20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Erg. I hate it when scheduled posts don't publish for some reason. My Clarissa post was supposed to go up last night, but for some reason it didn't, so you get two posts from me today instead. I just finished up my eighth book for Adam's Magical March, which I thoroughly enjoyed! I managed to get eight fantasy/science fiction books off my shelves and I've started in on a ninth but since it's 947 pages I don't think I'll finish it today since I'm on page 71. :)

Today's book also counts for the March prompt for November's Autumn's A Classics Challenge. This month's questions are about setting:

Level 1

How has the author introduced the setting? What does it tell you about the character? about the time period? What is the mood of the setting?

Level 2
How do you envision it? Find a few images or describe it. Do you feel the setting is right? or was it a weak point of the author?

Level 3
If this particular setting was changed how would it affect the course of the story?

Setting is an excellent aspect to talk about regarding this classic: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It's all about setting! The book takes place under the sea, obviously, and on board the Nautilus. In thinking about it, I think the setting was also the weakness. I expected magical descriptions of the sea and the creatures in it, but we mostly got scientific information and descriptions of the Nautilus. I expected to feel like I was along for the journey, but I never did. I felt very disconnected and struggled with being able to really visualize the story. I felt sort of like Verne wrote an outline for a story and then half-heartedly filled it in, but didn't go in and put the passion and details and characterization to make this truly a great story. It's not a bad book, but it left me disappointed.

However, I did enjoy reading about the first time our narrator and his companions walk on the sea floor: "The light, which lit the soil thirty feet below the surface of the ocean, astonished me by its power. The solar rays shone through the watery mass easily, and dissipated all colour, and I clearly distinguished objects at a distance of a hundred and fifty yards. Beyond that the tints darkened into fine gradations of ultramarine, and faded into vague obscurity....It was marvellous, a feast for the eyes, this complication of coloured tints, a perfect kaleidoscope of green, yellow, orange, violet, indigo, and blue; in one word, the whole palette of an enthusiastic colourist!"
This section has more vivid descriptions than a lot of the rest of the book, and also sets up M. Aronnax (our narrator) for wanting to continue his journey with the Nautilus, not that he has much of a choice. He sees the chance to explore the world in a way no one else has and be able to improve his studies and scholarly writings. It makes you understand why he's not as desperate as Ned Land is to get off the boat. I identified more with Mr. Land myself. :)

I had higher hopes for this one, but maybe that's because I know it's loved by many, and maybe my hopes were too high. I found it simply to be okay, and it doesn't make me excited to read the rest of Verne's works, although perhaps his non-sea voyages may be more enjoyable. I own Around the World in 18 Days, so I will give that one a shot at some point.

Clarissa: March Letters

Wow, Clarissa has gotten repeitive! There were a lot more letters to read this month than the last two months, but they all said the same thing. Here's a summary:

Clarissa: Woe is me! My family is forcing me to marry Mr. Solmes. I won't! I won't!
Miss Howe: Your family sucks.
Clarissa's family: You must marry Mr. Solmes! You are a terrible, horrible person because you refuse to marry an old man you don't like! It must be because of Mr. Lovelace, who is evil incarnate!
Clarissa: But I don't even like Mr. Lovelace (although he's not that bad and I keep writing him). But I won't marry Mr. Solmes, I won't!
Miss Howe: Your family still sucks.

So, yeah. I'm not really enjoying this one. I feel like I'm only reading it because I would feel a sense of accomplishment at having read what is probably the longest English language novel. But do I really want to read one million words of this???? I've made it just slightly further than where I stopped last time, hoping it would pick up, but no such luck yet. Maybe I should forget the year-long event hosted by Terri at Tip of the Iceberg and JoAnn at Lakeside Musing and try the readalong Allie and Jillian and some others are doing in April and just power through. Or perhaps I should just call it quits? Why am I making myself read this? I didn't even like Pamela, one of Richardson's other unecessarily long works.

However, I know a BIG event is coming at some point. I think it might actually make me dislike the novel more, or at least the characters, but at least I know something is coming. But, what if I have to slog through 1450 pages before that happens?

On the positive side, here are two lessons I've learned from this book so far.

1. I'm extremely thankful to have been born at a time when I'm free to choose who I marry. I love my parents and respect their opinions, but they in no way had control over who (or if) I married.
2. Whining is annoying. And boring. Note to self: think of Clarissa when you start to complain, then stop complaining!

Helen

One of my goals this year is to read through some of the Greek and Roman works I have in my Great Books set that I haven't read it. I seem to have gotten stuck in the plays. My plan was just to read a couple and then move on to non-fiction, but I marked all of the plays I haven't read yet with sticky tabs and now they are taunting me, so it looks like I'm my new goal is to finish reading the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes! Fortunately, this still works for Jean's Greek Classics Challenge. I do hope to still read a few other Greek works as well.

