Flanders

Speculative fiction is a broad literary genre encompassing any fiction with supernatural, fantastical, or futuristic elements.

Flanders by Patricia Anthony is labeled "speculative fiction."  It is the story of a young Texan who joins the British army during World War I.  Told through his letters home to his younger brother, Travis Lee Stanhope describes life in the trenches during his services as a sharpshooter. There are elements of supernatural.  Stanhope has visions of those who have died around him, those who are important to him.  But this is not a ghost story.  This in not a only a war story; it is a coming of age story. Travis Lee is an outsider.  The men around him accept him but only as a novelty "yank."  His one true friend is an outsider as well, an officer who is Jewish. 

Flanders gets a five star rating from me.  While I was reading, there was that tightness in the back of my throat that comes when sobs threaten. I would try to put it down so I could breathe but I soon picked it back up again.   More than any of the other World War I books that I have read this month, I saw just how cruel war can be.  The book doesn't have more gory scenes or more harsh battle descriptions, but the effects of battle on the soldiers is more evident.  It is felt more by the reader.  To say this is a beautiful story is misleading but nevertheless it touches the heart.

From Publishers Weekly

In Flanders Fields, where so many died so horribly during WWI, an American volunteer named Travis Lee Stanhope finds terror, death, forgiveness and, ultimately, an odd sort of salvation. Anthony (God's Fires), one of speculative fiction's brightest talents, has written a novel of the Great War that is worthy of comparison to Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Travis Lee is a wonderfully complex character, a wild boy from Texas who had the brains to win a scholarship to Harvard, a survivor of childhood abuse who hates his alcoholic father but fears he may be turning into him. Uncomfortable at home and at school, Travis, like many young Americans in 1916, enlists in the British army in search of adventure. What he finds instead is the monstrous human meatgrinder that is Flanders in northern France. Few writers have succeeded so well as Anthony in describing the horrors of trench warfare, the mud and disease, the rotting bodies and unending bombardment, the virtually universal madness that turns men into killers and rapists. Travis Lee is a talented sharpshooter, but as months of terror go by and the number of his kills grows, he beings to see things, at first in his dreams and later on the battlefield itself. Ghosts begin to haunt him, unwilling or unable to leave the shell craters and barbed wire where their lives ended. Told by a battlefield chaplain that he's gifted with the Second Sight, Travis Lee repeatedly finds himself wandering in an unearthly cemetery, a melancholy place that nonetheless hints at the possibility of eternal life. This is a harrowing and beautiful novel, demonstrating?again?that Anthony is one of our finest writers, in and out of the genre.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

My Cousin Rachel

Do you read books and then see the movie or do you see the movie and then check out the book?  I have done both but I prefer to read the book first.  In the case of Rebecca by Daphne duMaurier I saw the movie first and then had to read the book.  I fell in love with duMaurier.

My Cousin Rachel has been on my TBR stack for quite some time and finally I pulled it out.

"They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days.  Not anymore, though.  Now, when a murderer pays the penalty for his crime, he does so up at Bodmin, after fair trial at the Assizes.  That is, if the law convicts him, before his own conscience kills him.  It is better so.  Like a surgical operation.  And the body has decent burial, though a nameless grave.  When I was a child it was otherwise.  I can remember as a little lad seeing a fellow hang in chains where the four roads meet.  His face and body were blackened with tar for preservation.  He hung there for five weeks before they cut him down, and it was the fourth week that I saw him."

Granted this is no "Road to Manderley" but I would avoid walking down a road with a tar covered hanging corpse.

I'm giving this a thumbs up and off I wander.

Rainy Days and Mondays

It could be worse.  Some nearby areas have ice and sleet.  The shore is just getting rain.  At least I have a  good stash of books.

Hounds of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tops my list today.  Coffee and a book are a great way to take a break while cleaning the kitchen.  I love mysteries; it seems appropriate that I read one of the original detective series.  I am amazed at Holmes obvious deductions that are so easily overlooked by the average onlooker.  Sometimes I get so caught up in looking for the obvious that I miss the story and must go back and reread.

In addition to my "book" I am listening to The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper.  This is good company during the actual cleaning.  Both are classics that I have been meaning to tackle so life is good.

Now for another cup of coffee....

Library

This is what was awaiting me at South Coastal Library this morning.  I had two to return.  I love my library.  When I pulled on to the parking lot it was packed.  In the meeting room was a speaker on health foods.  From what I could see it was standing room only.  In the main part of the library, the computers were filled.  This little branch is always busy.  I didn't explore; I just picked up my holds and headed to the grocery store.  I have veggies simmering in chicken stock for soup.  Already it smells good.

In the background you might be able to see a corner craft cubby to sit on top of the craft table I got for Christmas.  I've moved it now and I am ready to stock it.  Boxes be gone!

Baby, It's Cold Outside!

