I chose this children’s story as my last read of the year after listening to an episode of the Old School podcast where musician Nick Cave shares how the book changed his life.
The volume I curled up with in my easy chair tonight was a Christmas present from an aunt and uncle back in 1971. The pages now brittle with age, the inscription to “Bobby” faded, felt both foreign and eerily familiar. I was a precocious seven-year-old when I read this, but I surely wasn’t prepared for all the violence and poverty and deceit. I remembered only vague outlines of the story, but found my hair standing on end a few times as long-hidden memories resurfaced. I wonder how many unconscious phobias and life decisions have come from reading this at too-young an age.
This time around, I brought a father’s perspective to the book. How Gepetto must have suffered during the many years of searching for his lost son; how helpless he must have felt. It also reminded me of all the crazy stuff I got away with as a teenager and young adult, and like Pinocchio, I lived to tell the tale. I thought about how some never get these second chances.
In the podcast interview, Cave chokes up when he shares how reading the book helped him during a time of intense grief:
I read this book a lot around the death of my son. The idea that the missing child ends up being able to save the grieving father, who’s been sitting in the belly of the beast on his own, became extraordinarily moving to me. It’s an inversion of the way it should be. The absent child returns to basically parent the parent.
Is this really a children’s book? Maybe. It is a fantastic story, and the language is simple enough for a child to understand. But only an adult could appreciate the religious symbolism, the moral quandaries, and the woes of loss. I’d call this timeless literature masquerading as a children’s story. I’m better for reading it.
Ah, Gatsby. It’s been a moment. I last read this book in college, and although I remember the story, I’m fairly sure I missed the point. It has been good for me to go back and reread these perennial classics that I thought I knew.
Here we have a true American tragedy, wrapped in social wit and irony, stewed in alcohol and disillusionment, where wealth, whether old or new, buys not love, but misery, where the strong moral values of the Midwest prove all too corruptible, where the very premise of the American Dream is nothing more than a cheat, a scam.
Other than maybe Gatsby, there isn’t a trustworthy or likeable character in the bunch. Ungrateful, snobbish, and vain, they look at people as novelties to play with and discard. Even Nick, our narrator, is cruel and two-faced. While her husband, Tom, is despicable, Daisy Buchanan is the real villain of this story. Her voice is full of money, Gatsby tells us. Not love, not empathy, not kindness. Money.
Rereading a book you haven’t read in 40 years is an interesting experience. I remembered only the bleakness but little of the story itself. I enjoyed most of the book, though all the decades of Hemingway parodies and copycats stole some of its luster. Still, it is a timeless classic that reinvented the novel. Makes me want to go back and read all those books I read when I was young. If this one is any guide, it will be like reading them again for the first time.
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.
Donald Sutherland did a wonderful job narrating this audiobook. It was nice to reacquaint myself with Hemingway’s short and simple sentences, yet so full of energy. Made me yearn for the ocean.
This book was nothing like I expected. Frankenstein (the scientist) is arrogant, self-absorbed, and makes incredibly bad decisions. The story itself is unbelievably far-fetched. There were times I wanted to throw my Kindle on the floor at the dumb-assedness of our unreliable protagonist.
Taken more broadly, it’s a cautionary tale about mankind’s continual push for scientific advancement, which feels more relevant today than ever.
Stepping into a Dickens novel requires a certain faith that the vocabulary and style and flood of characters you meet will eventually make sense. I was distrustful at first, my head spinning with each new character, some appearing for such a short visit that I complained to myself that Dickens was being indulgent. I was wrong to be critical of the master. By the end of this story, every character, no matter how minor, was reintroduced and I understood their purpose in the story. Sure, this involved a lot of happy coincidences for our protagonist, but it brought me happiness to have these loose threads woven together.
A beautiful, wise book touching so many themes: true love, societal pressures, women’s rights, nobility excesses, religious zealotry, jealousy, the fruitless search for the meaning of life, angst over landowner privilege, thinking vs. feeling/living, capitalism vs. communism. Reading Tolstoy is the study of life.
