Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

Ok this is my attempt to have at least one entry into the Estella Project before the baby arrives and the whole world goes insane!! I actually picked up Travels with Charley before the reading list for this project was announced so was half way through it when it began, but it still counts! In case you haven't been reading my blog lately and seen how many times I've referenced the awesomeness of this book, let me just say flat out that I LOVED it from pretty much page one.

You guys, I have got such a list of quotes from this book, it's silly. I honestly don't know how to talk about its' awesomeness without just resorting to a list of them, but I shall try. So Travels with Charley is non-fiction, and it's about Steinbeck's journey around America with his dog, Charley. He pretty much does what Rhys and I talk about all the time, which is to get a camper van and just drive around, seeing things and visiting random places and chatting to people. Consequently the book is packed full of his observations on everything from the countryside to racism to politics and stylistically it's beautiful. 

When I read East of Eden I was amazed by the depth of Steinbeck's description, and it's no less in Travels with Charley, although it does have a more conversational tone to it. I don't know if I would have enjoyed the book as much if I didn't agree with so much of what he said, but pretty much every observation he made I was like 'YES' to. I should have taken a picture of what the book looked like before I wrote the quotes down and unfolded the pages, because I swear it was probably every other page which was folded. The book was twice as thick by the time I finished it! It also (as Laura said it would!) really really made me want to road trip across America, but that's a bit of a pipe dream for now I think, unless I go all Hideous Kinky and decide to homeschool my kids from a van, which I think would probably require Rhys to have a personality transplant! 

So anyway, really all I have to say about this book is that it was seriously great. A really relaxing, inspiring, though provoking and beautiful read and perfect for summer as it's fairly short. It's going on my list of favourites and staying firmly on my keeper shelf! 

Here are a few of the absolute best quotes from the book:

• "For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?" (p29) - talking about Florida, but also about the need for variety in life in general. 
• "I think today if we forbade our illiterate children to touch the wonderful things of our literature perhaps they might steal them and find secret joy" (p31) - this guy clearly understands both kids and the awesomeness of literature
• "I had the fear that I might somewhere run out of butane gas, and how would I read in bed then?" (P42) - Oh John, this would be a fear of mine too, and totally justifies buying a kerosene lamp!
• "Maybe everybody needs Russians. I'll be even in Russia they need Russians. Maybe they call it Americans" (p110) - everybody needs somebody to blame for their problems! So true!
• "From start to finish I found no strangers. If I had, I might be able to report them more objectively. But these are my people and this is my country. If I found matters to criticise and deplore, they were tendencies equally present in myself" (p159)

I cut out about two pages of what I had written just to spare you a huge list of quotes, but I hope this little list will make you see why it was that I found this book so fascinating!

Review: - Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

I don’t know if I mention it enough, but just in case I don’t, I really like graphic novels. Like, really like them. I have a lot of t shirts with really geeky graphic novel related things on them, and I refuse to be ashamed. I love the effort that goes into them and I love their general thick glossiness and how the stories themselves are generally totally kick ass. As part of the Graphic Novel Challenge last year I decided to branch out from my almost solely Neil Gaiman based graphic novel collection and try some different styles. Fun Home came on my radar when I was looking for books the internet thought were similar to Perspolis by Marjane Satrapi. Any of you who have been reading my blog over the last year will probably know that Persepolis was my ‘oh my god what is this book and why did nobody tell me about it before??!’ book of 2011. I LOVED it, and up until I read The Night Circus, it was the book I was recommending to everybody, so I had incredibly high expectations of Fun Home going in.

Alison Bechdel’s autobiography centres around the family business; a funeral (‘fun’) home, and her childhood and growing up, although really it focuses on her issues with her father, Bruce Bechdel, and coming to terms with being a lesbian. Alison’s father is painted as a remote man, unpredictable, angry, and distant from his children. The reasons for this – that he was a closet homosexual who was having affairs with male students, and Alison’s babysitter – don’t become clear until later on in the book, but they have a considerable effect on Alison herself both consciously and unconsciously. She feels as a child that he loves their big, historic house more than his children, and is more interested in renovating it than in spending time with her and her brothers.

