To begin my week of guest-blogging for my mother, I’ve decided to cheat and answer a book meme that I found chez Laura. It’s as good a way of introducing myself as anything else, especially since I think you should always judge a man or woman by what he or she reads.

1. A book that made you cry: Well, aside from the obvious choices (Anne of Green Gables, anyone?), I was moved by the middle sequence of To the Lighthouse, the part wherein Woolf narrates the disintegration of a house and a family. The writing itself is completely unemotional, and I think that’s why the passage works.

2. A book that scared you: Usually I don’t read scary stuff, because I don’t enjoy the thrill that comes with being afraid (never liked to ride the roller coaster at Astroworld either). And I’ve never considered classic British murder mysteries scary (think Dame Agatha, Sayers, Tey, etc.), so I’ve gobbled up quite a few in my day – but one that really frightened me was And Then There Were None. Keep in mind that in the book version, as opposed to the play, everyone but the murderer ends up dead. Very creepy. Oh, and I remember being quite scared by the character of Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which I read very late at night around the age of fourteen. One of those can’t-get-out-of-the-bed-because-something-might-grab-me experiences.

3. A book that made you laugh: James Herriot’s animal books are a hoot – start with All Creatures Great and Small.

4. A book that disgusted you: The Grapes of Wrath. My first Baylor roommate loved Steinbeck, but to me he is simply depressing. Maybe I just read it at the wrong time.

5. A book you loved in elementary school: I was really into series reading at the time, but one stand-alone choice I loved was Lark, by Sally Watson. I believe it is out of print, even though it is an enchanting introduction to the British Civil War through the eyes of an independent-minded young girl who must aid a Royalist spy to evade his enemies by means of disguises, play-acting, and even the Gypsies as a last resort.

6. A book you loved in middle school: Jane Eyre. Read it the summer of seventh grade and was inspired to read Wuthering Heights as a follow-up; don’t remember being quite as impressed at the time by Emily as I was by Charlotte.

7. A book you loved in high school: Just one? My favorite was probably either Emily’s Quest, by L.M. Montgomery (confession: during my sophomore and junior years of high school I was heavily addicted to a kindred-spirits listserv, of all things, which aside from your humble servant was mostly made up of librarians) or A Ring of Endless Light, by Madeleine L’Engle – yes, we’re all fans at my house.

8. A book you loved in college: I’m still in college. I discovered Dorothy Dunnett’s Chronicles of Lymond two summers ago and fell in love with the complicated erudite hero – he’s sort of a renaissance Lord Peter Wimsey minus the moral principles. There are six books, all set in the mid-sixteenth century, and they take a little while to get into, but if you have a little patience you’ll soon be hooked. As a side note, Dunnett’s historical research is impeccable, or at least so I’ve read. The Game of Kings comes first.

9. A book that challenged your identity or your faith: Believe it or not, The Westminster Shorter Catechism, which I was assigned to read for school in seventh grade, and which forced me to realize there were other brands of Christianity besides the one affirmed at my Southern Baptist church.

10. A series that you love: Definitely Dorothy Sayers’ Wimsey mysteries, beginning with Strong Poison, in which the aristocratic detective saves Harriet Vane from the hangman’s noose, and ending with Busman’s Honeymoon, in which he marries her. The best one, though, is Gaudy Night, where Sayers explores the issue of women in academia versus women who choose to marry – yes, this was an issue in 1935, and no, it’s not totally irrelevant in 2006.

11. Your favorite horror book: See answer to question 2.

12. Your favorite science-fiction book: I’m going to have to pick another L’Engle and go with A Wrinkle in Time. Read it and the sequels for the first time when I was sick with a very bad cold, which just made them that much stranger. I’m not actually that much into sci-fi as a genre.

13. Your favorite fantasy book: The Lord of the Rings, no contest. But I also love Robin McKinley’s stuff, especially Beauty and Rose Daughter, two varying approaches to the re-telling of the same fairy-tale.

