The Ox-Bow Incident

Thoughts by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Kindle edition (orig 1940), 290 pages

Category  2. 20th Century Classic. 

A cowboy book, out on the range. Reminded me of western movies, and maybe I ‘ve seen the movie based on this book but if I did, it was a very long time ago.

I would like to see the film (again) eventually.

It’s about good versus evil and mob mentality. It’s about wanting to see what happens, fear of missing out, not sure how to stop it but sure as hell gonna try. It’s about quite a bit and it is very masculine-centric.

“Most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than of anything else, and a lot more afraid of being thought physical cowards than moral ones.”

It’s about uncertainty. It’s about power. It’s full of dread.

“you can feel awful guilty about nothing when the men you’re with don’t trust you.”

It is right and wrong, black and white and yet exposes all the ambiguity.

“…getting angry enough not to be scared when you knew you were wrong.”

I gave this four slices of pie.

No pie mentions noted.

Classics Club 50

“…she did a lot of intelligent feeling.”

Copyright © 2007-2019. Care’s Online Book Club. All rights reserved. This post was originally posted by Care from Care’s Online Book Club.  It should not be reproduced without express written permission.

I Completed SIX Categories of the Back to the Classics 2019

I copied my sign up post to compare my plan (in red) to what happened (blue).

Categories Achieved in Green

 (if I get Candide read and reviewed as well as a review of The Ox-bow Incident, I just might get to say I completed 9…)

1. 19th Century Classic. Any classic book originally published between 1800 and 1899. – The House of the Seven Gables – Nat Hawthorne 1851 √  LINK to REV

2. 20th Century Classic. Any classic book originally published between 1900 and 1969. – The Ox-bow Incident by Walt VanTilberg Clark 1940 √ (Link to review)

 

3. Classic by a Woman Author.  NANCY MITFORD’s LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE √ LINK to REV

 

4. Classic in Translation. CANDIDE – Voltaire    X – didn’t get to this. (yet?!)

5. Classic Comic Novel. Any comedy, satire, or humorous work. ?  A Handful of Dust by E Waugh √ LINK to REV

6. Classic Tragic Novel. Tragedies traditionally have a sad ending… Hardy: Jude the Obscure – Hardy: the Woodlanders√ LINK to REV

7. Very Long Classic. Any classic single work 500 pages or longer, not including introductions or end notes. – The Three Muskateers should work for this. X – didn’t get to this.

8. Classic Novella. Any work of narrative fiction shorter than 250 pages. – One Fine Day – Mollie Panter-Downes 179pp 1947 √ LINK TO REV

9. Classic From the Americas (includes the Caribbean). Includes classic set in either continent or the Caribbean, or by an author originally from one of those countries. – ? X – didn’t get to this.

10. Classic From Africa, Asia, or Oceania (includes Australia). Any classic set in one of those contents or islands, or by an author from these countries. – Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook? √ Link to review

11. Classic From a Place You’ve Lived. Read locally! Any classic set in a city, county, state or country in which you’ve lived, or by a local author. – The Age of Innocence / Wharton / Newport RI – Now in November 1934 by Josephine Johnson / Missouri √ LINK TO REV

12. Classic Play. Any play written or performed at least 50 years ago. Plays are eligible for this category only.  X X – didn’t get to this.

Maybe this year

I will read at least 6

and achieve this Challenge

for the first time!

YAY!  I have done 8 and if I hurry I can read Candide and count it for Translation and achieve 9. What a thrill. I’m so excited!!!

Copyright © 2007-2019. Care’s Online Book Club. All rights reserved. This post was originally posted by Care from Care’s Online Book Club.  It should not be reproduced without express written permission.

The Woodlanders, A Clockwork Orange, and A Handful of Dust

Mini Reviews

Challenge:  Classic Club 50 and Back to the Classics

  

This grouping of Brit classics comes to you as part of my effort to post on books that fit the challenge requirements for the 2019 Back to the Classics Challenge.

Audiobook, narrated by Samuel West, orig 1887, 14 hr 16 min

I read The Woodlanders and loved it. Gave it 5 slices of pie. And since it is British, of course it has pie. (I really need to make some meat pies to celebrate Brit pies!!!!)

