The Whole Bible

I read the Bible. I started with Genesis. I ended with Revelations. I skipped the Apocrypha.

Before I started this little project I had previously read no more than a few verses at a time. I fully admit, it was a very few verses indeed. For years I had a hand-me-down Bible from my Mom. The front had an illustration with little Golden-book style children sitting at Jesus’s feet. I read the first few lines of Genesis a few times and that was about it. I probably wouldn’t have read it at all if it weren’t for my book project. I’m sure there are those that wince at the fact that I started reading the Bible to check off an item on a list, but I did read it, and truly, I don’t think God minds. This time around I went with the black, leatherette version with my maiden name embossed in gold on it. Also a gift from Mom.

More importantly, for the most part I enjoyed reading the Bible. Now if anyone gets mad at the “for the most part,” I suspect you’ve perhaps not read this whole thing. There are some parts that are quite tedious, especially in the Old Testament. I understand that the measurements for temples were important and that the head counts for the tribes were important. I am no scholar, but I definitely had the feeling that the Old Testament, in its day, served not only as a religious text, but also as a law book, a cultural rule book, and a history book. That’s a lot to expect from one book. It can’t all be fire and brimstone and manna from heaven.

It may come as no surprise that I most enjoyed the Gospels (the books in the New Testaments that talk about Jesus’s life). I respond better to stories, and it truly is an amazing story. It left me feeling lighter and more hopeful after I read it. I admired Jesus’s patience. I barely have patience to explain things as complicated as tying shoe laces to my four-year-old, let alone the concept of grace. Of course entire books are written on the subject of grace alone, and I will leave it to those much better suited to it.

Now that I’ve come to the end of it, I rather miss my Bible reading time. For a few seconds I wondered if I shouldn’t just start again at the beginning. I quickly thought better of that. But I have yet to figure out a coherent plan. For the moment, I’m going to play it by ear and see where life takes me. I never thought it would take me here, after all, and things have turned out pretty good.

Anna Karenina

I know it's the movie poster, but you get all the main characters this way.

Synopsis:

We follow two love stories in this novel. We start with Levin, arriving in Moscow to woo Kitty. Anna arrives at the same time to comfort her sister-in-law, Dolly (Kitty’s older sister), in the wake of the revelation that her husband has cheated on her.

In a collision of worlds, Levin proposes to Kitty, but Kitty refuses because she’s in love with Vronsky, a young army officer. Kitty is convinced that Vronsky is about to propose, and even though she loves Levin, she’s blinded by the romance of Vronsky’s courtship. Vronsky meanwhile has just met Anna at the train station, where someone has been hit by a train, and has fallen instantly in love with her, forgetting all about Kitty, whom he never loved, but did like. At the ball following Levin’s proposal, Kitty sees that Vronsky has completely forgotten her and is in love with Anna, whom she had thought of as a mentor.

Levin leaves town painfully hurt at Kitty’s refusal and goes to his country estate, where he spends most of his time. Kitty plunges into depression caused by the double blow of losing Vronsky and secretly realizing that she would have been happy with Levin but she gave him up for nothing. Anna leaves to return to Petersburg to her husband and son. Vronsky leaves for Petersburg for the purpose of following and courting Anna with the hope of becoming her lover.

Anna and Vronsky do become lovers.  Kitty finds consolation through friendship while traveling abroad to recover from her depression. Levin spends a lot of time pouting and trying to improve farming methods on his estate.

Things come to a head for Anna when she finally explodes at her husband and tells him about her affair. Divorce at the time was possible, but very messy and socially anathema. Her husband decides he’d rather save face and tells her that she can do what she wants as long as she doesn’t embarrass him. A short time later, however, he finds Vronsky at his house and in a fury he takes a trip across the country bent on divorcing Anna on his return. Incidentally, she’s also pregnant with Vronsky’s child at this point, but nobody seems to remark on it. The husband rushes back to Petersburg when he gets a telegram telling him that Anna is dying in childbirth. He rushes in and in a moment of divine inspiration, forgives her everything, forgives Vronsky, and adores the baby girl that is not his. Anna recovers, but her spirit is broken under the benevolence of her husband and her own feelings of disgust at her behavior. Vronsky is so upset that he shoots himself in the chest, but doesn’t die. After all that, Anna and Vronsky take the baby and go off to live abroad like a married couple with her husband’s blessing.

Levin eventually has the courage to meet Kitty again and they quickly realize that despite their past, they love each other. Levin immediately proposes and Kitty accepts.

Anna and Vronsky are not happy abroad, in Petersburg, Moscow, or the country. Because Anna is not divorced no one will even acknowledge her in society. This creates such neediness in her that Vronsky feels suffocated and they begin to grow apart. Finally Anna is plunged into a jealous depression and throws herself under a train because of a supposed slight by Vronsky. (Circular story telling!)