I admit it.  I am a wuss when it comes to extreme cold, but I don't like extreme heat either.  That is not the case today.  We are under a deep freeze and awful wind chills.  Nothing like Chicago and the Midwest but bad for the mid-Atlantic states.

I'd like nothing more than to stay in bed with coffee and a book.  I have plenty of both but the siren's call of books being held at the library beckons.  While I am out I may as well go up the street a little more to the grocery store.  It is National Soup month.  I think we will have some chicken noodle soup - homemade.  I would like some good bread or rolls with it.

I have good intentions.  Now I just need to come out from under the covers and dress for the cold.

Banned Book Challenge #1

This is not a boy and his dog book.  Call of the Wild by Jack London is a survival of the fittest story at its best.

Buck, the protagonist of the novel, is a St. Bernard shepherd mix who lives a comfortable existence in the home of The Judge and his family.  He is stolen by a gardener's helper in need of extra cash and sold to men who aim to take him to the Yukon to sell as a sled dog.

Buck passes through the hands of several handlers falling victim to various degrees of violence and mistreatment all the while learning to survive and become alpha dog.  When Buck is eventually rescued by John Thornton, Buck is loved and loves in return.  Despite this comfort and satisfaction, Buck develops a yearning for his hereditary roots in the wild.  After a disaster at camp, Buck enters the wild for good earning the reputation as the Ghost Dog.

At first, I was not sure I could imagine why Call of the Wild would be a "banned book."  I research online to see if I could find credible explanations.

1.  It is labeled "inappropriate for targeted age group."  I am sure this is directed at school systems. In the system where I taught high school English, Call of the Wild is identified for grade 9 (14-15 year-olds).  Common Core lexiles also identify it for grade 9.  There is violence directed at the dogs which might upset dog lovers but I believe this age group could grasp the intent of the author.  There is also violence by the dogs, but again, I believe this age group would see it as part of the whole of nature.  The tone is dark but it is an element of literature and should be examined as such.

2.  There are definite elements of Darwinism - Survival of the fittest.  That doesn't affect my religious views (which are fairly conservative) but some might object.  This is where parental guidance could be important in explaining that while some may believe Darwin, we don't.  Let the student or reader see two sides.

3.  This book was banned and burned in Nazi Germany for its  revolutionary ideas.

I wouldn't challenge this book.  It provides excellent fodder for discussion.

Reading Assignment Challenge - January Complete

I have read both of the books I chose for January in the Reading Assignment Challenge: All Quiet on the Western Front on January 2 and Birdsong today.

This is only the second book I have read this year but I have to say it is a favorite.  I have had this book on my shelves for years and I thought I had read it, but as I perused my shelves for this challenge, I picked it up and flipped through it realizing I had no idea what it was about.  If I have in fact read it previously then my mind must have been elsewhere.

As mentioned with All Quiet on the Western Front, I have been on a World War I kick.  This is set during the war but it does flash forward to 1978.  Not only is this a war story, but it is a love story which in itself is somewhat a war story.

The protagonist is Stephen Wraysford.  As the novel opens he leaves England to visit a factory in France.  While he lives with the factory owner's family, he has an affair with the wife.  Eventually they leave together, but when she discovers she is pregnant she leaves him.  The other story involves their granddaughter in 1978.  The remaining six sections of the book go back and forth with World War I and Elizabeth's search to find out more about her grandfather.

The tragedy of the war is compounded with the tragedy of Stephen's life.  At times the book is truly heartbreaking.

"No one in England knows what this is like.  If they could see the way these men live they would not believe their eyes.  The is not a war, this is an exploration of how far men can be degraded."

From Amazon

Published to international critical and popular acclaim, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel spans three generations and the unimaginable gulf between the First World War and the present. As the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford passes through a tempestuous love affair with Isabelle Azaire in France and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land, Sebastian Faulks creates a world of fiction that is as tragic as A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient. Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, Birdsong is a novel that will be read and marveled at for years to come.

FrFrom Publishers Weekly

In 1910, England's Stephen Wraysford, a junior executive in a textile firm, is sent by his company to northern France. There he falls for Isabelle Azaire, a young and beautiful matron who abandons her abusive husband and sticks by Stephen long enough to conceive a child. Six years later, Stephen is back in France, as a British officer fighting in the trenches. Facing death, embittered by isolation, he steels himself against thoughts of love. But despite rampant disease, harrowing tunnel explosions and desperate attacks on highly fortified German positions, he manages to survive, and to meet with Isabelle again. The emotions roiled up by this meeting, however, threaten to ruin him as a soldier. Everything about this novel, which was a bestseller in England, is outsized, from its epic, if occasionally ramshackle, narrative to its gruesome and utterly convincing descriptions of battlefield horrors. Faulks (A Fool's Alphabet) proves himself a grand storyteller here. Enlivened with considerable historical detail related through accomplished prose, his narrative flows with a pleasingly appropriate recklessness that brings his characters to dynamic life.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.