So FIVE slices of Apple Pie for this lovely twisty crazy tale of infidelity and nutty triangles of DRAMA.  Published in 1887 — I swear, Hardy in now times would be a reality show writer but be sad about it.

Here’s what I wrote on gr:

I loved the language, I agree with others that Hardy delivers suspense and certainly drama, and he is a master at language. Oh, I said that already. He is becoming a favorite and I wouldn’t have guessed I would have said that since Tess about killed me. I adored Far from the Madding Crowd and that is still my favorite, but I delighted in this crazy tale of love gone wrong and twisty. (not THAT kind of ‘twisty’! get minds out of the gutter. No sordid descriptions of the dirty deeds in this tale, puhlease.) But this did have turns and unexpected conflicts and resolutions and just a ton of bad decision-making, as humans are wont to do. Such vexation!
I’m really not sure as to the ending, what really happened there. Was it a happy ending? If I hadn’t realized that the end was near, I might have been disappointed; but I knew the audiobook had only minutes to go and then = it stopped. Actually, I admire the framing that Tom did there with Marty at the beginning and at the end. Well done, Mr. Hardy! Huzzah

(the rating also reflects the comparison impact of the book I started immediately after which is Naked Lunch. These two stories couldn’t be more different…)

And for a pie quote:

Winterborne was standing before the brick oven in his shirt-sleeves, tossing in thorn sprays, and stirring about the blazing mass with a long-handled, three-pronged Beelzebub kind of fork, the heat shining out upon his streaming face and making his eyes like furnaces, the thorns crackling and sputtering; while Creedle, having ranged the pastry dishes in a row on the table till the oven should be ready, was pressing out the crust of a final apple-pie with a rolling-pin.

Back to Classics Category Fulfilled:  Classic Tragic Novel.  For an almost romance; no one has their HEA.

_____________________________________________________

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, orig 1962, 240 pages

Back to Classics Category Fulfilled:  uh…. none?

Whatever, let’s tell you what pies it had anyway.

It was like some frozen pie that she ‘d unfroze and then warmed up and it looked not so very appetitish.

“Still, I drank and ate growling, being more hungry than I thought at first, and I got fruit-pie from the larder and tore chunks off it to stuff into my greedy rot.”

This took some getting into; the language guide is a MUST!  Then, once realizing that the author created an entire new language, it became fun. While also being demoralizing, frightening, scary, and sad. I like it much more now when I don’t remember all that much.

_________________________________________________________

Audiobook, narrated by Andrew Sachs, orig 1934, 6 hrs 43 min

I like the book cover of the edition because it does suggest the comedy. This is SATIRE people and it’s brutal. The divorce machinations are unwieldy and just off the top but what happens to poor Tony… yikes.

Satisfies the Classic Comic Novel category. √

And because it was audio, I failed to do my due diligence and record the pie quotes. It’s British. It had meat pie.

Rating 3 to 4 slices of pie.

 

 

 

Copyright © 2007-2019. Care’s Online Book Club. All rights reserved. This post was originally posted by Care from Care’s Online Book Club.  It should not be reproduced without express written permission.

Now in November

Thoughts   by Josephine Johnson, Simon and Schuster 1934, 231 pages

Challenge:  Classic Club

and

Back to the Classics Challenge PLACES I HAVE LIVED (Missouri)

**AND** What’s in a Name 

Challenge 2019Month/Day Category

Genre: Depression Era, Pulitzer Winners

Type/Source: Library

 Why I read this now:  I was trying to find something for this WiaN category – come to end up reading 3 books to satisfy. #whatever #shrug

MOTIVATION for READING: I saw this on my tbr and it fit the category and the library had a copy – possibly a first edition copy? (I was having a hard time finding a copy of One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes which IS in my cc50. This just happens to be a classic; NOT on my cc50…)

Page 144: “When everything was finally dead, I thought that relief from hope would come, but hope’s an obsession that never dies.”