Although I didn’t love it like I love Persepolis, I can see where the comparison came from.  Both are stories of growing up in unusual and difficult circumstances (just to be clear, I’m not comparing Bechdel and Satrapi’s situations – they are clearly not the same, but they are both stories of a young girl feeling very lost and uncertain of who she was and where she belonged), and their style of illustration is similar – both are done solely in black and white and are very clear and easy to follow. Personally, it’s a style I find more relaxing than the full, aggressive colour of many other graphic novels.

The story isn’t told chronologically but jumps around a lot which I found made it more engaging. Both of Alison’s parents are prodigiously intelligent people; her father is a professor, and her mother is an actress. When I originally wrote that sentence, it came out in the past tense, and although Alison’s mother is still acting during the course of Alison’s childhood and adolescence, she feels like one of those women whose individuality became subsumed by her husbands’ personality and her children’s needs. Her mother seems very disappointed with life, resigned to living with a man who doesn’t really want to be with her, and whose interests are totally separate from her own. Bechdel talks about her mother with a sort of sadness, and actually I just found out that she is bringing out a new book in May 2012 entitled Are You My Mother, seemingly to even things out a bit.

Throughout the book, Alison’s parents are not often seen together, and when they are they are violently arguing, but still it takes Alison’s mother until Alison is nearly twenty to ask her father for a divorce. Her parents seem to both have very creative and intellectual lives, and her mother is in many ways an incredibly positive role model for Alison – acting and completing a Masters thesis while raising three children, but despite all the achievement she is shown as disappointed, lifeless, and worn out. The facial expressions in Fun Home were one of the things which made it most effective for me. Bruce Bechdel’s face is always the same – closed up and emotionless even when he is talking to Alison about having to visit a psychiatrist because he is ‘bad, not good like you’ (p153). Because Bechdel obviously knew what her father had done while writing the novel, the underlying accusation is always there throughout the story , giving the reader a different perspective on events than Bechdel herself would have had at the time.

People say that to a degree, every family is dysfunctional. I personally don’t have an experience of this – my family is big and loud and we all have similar interests and are always talking and ringing each other to borrow books, movies, clothes. We go to the pub together, to the cinema, some of my siblings came to stay for New Year and we had an awesome party... So I am lucky, but I know a lot of people who are less lucky than me, and everybody has their secrets it’s just that some are bigger than others, and Bruce Bechdels’ secret was definitely one of the bigger ones.

Another thing that I liked about Fun Home though was the other thing that makes it so comparable to Persepolis. It is filled with books. Throughout Alison’s life, she reads. Her father reads - he recommends her books from time to time. When she begins to think that she is a lesbian, she reads about it – all the books she can get her hands on. I can completely relate to this, and I’m sure many other readers can. When I want to learn about something, I read about it. Although I really enjoy a good debate, I am the kind of person who likes to be sure that I have all my facts straight first, and so in many ways I would rather learn intellectually first, before putting ideas into practice. I learned to knit this past year from a book,  which I know is not really comparable to learning about your sexuality from books, but it can be so comforting to read about somebody who has been through the situation you have been through and been confused as you are confused and to see how they resolved their situation.

Fun Home won’t be going on the list of things I rave at people about, but it will be staying on my shelf so that I can recommend it to people.  

Review: - How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

I'm back! Second post this week, and I'm very excited despite the fact that blogging is now actually costing me money as in order to access the Starbucks interwebs, I have to buy a tea first. Although tea is never a bad thing, it costing me £3 (I always end up having a cake of some sort too...) a go, is. Anyway! Aside from that, I'm really excited about this book.

