kind of sctick!

The book dubs itself  "A Novel without a Hero" and in a sense it is true. All the characters have the fatal flaw or "hubris" that Shakespeare so often potrays in his novels. Though each characters flaw is different in the end you see that they all made mistakes or lived selfishly at the expense of others.

For most of the novel I was convinced the dear old Dobbin, a devoted puppy dog following around Amelia, one of the novels two main characters, was a hero since he loved selflessly. I had to laugh after reading Daniel S. Burt's view on the book and also after coming to the end of the novel because I took a good hard look at myself. Of COURSE I would love Dobbin, because I too have been guilty of being someone who blindly follows people about who have no idea I exist. Amelia who Dobbin loved was also guilty of blind love as well, since she loved her unfaithful husband beyond reason. I think this quote best describes the flaw in their natures and mine: "The crime she had long ago been guilty-the crime of loving wrongly, too violently against reason"

And another: "And the business of her life, was to watch the corpse of Love"

The novel really focused on how Amelia did not see her husband for who he actually was, but for the exalted image of him she had created. When she witnesses him in unfaithfulness she stuffs the knowledge down inside of herself to avoid seeing it. I thought this extremely long quote showed the fate of a lot of women and men:

"Did she own to herself how different the real man was from that superb young hero she worshipped? It requires many, many years and a man must be very bad indeed before a woman's pride and vanity will let her own to such a confession"

You don't hear about idol worship in the church very often anymore, but I once had a professor at the Christian university I went to stop class to speak at great length about two troubled types of relationships one being Relational Idolatry and the other soemthing along the lines of Relational narcissism. I will always remember reacting violently to that message and seeing myself in it so clearly. If there is anything that people put on a pedastal and worship in this world it is often the idea of Love and sometimes another person.

It isn't until the end of the novel that Dobbin cracks and admits that his Idol has fallen off of her pedastal: " I knew all along that the prize I had set my life on was not worth the winning"

What is so great about literature is that when our flaws, or values are seen outside of ourselves in literary form you can really see them clearly for what they are and their end results. It is much easier to digest them first as fiction and then apply them to our lives, then it is to see them clearly in ourselves.

I love how this novel starts as a walk through the Vanity Fair and that it really plays up the idea of life as a trip to a fair.

"Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a moral place certainly, nor a merry one, though very noisy"

"The world is a looking-glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face"

"Are not there little chapters in everybody's life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?"

I absolutely adore the idea that our lives our a story with chapters, climaxes, villians, heros, etc. Perhaps that is why I love fairytales so much.

The novels lighthearted nature allows for very hard things to be said. Apparently Thackeray turned to the use of the novel as a teacher after facing much  hardship in life.  Daniel S. Burt talks about the fact that this novel was written "informed by  his sense of the world  made up of fellow sufferer's and sinners".

There are so many other quotes that I loved, but the last thing I will end with is one German concept the book talks about that I super excited about. I nearly died when I googled what it meant since I thought the concept was spot on!

The term was, "Sehnsuch nach der Liebe" which loosely translated means "yearning or longing for love". The book describes it this way, "yearning after the Ideal, and simply means that women are commonly not satisfied until they have husbands and children on whom they may centre their affections, which are spent elsewhere, as it were in small change"

Although the book uses the concept to talk wittily about how women have the closest bosom friends until they marry and turn their backs on all but their husbands and children after,  I actually think the term applies to so much more. So many of our addictions, obsessions, delusions and attempts at self soothing are all pale reflections of what we are really longing for which is to intimately know and be known by God. I have a magnet I picked up in Portobello Market, London which also talks about this too. It states, "We are all prostitutes and junkies". I love it because that statement basically means that we all sell our selves for something and all chase after other things as well". Kind of a harsh way to live life, but I actually find it makes me more compassionate towards others when I realize I am just as flawed as everyone else.

The next book is Book 25-Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, I am not so patiently waiting its arrival through the library system. Methinks I will not LOVE this book, but I am determined to read through the list and expose myself to new ideas.

And now for something completely fluffy...

WOW! What a good book! I loved Martha Grimes The Old Wine Shades. I expected to read it as a fluffy mystery (which it is) but it also comments on the idea of story as important to life and about stringtheory and Shroedinger's cat. So it goes a bit beyond your average British mystery. 

Here are a few quotes about story:

"We always  dream a story" referring to the fact that our brain makes up a story for the random images are mind flings are way when asleep. As bizarre as they are they are all incorporated into a tale.

"You dream in symbols, yes, but the symbols take place in narrative form"

"Are you saying we live for stories?"

YEEES!!!!

The books prologue ends with "Man walked into a pub..." and from there Richard Jury and the reader are hooked. The story told over a series of days in a series of pubs begins a very crazy and bizarre mystery that the reader wants to solve. You are left guessing right up to the last page and at the end of the book just want to keep right on reading. I can't wait to pick up the next Martha Grimes novel. Good thing I bought a stack of them at the mega used book sale/fundraiser in my town this fall.

