Well, it's almost 11 pm. And I wont finish any more books. I starting this one in January, but it had been awhile since I'd read any of it, that I started it over again earlier today, and just finished it now.
#23 - Journal of a Solitude - May Sarton
A diary from 1970-1971 as the author spends a year mostly alone working on a poetry book for her upcoming 60th birthday. Her observations (inner and outer), struggles, joys, and self-revelations.
20 - The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame, illustrated by Robert Ingpen
Lovely. Animal adventures in rural England, bygone days. Originally began as bedtime stories for his son.
21 - A Coney Island of the Mind - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Mid-century poetry.
22 - The Valkyries - Paulo Coelho
A story about wanting to meet his guardian angel. I thought of it because there is an early scene where they walk out into the Mojave Desert and get heat stroke, and it's 102 F outside right now and it resonated. So far my apartment is only at 89 F, but I'm getting the afternoon sun through the blinds I couldn't lower (too high to reach). Whole Foods is air-conditioned, only open until 9 pm, but it's an option.
18 - Dial A For Aunties - Jesse Q. Sutanto
Meddelin Chan is a wedding photographer for her close-knit family's wedding business. The night before a lavish wedding set on an an island off the coast of California, she accidently kills the date her mother set her up with from a dating website. A Chinese-Indonesian rom-com with a lavish wedding, first love, lost love, found love...and a dead body. What could possibly go wrong?
19 - Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro
Since I first became aware of this novel, it has been the one I was most looking forward to reading; a story told from the perspective of Klara. The Klara of the title is an "artificial friend" or AF, meant to keep children from becoming lonely. In some future time, somewhat similar to our own, children are separated into those "uplifted" and those not (fates chosen by their parents), and learn through tutors and computers at home, no longer in the classroom (which has been the experience of so many children across the world over the past year-and-a-half.)
Klara is a unique AF, in that she is observant, curious, and takes an interest in understanding humans, in particular their emotional states and reasons, as well as the world around her.
Ishiguro novels have an overarching sense of melancholy to me, though I find them engaging, thought-provoking, and page-turning. They deal with a stratification of society, there are outsiders who will never find a place in society. Society deems them as separate, undeserving of equal treatment. In "Remains of the Day" (sorry, I read the novel a few years ago and can't recall the characters' names, but I remember the movie) the Anthony Hopkins character no longer has a place, while the Emma Thompson character has adapted to a different world. "Never Let Me Go" where people are bred to be used for organ donation, unable to reproduce, and kept apart from society, and with a stigma that makes other people fear them.
And the thing is, they are naive about what they do not understand. They have been kept so separate, isolated from the "outside" world, that they do not understand how things "work". I could call it "fish out of water" but that usually implies a comedy, and these are lives deemed unnecessary, to be used and discarded. They never win, the world had been constructed such that there was never any chance for that. I think of the Anthony Hopkins butler when he is driving in the country and his overconfident belief that he understands the world, but he's been sequestered on an estate for his whole life, while the world outside has drastically altered, he might as well of woken on a different planet.
Klara creates her own religion. A supreme being to please and appeal to, in order to assist someone she has grown to love. And holds her conviction so strongly that she convinces others to help her in her scheme, even without being able to tell them her secret promises. Shades of "Never Let Me Go" here, though with Klara she chooses, while the donors in the other have no agency in their fates.
There's also something interesting in how the two mothers made different choices for their children, but on the same trip to the city, make desperate choices to hedge their bets, second-guessing what can't be undone.
#15 -The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
Tale of a shepherd boy's search for his destiny.
#16 - The Meaning of Mariah Carey - Mariah Carey with Michaela Angela Davis
Her story of her life, as opposed to what the tabloids have told you.
#17 - Maurice - E.M. Forster
Maurice is an interesting choice for a "hero" in that there isn't anything particularly likable or extraordinary about him at first glance. He's an average boy and then an average man. He's in denial of his sexuality until he goes to Cambridge where he falls in love with a fellow student. And yet, as he somewhat methodically tries to come to terms with his sexuality even going so far as to see a hypnotist in hopes of "being cured", which of course, doesn't work, once he decides to be who he is, he gives up everything for love. And that is heroic. Forster wrote "Maurice" in 1914-15, and for most of his lifetime, homosexuality was a crime in England. It was decriminalized in 1967, and Forster died in 1970. "Maurice" was published posthumously. In the novel, after the hypnotist fails, he suggests Maurice could move to Italy or France where it's not a crime, but in the end, Maurice and Alec stay in England. He chooses to live fully whereas other people fulfill societal expectations and live half-lives.
This is the first writing of Forster I've read, so I don't know if it's the style of his writing, the time period it was written (perhaps there is shorthand that people of the time would have understood, that readers 100+ years later, don't have the context or norm of language for), because of the subject matter, or because Maurice himself keeps things hidden from himself, but the first part of the novel seemed somewhat hidden, if that makes sense. Like things were being alluded to, talked around, rather than directly addressed. It was hard to stay engaged. That changed for me in the middle, it felt like it opened up more, let me into the story.
And I can't recall if it was a reviewer or Forster himself that commented (or a combination) but if he'd written a morality tale about homosexuality with a tragic ending it would've been publishable in his lifetime, but as it is, Maurice has a happy ending, no one is punished or suffers, and that was an unacceptable outcome in England for most of the 20th Century.
