Love continued: Marmee & Louisa

I finally finished this book a few weeks ago. Once I got over the initial hump I read it much faster.

Overall thoughts: It was very hard to drop my "modern eye" at times reading this. For example, the state of Abigail and Bronson's marriage was SO AGGRAVATING and it was so frustrating to see how trapped she was in the situation because of the times. However, this kind of thing STILL happens to women all over the world today. It is so tragic! Not just because of the personal suffering when a marriage is dysfunctional but because relationships can be wonderful, powerful, fulfilling things and it is a tragedy when they don't fill their potential and instead are life-sucking. Also, their relationship is a really good example of how sexism hurts everyone. Neither of them fit into the "role" they were supposed to and it made them both unhappy though in very different ways. If Abigail had been free to make a living for the family and Bronson had been free to work on his ideas they would have both been much happier. Of course, Abigail would have been even happier if she could be taken more seriously for HER ideas....

This book was really a biography of Louisa May Alcott and her mother Abigail but I found the transition to focusing on Louisa a bit lacking. We didn't get to know her life and personality the same way we did her mothers even though she was so much more famous and well known. Side note: I totally did not realize how famous Louisa was in her day, it is really amazing how many books she sold.

I find it really interesting that Louisa and her mother both journaled extensively their whole lives. In our lab we do research on expressive writing for anger. Clearly they were doing this at times! I wonder how much writing has played a role in emotion regulation in history. I also wonder how journaling affects intellectual development more generally.

As for the theme love, Louisa and her mother did truly care for each other. I find it interesting that they were very much self-sacrificing for each other in a way that was different from their other relationships. Abigail especially was very self sacrificing in general though it was really expected of her in many ways. We expect mothers (and parents more generally) to sacrifice for their children and it seems like she really took this to another level due to their family's unique situation. Yet, when it came to Louisa it seemed more a matter of choice than in some of the other situations. I really wonder how the rest of the family viewed their relationship - were they envious? appreciative? I would guess a mixture of both.

Rating: 3 stars.

Recommendation: If you want to learn more about what it was like living during this time, read on sister. If you want to know what Louisa May Alcott was like as a person or how her writing influenced the world, read something else as you will just get a taste of those topics.

LOVE: The Shadow on the Crown

The book follows the lives of multiple people as they move about England (and some of Norway): Emma, the Norse princess who is given to the English King, Aethelred, the English King who is haunted by his brother’s ghost, Athelstan, the eldest son of the King--and rightful heir to the throne (unless Emma bears the King a son), and Elvirga, an ambitious woman who will do anything for the crown on Emma’s head. The book follows Emma from when she is told her life has been negotiated for peace with the King of England through loss, trials, and growth in her young years.

She begins a strong, albeit naive, girl, but she quickly learns the way of court. And as her unwilling husband draws further and further away from her, she finds joy and love in other areas of her life--namely, the King’s son--who she falls deeply in love with. Throughout the course of the book, she grows immensely.. learning how to survive her husbands wrath, learning from the miscarriage of her first pregnancy, learning how to make friends from people who mistrust you, and learning how to be a Queen.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It was an extremely light read--which I was not expecting. Honestly I think I’ve read too much George RR Martin recently.. the setup was incredibly similar (multiple points of view, court intrigue, wars, backstabbing, feasts, kings, and passion) and I kept unwillingly comparing it to GRRM, which is completely unfair.

Anyway, the inner struggle of her duty as a wife and queen vs. her own desires was very intriguing to me. I wish it had been explored a bit more, but I think it was still done really well. I admire her character for making mistakes, realizing her mistakes, and recovering from them. Most of all, I admire her for living up to her situation and making the best out of it. I am amazed at how strong she must have been to endure her husband--which, I imagine, is the case for most arranged marriages.

Insofar as love is concerned, this book had an interesting angle--Emma was able to find love in all of the places except the one she should have been able to--in her husband’s arms. And she learned an important lesson about love: love can triumph over the largest hurdles and it can make you the strongest person you’ll ever be.

I didn't know this when I started, but this book is the first in a trilogy. I am looking forward to reading the rest of them.

 Rating on Goodreads: 3

Love: Marmee & Louisa

Rather than focusing on romantic love for this theme, I opted for familial love. Coincidentally, this is also how I love to celebrate Valentine's Day - it's about EVERYONE I love, not just my man-mate (though I was less successful at that this year, sorry for the e-card Mom!).

Any-who, I have only just started this book, Marmee & Louisa by Eve LaPlante, about the strong, loving relationship between Louisa May Alcott and her mother. The title is from how this relationship was immortalized in the book Little Women, which I love. Though I was rather miffed about the ending at first - that's a point for another day. I am not so well versed in the Alcotts but even I have gathered that Louisa's father, Bronson Alcott, gets much more press than her mother did. This book is about correcting some of that historical oversight, that Louisa valued her relationship with and was influenced by her mother just as much, if not more, than by her father.