I’ve read a lot of reviews of How to be a Woman; some loved it, some hated it. From reading these reviews I thought I’d probably love it, and I was so right. How to be a Woman is Caitlin Moran’s autobiography; it is also an acerbically funny look at feminism and the things that make it necessary. I won’t ramble on and on about this book – it doesn’t need me to. Moran discusses candidly all the horrible squeamish bits of being a woman that nobody ever talks about, unless they are very very drunk. She managed to make me squirm in disgust and have a very public giggling fit within the space of five minutes, and I came away from the book feeling like I’d learned a lot. Having grown up with four sisters in the kind of family where you never ever talked about the gross stuff, except by using vague shrugging gestures in the place of the thing you were actually talking about, maybe I just loved this book because it told me all the things nobody else had, and by this I don’t mean that I’ve managed to reach the age of 24 without knowing about periods or where babies come from, but just that it was amazing (and disgusting) for me to read a book that talked about all the horrible bits of childbirth as well as the awesomesauce stuff.

Here is the bit that made me laugh for a full five minutes, and then periodically throughout the day whenever I remembered it. Customers thought I was weeeeeeird that day!

 “Caz gets horrific cramps- she spends her periods in the bedroom with the curtains drawn, covered in hot water bottles, shouting ‘Fuck off’ at anyone who tries to come into the room. As part of being a hippy, my mother doesn’t ‘believe’ in pain-killers, and urges us to research herbal remedies. We read that sage is supposed to help, and sit in bed eating handfuls of sage and onion stuffing, crying. Neither of us can believe that we’re going to have to put up with this for the next 30 years.” (p20)

I have so much love, and as I’m totally hating my current rating system for books, I’m going to go with ‘this is a book that I really enjoyed, and will be keeping forever and re-reading, and recommending to absolutely everyone I can find’. Well done, Ms Moran, you are totally hilarious.

Maybe I’m just a weirdo, but it struck a chord with me, and I’ll be recommending this book to everyone I come across in the foreseeable future, whether they be male or female. Most of the men I know would benefit just as much as the women from reading about how difficult it is for a woman to know what to call her breasts and other such things.

A Vicarage Family by Noel Streatfeild

Yay, the writing bug is back! :-) It feels like ages since I last reviewed anything, so last night I sat down and wrote this, and I'm sooooo glad I did. The sun is shining, I'm excited about reviewing books again, all is right with the world. So, this is the latest update on my Noel Streatfeild Challenge. I'm having a lot of fun with this so far, and really enjoying starting to read some of her books that I haven't before! The copy of A Vicarage Family which I got from the library was a mega old one, first borrowed in the 1970s. Interestingly, it was borrowed consistently throughout the '70s and '80s, but then only three times between 1993 and 2011. I guess it's representative of the decline in Streatfeild's popularity... and it's a shame. Anyway, on to the review!

A Vicarage Family is the first part of Noel Streafeild's autobiography. She says that she has changed the names, because it is only the truth as she remembers it, and acknowledges that it may not be the truth as it actually was. It follows the Strangeway family - the father is a vicar, and the novel documents the childhood of the Strangeway children, Isabel, Victoria (Noel), Louise, Dick, and their cousin, John.

I really enjoyed the novel. I've enjoyed all of Streatfeild's work, so far, but I liked this on a different level. Victoria is instantly recognisable as the awkward middle child, who just doesn't seem to be able to get anything right, and whose attitude and problems with authority are constantly causing her to get into trouble. In her, I can see where Streatfeild got the ability to create such characters as Jane Winter (one of my favourites..) in The Painted Garden : children who feel untalented and unloved, and so become products of an environment where their siblings are constantly favoured and prioritised above them. 

The book had all of her usual charm and comfortable feeling about it, but it was much more gritty than I'm used to - for the first time, the First World War actually left its mark on the book, rather than just passing over or around it. Even books like When the Siren Wailed, which is ostensibly about the war, didn't really feel like they engaged with it as much as this novel did, and for me, that took it to a completely different level.

Having read this, I'm starting to see similarities to different parts of all her other novels, and maybe it's the authentic touch of reality which is what I love about Streatfeild. Her books often feel like my own childhood. The book was published in 1963, well after the success of Ballet Shoes, etc, so in some ways I suppose it can be seen as a kind of explanation of her children's books.

