Spontaneous Musings

The prompt is A book from your childhood.

The Westing Game by Ellen Ranskin

I vaguely remember doing an oral book report on it in the sixth grade. I created puppets for each of the characters. And a board game of sorts.

The book is kind of "Knives Out" for the elementary school set. It's also a satire of capitalism.

Book Review

( spoilery book review )

There was apparently a movie done in 1997 entitled "Get a Clue" but from the trailer and reviews? I'd skip the movie and just read the book. I adored it as a child. It's kind of a puzzle box of a book. And very witty. One of the better satires that I've read.

I counted them - it's a 50 Day Book Challenge masquerading as a 30 Day Challenge

The prompt is A Book that you enjoyed with Bad Reviews.

Hee.

Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James

Enuf said. That's one controversial book.

Oh it also was a controversial movie.

Next prompt in the seemingly endless book challenge:

A book set somewhere that you've always wanted to visit

Eh... The Seville Communion by Arturo Perez-Reverte

A“diabolically good” hacker puts a message on the pope’s computer, pleading for him to save a seventeenth-century Spanish church—a church that is killing to defend itself.Although Our Lady of the Tears is but a crumbling baroque building in the heart of Seville, it is also the center of a multilayered mystery—one that will force ecclesiastical sleuth Father Lorenzo Quart to question his loyalty, his vow of chastity, and his faith itself.

Read it about fifteen or sixteen years ago. Can't remember it very well. Can't even remember exactly when I read it - except that it was somewhere around 2002.

I do remember loving it at the time. I don't know if it holds up well or not. Just that I've always wanted to visit Seville, Spain - maybe in five years? I'll visit Peru when the pandemic is over, then possibly Hawaii, and then New Zealand, and then Africa, and then Seville - or maybe London or Canada if my niece ends up going to school there.

The prompt is Name a book you can finish in a day

Uh...I don't read that quickly. It would have to be a very short book and not written by Hemingway.

Most likely a play.

Or one with illustrations.

My grandmother liked to brag about reading Gone with the Wind in one day - but I'm willing to bet she skimmed.

Although my mother has been known to do it with romance novels.

I'm going with something easy - which I read in a day, in French and English...

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Expery

The prompt is A book you were supposed to read in school but didn't

Rest of the meme is HERE

Hmm..I've either lost count or the person who did this meme did? It looks longer than it should be. I'm guessing I did. But who knows?

A book I was supposed to read in school but didn't. First of all - school was a VERY long time ago - I don't remember most of it.

Ah, I am going to go with two books for a Myth and Meaning Course I took in undergrad - that I somehow managed to avoid reading.

1. The Odyssey by Homer

and

2. Til We Have Faces by CS Lewis

I managed to bluff that I'd read them, when I hadn't. I read a portion, gave up, and bluffed.

This is day #23 of the 30 Day Book Challenge.

Good luck with that link by the way, it has a sneaky habit of disappearing on me.

The prompt is...well, it worked better in the 20th century, now it's kind of easy.

A Book That is Over a Hundred Years old

Basically anything written before 1920...

Seems a bit easy to me.

Here's mine...

Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady

Pressured by her unscrupulous family to marry a wealthy man she detests, the young Clarissa Harlowe is tricked into fleeing with the witty and debonair Robert Lovelace and places herself under his protection. Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague promises of marriage are accompanied by unwelcome and increasingly brutal sexual advances. And yet, Clarissa finds his charm alluring, her scrupulous sense of virtue tinged with unconfessed desire.

Told through a complex series of interweaving letters, "Clarissa" is a richly ambiguous study of a fatally attracted couple and a work of astonishing power and immediacy. A huge success when it first appeared in 1747, and translated into French and German, it remains one of the greatest of all European novels. Its rich ambiguities - our sense of Clarissa's scrupulous virtue tinged with intimations of her capacity for self-deception in matters of sex; the wicked and amusing faces of Lovelace, who must be easily the most charming villain in English literature - give the story extraordinary psychological momentum.

It's notable for its narrative style - back then they wrote novels in letter format - Les Liasons Dangereux was done in a similar style, so too were a lot of Austen's novels. Even those not written in letter format - had the formality of a letter writing style.