I am still obsessed with all things British since my trip to the UK this summer and this book didn't let me down. Filled with just enough street names and tourist locations to keep me happy I gleefully snapped up things about Fulham Road, Hatchards, Fortnum and Mason and Picadilly.
"You've got to understand with Harrod's you're there because you're there. It's a destination place, you know like Las Vegas or the La Brea Tar Pits"

Although this book was obviously not on any of my great classics lists it was well worth the tangent to read it. you have to go fluffy this time of year and I didn't have anything holiday themed to read.

Book 23-The Sound and the Fury

I did not like this book, it was horribly difficult to read, and in the end left me understanding what I read (to a degree) but not what it meant.

Thank God for Daniel S. Burt's brief description of the book in The Novel 100 because after reading it I realized that I understood more of what was happening than I thought I did, but I still didn't end the book feeling like I learned anything. I wanted to like it after having such a huge epiphany after reading Absalom, Absalom, but try as I might I just can't say that I loved it. Interestingly enough this is one of 6 books on the list of 100 that does not appear on the list of 1001.

I didn't like any of the character's in this novel, and normally that is okay (when they are parts of myself that I can identify and want to work on) but in this case I just didn't like any of the characters they were all crazy and not in a good way!!!

Benjy-who is the special needs adult whose brain you are plummeted into at the beginning of the novel frustrated me (but also gave me compassion for those for whom the world is a confusing place)

Quentin- One of the narrators who appeared in Absalom, absalom is apathetic and unable to face real life

Jason jr- Huge jerk that I hope to never be like in my life. Man, he made me mad, but I was glad he came to at the end of the novel

Caddy- although she was kind to Benjy and took care of him she was also selfish and her choices ended up being the downfall of her family

I suppose Dilsey- the black servant was a fine character who ran the family out of love and compassion. I felt so bad for her as she ran around trying to keep everyone in line. The scene in church where Benjy is silent listening to the preachers story of redemption was beautiful, but still not enough to redeem the novel. Daniel S. Burt talks about this as the alternate option that could have happened for the family, but it wasn't paraticularly clear for me as the reader. I finished the book, and thought to myself... now what was the point of all of that?!

I guess one thing that I did get out of the novel is that you will torture yourself i you live in the past. The quotes that stood out most for me had to do with time and its passage.

"I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire" ~speaking of the pocket watch Quentin was left by his grandfather

"I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it."

"clocks slay time"

There is an interesting occurence that happens when they change the "man child's" name from Maury to Benjy. I loved the quote "Folks don't have no luck changing names" because I actually think that people do! I have always been a believer in the Biblical process of changing names when your character changes. I hope to name my children for character if I am ever blessed to have them.

Finally here are a few random quotes about various characters that amused me or made me think.

"Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature" ~Faulkner seems to have a thing with virginity...

"You're not a gentleman,' Spoade said. 'No I'm Canadian,' Shreve said. Lol!!!! As a Canadian that made me laugh!

A quote about Caddy shall end off this review and than I can finally leave this book to rest. Thank god! "It was to isolate her out of the loud world".

Onwards to Book 24 which is Vanity Fair. Kind of excited to read this one!

Book 22-Crime and Punishment

ahh Book 22, one of the very first classics I ever read was Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I instantly developed a love of Dostoyevsky and picked up everything I could by him. I read Crime and Punishment in 2002 while I was still in university. I enjoyed the darkness of his books, which to me equated realness...because the earth isn't always a pretty place and we humans aren't always the beautiful people we can be. This story is a horrible nightmare about the tortures of our conscience and how internally we do know right from wrong (and yet, still chose to do the bad anyways).The story is also about finding redempetion and realizing we all suffer from the human condition with all its beauty, glory and agony.

I eventually put down that type of reading when I started working in the Social Services field because the harsh realities of Dostoyevsky, the horrid family histories of canadian author David Adams Richards and the softer, but still brutal approach of John Steinbeck, smacked too much of real life. My clients lives were dark enough as it was I didn't need to see it in fiction. I had a few dark years were I stepped away from truth giving fiction and started reading extremely fluffy novels (the wonderous genre called Cosy mysteries which has very little to do with real life). I came back to reading classics shortly before I picked up The Novel 100 list because I realized I had let one of my favorite parts of myself die. I love truth, beauty, literature and beautiful words and when I realized I missed out on the things that the classics spoke to me; I knew I had to pick them up again.

Here are a few quotes that spoke the most to me back in 2002. God bless the things I recorded in my quote book!

"What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind-then all the rest is prejudice, simply artifical terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be."

"I have come because I am bad. There are men who wouldn't have come, but I am a coward..."

"I regard you as one of those men who would stand and smile at their torturer while he cuts their entrails out , if only they have found faith or God. Find it and you will live"

"Life had stepped into place of theory and something quite differnet would work itself out in his mind"

Russian novels speak to me about faith and God. Not the north american version of faith with its lulling platitudes and self serving cliches, but real faith founded on both the beauty and horror of humanity. It speaks to me on such a deep level and reminds were I want to be even though I am so far away. I am the person I am because of some of the Russian novels I read during my formative years. I hope I can find my way back to the person I was when I first picked up Crime and Punishment and subsequently devoured everything Dostoyevsky had, because I am so far from there at the moment I don't even know how to begin.....