Just Finished Reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Back in the primitive days of computerdom it was considered a great innovation to have a CD slot on one's PC to play music, and the educational CD-ROM came into existence as well...a lot of information can be stored on these discs.  I soon became the owner of a set of three CD-ROMS, each claiming to be the complete fictional works of a famous author: William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain.  Yet I rarely used this format...now I'm wondering whether I want to dig them out and examine them.  For Mark Twain's 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which I just finished reading, is no doubt included...

There is a lot of narrative to this novel...it is initially in the first-person by the author himself but switches to that of a New England native, Hank Morgan, who after suffering a head blow during a fight finds himself back in the times of Camelot when King Arthur supposedly reigned over England...in the sixth century.  Hank brings his Yankee independence and technological knowhow to this situation, cloaking his abilities as being that of a magician, one superior to the envious Merlin...and King Arthur buys it!  Along the course of the story he sees firsthand the injustices caused by what he deems the outright fraud of nobility, but also notes that the masses of oppressed people themselves willingly submit to their domination, something continually very consternating to him. Hank has his own ideas about how to change this society, and he uses America's late-nineteenth-century model of freedom, science, and self-reliance to implement it...including the development of electricity and mass communications.  And we know that Hank made it back to our time (i.e., 1889) because M.T.,the original narrator, had met and interviewed him.  Other than that I think I'd better leave the finer points of characters and plot to you should you want to read it someday.  Instead some side thoughts...

First of all, the dialog between Hank and the people of King Arthur's era is uproariously funny and reminds me of the hilarious repartee between Groucho Marx and others when the moustached comedian would continuously follow one zinger with another...now I wonder whether Groucho derived some of his act in part from Twain's writings.  For that alone I'd recommend this book, but there's more.  Hank's narrative, which really reflects the thoughts of Twain, is very incisive as he observes what's going on around him and it carries much application to the world today.  For one, I never did understand why folks in America are so interested in and endeared to English royalty...didn't we have a revolution to get away from that sort of thing?  And for another, I look at the political landscape today and marvel at how some of the poorest groups of people regularly support political leaders and parties whose very actions go directly against their own best interests...you can read this from either side of the political spectrum if you wish.  No, "our" politicians aren't technically "nobility" although that great Don Henley line speaks to me: "We're beating plowshares into swords for this tired old man that we elected King" (referring to President Reagan).  Yes, we in America have substituted other forms of royalty for that which we abandoned in 1776. And Twain, through his protagonist, had a lot to say about a Church that so monopolized religion and its expression that it had become a corrupt political institution in itself and a rival to the nobles in subjugating the vast majority of the people...

There have been a number of film adaptations to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, including one in 1931 starring Will Rogers and another in 1949 with Bing Crosby...this one was a musical...a musical of all things!  I can't imagine how anyone could read this book and come away with a musical...well, now I'm intrigued, so I guess I'll have to watch it sometime.  But I'm already confident that, regardless which movie adaptation you see, you'll still be missing a lot of what the book has to offer...and maybe the most important parts...

Just Finished Reading Middlemarch by George Eliot

George Eliot was the pen name for Mary Anne Evans, an English writer who felt the need to make it seem as if a man wrote her stories in order for that male-dominated nineteenth-century literary society to take them seriously.  I just finished reading her novel Middlemarch, which I encountered a little while ago while browsing through my local Books-a-Million...the paperback edition has a whopping 1,436 pages!  So yes, this was an epic of a book...just finishing it gave me a feeling of accomplishment.  The story, set in the imaginary English town of Middlemarch and the outlying rural areas, centers around the families Vincy, Brooke, and Garth...along with the idealistic young physician Tertius Lydgate and the sanctimonious and parsimonious banker Nicholas Bulstrode.  While the novel, set around 1830, treats various issues like class distinctions, land reform, religion's role in society, and making the responsible practice of medicine more science-based, the intertwining stories of three couples drive the narrative.  Dorothea Brooke is a "higher class" young woman who eschews her privileged position to marry a much older man, Edward Casaubon, a frustrated Biblical scholar whose writings are already considered obsolete before they are even submitted and published...he curtly rebuffs her attempts to assist him and the marriage slides from there.  Casaubon's younger cousin Will Latislaw develops an impossible, painful love for Dorothea...sounds like a conflict brewing here. Doctor Lydgate finds and marries Rosamond Vincy, pretty, immature, and self-absorbed...each of the two eventually find their previously held adoration of the other falling into disillusionment.  And then there is Rosamond's brother Fred, a financially irresponsible young man with a bad habit of owing other people money...will he be able to win the heart of his childhood sweetheart Mary Garth?  And then there's something fishy going on with Bulstrode: what's he trying to hide, anyway?

