I really wanted to like this one. I liked Jane Eyre quite a bit and I had high hopes for Charlotte Brontë’s last novel.

I liked it at first — though I’m a bit disappointed with the blurb on the back (there’s a post — what makes a good jacket/back blurb); I didn’t get the sense that Lucy had a “unhappy past” that she was “in flight” from. I enjoyed the detail fo Lucy’s childhood, the relationship between Graham and Polly, and even Lucy’s job with Miss Marchmont. But once she gets to Villette, things slow way down.

I managed to stay interested through volume 2. I thought the whole Dr. John drama was fun. Especially the bit when Lucy realizes who he his (or rather, the bit when she lets us, as readers, know who he is). But as the book wore on, I began to care less and less about Lucy and her life. It took a l-o-n-g time to get to the main point of the book — at least according to the back blurb again: her relationship with fellow teacher M. Paul and Madame Beck’s attempts to keep them apart. Honestly, by the time I got around to their relationship I was fed up. Fed up with the oh-so-helpful endnotes (great for translating the French, but kind of annoying otherwise), fed up with M. Paul and his annoying attempts to control Lucy, fed up with the excesses of Victorian literature.

So, I read the last chapter, discovered that M. Paul left Lucy and possibly died in a shipwreck, and called it quits.

Maybe I’m just not meant to read so much Brontë. A little goes a long way in this case.

After all the hemming and hawing and picking not very good books for the Armchair Traveler Challenge, I think I finally found a winner in Pomegranate Soup, by Marsha Mehran. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

It’s hard to describe what this book is about. It’s a food book, complete with the recipes for the delectable dishes that Marjan — the oldest sister – cooks up for the town of Ballinacroagh, County Mayo, Irleand, where the Aminpour sisters have ended up. It’s one part travel book — lush descriptions of both Irleand and Iran, as we slowly get the sisters’ back story. It’s magical realism; Marjan’s cooking changes lives, Layla’s (the youngest sister) sent of cinnamon and rosewater inspires lust in younger men and remembrances in older ones. The only sister who didn’t have a healthy dose of the magical was Bahar (the middle sister); perhaps it’s because of her past — it was too brutal and too sad (and the reason that the sisters are in Ireland) for it to be magical.

It wasn’t a depressing book, even though it touched on heavy themes: domestic abuse, the Iranian Revolution, greed, gossip, racisim… It was all there, but done in such an engaging way that the book never seemed depressing or difficult. I loved the characters in this book — from the sisters, to Estelle Delmonico (the landlady of the cafe’s space), to Malachy (Layla’s love interest) to many of the other townspeople. Like the store owner who believes in fairies and leprechauns. Or the hair stylist who used to be an actress. Or the grumpy woman stuck in her house so she spend the day spying on everyone. Or even the town “bad guy”, the bully Thomas McGuire. Sure, he was a jerk, but he was a very well-written one.

Now if I can just find two other books that I enjoyed just as much as this one.

I know I haven’t really posted in nearly a week, but when you’re given a 645-page book that you’re supposed to read by the 15th, blogging just kind of falls by the wayside. After a while, though, it was no longer an obligation that kept me away, but a real desire to finish this book… a desire to know, to experience, and to feel what this book had to offer.

I just finished it — it’s by David James Duncan, by the way — and I’m flabbergasted (sorry, the book’s language is rubbing off on me) as to what to say about it. Hubby asked yesterday if I was enjoying it. “Yes,” I replied. “Very much so.” What’s it about? Well… that’s the problem. See… it’s about a family, the Chances, and their lives, their experiences, their joys, their heartbreaks, their mistakes, their reconciliations… there really isn’t much of a “plot” or a “storyline”, but the story telling is so wonderful that I never noticed. The narrator is Kincade, the youngest of the Chance brothers (though there are twin sisters younger than him), and it’s the observations, wit, soul, and love that Duncan puts in this character that pulls the lives of these people from the ordinary and mundane to the spectacular and transcendent.

At times I laughed — howled, to use bookspeak again — so hard that I figured this had to be the funniest book I’d read in a long time.

Case in point: made up “scriptures” spouting out of the mouth of the brothers.

Deuteronomy three, sixteen: “And they who pinroll the dough shall be airplaned. Verily, unto illness shall they be flown about the yard. Unto airsickness, yea, and unto every other type of disaster shall they be propellered. And their poor mama shall watch though it cleaveth her heart in twain to do so!”