“Have no fear of robbers or murderers. Such dangers are without, and are but petty. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. What matters it what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think only of what threatens our souls.” (Location 560)
What was passing within him, no one could describe, all will understand. What man has not entered, at least once in his life, into this dark cavern of the unknown? (Location 4126)
Misery, almost always a step-mother, is sometimes a mother; privation gives birth to power of soul and mind; distress is the nurse of self-respect; misfortune is a good breast for great souls. (Location 11428)
There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson. (Location 11501)
Love one another. Be foolish about it. Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God. (Location 22563)
It is impossible to suppose that God made us for any other purpose than to enact all the fantasies and delights of love. (no location — Libby app)
The delight we inspire in others has this enchanting peculiarity that, far from being diminished like every other reflection, it returns to us more radiant than ever. (Location 9650)
Laughter is sunshine; it chases winter from the human face. (Location 9653)
there can be power only in a brain; in other words, that what leads and controls the world, is not locomotives, but ideas. Harness the locomotives to the ideas, very well; but do not take the horse for the horseman. (Location 15984)
Despair is surrounded by fragile walls which all open into vice or crime. (Location 12446)
Undoubtedly they seemed very depraved, very corrupt, very vile, very hateful, even, but those are rare who fall without becoming degraded; there is a point, moreover, at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, a fatal word, Les Misérables; whose fault is it? And then, is it not when the fall is lowest that charity ought to be greatest? (Location 12463)
She was sad with an obscure sadness of which she had not the secret herself. There was in her whole person the stupor of a life ended but never commenced. (Location 10226)
Whenever immense strength is put forth only to end in immense weakness, it makes men meditate. (Location 6312)
The soul does not give itself up to despair until it has exhausted all illusions. (Location 19398)
Great griefs contain dejection. They discourage existence. The man into whom they enter feels something go out of him. In youth, their visit is dismal; in later years it is ominous. (Location 19449)
One can no more prevent the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. In the case of the sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty, it is called remorse. God upheaves the soul as well as the ocean. (Location 3860)
he has his own metaphors; to be dead he calls eating dandelions by the root; (Location 9747)
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age. (Location 22411)
Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon; a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky. (Location 1042)
If anything is frightful, if there be a reality which surpasses dreams, it is this: to live, to see the sun, to be in full possession of manly vigour, to have health and joy, to laugh sturdily, to rush towards a glory which dazzlingly invites you on, to feel a very pleasure in respiration, to feel your heart beat, to feel yourself a reasoning being, to speak, to think, to hope, to love; to have mother, to have wife, to have children, to have sunlight, and suddenly, in a moment, in less than a minute, to feel yourself buried in an abyss, to fall, to roll, to crush, to be crushed, to see the grain, the flowers, the leaves, the branches, to be able to seize upon nothing, to feel your sword useless, men under you, horses over you, to strike about you in vain, your bones broken by some kick in the darkness, to feel a heel which makes your eyes leap from their sockets, to grind the horseshoes with rage in your teeth, to stifle, to howl, to twist, to be under all this, and to say: just now I was a living man! (Location 6060)
We have only to look at some men to distrust them, for we feel the darkness of their souls in two ways. They are restless as to what is behind them, and threatening as to what is before them. (Location 2674)
In vain we chisel, as best we can, the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny reappears continually. (Location 3486)
To have done all that he had done to come to this! and, what! to be nothing! Then, as we have just said, he felt from head to foot a shudder of revolt. He felt even to the roots of his hair the immense awakening of selfishness, and the Me howled in the abyss of his soul. (Location 19430)
To see a thousand objects for the first and for the last time, what can be deeper and more melancholy? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant. (Location 4259)
A walk at early dawn, to him who loves solitude, is equivalent to a walk at night, with the gaiety of nature added. (Location 15149)