I only scratched the surface of some of the many characters and subplots in Middlemarch.  The author did a masterful job of presenting the perspectives of the major participants and showed them to have a depth and complexity that reflected how people really are: a mixture of good and bad, strong and weak...I think that was my favorite thing about it, along with how often people make the wrong assumptions about others' motivations.  It was also interesting to see how people can fall under faulty reasoning and make momentous, often disastrous, decisions that effect them for years and even a lifetime.  Middlemarch is considered to be a masterpiece in English fictional literature: I liked it, but have to admit that it probably would have carried more meaning to me had I been an Englishman reading it back in 1871 when it was first published...

Just Finished Reading The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton

English writer G.K. Chesterton came out with his short novel The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare in 1908, during the middle of a historic period in which anarchists wreaked havoc across the world...one of them assassinated our own president, William McKinley, in 1901.  In Chesterton's tale, set in England, this movement is the central theme as two poets with different worldviews meet in a park.  During their discussion about their respective philosophies, Gregory reveals his belief in the destruction of society's institutions for the greater good of humanity...he is an anarchist.  Syme counters his argument by exalting the law and the beauty of order that society bestows on us.  The two conclude with Gregory inviting Syme, who expresses doubt as to the degree of Gregory's commitment to anarchism, to a real anarchists' meeting...only he must swear an oath to never speak of it to others.  Once at the meeting place, Syme turns the tables on Gregory and elicits a corresponding secrecy oath from his fellow poet: having it, he reveals that he is working undercover for the police and is infiltrating anarchist groups.  Both feel bound by their oaths, but Gregory is very uncomfortable in the presence of an undercover cop...so when he is nominated to be the local chapter's representative to the general council, he makes a weak speech toning down the severity of their plans.  Then Syme unexpectedly rises up and opposes him, making a thundering and passionate address supporting anarchism and its violence.  The members enthusiastically choose Syme over Gregory to be Thursday...that's the cover name...and the winner now has to meet with this group that organizes and oversees anarchist activities.  Syme is introduced to the others...each named by a day of the week...with Sunday, a very large, charismatic man, leading them all.  There, I've given you enough background story...you can read the rest yourself, but beware: while certain subsequent events might lead you to make your own conclusions as to where it will all lead, the ending is nothing short of puzzling...

Chesterton put an enormous amount of humor in The Man Who Was Thursday, and the developing situation as the tale progresses is nothing short of ridiculous.  Had the ending been a little clearer, who knows, this might have been a more universally known and liked story.  In a few movies I've seen of late, like Fight Club, Vanilla Sky, and American Psycho, they seem to deliberately confuse the viewer as to what is real and what isn't...and who exactly is who.  I know a lot of us enjoy being messed with like this, but I don't...when I first discovered as a kid that Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz had dreamt everything up, I thought it all was a cop-out...although back then the term didn't yet exist for me.  There is a message...or maybe more appropriately...a moral at the end of this perplexing-yet-funny story, but the question of what is real and what isn't obscured it all for me and detracted from my enjoyment.  Why not check out The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare and tell me what you think?  You're sure to get a few good laughs from it, although I bet you'll also be scratching your head in bewilderment at the end...

Just Finished Reading The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling, of course, is the author of the famed Harry Potter series.  After it was all over, she decided to try her hand at adult fiction and consequently came out with The Casual Vacancy in 2012.  I've tried reading it a couple of times in the past and got bogged down...this third time around, though, was the charm and, after finally finishing it,  I look back and wonder why it took me so long...