14. Your favorite mystery book: Leaving Sayers out because I’ve already mentioned her, it would probably come down to one of Josephine Tey’s novels, either Brat Farrar or The Daughter of Time.

15. Your favorite biography: Maybe Nicholas and Alexandra, by Robert K. Massie. Had to read it for a European history class senior year of high school, and I guess it’s not exactly a biography, but it is a thrilling narrative of the tragedy of the last Russian emperor and his family.

16. Your favorite coming-of-age book: The Greengage Summer, by Rumer Godden, in which an adolescent girl spends a summer with her family in the Marne Valley and must deal with evil coming from an unexpected source.

17. Your favorite book not on this list: That is very hard to say, but I’ll go with The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky asks all the right questions and gives literature its most convincing and sympathetic good guy. I dare you to read it and not fall in love with Alyosha.

Early in the morning Organizer Daughter and I leave for Mexico. We’re headed for Matamoros to do construction work on a church building. And I’m supposed to help teach Vacation Bible School. In Spanish.
(Please pray for my Spanish.)

However, I’m leaving the blog in capable hands. I have some posts scheduled to appear at intervals throughout the week. And I have a guest blogger who actually writes more lucid and fascinating prose than I do. Eldest Daughter, the one who just returned from a year of study in Paris, will post a few times while I’m gone. I told her to write about whatever she wanted, but it will probably be something about her twin passions: literature and languages.

Hasta luego, amigos.

From Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley:

“Every novel is a logical argument —an assertion of the author’s sense of what life is, embodied in characters, plots, and images.”

Dickens “took up the habit of long, vigorous daily walks that seem almost unimaginable today for an otherwise very busy man with many obligations. At a pace of twelve to fifteen minutes per mile, he regularly covered twenty and sometimes thirty miles.” Unimaginable, indeed! Those were four to six hour walks!

“Dickens’s letters increasingly betray dissatisfaction with Catherine’s ‘slowness’ and her invariable postpartum depressions. It seems not to have occurred to him that curbing his own appetites and relieving her from an endless cycle of pregnancy and parturition was a possibility.” The Dickenses had nine children in fifteen years; then Mr. Dickens divorced his wife in a fit of what we would now probably call midlife crisis.

Ah, but he wrote wonderful novels!

I’ve been spending all my reading time with Charles Dickens this week, not reading one of his novels, but rather a biography in the series Penguin Lives by novelist Jane Smiley.

I was struck by several facts and observations. I had a vague memory that Dickens had a troubled marriage and that he had some kind of “relationship” with an actress named Ellen Ternan. “Some sort” is about right. According to Ms. Smiley, none of the Dickens’s biographers or critics can decide whether Ellen Ternan was Dickens’ mistress or whether he acted toward her with exteme propriety in an avuncular manner. He did divorce his wife not too long after he met the eighteen year old Ms. Ternan; Dickens was forty-five years old when he met his erstwhile “niece.” Shades of Arthur Gride, the old man in Nicholas Nickleby; however, Dickens wasn’t after Ms. Ternan’s money. She hadn’t any, and she and her mother and sisters lived off of Dickens for the rest of his life.

I thought the order of Dickens’ novels was interesting, too. I knew Pickwick Papers was Dickens’ first book. After Pickwick was such a success, he wrote the following major works in order:

2. Oliver Twist, one of my favorite Dickens’ novels. However, it was rather grisly to read that Dickens, toward the end of his life, made a mint doing dramatic readings of the murder of Nancy Sikes to much popular acclaim.

3. Nicholas Nickleby Two of my girls were in a play this spring based on this novel. That’s why I remember Arthur Gride.

4. Barnaby Rudge. I’ve not read this one.

5. The Old Curiosity Shop. I’ve not read this one either, but I’ve always heard the stories of how everyone on both sides of the Atlantic was anxiously dreading the possible death of Little Nell as the book was published in installments. Ms. Smiley quotes Oscar Wilde: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” Cynical old Oscar.