But not two pages later, Duncan had me musing over his observations of people and religion. Here’s one from the middle of the book.

Everett stood up and started pacing. “What I was feeling, Winnie,” he said, “was that maybe the reason prayers never get answered is that everybody prays the wrong way, and for the wrong things. People ask God for good things all the time, and never offer anything in return. But if God exists, if He really made the world and is all-powerful and all-wise and all that, then I figure He made all of the world, including the bad stuff. So if He ‘saw that it was good’, He meant just that. From His point of view, bad stuff must somehow be ‘good,’ or at least must serve some sort of divine purpose. I was trying to give God the benefit of the doubt, see? And look where it got me!”

And a half-chapter after that, I was crying.

Would I recommend this? In a heartbeat. But not to everyone. See, the one drawback, the one that will keep people like many in my in-person book group from enjoying this wonder, is the language. It’s, well, extensive and colorful. But, I suppose, when you write a book about baseball, milling towns and the Vietnam War, extensive and colorful language is going to be a part of that book. It didn’t bother me. And if you can get past that, by all means, I would whole-heartedly recommend this book.

If not, well, you’re life won’t be worse because of it. But you are missing one heckuva book.

It’s my own fault that this is even here. You see, after I read Letters from Pemberly, which I kind of liked, I recommended it to Mme. 76 (remember her?) because I knew she would LOVE it. And I was right. A couple days after I lent my copy to her, she called gushing about how wonderful it was and did I know if there was more? Well, I had just happened to have been in Borders, and just happened to have seen that there was a sequel out, and I just happened to mention it to Mme. 76, who rushed out and bought herself a copy.

Oy! (I never use that expression, but it fits today.) I’m SO totally… Grrr. Let me explain.

Last night, Hubby took the older girls on a campout, leaving me home with Baby (well, Toddler) K. We had fun, watched Dora (she loves Dora), ate, played, and I got her to bed around 8:30. I had started The Traveler’s Gift, by Andy Andrews (poor, unfortunate man. What were his parents thinking?), earlier that evening (during Dora), and realized it was an easy read. I figured I’d finish it before popping in my movie, which a friend said I was sure to love: The Inheritance.

Yes. That Inheritance. I have to say, though, I liked the movie better than the book. The screenwriters took the disaster that was published and turned it into… a cheesy, sappy, maudlin movie. But I did like it better. Just not enough. It didn’t help that the acting was terrible: Merideth Baxter and Thomas Gibson were just showing up for the money. And no one else could act. They had to dress Ida in low-cut costumes so we could tell she was the “bad girl”. At one point — supposedly the climax — I laughed. Um. I don’t think that was the reaction they were looking for. The one thing I did like was that they got rid of the Insufferable Older Brother, and brought back the Father Figure. I liked him; he was genuinely funny (and I think he was meant to be). They killed him off near the end, though. By the time I was finished I was sick of the whole lot. (It didn’t help that they had those notes — what do you call them? — at the end where you get to find out what happened to all the characters. Ida ended up in a mental institution. Serves her right for being a desperate, snitty wench. At least I guess that’s what we’re suppose to think.)

And the book…. let’s just say it’s not been a good month for my in-person book group. David Ponder is 46 years old, with a wife and daughter, who has lost his job. Hit rock bottom (which really isn’t all that rock bottom if you think about it): credit cards maxed, behind on mortgage, daughter sick (with tonsillitis of all things. I figured “daughter sick” would mean leukemia or something important). He’s worthless. He’s failed. He’s going to kill himself. But, no. He gets a second chance: he gets to travel throughout history learning life lessons from dead white guys. (Oh, except he meets Anne Frank, so it doesn’t quite work out.) The back of the book says “The Traveler’s Gift effectively combines self-help with fiction.” Yes. Beware books that effectively combine self-help with fiction. They’re lame.

As a self-help book, this may have been okay. David does learn some good lessons (I’m going to give them to you so you don’t have to read the book, and you still get what you need to change your life. Okay?): I am responsible for my past and future; I will seek wisdom and be a servant to others; I am a person of action; I have a decided heart; I will choose to be happy; I will greet the day with a forgiving spirit; I will persist without exception. See? Not bad lessons. But the situations he receives them in are completely overdone. He meets (in order): Truman, King Solomon, Joshua Chamberlin (who is really cool, but you shouldn’t learn about him from this book!), Columbus, Anne Frank, Lincoln and Angel Gabriel. They lecture a believably disbelieving David on what made their lives great. It wasn’t bad…. but it wasn’t great. It was when he got to Gabriel that I really lost patience with the thing. Gabriel says that David is the last person to take this “trip” (others included George Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.) and that is was up to David to change the world. Oh. Okay. Then, as an added bonus, David gets to see his future where he does change the world by becoming… wait for it…

A motivational speaker. At this point, I threw the book across the room. I’ll take my self-help from legitimate sources, thank you. Bleh.