I'm starting to think the first book I read when embarking on this challenge, should have been a biography of Streafeild. When I was at university,a  few professors used to tell us that for every new author we read, we should read a biography, as understanding the author's life experiences and their historical period, often helps to better understand their work. I really wish I had enough hours in the day to be able to fit in reading a biography of every author I read, especially the ones I love, but realisitically, given my huuuuuuuge TBR pile, plus the fact that I do have a job, and a life outside of reading a blogging (ish, anyway!), a house to clean, and friends who expect me to at least vaguely keep in touch with them, it's not going to happen. So, for the moment at least, I'm stuck with reading author bio's on Goodreads and Wikipedia, and from the introductions in books. Reading A Vicarage Family helped give me at least a little bit of insight into Noel Streatfeild, and what caused her to write in the way that she did. I am planning to read the other 2 installments of her autobiography, as and when the library get them in for me, and I'm also planning to read a biography, just to see if somebody else's view of her life even slightly tallies up with her own!

Rating: ****

(I've decided I give out too many 5 star ratings, so I'm stopping. Unless they actually are earth-stoppingly good. This was great, but the earth kept turning....)

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Sometimes I do this really geeky thing when I really like a book, where I'll do an Amazon search on it, and then make a list of 20 books. I take the first one from the 'Customers who bought this also bought' list of the first book, the second one from the list of that book and on and on until I have 20. Eat, Pray, Love is one of those book that made me want to read lots of other books like it. It also made me want to eat lots, cook lots, learn to meditate, take up yoga, and live in an ashram, as well as reinforcing my feelings that it's probably time for a major lifestyle change.

Eat, Pray, Love (for those who don't know) is about Elizabeth Gilbert, and her journey of self-discovery following her divorce. She goes to Rome, purely because she wants to learn to speak Italian, and to eat, India, where she lives on an ashram and learns a lot about herself, and Indonesia, where she makes a lot of friends, and falls in love. I've wanted to read this book for a while, and am waiting on lovefilm to send me the movie, so it can be part of my Page to Screen challenge.

I was absorbed by the descriptive power of the book, and by the depth of experience contained in the story. As someone who was brought up Catholic, and currently considers themself a Christian without denomination (we've lately been attending the Baptist church, as it has the most people in our new area!), I was impressed by the sincerity of Gilbert's quest for a relationship with God, and recognised in it something I'm after myself.

Back before I got engaged, I was in the middle of planning this big (imaginary) word trip, and Italy and India were two of the countries that I really wanted to visit. I was never that excited to go to Indonesia before, but having read so much about it recently, and having a friend who recently went there and loved it, I may be changing my mind.

The major thing to adore about Eat, Pray, Love, is the fact that it made me want to travel again - in fact I've already started to delve back into travel writing with a vengeance! :-)

Rating: *****

Wonderful Wednesdays #2 - Biographies

Wonderful Wednesdays is a meme hosted by Tiny Library . It is about spotlighting and recommending some of our most loved books, even if we haven't read them recently.  Each week will have a different theme or genre of book to focus on.

This week's theme is biographies.

I thought about this quite a lot, and I've decided that my favourite biography (although it's by a group, rather than a single person) has got to be The Freedom Writers Diary.

I actually hadn't read this book until after my roomate at the time made me watch the film, but it was (and still is) one of those films which inspired me so much that I immediately went out and bought all the associated reading material. And by the way, if you haven't seen the film, you really really should.

Basically, the diary is a collection of entries from the diaries of High School English students, most of whom live in the Projects in Long Beach, California. It's basically a record of the way in which their English teacher, Erin Gruwell, uses books, and different forms of English, to inspire the children, most of whom are gang members, or living in horrific circumstances, trying not to get shot everytime they walk out of their door.

The reason that I love this book, and the film, is that it helped to reaffirm my belief in the healing,motivating, and inspiring power of books, at a point when I was having doubts. And on top of that, it's a hugely moving and inspring read!

As well as this, the other biography that I would recommend, especially for anyone who actually teaches English, is 'Teach with Your Heart' by Erin Gruwell, which is actually the biography of the teacher, rather than the students. It's also a great book.