The Lost World & Other Stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

From The Lost World: Mr. Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth- a fluffy, feather, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centred upon his own silly self. If anything could have driven me from Gladys, it would have been the thought of such a father-in-law.

I have of course read Sherlock Holmes, and I really loved the Doyle's science fiction stories too. There are, I think, 5 stories in this book, all eerie sci-fi. One deals with a mysterious sheltered land in the Amazon, home to pre-historic creatures, another with a "poison belt" that the earth passes through, and another with Spiritualism.  They were all really entertaining, but I think The Poison Belt was the most creepy. The premise is that the earth is passing through an ether cloud that will kill everyone on earth (or so they think.) Like Sherlock Holmes, many of the stories are narrated by Malone, a reporter. But the main character is really Professor Challenger. There are many good characters, and as I said, this is a gripping story. The Lost World is also very good, and kind of scary. The book challenges everything we think we "know" about the world; that dinosaurs are extinct, that humans are invincible, etc. etc. I would definitely recommend this to fans of Sherlock Holmes and of science fiction.

Read The Lost World & Other Stories:

• if you like science fiction
• if you like Sherlock Holmes and other Conan Doyle

461 pages.

Very Good! I would recommend this book

Essays of E.B. White, E.B. White

From Goodbye to Forty-eighth Street: For some weeks now I have been engaged in dispersing the contents of this apartment, trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave me alone. It is not a simple matter. I am impressed by the reluctance of one's worldly goods to go out again into the world. 

Of course I've read E.B. White's children's books (Charlotte's Web, The Trumpet of the Swan, Stuart Little), but I'd never read his essays before, though I did know that he was a famous essayist. And I just loved his essays. Even more than the children's books. He's funny and witty, and he writes about interesting things. There's a quote on the back of the book of his about the essayist, "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest." That quote is kind of true, but it also demonstrates his writing style. I could definitely see the guy who wrote Charlotte's Web in his essays. He lived part of his life on a farm in Maine, and he tends to anthropomorphize his animals, something he (obviously) did in all three of his children's books. But his essays really are entertaining. Some topics are more interesting than others, but he writes about all of them very well. I particularly liked the essays about his farm and the various inhabitants of it. Also, some of his essays about the ridiculousness of various parts of government and administration were funny. For example, the way that snow plows always plow the road and pile the snow up right in front of everyone's driveways. It is very annoying, and it never helps anybody.

Read Essays of E.B. White:

• if you like essays
• if you like E.B. White

347 pages.

 

Outstanding Book That Will Stay On My Bookshelf For Rereading (jf I own it)!

Little Bee, Chris Cleave

Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl. Everyone would be pleased to see me coming.

Little Bee is certainly a very interesting book; at first it didn't seem that great, but then I found myself drawn in. As the book says on the back, when you tell your friends about it you don't want to tell them happens. So I won't. But Little Bee is about two women; Sarah, a British woman, and Little Bee from Nigeria. Their lives collide when Sarah and her husband Andrew take a vacation to Nigeria and encounter Little Bee and her sister on a beach. Little Bee eventually joins Sarah in England. This book, by the author of Gold, was also given to me by Simon & Schuster, and was originally the one I was most interested in. But for me, Gold was ultimately more gripping. That's not to say the Little Bee was no good; I did like it a lot. And I love the name Little Bee. Sarah and Little Bee alternate in narrating the chapters, and Little Bee is really wise and full of experience, though she is only sixteen. Sarah has experience too, but probably a little less than Little Bee, and this is really striking, because she is so much older.

Sarah and Little Bee are very different women. In comparison to Little Bee, Sarah seems pampered and used to the easy life. But she has her problems too. Little Bee has seen a lot of bad things, and she has to deal with the repercussions of them. You can read Book Weyr's excellent review of it here.

The ending of Little Bee was bittersweet, and you weren't really sure how it would all work out in the end. But despite the sadness of the book, it is laced throughout with hope, and is definitely a worthwhile read.

Read Little Bee:

• if you like Chris Cleave
• if you are interested in Nigeria

266 pages.

Very Good! I would recommend this book!

Island Beneath the Sea, Isabel Allende

In my forty years I, Zarite Sedella, have had better luck than other slaves. I am going to have a long life and my old age will be a time of contentment because my star -mi z'etoile- also shines when the night is cloudy.


