Great Posts on Reading Classics

I've found a couple of really great blog posts on some of the blogs that I follow that talk about reading classic novels and some of the challenges that come with them, as well as suggestions on how to tackle them, if you're trying to encourage yourself to read one. Here they are, in no particular order:

1) Desert Book Chick has a great posting on How to Read a Classic at her site. She was recently trying to motivate herself to read Anna Karenina (a GREAT book if you've never read it!).

2) Dead White Guys is putting together a series of articles on reading classics. The first one tackled becoming BFF's with the author; the 2nd talks about getting to know the author's intent. They are super funny and very enlightening.

3) Page Turners did a guest posting for Desert Book Chick on what defines a classic, and why we should read them.

Check these postings out. They are very encouraging and inspirational!

Ranking the 3rd 10 Books

Thanks to the Alexandria Quartet, we actually had 14 books in this group!

I was surprised when I went back to look at the grades I gave the last ten books I read to see how many were in the A/B range. There were only a couple in this group that really blew me away...the rest were really just okay for me, dawg. Besides maybe the first two, there aren't any others in this group I see myself picking up and reading again in the future. The overall themes of this 3rd group were darker. We had the kids that lost it on the pirate ship, the teacher who wanted to take over the lives of her kids, the seedy side of Hollywood, and people under house arrest. It would be nice if the next group of books was more upbeat!!!

Without any further ado, here's this group's breakdown, from 1 (best) to 14 (worst).
1) A House for Mr Biswas
2) A Farewell to Arms
3) Scoop
4) Balthazar
5) Justine
6) Mountolive
7) A Room With a View
8) Brideshead Revisited
9) A High Wind in Jamaica
10) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
11) Kim
12) The Day of the Locust
13) Finnegans Wake

#70....The Alexandria Quartet....Clea

"I began to see too that the real 'fiction' lay neither in Arnauti's pages nor Pursewarden's--nor even my own. It was life itself that was a fiction--we were all saying it on our different ways, each understanding it according to his nature and gift."

Clea, the fourth and final installment of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, attemps to wrap up the lives and destinies of the characters we've grown to know, love and/or detest during this series. Darley is asked to return to Alexandria to drop off Nessim and Melissa's kid with Nessim, and while doing so, hangs out with all of his wacky buddies to see what they've been up to since he took off to be a hermit on the island. Here's the breakdown of what's been going on in Alexandria:

Nessim and Justine: after their little illegal weapons caper, they're under house arrest.
Scobie, the dead cross-dressing secret agent: after his homemade liquor killed a whole bunch of people, and touching his bathtub made a bunch of women get pregnant, he's now revered as a quasi-saint by the locals.
Capodistria: actually not dead as was once thought. The guy everyone thought was him floating in the water at the duck hunt was someone else. He lives in Greece now.
Pursewarden: still dead. As far as I know.
Clea: she's apparently still painting, but she hooks up with Darley for much of the book and kicks him to the curb by the end of it. She also has an unfortunate boating accident that changes her career.
Mountolive: he's getting married to Pursewarden's blind sister Liza. He's still PO'd at Nessim.
Pombal: he hooked up with a married lady, who gets sick and dies.
Balthazar: he fell in love with a guy and went psycho. He's recovering now though.

And that's it. Clea reads like the high school reunion you'd never want to attend. After how much I liked the first three books, particularly Mountolive, this book fell very flat for me. I wanted, and to be honest, expected everyone to have more dramatic life changes, like Nessim going in front of a firing squad or Justine dying of the clap. Durrell had created a world where nothing was really outside the realm of possibility. So I have to say I was surprised that he went this direction. The story just kind of fizzed out for me like one of those sparklers on 4th of July.

In closing, I'm not sorry I read this series. There were some shocking revelations throughout, which kept you guessing what would happen next. By the time I finished Mountolive, I was used to drama and misunderstandings and 'a-ha moments'. Clea was different from the other three books in that it was the only one of the books that went into fast-forward. Nothing new and amazing was revealed in Clea like in the other three books, and maybe that was why I didn't like it as much?

Durrell showed us there are always different angles, different views, different takes on any one situation, and it was like peeling back the layers of an onion. That was the take-home message for me from this series.

Grade: C+

Hop-Scotch

For those of you joining us from the Crazy for Books Book Blogger Hop, welcome! Glad you're here. This site is your oyster...crack it open and take a look! It goes great with a good Pinot Grigio! I've dedicated myself and my reading free time, foregoing anything involving vampires, zombies, shopaholics and Stephanie Plum, to reading the Modern Library's Top 100 Board's list from the last century. We've been at it almost a year now, and I'm about thirty books through. So at this rate, by the time I'm done, the Modern Library will probably have put together their Top 100 list from this century! Right on!

The question the book blogger folks ask us this week is, how many books are on your TBR shelf? What a great question. When I first started the blog, I refused to go out and buy the next book on the list until it was time to read it, so that I wouldn't get all freaked out when I read the back cover and dread reading it. Well, that went by the wayside long ago when I realized half the books on the list aren't readily available at my neighborhood Barnes and Noble, and basically have to be exhumed from someone's basement and sold on Amazon.com. Thanks to the internet, and my newfound worship of Half-Price Books. I currently have 18 books on the shelf ready to go.