The Casual Vacancy is set in the present time, in the fictional western English town of Pagford as one its more influential council members, Barry Fairbrother, suddenly dies of an erupted brain aneurism. The politics of the town are thrown into turmoil as a campaign ensues for his replacement while the future of a poverty-stricken area called "The Fields"...on Pagford's outskirts but under its jurisdiction...is up in the air.  Fairbrother had supported defending it but his chief council opponent, deli owner Howard Mollison, wants to turn it over to the nearby town of Yarvil as well as closing down the nearby drug treatment center.  Very early in the story, Rowling introduces many different characters and families up front, unduly taxing the reader's memory..this may have been the one major flaw in this book.  As I was reading, I wondered to myself whether she would ever relent and focus on the characters she had already introduced without constantly adding more...I was gratified that she eventually did this.   When I began reading the book, I felt that the main story was the election campaign and its outcome.  After finishing it, though, I came to a completely different conclusion...

The characters in The Casual Vacancy, their personalities, relationships with one another, and personal substories are what make this novel memorable to me, not the council seat campaign.  It's about compassion for the poor and disadvantaged, to be sure, but also about the different types of families there are out there, how the parents and children function (usually "dysfuntionally") as well as the spouses and boyfriends/girlfriends.  Rowling goes into great detail examining the inner workings of her characters' beliefs and histories...including a lot of stuff they like keeping hidden from others.  The result is a kind of universality of despair pervading most of them, each one suffering in his or her own personal prison.  The author also goes deeply into the minds of the adolescents in the story, in particular Andrew Price, an awkward acne-ridden boy suffering verbal and physical abuse from his father while in love with Gaia Bawden, a pretty and compassionate girl resentful at being moved here away from cosmopolitan London and her friends.  Also, there's Stuart "Fats" Walls, who pursues life for its "authenticity" and is devoid of empathy for others, and Sukhvinder Jawanda, a shy and sensitive victim of Fats's bullying, both at school and on the computer who has resorted to "cutting" as a way of coping with her self-loathing.  And then there is Krystal Weedon, the self-described "good girl gone bad" from the Fields having to cope with her usually-stoned and always-apathetic mother as she tries to take care of her little brother Robbie while continually getting into trouble at school...Barry Fairbrother had made helping her his project and now that he's gone, she's essentially become an abandoned, desperate character...

The Casual Vacancy is an England-based and England-oriented story.  In this sense it reminded me a bit of some of the Ruth Rendell fiction I've read in the not-so-distant past.  This may make some things seem a bit strange for readers on this side of the Atlantic, but the same general issues of local politics, disadvantaged residents and how to deal with them, drug abuse, dysfunctional families, teenage angst, and bullying permeate our society as well.  It was worth reading and I recommend it.  You might, however, just want to get a pen and paper handy to write down the many different characters in order to avoid getting inundated at the beginning...

Wednesday's Short Story: Crouch End by Stephen King

Although Stephen King is primarily known for his novels, he is also an excellent short story writer, coming out every few years with a new collection.  One of these, 1993's Nightmares and Dreamscapes, contains several good pieces, but by far my favorite (as well as one of my all-time favorite Stephen King stories) is Crouch End.  Named for a London suburb, the setting of the story, it concerns itself with alternate worlds and the "thin places" on Earth through which passage is sometimes possible...

The story is told through a flashback at the local police station as young American tourist Doris Freeman is relating her harrowing ordeal to the officers on duty there.  Doris, her husband Lonnie, and their two children are on vacation, first to England and later Barcelona.  While in London Lonnie decides to visit a business contact living in Crouch End, and Doris is going with him in a cab, the kids having remained at the hotel with a sitter.  It is getting late in the day as they arrive, and Lonnie has foolishly lost his friend's address.  The cab parks near a phone booth and he goes there to make a call, and Doris soon follows after him.  Lonnie gets his address, but as they both look back at the cab, it is gone...and then they notice that the scenery around them has changed as well.  During the next few hours...well, this is where I get off the storytelling bus and you'll just have to get on yourself to see what happens...