WHAT’s it ABOUT:  A family trying to eke a living out of the ground in the midst of the depression. Older sister is a fish out of water, the youngest sister and mother are inspirations, Dad is wearily lost and angry about it all and our narrator just aches with  feelings and thoughts that only confound.

What gr says: “Brilliant, evocative, poetic, savage, this Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel (1934) written when Josephine Winslow Johnson was only 24, depicts a white, middle-class urban family that is turned into dirt-poor farmers by the Depression and the great drought of the thirties. The novel moves through a single year and, at the same time, a decade of years, from the spring arrival of the family at their mortgaged farm to the winter 10 years later, when the ravages of drought, fire, and personal anguish have led to the deaths of two of the five. Like Ethan Frome, the relatively brief, intense story evokes the torment possible among people isolated and driven by strong feelings of love and hate that, unexpressed, lead inevitably to doom. Reviewers in the thirties praised the novel, calling its prose “profoundly moving music,” expressing incredulity “that this mature style and this mature point of view are those of a young women in her twenties,” comparing the book to “the luminous work of Willa Cather,” and, with prescience, suggesting that it “has that rare quality of timelessness which is the mark of first-rate fiction.””

THOUGHTS:  I would NEVER have compared this to Ethan Frome, but yea. I guess I could go there. (I shudder.)

Such pain. Such loss. I worry about our world now and how much we use and discard, in our disposable society. If I had to live simply and off the land, giving every extra penny to my mortgage, thinking of it as a terrifying weight that could drag me to my death with any next scratch of a pen; … Anyway, it is a sobering look at how people managed, or didn’t, in that awful time.

The descriptions of nature offer some glimmer of love and sunshine. But even the sun gets cursed in this one.

Brilliant, evocative, poetic, savage.

Four slices of pie.

Page 28: “He cut us big slices, firm and wedge-shaped like the tall pieces of a pie, and a bigger one for mother, and then we thought it was time for the presents to be given.”

Page 115: “He did it because he liked pies, he said, and was fearful that M would fall asleep and put away God knows what in the jars.”

Copyright © 2007-2019. Care’s Online Book Club. All rights reserved. This post was originally posted by Care from Care’s Online Book Club.  It should not be reproduced without express written permission.

October End 2019 Update

Thoughts

What a wonderful month of reading was October!  EIGHT BOOKs!  Yowza.  Almost puts me back on the path to achieving my yearly goal of 75.

I would pick The Paper Wasp as my favorite and I had a great time devouring the many classics plus comparing the 2 Brit Class books against each other. The Bird’s Nest would count for RIP if I had been official, and probably the Hawthorne? TWO Time Travel books!

The Alexandrite and The Bird’s Nest also qualify for my What’s in a Name Challenge.

I’m pleased with myself.  And I blogged 4 posts! WOW.

Future goals are to

• read a few more classics
• post on a 50 in 5 for Classics Club 50
• wrap-up post for What’s in a Name
• maybe a few actual book reviews
• bake pie!
• participate at least one post in this: 
• read something nonfiction that ISN’T a “Work” book?
• and finish Wolf Hall for my Super Rooster Chase! (come back here 12/15)

 

Happy Challenge-Chasing Time of Year!

 

 

Copyright © 2007-2019. Care’s Online Book Club aka Care’s Books and Pie. All rights reserved. This post was originally posted by Care from Care’s Online Book Club aka BkClubCare.  It should not be reproduced without express written permission.

Mini Reviews for Mid October 2019

Thoughts

Since my last random update post, August’s, when I was audiobooking Charlotte Sometimes, I have not only completed my Classics Club 50 in 5 years requirement but am devouring more classics in a race to the end of the year!

Not sure why the above is indented, but I’m going with it. The list/image below is in finished order, but I’m going to talk about audiobooks first and then print.

OK, so I finished Charlotte and only kind of liked it. Gave it 3 slices of pie. As far as I recall (and perhaps failed to note) there was NO PIE. Boo.

On to my next audiobook, also a classic, Tom Hardy’s The Woodlanders – and I was all in for the drama-DRAMA-D.R.A.M.A!!! of that crazy tale.

