tiny pink books

Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
First published in 1932

Reading this book is like taking a personal journey to the end of night.  A hard book to sell to the average reader, this is a bleak, semi-autobiographical work tells the long, dark and unhappy life of Ferdinand Bardamu.  An epic book, feeling even longer than its 462 pages should, Bardamu travels through World War I, to the colonies of Africa, to America and into the poor suburbs of Paris, as a somewhat shady doctor.  Seriously, there are so many journeys in here that it’s like reading five books in one!  Along the way, Bardamu contemplates the ever present inevitability of death and his complete disgust for humanity.  Sound fun?  The thing is, Journey to the End of the Night is hilarious in a sick way.  Celine also paints an incredibly vivid picture with his words that Journey, for me anyway, is more like a life experience than a book.

As for my journey–it took me 10 years to complete it!  I picked up this sunny charmer in high school (probably off the shelves of my intellectual then boyfriend) and the challenge and read it until I was merely 30 or 40 pages from the end…and then I lost the book.  Ten years later (aka, last month), I snatched it up in used bookshop, reread it and finally finished it with glee!  I feel like if books were races, this would be my marathon!

So if I haven’t made it clear yet, I recommend this book to intellectual, sarcastic and bitter high school students and other readers who can appreciate an amazingly written, yet meandering book filled with more depravity, disgust and musings on the brutality of life and death than you can shake a stick at.  I would not recommend this book for reluctant readers or people looking for something short, sweet or sunny.

Farewell to Arms

Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
1929
First off, let me just say that I have absolutely loved all the Hemingway that I have encountered thus far.  He makes me want to go camping and hunt with my bare hands or fight a bull or something.  This was no exception, even though the ending left me furious and frustrated (and sad, sad, sad, sad, sad!).

A Farewell to Arms is a love and war story with some of the most interesting characters I’ve ever met on the page.  Lieutenant Henry, the main character, is serving in World War I in the Italian army, despite the fact that he is an American.  Complicated, yet oh so macho much?  Check.  He falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a British nurse who is stationed in Italy.  Catherine starts off crazy and soon becomes, well, interesting.  I’ve read some comments that describe Catherine as a sexist portrayal of a woman, but I found to be much more intriguing and complicated than that.  She and Lieutenant Henry embark on an intense, war hospital-based courtship that is all fairytale and no reality.  There’s love, there’s sexy banter, there’s some tough guy war stuffs (it is Hemingway, after all), a bit of adventure and them, of course, some tragedy.  It’s all very good and I think this is one of those classics for everyone.

Also, I should add that I listened to this in audio format.  How did this come to be?  I desperately needed a new audiobook for my commute home and my holds for the latest teen werewolf love story hadn’t come through yet, so I found myself browsing until I picked this one up.  I usually avoid the classics or anything really that could be defined as “literature” when it comes to audio format, but I figured that Hemingway is so short and blunt and downright uncomplicated that I could follow in audio format…and I was right!

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:  The Classic Regency Romance - Now With Ultraviolent Zombie Mayham!
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
Quirk Books, 2009

Preserving most of the original text of Pride and Prejudice, this modified classic now includes zombies and a horror twist.  The “strange plague” going around England is actually that of zombies.  Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters have been trained in “the deadly arts” to be, no longer just well-mannered young ladies, but zombie slayers of the finest caliber as they putter about society before being married off.  Mr. Darcy has also been transformed into a gentlemanly, zombie slaying hero.

And now to admit something that perhaps will sway your view of me as a reader–until it was available in zombie fused fashion, I have never read Pride and Prejudice. Although I was forced to read some other Austen novels in high school, they never moved me, a true tomboy at heart, enough to seek out anything more.  It wasn’t until there were zombies and a concept so hilarious (fancy, well-mannered ladies zombie slaying!) that I just had to pick it up.  Pick it up I did and it was in doing so that I realized that, while the zombie bits are funny, the real goodness of the book is in Austen’s original work.  I found myself enjoying the characters and the original humor enough that, at times, the zombie interruptions felt just like that–like interruptions.  Although I credit Grahame-Smith for coming up with such a wonderful concept and for fusing it in some seamlessly, the quality of the book still lies in the original work.

All in all, the postmodern, zombie mashup concept is a good way to get reluctant readers slightly more interested in Jane Austen.  I could see this being successfully used in high school English classes to make Austen (slightly) more appealing to boys and girls.  At the same time, I can see why Austen fans might be offended at the addition of ironically place gore and grossness in such a beloved classic.  I think it’s important to recognize that this zombie version of Pride and Prejudice, will never replace the original text.  It’s just a fun twist that may get non-Austen readers (like me) to pick up and *actually enjoy* Pride and Prejudice.