Those of you who are already following us here at Journeys, and are waiting breathlessly for my review of Lawrence Durrell's Clea, I'm about 15 pages from finishing it up. Let me tell ya, I cannot wait to be done dragging around a book that is roughly the size and weight of my car. Although my right arm is looking a bit more toned these days.

Thanks for stopping by!

Think About It Thursday

1001 Books has started a weekly meme where she'll be asking questions about all things literary. So of course I had to jump on board!

This week's question asks where our favorite literary vacation spot would be. Sadly, she doesn't mean the wonderful beach on the Riviera Maya where you'd love to be lounging on a deck chair in the sun with endless margaritas while you read. What we're looking for is the time period you'd love to visit from one of the books you've read.

I would have to say, hands down, Jane Austen's England. I love, love, love the formality, the manners, the cool reserve. Telling people off with words like "thither". The quid pro quo on that would be as long as I could also somehow transform into Lizzy Bennet, make out with Mr Darcy for a while, and then simultaneously kick the asses of Mr Collins AND Mr Elton from Emma. That would rock.

Head on over and join the fun!

Hop, Hop, Hippety-hop

Welcome to all of you stopping by courtesy of the awesome Book Blogger Hop, sponsored by Crazy-For-Books. Feel free to take off your shoes, plop down in a cushy armchair, and take a look around. It is my quest to read the Modern Library's Board's List of the Top 100 Books from the last century. Believe it or not, I am 30 books in, and still alive!

Crazy-For-Books asks us Hop participants this week if we like to listen to music while we read. I used to do this a lot when I was younger. I remember listening to Def Leppard's Pyromania while I was reading Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff in middle school. Don't ask how I came up with that combo. Now as I get older, I've discovered that I am losing the ability to concentrate on anything longer than a segment on TMZ about Snooki from Jersey Shore getting arrested....so as a result, I can't read, listen to music, pat my stomach and chew gum at the same time anymore. I do, however, get these goofy hairs that sprout out of my chin every now and then, so this getting older thing isn't all THAT bad. :)

Take a look around the site, and I have a question for all of you stopping by. How do you feel about reading the classics, and what is the last classic book you read?

Thanks for coming by!!!

#70....The Alexandria Quartet....Mountolive

"He pondered deeply upon them during those long sleepless days and nights and for the first time he saw them, in the light of this new knowledge, as enigmas. They were puzzles now, and even their private moral relationship haunted him with a sense of something he had never properly understood, never clearly evaluated. Somehow his friendship for them had prevented him from thinking of them as people who might, like himself, be living on several different levels at once. As conspirators, as lovers--what was the key to the enigma? He could not guess."

In Mountolive, Lawrence Durrell's third installment of the dramatic Alexandria Quartet, Durrell takes a different turn from his previous novels Justine and Balthazar. We finally leave behind the whiny, depressed narrator Darley, and switch to an omniscent third person narrator who gives us the skinny on what's REALLY going on behind the scenes. Mountolive might well be called "Nessim", because a good portion of the novel takes place from Nessim's POV...and boy, is he not who you think he is.

David Mountolive, a Britisher who is briefly mentioned during Balthazar, meets up with the same wacky cast of characters from Justine when he spends time at the Hosnani household perfecting his Arabic. He develops a close friendship with Nessim (pre-Justine) and an even closer friendship (with benefits) with Nessim's mom Leila, who is tending her sick husband. We also get to know Nessim's younger, less attractive brother Narouz, who is a couple cards short of a deck, if you know what I mean. Mountolive returns to England, and after years in the diplomatic service is finally given an Ambassadorship back to Egypt. He hopes to hook up again with Leila, whom he has been corresponding with by letter since he left, and whose husband has finally died, but Leila becomes disfigured after a bout with smallpox and is afraid to meet him.

Through diplomatic channels, and thanks to one of Pursewarden's one-night-stands, Mountolive and we find out what Nessim's really been up to all this time. Apparently he's been shipping weapons illegally to Palestine in support of the Jewish cause. Which, if you've been keeping up, explains why he was so hot to marry Justine (she of the Jewish faith). We discover that Justine was sleeping with both Pursewarden and Darley to keep an eye on them in case they knew anything about Nessim, since Pursewarden is in the diplomatic corps and Darley is close to Melissa, who was dating someone who knew all about Nessim. When Pursewarden discovers the truth, he kills himself rather than turn in his friend, but tells Mountolive what he knows before he offs himself. Mountolive has to turn this information over to the British, and starts to see his friend in a whole new light. The Minister of the Interior, Memlik Pasha, is kept quiet by Nessim through bribery, and they both agree that no one need know which Hosnani brother was responsible for the diplomatic melee. So you guessed it...Narouz gets the blame and the gunfire.

There were good and bad things for me about Mountolive. Parts of it bored me to tears. It was way more historical and political than Justine or Balthazar, which were more gossipy and, at times, mopey and sentimental. The best part of the book, for me, happened once everyone started to figure out what Nessim was up to. I could not stop reading. There were a lot of "a-ha" moments....scenes from the first two books suddenly made sense. It made me want to go back and re-read the first two books again so I could put things together, or in case I missed stuff.

I have read that the next book, Clea is actually a sequel, not another POV on the same time period like the first three books, so I will be excited to finally move forward in time and see what happens to everyone.

Grade: B+