Started Naked Lunch after that both for Classics Club 50 and for this year’s What’s in a Name Challenge. I DNF’d. I got 25% in and decided that I wasn’t going to enrich my life further by listening to any more c words, f words, p words and v words.  (v for vomit.)  I’m counting it as read. Judge me all you want. (Applause also appreciated.)

Then it was on to A Handful of Dust!   Crazy wild tale, really. Quite. I would love to chat with anyone who would like to discuss. I don’t think I shall forget this story. Ever. Evelyn Waugh is just so easy to imagine as a snooty and brilliant uppercrusty-judgey Brit. Apparently he hated Dickens. Huh.

I palate-cleansed with a quick 1 hour audio ‘short story’ called Wally Roux, Quantum Mechanics, an Audible Exclusive (freebie) and enjoyed it very much. I like time travel stories.

After that and still into is my current audiobook, Wolf Hall. More on that in a later post…

Now print – mostly eBooks:

For print and in this case, I mean KINDLE, I read   The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal and LOVED IT!  OF course it HAD PIE!  Pie was a goddamn THEME.  Five slices of pie served with beer, if you please. Read it if you LOVED Kitchens of the Great Midwest, which I did. I think it was an eBook. (Yes, yes it was. I noted that.)

I read a few free or not-expensive eBook romances:   Next in Line by Amy Daws (fun! especially to read aloud to the hub while driving in to work) and Sealed With a Kiss   by Leeanna Morgan (not my cup of tea – skimmed it).

And, YIPPEE SKIPPY for me! I finally finished The House of the Seven Gables!! After many rocky starts which never ever seemed to catch, this time, I rolled up my sleeves and powered through. LOVED it once the characters were allowed to be characters (about 25% in, I’d guess? and not the history prep explanation which begins this story. I’m so glad to have read it. whew.

Then The Bird’s Nest was available – I think it was a library eBook? Very Shirley Jackson. I adore Shirley Jackson. Such talent. This book impressed me.

Oh wait! I read A Clockwork Orange, too. And yes, it was odd, violent and scary but not as scary as Naked Lunch. At least ACO had a story.

Which brings us to Love in a Cold Climate  – hardback, library – which I just finished and immediately reviewed in the post prior to this one.

The pie tally?  7 out of the 12 had pie. A few had interesting pie references, indeed (chubb pie in Love in a Cold Climate!)  Plus, a description of pie dough rolling in The Woodlanders, kidney pie and meat pie in A Handful of Dust. Truly, I’m deeply suspicious of any Brit book not having pie!

On the list of 1001+ Books To Read Before You Die: A Clockwork Orange, House of Seven Gables, and Cold Climate Love. And Naked Lunch.

Edith would just as soon take another woman’s husband as another woman’s pie recipe, and she had the best husband in the world, so there you go.

• from The Lager Queen of Minnesota

Copyright © 2007-2019. Care’s Online Book Club. All rights reserved. This post was originally posted by Care from Care’s Online Book Club.  It should not be reproduced without express written permission.

Love in a Cold Climate

Thoughts by Nancy Mitford, Hamish Hamilton 1995 (orig 1949), 343 pages

Challenge:  Classic Club 50 and Back to the Classics 2019 – By a Woman Category

**AND** What’s in a Name 

Challenge 2019Temperature

Genre: British Class Capers?

Type/Source: Library

 Why I read this now:  Classics Club Spin October 2019

MOTIVATION for READING: Curiosity about the Mitfords

Page 33: “… and everything too much in apple-pie order,”

WHAT’s it ABOUT:  A rich society girl with a scheming mother and dutiful father decides not to do as expected.

What gr says: “Polly Hampton has long been groomed for the perfect marriage by her mother, the fearsome and ambitious Lady Montdore. But Polly, with her stunning good looks and impeccable connections, is bored by the monotony of her glittering debut season in London. Having just come from India, where her father served as Viceroy, she claims to have hoped that society in a colder climate would be less obsessed with love affairs. The apparently aloof and indifferent Polly has a long-held secret, however, one that leads to the shattering of her mother’s dreams and her own disinheritance. When an elderly duke begins pursuing the disgraced Polly and a callow potential heir curries favor with her parents, nothing goes as expected, but in the end all find happiness in their own unconventional ways.”