Crouch End reminds me of times in my otherwise ordinary, mundane life in which I discern that things around me aren't quite "right"...that something undecipherable has changed and it's not necessarily for the better.  Wanting to believe that I am a sensible person, I attribute these feelings to my own imagination and propensity for the dramatic...after all, I do like to read Stephen King's books.  So no, I'm not talking about entering a parallel universe or crossing over into another dimension...although there are some areas around Gainesville that are frankly hair-raising in their creepiness, one of them being near my workplace and marked by a prevalence of strange people and an overriding sense of wrongness.   I have also heard of haunted house stories from people whom I otherwise would regard as completely rational and grounded in reality.  When I used to work the graveyard shift at my job, I would listen to a late-night radio talk show that catered to these kinds of thoughts...we humans do tend toward the melodramatic, don't we...

Crouch End is a tribute to the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, and King references much of his material in this short tale.  The two police officers, the seasoned Vetter and the novice Farnham, play an important role in how the story ends.  Whether or not there is any true basis for the kind of scenario presented here is one thing: what I'm sure of is that there are many, many such places scattered all over the world that the locals regard in much the same, wary manner as those in Crouch End, even if everything is ultimately explainable in terms of our own reality...

Well, that's my "spooky" Halloween article, even if it is a couple of weeks early...

Just Finished Reading Ruth Rendell's The Babes in the Wood

In about a two-month span from September to November last year, I read eight different Ruth Rendell novels.  She is a renowned mystery writer from England and her stories strongly reflect her homeland and its society.  Some of the books have been standalone, but I also began to read her Inspector Wexford series.  I stopped reading Rendell last year because there was a disruption concerning my checking out of books from a download/borrowing provider in conjunction with my local public library.  But that glitch has been resolved and I'm back to reading this excellent author's works.  I picked The Babes in the Wood, which is the nineteenth Inspector Wexford book, coming out in 2002.  I was a little hesitant about jumping ahead in the series (I was earlier reading them in chronological order) only because with these types of ongoing series there are two story lines: the main mystery...in which it doesn't matter what order you read them in, and the personal lives of the main continuous characters like Wexford and Burden and their families...this book was a little disorienting as a lot had happened to them over the course of the previous stories...

In The Babes in the Wood, the town of Kingsmarkham's Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford, Inspector Mike Burden, and their team have to find three missing people: two teenagers...a brother and sister...and their babysitter.  The search is complicated by heavy rains and flooding, which at the start prompts some to suspect that they all had drowned.  Wexford, Burden, and company go around questioning all involved and soon discover a peculiar fundamentalist sect to which the boy had recently joined: is there any connection?  Add to this several suspicious leads and you have a mystery that won't let you down: the ending makes sense while Rendell deftly creates an array of interesting...and very flawed...characters.  But why believe me when you can read it for yourself? 

I wonder, what will be the next Ruth Rendell book for me?

Tuesday's List: I Rank the Moody Blues Studio Albums

If you've heard the songs Go Now!, Nights in White Satin, Tuesday Afternoon, Question, Just a Singer in a Rock and Roll Band, The Voice, or Your Wildest Dreams, then you're already aware of the Moody Blues, a British rock band from the sixties that has endured to this day...although it's going on eighteen years since their last non-Christmas studio album.  When they started out, Denny Laine...later in Paul McCartney's group Wings...was the lead singer and they focused on covering others' rhythm and blues songs.  But the band stagnated in popularity when their first album went nowhere on the charts in 1965, Laine and some others left, and Justin Hayward and John Lodge joined and changed to a more orchestral/electronic/progressive orientation. From 1967 through 1972 they produced seven albums of this type...subsequent works tended to have a much more pop music flavor to them.  If you look at this list of mine, you'll clearly see where my preferences are!  My favorite composer/singer in the group has always been Ray Thomas, who was in the original lineup and retired in 2003...he's responsible for my all-time favorite song of theirs, For My Lady, off Seventh Sojourn. And now, without further ado, my list of favorite-to-worst Moody Blues albums (in capitals), with my three favorite tracks from each one listed under the title:

1 IN SEARCH OF THE LOST CHORD (1968)
     Legend of a Mind
     Departure/Ride My Seesaw
     Voices in the Sky
2 ON THE THRESHOLD OF A DREAM (1969)
     Lazy Day
     Are You Sitting Comfortably
     Never Comes the Day
3 TO OUR CHILDREN'S CHILDREN'S CHILDREN (1969)
     Eyes of a Child/Floating
     Out and In
     Candle of Life
4 SEVENTH SOJOURN (1972)
     For My Lady
     Isn't Life Strange
     Just a Singer in a Rock and Roll Band
5 DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED (1967)
     Nights in White Satin
     Peak Hour
     Tuesday Afternoon
6 A QUESTION OF BALANCE (1970)
     Question
     Minstrel Song
     And the Tide Rushes In
7 EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR (1971)
     Nice to Be Here
     After You Came
     The Story in Your Eyes
8 THE PRESENT (1983)     
     Meet Me Halfway
     Sitting At the Wheel
     Running Water
 9 OCTAVE (1978)
     One Step Into the Light
     The Day We Meet Again
     Steppin' in a Slide Zone    
10 LOST DISTANCE VOYAGER (1981)
     Gemini Dream
     The Voice
     Talking Out of Turn
11 KEYS OF THE KINGDOM (1991)
     Celtic Sonant
     Lean on Me Tonight
     Say It With Love   
12 THE OTHER SIDE OF LIFE (1986)
     Your Wildest Dreams
     Talking Talking
     The Other Side of Life
13 STRANGE TIMES (1999)
     The Swallow
     My Little Lovely
     English Sunset
14 THE MAGNIFICENT MOODIES (1965)     
     Go Now!
     True Story
     I'll Go Crazy
15 SUR LA MER (1988)
     I Know You're Out There Somewhere
     Miracle
     River of Endless Love

Just Finished Reading Gamble by Felix Francis

Felix Francis is the son of the late Dick Francis, a British mystery writer who centered his works around the theme of horseracing in England.  After his father's death, Felix continued writing the short novels while giving the general credit as "Dick Francis's _____".  Hence the full name of the book I just read: Dick Francis's Gamble by Felix Francis.  Not having read any of the senior Francis's books, I'm in no condition to compare father with son.  But this book was a good, worthwhile venture into mystery reading, with an interesting angle, it being all related to horseracing...

Nicholas "Foxy" Foxton, in his early thirties, is still a young man...but has for more than ten years already retired from his first love, as a horserace jockey, due to an accident leaving him with a broken neck and a precarious potential outcome on any subsequent mishaps.  So he switches careers and becomes a financial advisor for Lyall and Black, a small London firm.  Many of his old racing colleagues become clients of his and he maintains, through them, a connection to the racing scene.  One day he is attending the races in a crowded stadium with a fellow financial advisor when his coworker is gunned down dead in front of everyone.  The killer disappears into the crowd and the mystery is on as to who did it and why.  The plot twists and turns this way and that with various angles thrown in, such as a jockey immediately needing a hundred grand in cash or a spurious land development venture going down in Bulgaria.  Foxton eventually finds himself to be a hunted man, both by the police and the unknown criminal mastermind who murdered his cohort...

When writing a novel in this genre, it's necessary to have a likable, sympathetic protagonist, have him or her in a state of peril, gradually solve little mysteries as the story progresses, and then at the end come up with a big surprise.  Gamble fulfills all of these conditions and also gives a glimpse into the often different way of life across the sea in England...reminding me a little of Ruth Rendell, another England-based mystery author.  Although as far as I know, Gamble is a standalone novel, I can easily see Felix Francis expanding it into a longer series, with "Foxy" Foxton solving more mysteries.  But regardless whether Dick Francis was a great writer or not, his son should write any future books solely under his own name...he has that right in his one life to be recognized for his own writing, as much as he may revere his father's legacy...