(Now to go to book group and face people who actually liked these books. And express my displeasure without sounding snobby. Any suggestions?)

A couple months ago, when that “which author’s fiction are you” quiz was going around, this was my result:

I was highly embarrassed; I had never read Flannery O’Connor, and didn’t want to link to something that I hadn’t read. Now, thanks to the online bookgroup, I can now say: I’m not sure I want Flannery O’Connor writing my story.

I say that mostly because her stories, at first glance, are harsh, violent and, well, depressing. I hope my life isn’t like her Southern characters… they are often banal, pathetic, racist. They grate on the nerves, on the psyche: what on earth is redeeming about any of them?

Yet, I found as I was reading, that I related to and liked several of these stories. The first — A Good Man is Hard to Find — is a horrible way (for me) to start a book: a banal picture of a family taking a vacation, which ends in the violent deaths of said family. I was about ready to give up on O’Connor after that one. (I’m still not sure if I see the “redemption” and “grace” that’s supposed to be in that particular story.) But, feeling a desire to be a part of the discussion, I kept reading. I found I actually liked “A Stroke of Good Fortune”; I identified with the main character’s desire to be something more than the way she was raised, though I thought denying that she was pregnant was a pretty drastic way to do so. I liked “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”: I thought the ending was particularly ironic, which made me smile. The rest of them… well, I have to admit that I didn’t get them. Some of them I didn’t get more than others (“The River”, in particular), but I’m lost as to the whole Christian allegory that she’s supposed to have written about.

I guess she may just be over my head. At the very least, she’ll make for good book group discussion, right? (And maybe I’ll even learn a thing or two in the process.)

I’ve been telling people that I’m “re-reading” Jane Eyre, that I hadn’t read it since 8th grade, but I realized a few chapters into it that I’ve never read this one by Charlotte Brontë (I think it was Ethan Frome I read in 8th grade….). And it’s about time I did.

I really have the movie, and the adoration of the movie by my fellow book bloggers, to thank. If there had never been a Masterpiece Theater movie, and if y’all hadn’t raved about it, I wouldn’t have gotten it from the library, watched it with M, loved it, and then read the book.

Since you all know the plot, I’ll just leave you with some observations:

1) I like Charlotte better than Emily. I read Wuthering Heights several years back and HATED it. (Sorry to all you Heathcliff lovers out there.) It was like watching a train wreck. Horrible, but you can’t tear yourself away. I think I must have assumed that all Brontë sisters were alike, and so I thought Jane Eyre would be monumentally depressing. It wasn’t. It truly is a wonderful love story. Not as simplistic as The Blue Castle, but just as wonderful. I think my annoyance of Eclipse is hereby purged.

2) St. John Rivers is a jerk. Mr. Rochester may be gruff, may be impulsive and may be arrogant, but he is not a jerk. I was seething at St. John when he went off on Jane trying to convince her to marry him. Humph. She said no; deal with it, man.

3) I liked Jane. A lot. She was sensible, practical, intelligent and kind. She’s a remarkable, admirable heroine. In short, someone I want my girls to grow up like. (Just without the aunt that hates them. ) I like what Erica Jong said about her in the introduction:

Jane may be the first heroine in fiction to know that she needs her own identity more than she needs marriage. Her determination not to relinquish selfhood for love could well belong to a contemporary heroine.

I don’t know about the contemporary heroine part; she’s a lot more selfless than contemporary heroines. But she does have a self-awareness and goodness about her that demands respect and admiration. In Jane, Charlotte came up with a remarkable, and memorable, character.

I know the Brontë sisters have been compared to Jane Austen, but I’m not sure there’s really a comparison. Austen wrote social commentary in the form of love stories; I don’t think Charlotte was really making a commentary on society in Jane Eyre (though I suppose it could be read as such). I think she was just writing a gripping love story, a tale of someone who overcame all odds to find happiness in her life.

And isn’t that one of the best stories to tell?