6. American Notes for General Circulation. In this travelogue, Dickens wrote about his tour of America in which he offended his hosts and he was, in turn, “eager to get home.”

7. Martin Chuzzlewit is another Dickensensian novel that I haven’t read. I fact, I suppose, Dickens fan notwithstanding, I’ve read fewer than half of the novels Dickens wrote.

8. A Christmas Carol. Dickens created Ebenezer Scrooge and his ghosts during October and November of 1843 while he was finishing Martin Chuzzlewit. “With power must come an inner sense of connection to others that, in Dickens’s life and work, comes from the model of Jesus Christ as benevolent Saviour.”

9.Dombey and Son. Another Dickens novel I have to anticipate. Ms. Smiley compares it to Vanity Fair. I thought it was funny that, according to Ms. Smiley, Thackeray expressed a definite sense of rivalry with Dickens that Dickens never seemed to notice or reciprocate. Dickens called himself “the Inimitable” and gave out indiscriminate, benevolent encouragement to other lesser beings.

10.David Copperfield. As Dickens himself did, I absolutely love David Copperfield. I like all the characters, Miss Betsy Trotwqood, Mr. Dick, Mr. Micawber and all the little Micawbers, Dora and Agnes, Peggotty and Little Em’ly, even Steerforth and Uriah Heep. David Copperfield is just so much fun, and it doesn’t really get melodramatic as A Tale of Two Cities and other Dickensian novels sometimes do.

11. Bleak House. I wouldn’t know except from what I deduce from the title, but Ms. Smiley says that Bleak House is “the most unhopeful of Dickens’s novels.” It sold well, though. Maybe bleak and unhopeful sells.

12. Hard Times sounds as if it would be another bleak novel. Dancer Daughter read this one last year for a class and hated it. She’s not alone. Charlotte Bronte complained that she disliked Dickens’s “extravagance.” Trollope called Dickens “Mr. Popular Sentiment.” George Eliot, in spite of Dickens’s praise for her work, thought Dickens’s novels were shallow and melodramatic. (This criticism comes from the author of Mill on the Floss, which may not be shallow but definitely leans toward the melodramatic.)

13. Little Dorrit. After Dickens finished writing Little Dorrit in June 1857, Hans Christian Andersen came to visit and overstayed his welcome. This summer was also the summer of his meeting with and falling in love with Ellen Ternan, and by the next summer he was formally separated from his wife, Catherine, and seeking a divorce. It was messy, public divorce attended by all sorts of nasty rumors, even though Catherine “maintained her loyalty to her husband for the rest of her life” and biographers “record no instances of anger or recrimination, either in public or in writing, on her part.” Dickens, unfortunately, was not so circumspect. His own daughters characterized his behaviour during the divorce proceedings as “wicked and “mad.”

14. A Tale of Two Cities. Another favorite of mine. I probably don’t know too much more about the French Revolution than what I learned from A Tale of Two Cities. I just re-read thi novel for my British Literature class last year, and I found it just as good as the first time I read it in ninth grade.

15. Great Expectations. I have fond memories of this novel because we read it aloud as a family when the first four urchins were only elementary school age. Yes, there were some things they found difficult to understand, but everybody got the basic plotline. And we all grew quite fond of young Pip.

16. Our Mutual Friend was Dickens’s last completed novel. I’m quite interested in reading this one because Ms. Smiley says it’s “Dickens’s perfect novel, seamless and true and delightful in every line.” Also, I want to know why Desmond (LOST) was carrying Our Mutual Friend around with him, unread. He said he was saving it to be the last novel he read before he died. I’m not sure how one would pull that trick off, but I’m intrigued enough to want to read the novel to see what it’s about and why the writers of LOST would use it as a prop.

17. The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens’s last novel, was never finished.

Sorry, this post has become unmanagably long. Especially if you’re not a Dickens fan. Chalk it up to the influence of the The Inimitable.

Maybe I’ll finish up tomorrow with a couple of more quotations Jane Smiley’s biography.