Island Beneath the Sea is set in the late 18th century on the island of Saint-Dominigue. The book focuses on a plantation owner, Toulouse Valmorain, and his slave Zarite, with whom he develops an interesting relationship. This book started rather slow, but in true Allende fashion, it quickly became very interesting. Toulouse Valmorain is very dissatisfied; he got dragged out to the island from Paris when his father died when he was twenty. He married a young woman named Eugenia, and she went stark raving mad. So he begins to rely more and more on Zarite. Of course there is the typical relationship of female slave and male master between them, but there is also something else. Toulouse genuinely cares about Zarite (sometimes), and he certainly couldn't do without her. I loved the setting of the book; the Caribbean Island rich with sugar cane. On the one hand, it's very beautiful and the whites live in big mansions, but on the other hand, field slaves must do backbreaking labor all day long in the sugar cane fields under the baking sun. Two very different seeming worlds, on the same island. Island Beneath the Sea also talks about the brutal revolution on the island that became Haiti. Of course the whites were very cruel towards their slaves, but then when the slaves rose up, they were just as terrible towards whites that they captured. That's not the way to restore peace of any sort; each side just keeps getting angrier and angrier.

Once again, Allende's writing style was quite absorbing; another great novel by her. It was different in that it wasn't at least partially set in Chile; she was trying to branch out a bit, and I think she succeeded very well.

Read Island Beneath the Sea:

• if you like Isabel Allende
• if you are interested in Saint-Domingue (Santo Domingo)
• if you are like stories about complicated human relationships

457 pages.

Very Good! I would recommend this book!

New York Book Haul

While I was in New York City and Washington, DC, I visited many bookstores, and acquired many books, so I'm going to do an image post of all the books I got. Some I got for my birthday, and others I received from Abram's for review.
So, as you can see, quite a few books. That's my ideal birthday present, a stack of books. I went to many bookstores in DC and in New York. In Washington, DC, we visited a bookstore owned by one of my dad's friends. The books I got for my birthday were from Rizzoli's in New York, except for Notre Dame de Paris, which I got from BookBook on Bleeker Street. We also stopped by Bauman's Rare Books and Argosy's Rare Books. I just love looking at rare books!

On the Road, Jack Kerouac

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. 


On the Road is a very famous classic from 1955. As it is described by Amazon it is "the most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac's alter-egos, On the Road is a cross-country bohemian odyssey that not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture." It makes sense that it is an autobiography; it really feels like it. Jack Kerouac was obviously a famous writer, but I think maybe one of the reasons that On the Road was so popular is because it describes the travel bug; that feeling that you just have to move from place to place, with only a few bucks in your pocket and not much of an idea of where you're going or how you're going to get there. Sal Paradise definitely has this; he's always eager to get to the next town and just keep moving. That said, at first, I didn't think that this would be that interesting; the plot didn't sound that great. But yet, I found myself drawn in almost imperceptibly, until before I knew it, I was enjoying it. It is slow reading, however, despite it's short length. But it's a good book, and definitely a must read.


Read On the Road: 

• if you like Jack Kerouac
• if you like books about traveling

307 pages.  

Very Good! I would recommend this book!

The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens

Night is generally my time for walking. In the summer I often leave home early in the morning, and roam about fields and lanes all day, or even escape for days or weeks together, but saving in the country, I seldom go out until after dark, though, Heaven be thanked, I love its light and feel the cheerfulness it sheds upon the earth, as much as any creature living.


I enjoy Charles Dickens, and this book sounded quite interesting, along with A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House (reviews coming soon.) The Dickens I'd read before were Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations. The Old Curiosity Shop tells of Nell Trent, a young girl living in an old curiosity shop who cares for her grandfather selflessly. But the loathsome dwarf Quilp, seizes the shop because they can't pay their debts to him, and they have to flee. The plot of this was so-so, and the writing was a bit overwritten, as Dickens tends to be. But what redeemed it was the characters: Nell is portrayed well. She's an innocent, sweet young girl, and all these horrible schemes are going on around her. Quilp, is a horrible, wicked man, and he's described perfectly. You can just imagine him. There's also a great cast of supporting characters, and a nice cover from Penguin Classics, as well as good ink illustrations.

There were, however, two disappointing things in it. One of them was that there is a female lawyer called Sally Brass in the book. She's independent and intelligent, and yet she is depicted as one of the worst characters of the lot, after Quilp. I mean, I suppose you have to expect that from that time period, but it was still off-putting. Another thing was the ending. It was just so depressing. Without giving too much away, I was just like really? And all that talk about Heaven and smiling angels just got on my nerves. We want them to be alive here, not in some hypothetical, probably not real place where can't see them. But up to that point, I would have given the book 5 stars, so it's just demoted to 4. You should still read, just be prepared.

Read The Old Curiosity Shop:

• if you like Charles Dickens
• if you are looking for an interesting classic

556 pages.

Very Good! I would recommend this book!