The story, however, is ...well...it's not exactly feminist. There's a brutal rape. And the writer's intention was to punish the young woman for seeking her pleasure outside the home, and outside of her family and her duty. The writer was a minister of his time, and didn't think highly of women. And thought even less of romance.

I read it for a college English Lit Course back in the late 1980s - entitled Clarissa and Women's Literature or something like that. And I had to write a paper on it - which is why I remember it. My paper was a critique of the novel and an exploration of the narrative form, I think. The book is over 1500 pages, and huge and all letters.

They did a British Television Adaptation a while back, with a young Scean Bean playing the villianous love interest Lovelace.

At least I think it is Day 20, I don't count well and the stupid LIST isn't numbered. So if I suddenly end up with more than 30 days, we'll know why.

The prompt is weird...

"Pick a book from the bottom of your to read list"

What if your to read list is kind of bottomless?

I don't like the prompt. I don't have a to read list - I just spontaneously pick stuff.

So, how about, pick a Book by a Russian Author (Note you don't have to have read it yet - in fact, better if you haven't. Because it fits the prompt above as well. If you have that's okay too.)

That way I can pick the one that popped into my head just now and be done with it. (Also I need to jazz this up a bit...it's kind of a bland list in places.)

Crime and Punishment by Fydor Dostevsky as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

The cover sold me on this translation, also it had been highly praised at the time it came out. So much is dependent on the translation. I have it in paperback - when I was still buying paperback and hardback books, as opposed to everything on the Kindle. Apparently it's hard to get the version that I have at the moment - it doesn't appear to be readily available on Amazon except through third party sellers.

Here's the Australian film adaptation of the book

This is Day #18 of the 30 Day Book Challenge.

The prompt is A Pulitizer Prize Winning Book

I had to look them up, because I honestly don't know which books I've read have won Pulitizer Prizes, Booker's yes, Pulitizer, no.

My pick is The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck which I read in high school and remember vividly. I remember books that I read between the ages of ten and thirty better than the ones that I read in the last fifteen years. This is just sad.

I liked the book better than the movie...mainly because very few people do descriptive text as well as John Steinbeck did. You could feel the dust biting in your cheeks.

This is Day 16 of 30 Day Book Challenge

The prompt is A book from an author you love that you haven't read yet.

Cyteen by C. J. Cherryh

Although love may be an exaggeration. I haven't read her in a while. I did however love her novels as a child. I should have picked one of them for the non-human category. My librarian aunt introduced me to C J Cherryh. My Aunt loved to tell stories - she used to tell them to her sisters, specifically my mother while they lay in bed awaiting sleep. My Aunt also wrote stories, including one entitled Miserable Thin Skin - it was about a woman in a mental hospital who has a lovely dream about being outside in a lovely garden, only to wake up in the padded cell.

She never published anything - too gun shy, I think. But she found great ways to convince me to read a book. I remember as a child - in the sixth or seventh grade, coming to my grandparents house in Liberty, Missouri to see her collection of books. She'd moved back to Missouri en route to Virginia.
My grandparents house was a small two bedroom affair. With a living room, attic - that served in later years as an extra bedroom, master bedroom, and another bedroom. The shower was downstairs in the basement/garage, and there were two bathrooms with tubs. A living room/family room, dining area and kitchen. It was small, cozy even. I remember when a tour of historic homes toured it - and people were amazed that my mother and her two sisters slept in the same small bedroom. My mother shared a bed with her sister.

Anyhow, I used to go there and take a stack of books out of the attic bedroom and read. I'd sit in a chair in the living room and read, while my grandparents either read, talked, watched television or did errands. And I read whatever I could get my grubby hands on.

When my Aunt visited, she introduced me to fantasy and sci-fi novels. Among them where books by CJ - specifically the Chanur Saga which I loved.

Cyteen is starring at me now from my own bookshelves, a large paperbook, wondering why I've yet to read her. I should. I really should.

This is Day #14 of the 30 Day Book Challenge.

The prompt is Name a non-fiction book

Boys in the Boat:Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics