Jack

Thoughts by Marilynne Robinson, Picador 2020, 310 pages

Challenge: personal

Genre/Theme: Faith Family Redemption Despair

Type/Source: eBook / Libby-Kindle

What It’s About: Forbidden love. Why, oh why, do we do things we know we shouldn’t? Uncountenanced.

Yes, I had to look up that word. A word that is defined by its opposite. INFURIATING.

Uncountenanced means not countenanced.

Yea, OK.

ah! but the SYNONYMS tell you: “forbidden, unaccredited, black-market, censor, banish, out, tabu, ostracise, forbidding, banning, smuggled,…”

Thoughts: Jack, a bum, a lowlife, a shiftless fraud, a ne’er-do-well, aimless, lost soul… meets Della, a fine upstanding young Black teacher. They fall in love, despite good intentions? despite seeing all the roadblocks and glaring reasons how it will be a difficult relationship, this being set in the 1950’s where just being seen together could get them arrested. Jack is just so fascinating! He is talented and smart, but just cannot feign interest or trust in ambition, to live on any set path of ‘the straight & narrow’. Oh Della.

Had my heart an unbroken string, your touch would set it trembling.

Rating: Five slices of pie. These books are my favorite FAVORITES.

… she put her hand in the crook of his arm. “I kept a drumstick for you, Mr. Boughton, and some stuffing, and a piece of pie.

 

For other EXCELLENT reviews, visit Ripple Effects by Arti and also Teresa at Shelf Love.

He was undisgraced and she was unoffended, a devout hope more or less fulfilled.

 

Copyright © 2007-2022. Care’s Books and Pie also known as and originally created as Care’s Online Book Club. All rights reserved. This post was originally posted by Care. It should not be reproduced without express written permission.

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The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Thoughts The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, Europa Editions 2008 (orig 2006), 325 pages

For What’s in a Name 8 Reading Challenge

Thank you Holly for giving me this book (in 2012).

Thank you Katie for cheering me along as I read this! So it was somewhat of a buddy read although I was the only one reading/hashtagging (#HedgehogElegance) and Katie was the TWEET-TO for all the fun tweetable quips and quotes that entertained and/or amused me.

“People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.”

What it’s ABOUT:  A concierge of a high-society apartment complex (of 5 units) keeps to herself and works hard to build an image of the lowly dumb building caretaker stereotype – NOT that I have such. The only concierges I know are for fancy hotels so it was a bit difficult to buy-in to an assumed stereotype when I don’t have it. Still, she is good at explaining herself as hiding her true passions of literature, music and cinema.

“She has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary – and terribly elegant.”

In alternating chapters, we meet a 12 year old resident of the building who feels like she doesn’t belong into the world she is born in, or in any world for that matter and she is extremely bright and thoughtful.

“But if you dread tomorrow, it’s because you don’t know how to build the present, and when you don’t know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it’s a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don’t you see?”

I WAS entertained and amused. I can see why some might think it ‘pretentious’ but I thought it was merely a perfect part of the character descriptions and not of the author nor a story issue.

I had been wanting to read this for a long time and had it often on the NEXT-BOOK shelf but it kept getting shuffled aside for whatever hot glamorous book had to be read. I think I was afraid that I wouldn’t like it because I knew I had high expectations. I waited, also, to let the hype die down in the blogging world and in my brain, hoping to forget anything/everything.

Still, I had still had glimmers of expectation threatening my enjoyment. And I was wrong about a few things. Darn it! I thought it was about an odd  friendship between the caretaker and the little girl. Yes, but NO – it happened SO LATE in the book, I was rather confused!  so do know that going in.

“I have always been fascinated by the abnegation with which we human beings are capable of devoting a great deal of energy to the quest for nothing and to the rehashing of useless and absurd ideas.”

So much good stuff. A favorite book to add to my list.

“We live each day as if it were merely a rehearsal for the  next…”

Rating:  FIVE slices of pie.

TONS of new vocab words, too. I won’t define for you; I only starred these as I read along. A few I did put on Twitter.

Sidereal, deontology, furbelow, consonant, salvo, asthenic, demiurge, exeunt, syncretism, debility, subaltern, factotum*, incunabulum, eructation…

* I plan on using — factotum — in my NaNoWriMo work. Gots to! Definition is: A person whose job involves doing many different types of work. This is me.

Copyright © 2007-2015. 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.