THOUGHTS: 

Yea, let’s discuss the “in the end, all find happiness” – really?  I thought the ending SO abrupt!  I’m left shaking my head, “what did I just read?” “what IS this?” Who really was this Polly girl – so truly naive?” Oh goodness me. Maybe just like her mother?

In some ways, this book was extremely fascinating.

I really liked Fanny. I thought she was beautifully written into life. I enjoyed her very much.

I think I am just glad the book is done. I can say I read it. I now have an inkling about who was Nancy Mitford, I am not at all opposed to reading more by her and about her, and this book suffered from being the book I read immediately after A Handful of Dust.

Dust was another tragedy/comedy of the Brits and their moneyed ranks, just set  a generation or so prior. And much more tragic and not very funny. Dark funny not silly funny.

I really say “really” too much and I really am spending too much time with the British upper crust these days!

Three slices of pie.

Page 109: “several wheelbarrows were filled and the contents taken off to be used as manure for cottage gardens or chubb pie, according to taste.”

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Classics Spin Sept 2019

Updated, copied directly from the Classics Club announcement: If you joined the game last week, find number 5 on your CC Spin #21 List! That’s the CLASSIC you are challenged to read by 31st October, 2019.

And I just picked up Love in a Cold Climate on Monday, am on page 30 something.  Have already encountered the reference to the title, which is cool. The heroine is easy to like, so far. I’m also listening to A Handful of Dust which would be set almost a generation prior to Mitford’s story but certainly a very specific world “culture” I’m reading in these days!

 

Another SPIN!   

I only have 19 books left on my original list:

1. The Three Musketeers – Alex Dumas
2. Jude the Obscure – Hardy
3. Rabbit, Run – Updike
4. Naked Lunch – Wm Burroughs
5. Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
6. Dead Souls – Nikolay Gogol
7. Candide – Voltaire
8. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
9. Confederacy of Dunces – JKToole
10. Twelve Years a Slave – Solomon Northup
11. The Way We Live Now – Trollope
12. the Counterfeiters – A. Gide
13. A Handful of Dust – Waugh
14. The Ox-bow Incident – Walter Van Tilberg Clark
15. Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City
16. One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes
17. They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple
18. The Bird’s Nest – Shirley Jackson
19. The King Must Die
20. <open>

SO…. Made the above list and then went to the website (because the SPIN number was chosen Sept 23 – oops)

and…

the number is . . .

= Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford

 

and here’s a quick update for you. I will succeed in reading 50 classics in 5 years but just not the original list. I am currently reading (and enjoying!) The Woodlanders by Hardy on audio and The House of the Seven Gables by Nat Hawthorne. Both on the list, by the way. I’ve researched and requested a few other books from the list above and this leads me to the next paragraph:

…more update! I had wanted to read The House of the Seven Gables for the What’s in a Name Challenge but realized that the category was in last year’s requirements. Ooops. I hadn’t yet read any of the books for the 2019 challenge, so I decided on the following:

For Precious Metal – The Golden Notebook

For Temperature – Love in a Cold Climate – YAY CC Spin!

For Month/Day/Week: One Fine Day – (tbh, this one is proving difficult to find)

For a Meal: Naked Lunch – the only one findable everywhere: library, audible, etc

For Girl/Woman:  The Woman in the Window – a DNF but who cares

For both OF + AND: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memeory in Northern Ireland

This should give me a successful challenge year to recap in December. Happy Fall!

Here’s Butterscotch Cinnamon Pie to celebrate:

 

 

Copyright © 2007-2019. Care’s Online Book Club aka Care’s Books and Pie. All rights reserved. This post was originally posted by Care from Care’s Online Book Club aka BkClubCare.  It should not be reproduced without express written permission.

August 2019 Update

Thoughts

I’m still here! I’m around. Just not as frequently and via less apps. (usually ALWAYS on Twitter, if you are looking for me…)

But I need a new cellphone – it has been “hiding” my apps and so they just aren’t available. Meaning no Litsy, which I miss and then I can’t remember passwords and online-life is just too complicated anymore. I miss the old days when blogging was fun and we didn’t have to jump through any hoops to leave comments and even visit!