A ship-of-the-line is one of the most magnificent struggles of human genius with the forces of nature. (Location 6289)
It was no longer a conflict, it was a darkness, a fury, a giddy vortex of souls and courage, a hurricane of sword-flashes. (Location 5683)
Every profession has its aspirants who make up the cortège of those who are at the summit. No power is without its worshippers, no fortune without its court. The seekers of the future revolve about the splendid present. (Location 944)
“The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no me, the me would be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words it would not be. But it is. Then it has a me. This me of the infinite is God.” (Location 845)
Whenever we meet with the Infinite in man, whether well or ill understood, we are seized with an involuntary feeling of respect. There in the synagogue, in the mosque, a hideous side that we detest, and in the pagoda and in the wigwam, a sublime aspect that we adore. What a subject of meditation for the mind, and what a limitless source of reverie is this reflection of God upon the human wall! (Location 8653)
Nothing is really small; whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this. Although indeed no absolute satisfaction may be vouch-safed to philosophy, no more in circumscribing the cause than in limiting the effect, the contemplator falls into unfathomable ecstasies in view of all these decompositions of forces resulting in unity. All works for all. (Location 14835)
Who then can calculate the path of the molecule? how do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation? (Location 14839)
Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the grander view? Choose. A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars. (Location 14845)
The future belongs still more to the heart than to the mind. To love is the only thing which can occupy and fill up eternity. The infinite requires the inexhaustible. (Location 15595)
A hundred years is youth to a church, but old age to a private mansion. It would seem that the dwelling of Man partakes of his brief existence, and the dwelling of God, of His eternity. (Location 7358)
Théodule was, we think we have mentioned, the favourite of Aunt Gillenormand, who preferred him because she did not see him. Not seeing people permits us to imagine in them every perfection. (Location 10698)
Wonderful and terrible trial, from which the feeble come out infamous, from which the strong come out sublime. (Location 11423)
In fact, were it given to our eye of flesh to see into the consciences of others, we should judge a man much more surely from what he dreams than from what he thinks. There is will in the thought, there is none in the dream. The dream, which is completely spontaneous, takes and keeps, even in the gigantic and the ideal, the form of our mind. (Location 11654)
Each one dreams the unknown and the impossible according to his own nature. (Location 11659)
His habits of solitary meditation, while developing sympathy and compassion in him, had perhaps diminished his liability to become irritated, but left intact the faculty of indignation; he had the benevolence of a brahmin and the severity of a judge; he would have pitied a toad, but he would have crushed a viper. (Location 12885)
learn to produce wealth and learn to distribute it, and you shall have material grandeur and moral grandeur combined; (Location 14094). Political and Social Issues
There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has planned; (Location 18979)
nothing is more imminent than the impossible, and that what we must always foresee is the unforeseen. (Location 19175)
A close reading of this classic with the #Booktwitter group. I read this in college, and while I finished it, I wasn’t quite sure what I had read. This time, having many decades to reflect on it, and benefitting from the expert notes of my fellow readers, and understanding better the brutal facts of mortality and existence, I drank this in, entranced. Maybe this one is only meant to be read later in life.
When I feel that “damp, drizzly November in my soul,” I’ll return once more to this incredible novel.
At least my fourth reading of this Hemingway classic. My comfort read, maybe my favorite book. I had to buy a new edition because I wore my last copy to tatters.
Highlights
As he had been thinking for months about leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to deprive her of himself, her departure was a very healthful shock.
Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.
You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.
Miseries of children — orphans, child labor, mistreatment.
The mystery of Lady Dedlock.
Highlights
It is the long vacation in the regions of Chancery Lane. The good ships Law and Equity, those teak-built, copper-bottomed, iron- fastened, brazen-faced, and not by any means fast-sailing clippers are laid up in ordinary. The Flying Dutchman, with a crew of ghostly clients imploring all whom they may encounter to peruse their papers, has drifted, for the time being, heaven knows where.