The Levins meanwhile have their first baby and generally very happy. The novel wraps up with Vronsky heading off to war, a hollow man after Anna’s suicide, and Levin finding God and happiness in his family circle.

Other Thoughts:

• So long. So very, very long. But what made Anna Karenina ever so much more readable is the fact that, unlike War and Peace, it sustained a narrative arc the whole time. It was a long story, but it was all story and characters. There was still some philosophizing on the state of the peasant, but much less.

• AK has one of the most famous openings in literature, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That line holds true throughout the novel. You can tell just from my synopsis that the Levin story line, the happy one, is much more easily summed up than Anna’s story line, which is full of unhappiness. There are a few times too when Levin is so happy that he admits that he simply agrees to whatever arrangements are suggested to him because it’ll all be fine and he just doesn’t really care because he’s so in love.

• I feel the most sympathy for Vronsky, of all characters. I wouldn’t have thought to feel sympathy for the guy who stole the married woman, but he is an upstanding, nice guy.  He’s a decent man, a man of honor, and he really does love Anna. It’s really her own unhappiness and the changes they produce in her that begins to drive him away. I can easily see how it would be difficult to be around someone who is always upset, mad, or nitpicking. She can’t go out, she has no life other than him, and so it drives her to absolute distraction when he tries to have a life. Even so, he gives up his army career, which was bright, and his social standing to be with her. He wants to marry her and is the main force encouraging her to get a divorce. Also, he adores his daughter and it kills him that because she was born while Anna was married, she doesn’t legally belong to him. When Anna dies, it nearly destroys him and he feels very responsible for it.

• I was talking to a good friend while I was reading this one and when she heard what I was reading she said something along the lines of, “I tried to read that in high school. It was awful!” I was pretty surprised, because it really wasn’t bad and actually quite entertaining in its way. As I thought about it, I realized that if I had read it when I was a teenager, I definitely would have hated it too. You have to have a good amount of patience to read a book that long where plot lines develop over the course of years and you can read whole chapters that don’t actually advance the plot at all. It also helps to just have more life experience sometimes. If it ever comes up, I will definitely tell people not to read AK until they’re 30 at least.

Next up is David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Somehow I don’t think that one’s short either. We’re nearing the half way point. I’ve got 47 books down. I’ll have to start thinking about some sort of half way blog party. Feel free to post ideas!

Wind the the Willows

 

Synopsis:

We follow Mole as he breaks out of his hole and into Spring. He quickly meets the Water Rat at the river’s edge and they form a fast friendship, boating and picnicking. Their world is peopled with the Otter, Toad, and Badger, as well as various families of field mice.

Toad, who fancies his wealth to equate with greatness, becomes obsessed with motor cars and quickly becomes the bane of the local roads. His driving is absolutely terrible, but his love of automotives is unquenchable. He no sooner wrecks a car then a new one arrives. Finally his friends step in to try and rid him of this obsession.

The combined powers of the Water Rat, Mole, and Badger come to naught when Toad escapes their house arrest. He immediately steals a motor car, crashes, pours abuse upon the policeman and finds himself in a deep, dark jail with a long sentence. After months of confinement the jailer’s daughter takes pity on him and helps him escape dressed as a washerwoman.

Relying on his wits and a great deal of luck, Toad makes it home only to discover that the weasels of the Wild Wood have taken over his grand residence, Toad Hall. The friends hatch a plot and, using a secret tunnel, take the weasels by surprise and rout them from the house. The novel ends with a welcome home party hosted by a newly modest Toad.

Other Thoughts:

• This is one novel that I’m pleased to report is thoroughly delightful. I can’t wait to introduce this to H in three or four years when chapter books will be no problem for her. My library copy included the original illustrations, which greatly added to the reading experience as well.

• I thought the ending was a bit abrupt. The Toad is just horribly conceited and thinks a very great deal of himself and a very little for anyone else. Yet, at the final welcome home party he somehow changes himself into a new Toad full of modesty. After such a build up throughout the novel it seemed a bit odd. I couldn’t help but think that it wouldn’t last.

I have to confess I wrote this review quite a while ago, and it got lost in the flurry of summer. I will try to be better and get back to the keyboard this fall. Pray that J takes decent naps. Meanwhile, I’m in the depths of Anna Karenina.

The Bible - Part V

I’m finally in the New Testament! Yay! I’ve been rather tardy in blogging, so we’ll be covering the Gospels and Acts.

The Gospels cover the life of Jesus four times. You hear from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and get more or less the same stories each time. Just like any other happening, you get slightly different points of view and a few different stories here and there. While I was familiar with the overall story, this was my first time reading it all, and I greatly enjoyed it.

It’s sort of funny how some of the parables like the seeds that fall on fertile ground or rock are so familiar and seem so obvious to us, but at the time not even the disciples really understood what Jesus was saying. That particular story is a good example because the disciples went up to him afterward and asked, “What the heck were you talking about?” Jesus does explain it to them, but sometimes I feel like he’s also a little impatient with them. To us, it makes the disciples sometimes seem foolish because it seems obvious, but at the time it was so new that it’s no surprise that the disciples wondered why Jesus was talking about farming.