I am only about 40 pages in but this book already had me in tears. Perhaps I was a bit hormonal that day but works from this time period tend to get me.

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It's the child mortality folks, gets me EVERY TIME. This book is very much a historical, biographical account and thus starts with her mother's family. Abigail May's parents lost more than one of their children early on, but it was the death of one of their sons in middle childhood that greatly influenced her upbringing, by bringing her close to her brother Sam Jo. This small child's death really hit me, I just can't imagine losing a child and it was so commonplace at that time. Samuel Joseph May provides Abigail with many opportunities she would normally not have gotten, purposefully bringing his little sister into many of his educational experiences. Her father wasn't really down with this and Abigail caused some drama by refusing to many a suitor or really even be on the market for suitors. She was really captivated early in her life by education and very much aware of the many opportunities denied to her by her gender. I like that this book very firmly places her life in it's historical context but maintains a modern eye; let's be real we are all thinking about the contrast so I appreciate it when authors work with it. So, so far so good. I hope this post motivates me to get moving a bit faster on this book. American's Best Science and Nature Writing 2012 edited by Dan Arielly has been distracting me. Love that stuff.

We're Back! Now with more Pages!

A little re-introduction if you will, as allison k. and I decided to get back into the swing of blogging about out books. I feel reinspired - I have still been reading a ton, but writing about what I am reading does bring it to another level - and reading old posts was quite fun. Guess it's the narcissist in mean but damn, we are hilarious at times.

So this time it is just allison k. and I. And perhaps I will finish out the penguin year alphabet that inspired this little blogging adventure in the first place, but for now that is on hold. This time around we are freestylin' a bit more about what we read, but are trying to try it together with some themes, interpreted quite broadly. The themes we brainstormed encompass quite a range to accommodate our interests and our tendencies to read very different works.

The first theme, in honor of Valentine's Day, is Love. Yes, Love with a capital "L". Cue Sinatra. Get ready!

"V" is for Verne

Ok so I am skipping again a bit. I don't remember how I ended up reading this one - it was on the list, formally for what letter I don't remember, Ill check at a later date. In any case, I actually finished this book at least a month ago, and am just now updating.

Around the World in Eighty Days was a fun book that read really fast. This is in mind definitely an "adventure" book, in that the fun parts of the book are the crazy escapades the characters take on, not the characters themselves. That's also the drawback of this book, you don't get to know the characters very well and I tend to enjoy character driven plots more myself.

******spoilers*********

The whole point of the book, the journey around the world, was taken up on a bet, which seemed somewhat implausible and a very bored rich white male thing, though I did like the balancing of the attitude of the protagonist "just getting it done" with all of the things that accidentally come up to disrupt the journey that other characters throw into the mix. I especially enjoyed the detective, Fix, who follows them for most of the journey. Ok, I don't want to give too much away, but its a fun little read.

"N" is for Narayan

I should have finished this book quite some time ago, it was a pleasant, easy read. "Man eater of Malgudi" is written in a simple concise style. One of my favorite things about any good book is getting connected with the characters - if Im not invested in them a book is much less interesting to me. This book got you interested in the characters (I wouldn't go so far as invested), you wanted to know what happens, particularly to the antagonist, Vasu. Vasu was SO OBNOXIOUS. I had to read ahead to make sure he got his comeuppance, thats how annoying this man was. But that shows Narayan is a good writer, he made me want to know.

This book takes place in Southern India, which also added to its interest. It was set in post Ghandi India and makes many references to the changing and growing economy of Indian in that era, and with the traditional culture and Hindu belief system, so I found that fun and interesting. A edition with illustrations, even minor, would have made this a really fun book for me.

Isn't this cover beautiful? Mine was plain, alas.

"L" is for Loos

So my "L" book was "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" from which the famous Marilyn Monroe movie was based. I never actually watched the movie, but I thought reading the book it was based on might be fun.

How wrong I was.

I couldn't even make it through the first chapter.

The book is the diary of a "lady in society" published in the 1920s. Basically, she's a kept woman - and thats what the first 12 pages of the book were about. I get it that this was culturally acceptable at the time, but I couldn't take it. All the "oh well, since a man is paying for a woman's education for some reason I suppose I should quit the job he doesn't like" was just more than I could take. I've read plenty of books where the women had to conform to rules I didn't like, or acted and thought in ways I didn't agree with, but rarely has it annoyed me so much, I had to stop reading. Usually I can deal, people are shaped by the times right? Sometimes they are conscious of the forces shaping their lives, sometimes not but this book was too much.

So thats the end of my "L" book.

It did have cool illustrations.