Oddly enough, Helen really could count toward Magical March as well, although I'm not sure plays count. Like a lot of Greek plays, there are gods involved and they do work a bit of magic. The premise of this story is that the Helen of the Trojan War didn't really run off with Paris. Hera kidnapped the real Helen and locked her away, and created a fake Helen that went with Paris. So the whole massive, brutal Trojan War was fought over a fake woman. That was both frustrating and chuckle inducing. I wonder what they people at the time thought of this take on the story? It's kind of funny, and shows how pointless the war was, but I wonder how well that went over.

Anyway, in the story, the real Helen has been trapped for 17 years!!! Hera doesn't sound like the most pleasant god, does she? Helen is in the same situation Penelope is in - she's having to fend off suitors as her husband Menelaus is presumed dead and even if he's not, he's off chasing the fake Helen so the real Helen should be free to marry. The primary suitor is Theoclymenus, who decides he's going to force Helen to marry him, and he has the power to pull this off. At the same time, Menelaus shows up and finds the real Helen, but can't be seen by Theo. Does he believe real Helen's tale? Will he be able to rescue her? What will Theo do? Is Theo's sister Theonoe - who knows everything that goes on and whose help is necessary if Menelaus and Helen want to escape - a friend or foe? Check out Helen by Euripides to find out! :)

This play is easier to understand and follow than some of the Greek plays, maybe because I'm fairly familiar with the Trojan War so most of the characters were familiar and I wasn't having to work to keep them straight. It's a fun twist on an old story, even if it's almost as old itself!

In other news, I'm working my way through 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (which isn't terrible, but isn't enthralling me either) and I jumped right in to Dragonfly in Amber, which is definitely enthralling! I feel bad for my mixed review of Outlander - I don't think I gave it enough credit for telling a great story. I'm also trying very hard to finish out CB's TBR Challenge - I had to go to the library today because I had a reserve come in. I went ahead and checked out a few more books to save a trip, but I CANNOT touch them until Sunday. Actually, I've told myself I can't finish them until the stack of books I'm already in the middle of are cleared off my table, so I have quite a bit of reading to do! I am going to try to catch up on some blog reading and commenting tonight though. I've been so busy with work lately that I haven't wanted to spend much time with the computer in the evenings and I'm way behind on making the rounds and miss the interaction.

Outlander

Outlander is one of those novels I've heard a lot about from other bloggers. Some people love it, some people hate it, and a lot of people liked it but noted that it's really more of a romance series than a fantasy series. I'm really glad I had heard that going in, or I think I would have disliked it. I would have kept waiting for the fantasy part to kick in more, but it's really just the time travel element that makes this a fantasy - it does read more like a historical romance. I somehow seemed to both love and hate it - the fact that I'm anxious to read the next book in the series tells me I must have landed more on the love side!

I think one of the reasons I liked this book was the idea of suddenly traveling back in time. What would it be like to suddenly be 200 years in the past? What would you do? How would you survive? Claire does things she wouldn't normally do, but she has to adjust quickly to life in the mid-1700s Scotland or be killed. The descriptions of Scotland are wonderful - they definitely made me want to move up Scotland and my travel wishlist. Something in the storytelling kept me flipping the pages, which was good since this clocks in at over 800 pages!

On the negative side, it was hard to read some of the scenes or judge characters by today's standards instead of the standards of two centuries ago. Today, it's clearly wrong for a man to beat his wife, or for a man to beat his child for that matter. Yes, people still do it, but they are for the most part reviled. But 200 years ago, this was common. It was seen as normal - something you did out of love as long as you did it in the "right" way. As long as it was done in punishment for something, then no big deal. However, knowing this and being okay with reading a love story where the man beats his wife for disobeying are not the same thing. It's disturbing.

However, this isn't the most disturbing scene in the book. There's a graphic recollection of a rape scene that was sickening to read. I don't think a rape scene would ever be anything but disturbing on some level, but this just went too far. It was so gross, I just couldn't imagine someone actually doing that, or the author dreaming that up and actually writing it. If this happened early in the book, I would have probably have quit reading, but I was invested by this point and carried on.

I think it sounds like I'm being more negative toward the book than I actually feel. It's just easier in this case to pinpoint what I disliked than what I liked! But, I've already pulled the next book off my shelf on to the table by my reading chair, so I clearly liked it overall. I will say this is a lesson learned in buying books in a series before reading them though - I bought the first two during the closing sale Borders had. I doubt these will be books I'll re-read even though I did like this one, so I hate that I spent the money on them instead of just going to the library. I think that's something the TBR Challenge has taught me - quit buying so many dang books!!! :)

This is the seventh book I've read for Adam's Magical March. Just one more to go! I've already started 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and hope to finish it and maybe one more before the end of March.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

This is yet another book I picked up at a library book sale years ago, and it has lingered sadly on my shelves once I realized it was by Ray Bradbury. I just liked the title and in the mad rush to grab cheap books by the bag full, I hadn't looked at it too closely. I'm glad I didn't, and that I finally read it because I really liked it!

