Another Challenge – Who Will Join Me?

Trish has challenged all to read NOVELLAS!    you can find her own PR about it here which will direct you to the actual challenge…

Since the last book I read was under 250 pages, can I count it!??!

                 Wind, Sand & Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I don’t yet know which books I will commit to and I am thrilled to know that I’ve read quite a few from her suggested list (but that could only be a clue that I like to read short books!??!?!   nah, couldn’t be)

I think, but may be mistaken on only a couple, that I’ve read these:

• Animal Farm (1945) George Orwell
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) Truman Capote
• A Christmas Carol (1843) Charles Dickens
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) Leo Tolstoy
• The House on Mango Street (1984) Sandra Cisneros
• Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) Stephen Crane
• The Metamorphosis (1915) Franz Kafka
• Mrs Dalloway (1925) Virginia Woolf
• Of Mice and Men (1937) John Steinbeck
• The Old Man and the Sea (1952) Ernest Hemingway
• The Pearl (1945) John Steinbeck
• Shopgirl (2001) Steve Martin
• The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Stranger (1942) Albert Camus
• The Turn of the Screw (1898) Henry James

I loved Mrs. Dalloway!!!   and Shopgirl.   Both of these I’ve read fairly recently.   House on Mango Street is good, too.       

These I think I might WANT to read…

            The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962) Muriel Spark

• The Woman Who Waited (2006) Andrei Makine
• Visions of Sugar Plums Janet Evanovich
• Seize the Day (1956) Saul Bellow
• Stardust Neil Gaiman
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
• The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
• Anthem (1938) Ayn Rand

AND!   Trish?  I want to offer to create a possible graphic for it but I’m not sure I can find the time this week.   Vacation starts next week and I will be taking a big blogging break – but hope to do some excellent reading, of course.   POOLSIDE!

Wind, Sand, & Stars

   Finally finished this book and it’s a keeper.   It is one I hope to read again and again.   And I don’t usually do that.    I’m giving it 5 stars.

It’s philosophy and beautiful prose.  And history.   And beautiful language.   Fascinating, isn’t it?  that even though Mr. de Saint-Exupery wrote it in French originally, that the translation into English translated so well?  (Translation acknowledgement / thank you to Lewis Galantiere)

He takes us into flight; we survive being sucked into the seas or hurled into mountain sides.   We travel the countrysides of France and Spain, into the bombed city of Madrid, over the snow-covered Andes, introduced to the mirages of the Libyan desert.   We die of thrist; we are rescued.   We are left to guard a crashed airplane with one gun and few bullets against possible marauding fanatics.   We fear not death.

And we explore life from amazing perspectives.   We ponder, we contemplate, we question, and we share.

“But if we are to succeed in grasping what is essential in man, we must put aside the passions that divide us and that, once they are accepted, sow in the wind a whole Koran of unassailable verities and fanaticisms.  Nothing is easier than to divide men into rightest and leftists, hunchbacks and straightbacks, fascists and democrats – and these distinctions will be perfectly just.  But truth, we know, is that which clarifies, not that which confuses.  Truth is the language that expresses universality.  Newton did not”discover” a law that lay hidden from man like the answer to a rebus.   He accomplished a creative operation.   He founded a human speech which could express at one and the same time the fall of an apple and the rising of the sun.  Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is ineluctable.

If you love children’s books, you will recognize that this author also penned The Little Prince.  If I know The Little Prince, it is a vague recollection only.     Wind, Sand & Stars was written in 1939 before this kids book which was written in 1943.      It won the National Book Award and is listed as a Top Ten Adventure Book of All Time by National Geographic.   A few sexist and racist sentences which reflect the times stand out so glaringly in our now PC world and I’m not quite sure if worth mentioning.    While flying for his air squadron, Antoine de Saint-Exupery disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1944 at the age of 44.    He also wrote Night Flight and Wartime Writings.