Actually, I kind of got the impression that there were a lot of times that Jesus got frustrated. I wonder what it was like to have all that knowledge and power, spend all your time trying to enlighten people, and then have those same people come up and ask what seem like the dumbest questions. It probably was frustrating on some level. After all, he only had limited time and he was trying to pack in as much teaching as possible. I’m sure there were some times he just wanted to say, “Listen, trust me. I know what I’m talking about.”

Acts is entirely new ground for me. I enjoyed learning how Paul went out and spread the word all around the Mediterranean, but it also saddened me by how little has changed in human spirit from then to now. Paul was doing a good thing. He was teaching about love and forgiveness. He wasn’t discriminating, but trying to teach anyone who would listen. Yet, the powerful Jews, who stood to lose power and prestige if this new church prospered, tried to have him killed. They were so threatened at the thought of losing their position they wanted to kill him for spreading love. Love! How insane does that sound?

Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed for the very same thing. What’s equality if not loving one’s neighbor? Power is so corrupting that even when the “subversive” message being preached is one of love, it threatens us. And you can extend that perceived “threat” to so many other topics.

It leads me to hope that one day we can truly embrace those principles of love and forgiveness. The world would certainly be a better place for it.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Synopsis:

I’m going to guess you probably know this one, but I’ll give you the big picture anyway.

Alice is playing in the garden with her older sister when she spots a white rabbit checking his pocket watch and remarking on his lateness. She chases him and falls down the famous rabbit hole. She finds herself in a hall full of doors, all of which are locked. She eats and drinks and changes size several times trying to get into a tiny door that leads to a beautiful garden. But it’s all to no avail.

As a tiny person she comes across a whole group of animals and spends some time with them. She insults the mouse several times when she brings up her beloved cat, Dinah. In this way she puts off all the animals she’d been talking to and goes wandering off by herself.

Here she runs into the rabbit again who sends her to his house to fetch him a pair of kid gloves. She finds the house and the gloves, only to grow very large while inside the house until she is trapped. A bevy of animals under the rabbit’s direction then tries to get her out of the house by throwing things at her. The things turn out to be little cakes, which she eats; they shrink her back down and she runs out of the house.

Next she meets the caterpillar. He shares with her the secret that one side of his mushroom will make her grow larger and the other smaller. With that she goes off to the Duchess’s house. There the cook is throwing things and demanding more pepper. The Duchess is breastfeeding an ugly baby that won’t stop screaming. The Duchess leaves to get ready for croquet with the Queen and hands Alice her baby. The baby promptly turns into a pig and wanders off.

It’s then that Alice notices the Duchess’s grinning cat in the tree. The Cheshire Cat gives Alice directions to the March Hare’s house, where Alice finds a tea party in progress. There she also meets the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse. Apparently it’s always tea time there and the group keeps progressing around the table from place to place, drinking more tea.

After a few rounds of riddles, Alice leaves and finds herself in the royal garden. There she meets some playing cards who are trying to paint the white roses red. The Queen catches them and orders their heads cut off. She then presses Alice into playing croquet with her using a flamingo for a mallet, a hedge hog for a ball, and more playing cards for the arches. Of course the game gets nowhere, and the Queen spends all the time ordering people’s heads cut off. 

Finally the Queen takes Alice to the Gryphon, who introduces her to the Mock Turtle. The Mock Turtle proceeds to tell some thoroughly confusing stories until they hear that a trial is beginning and Alice and the Gryphon run off to see the Knave of Hearts tried for stealing the Queen’s tarts. After much silliness Alice grows in height again and tells off the King and Queen. When the cards begin to attack her, she wakes up to discover that her adventures were really just a dream and the cards were just some leaves falling from a tree.

Other Thoughts:

• When I was a little kid, I danced the part of a flamingo in Alice Through the Looking Glass. Just thought you should know.

I thought I was "da bomb" in this costume.

• Lewis Carroll clearly had a vast and vivid imagination. I would say that he perhaps had some recreational habits, but the writing reminded me a good deal of A.A. Milne and Winnie the Pooh, which is to say, it’s clearly the sort of silliness you invent for the toddler/young child set.

• I once again missed a whole rash of very English, very period references. Alice recites several poems which are meant to be comical because they are slightly off from the real versions. Having no acquaintance whatsoever with the real versions, the references were lost on me.

• I was impressed by how many of the stories I did actually know. Quite a bit of the original story has made its way, in one form or another, into popular culture.

• My copy has a color illustration of the tea party on the front, which has prompted H to ask me about Alice. I’ve had rather a good time telling her some of the stories—abridged for both content and time. She’s a very practical child and doesn’t understand the comedy of the cook throwing things for no reason whatsoever.

Next up: The Wind in the Willows.