A little background: I had to read Fahrenheit 451 my sophomore year of high school - when I had a teacher I called Mrs. Satan. She was seriously not right in the head. We spent probably two whole months on this short work. We had to find all of the allusions in it - I found over 400! And yet, I ended up with a C on the assignment because on a different assignment, we had to write about which character we identified with the most, and I picked someone who wouldn't have been able to come up with that many allusions, so I got Cs on both assignments!!! Oh, I was so angry. And clearly I'm still a little angry about it! Anyway, I reread it not that long ago, and I still didn't really enjoy it. I felt Bradbury's writing was a little weak and the story just wasn't really developed. So, I didn't have high hopes for Something Wicked this Way Comes.
But...I was so wrong! I ended up really enjoying it. It's about two 13-year-old boys who stumble upon the dark deeds happening at a creepy carnival and get mixed up in some crazy stuff, along with the dad of one of the boys. It kept me hooked and was a fast read - I read all but the first chapter in one day. I loved the descriptions and scenes in the library, about how the library takes you to far away lands and worlds and times. You get to become a warrior, a prince, a president and experience things you can't experience in real life.

One thing I found interesting was how much parts of the book reminded me of the movie Big. The stories overall are completely different, and the tone of this is much darker than Big, but I'm pretty sure whoever wrote Big must have read this and thought "I wonder what would happen if..." even if they did it subconsciously. Both have start with a creepy carnival scene at night, and both involve aging machines, and it was just something in the descriptions that made me keep thinking about Big.

Speaking of movies, as I was reading I kept thinking that this really seemed more like a movie. It was very easy to visualize each chapter as a scene, and the only rough parts in the writing were spots were I thought it would be easier to see the action play out on screen that to write out a description about it. Oddly enough, in the epilogue Bradbury says it was originally a screenplay (well, originally, it was a start to a short story) and that when that failed, he turned it in to a novel. He wrote the screenplay because Gene Kelly wanted him to write something he could play a role in - isn't that funny?

Liking this book makes me want to explore more of Bradbury's backlist. I think The Illustrated Man would be one I want to look into, because he plays a role in this book. Has anyone else read any of his other books? What do you recommend?

This is my sixth book in Adam's Magical March challenge!

Classics Club

A Classics Club hosted by one of my favorite bloggers? How could I resist! Want to join? Check out the info at Jillian's blog.

Here is my list of 50 classics I plan to read by April 1, 2014. A lot of people are doing 5-year lists, but I decided to just go with 50 in two years and then do another 50 or whatever amount at that time. I included a few recent works that may be disputable as classics, but I've noticed them on a few other lists and I'm lacking in my reading of contemporary classics compared to older classics, and I wanted this to help fill in some gaps, so I included them. I've created a new page to keep track of these, but also copied the list below.

1. Ulysses by James Joyce
2. Pendennis by Thackeray
3. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
4. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
5. Shirley by Charlotte Bronte
6. Don Quixote by Cervantes
7. War and Peace by Tolstoy
8. Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
9. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
10. Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
11. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
12. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
13. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
14. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
15. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
16. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
19. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
20. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
21. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
22. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
23. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
24. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
25. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
26. An American Tragedy by Theodore Drieser
27. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
28. The Golden Bowl by Henry James
29. Howard's End by EM Forster
30. Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence
31. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
32. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
33. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
34. The Stranger by Albert Camus
35. The Decameron by Boccaccio
36. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
37. Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
38. Adam Bede by George Eliot
39. The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
40. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
41. Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
42. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
43. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
44. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
45. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
46. The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
47. Walden by Thoreau
48. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
49. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
50. The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

This is yet another post for Adam's Magical March challenge! I've also finished Something Wicked this Way Comes and will review it later in the week, and have just stared Outlander. I'm hoping to finish it, Dragonfly in Amber, The War of the Worlds and The Crystal Cave before the end of the month, but since two of those are quite chunky, that may not happen!

I picked up Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator at a library book sale at some point. I love both Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movies, although I remember being a little disappointed by the actual book when I read it in elementary school. Still, I wanted to see what further adventures Charlie has.

Apparently, Charlie goes on to visit space, fight Vernicious Knids, deal with three of his grandparents take reverse aging vitamins will nasty consequences and head off to the White House. Seriously, what the heck? That makes no sense! It kind of felt like a book for kids with ADD.

I have a confession to make here - I have yet to read a Roald Dahl book that I actually liked. I feel like a terrible person and that I should have be "I'm a reader!" card revoked or something. But I just don't care for his books. Now, I like nonsense stories and silly tales and slightly creepy kids books. I enjoy Dr. Suess and Shel Silverstein and Lewis Carroll and many others, but I guess when you think about it, those aren't nonsense stories. They all have a point. And I suppose Dahl does as well - you can't turn back time - but only part of the book is about that and the rest of it was just random. I felt like I was watching Spongebob or something. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory clearly has several points, so I suppose it's not the nonsense angle that bothers me about his books as a whole. I just can't quite put my finger on it. The other books of his I've read (all when I was a child) were Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, and The BFG. Matilda was my favorite, but I still didn't really care for it. I'm usually a sucker for books with readers in them, and this seems like something I would love, but I just didn't. It just makes me a little sad. Oh well, I have a beloved movie because of him (even if he wasn't happy with it!)!