My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell is such a fun book! It’s easy to see why it has been adapted in TV shows and movies, but I think the book is better than the adaptations. It’s hard to capture that level of craziness on the screen. The eccentric family and their friends and neighbors create a very interesting and enjoyable read. Is all of it true? Well, I’m thinking there is some exaggeration here and there!

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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is an amazing book that profiles one day in the life of a prisoner in a Soviet gulag. The story is short and focuses on the daily routine – the little details that come to mean everything in a life that is diminished by imprisonment. Ivan is a poor, uneducated man who is in prison because … well, it’s not really clear. Some other Russian novels use extraordinary characters to describe the dramatic and terrible circumstances of imprisonment, which then inform the prisoner’s struggles. Others tell of people whose special skills or knowledge are exploited, hidden, or contained by an authoritarian government. Ivan’s story is quieter. He represents “the poor” or “the lower class” person who ended up in the gulag for some minor crime or for breaking the rules at the wrong place and time – in the eyes of many, he is a nobody. In reality, he is in a Stalin-era work camp to do menial labor (under horrible conditions) that needs doing – fixing up buildings, repairing things, and anything else that the powers that be deem appropriate.

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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published in 1940 and is the first novel by Carson McCullers, who was 23 at the time. I feel like a complete slacker now! I really enjoyed this book. It is not a fast read – in some ways the pace of the book reflects the pace of life among the characters of the book. This is not a plot-driven book; it is more of a slice of life among people living fairly isolated and solitary lives. 

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I loved Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. The pacing was excellent and the story compelling. The fact that it is a true story of a double murder and no one really knows (or likely will ever know) what really happened was handled in a way that seemed to enhance rather than ruin the ending. The fact that so many aspects of human nature and the mind and memories and dreams were not well explored in the mid-1800s also adds to the mystery.

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I first read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald back in high school and liked it on a more “romantic” level – not so much about the love story component but the overall pathos of the book, if that makes any sense. There was a sense of characters being swept up into their storylines, which seemed new and different and a bit exciting. When I reread it about seven years ago, I really felt sad that there were so many people in this story who were either unhappy with their choices in life or uncomfortable with who they were as people.

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This wonderful book by Wilkie Collins was published in 1860 and is an early mystery novel. It plays with structure and presentation by having different chapters narrated by or focusing on the various main characters. The story was gripping and fascinating; the characters were very well-drawn and compelling.

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It’s always interesting to re-read books from your childhood. Will they still have that magical quality? Have I grown too cynical or “sophisticated” to enjoy them again? A couple of books still hit that sweet spot. I re-read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (and Through the Looking Glass) by Lewis Carroll and The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery a few years ago and they were lovely.

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The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (published in 1968) is a truly remarkable book. The story plays out over a few days in December 1949 in Moscow. Although I loved One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, I had not read one of the tomes by Solzhenitsyn (e.g., The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 or Cancer Ward), so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I knew this was set largely in a prison, so was prepared to read about a lot of physical pain, starvation, and so on. What I got was different … and so much more.

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I read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and really loved the book – though in a sad way. I have read novels that dealt with mental illness, as well as (auto)biographical accounts, and even non-fiction. This book really touched me. The initial impact of this book in 1963 must have been something to see! It is easy to forget or minimize how influential some books (or movies or art or TV shows) were – the “first” is groundbreaking but after a while what was new becomes part of life. It seems now that just about everything is discussed in the public arena, so the impact of mental health discussions being taboo seems a bit strange.

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I have read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men twice and both times thought it was an amazing story. In many ways, it seems to be a nearly perfect story in terms of construction and balance – the major themes of the story can be viewed through multiple characters and circumstances, and the beginning-middle-end all form a cohesive snapshot of people at a particular time, in this case during the Depression. Everything is so beautifully and clearly described that it’s easy to picture it all unfolding. It is a quiet and often lonely story about men whose voices were often not heard.

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