The image above is from goodreads. (I am on goodreads; often.) I seem to be devouring the free (and short!) audiobooks from Audible. Treasure Island will end up helping me make the Classics 50 in Five Years. I think I have a few more months. (Need to check that.)

Speaking of Classics 50 — I just started the audiobook of Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer.

(I’m on a Penelope kick?)

AND, when I went to goodreads, I couldn’t find it in the editions offerings. So I added it. I love being a gr librarian!  Hopefully I did it right and correctly verified that an edition wasn’t already in the catalog.

I added the appropriate image and everything!

Back to my tbr image: the Elizabeth Bowen and the William Golding book were recommended by Penelope Lively. I just finished her Dancing Fish and Ammonites

 

and it was delightful.

Funny thing is that I have yet to read any fiction (or anything!) by Lively and now I’ve gone and read her memoir.

I’ve done that before — read an author’s memoir or biography before I’ve read any of what made the author an author in the first place. Did that with PD Wodehouse…

I am also reading A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess because it is handy. I found it on the Take-One-Leave-One bookshelf at my apt complex. I think it is on my Classics 50 list, too?  (Really need to go look at that list soon.)

Looking back on what I’ve read lately and would like to recommend, I find I am baffled by what I stated in my last post. I *did* actually read a few books in June. I read The Great Believers (which is two posts ago – look at that, I wrote an actual review.) and I read The Psychology of Time Travel – I liked it a lot and invite you to check it out.

Here’s the pic of the truly latest reads: 

Yes to Good Omens (my first Terry Pratchett) and enthusiastic yes for Crazy Rich Asians.  The Silent Patient was so-so. I DNF’d The Woman in the Window, Lost Children Archive and Black Leopard,Red Wolf.  NOT for all the same reasons, but one applicable reason for all is Too Many Books Not Enough Time.

That said, I hope you have terrific books in your life, the opportunity to eat some great pie and aren’t too stressed about time nor world affairs nor climate/weather, etc. Goodness! Can’t end on a downer!  How about some Rhubarb Raspberry Handpies…

 

 

 

Copyright © 2007-2019. Care’s Online Book Club aka Care’s Books and Pie. All rights reserved. This post was originally posted by Care from Care’s Online Book Club aka BkClubCare.  It should not be reproduced without express written permission.

Classics Spin April 2019

I’m late to the party but WOW!  . . .  do I make a grand entrance to the party! (Slide in, look around? no one has noticed I’m late. Walk in casually, present a bottle of wine to the host…)

Here’s my list from August 2018’s spin:

The Three Musketeers – Alex Dumas
Jude the Obscure – Hardy
the Woodlanders – Hardy
Rabbit, Run – Updike
Naked Lunch – Wm Burroughs
Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
The House of the Seven Gables – Hawthorne
Vanity Fair – Thackeray
Dead Souls – Nikolay Gogol
Candide – Voltaire
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
Confederacy of Dunces – JKToole
Twelve Years a Slave – Solomon Northup
The Way We Live Now – Trollope
the Counterfeiters – A. Gide
A Handful of Dust – Waugh
The Ox-bow Incident – Walter Van Tilberg Clark
Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City
One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes

And then I went HERE (random.org); entered the above and then hit GO to get:

SO, it looks like I will be reading The Golden Notebook because according to the Monday, April 22 post at the Classics Club blog, the number hit is 19.

Pretty cool that I own a copy of this book. AND have discussed a readalong with my penpal Jill. Not sure how exactly we will conduct a readalong via snail mail but I think it can be done. Just a case of reading some, writing it, putting in the mail. Repeat.  Anyone who want to join in?

AND….. one more thing. Here’s a pic of a pie. Lemon Meringue.

 

 

Copyright © 2007-2019. Care’s Online Book Club aka Care’s Books and Pie. All rights reserved. This post was originally posted by Care from Care’s Online Book Club aka BkClubCare.  It should not be reproduced without express written permission.