September 2012 Books

King Lear by William Shakespeare (No Fear Shakespeare version)
Published: 1608
Rating: 4
Goodreads

This play is about a dysfunctional family headed by an old king who prefers flattery to truth and so is blinded from seeing the loyal people in his life, daughter Cordelia and nobleman Kent.  He rashly disinherits Cordelia and divides the kingdom between his other daughters, Regan and Goneril, both consumed with greed and ambition which breeds jealousy, rage, cruelty, violence and sheer evil.  They remind me of the horrible, cold, unfeeling Lady Macbeth.

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The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Published: 1911
Rating: 5
Goodreads

I have been meaning to read this book for quite a while and for some reason, on a night when I felt particularly ornery and crochety, I began and LOVED IT.

Swept away from the first sentence - "When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen" - I did not close my iPad until finished.

I found Burnett's writing extremely economical.  The chapters are not very long and yet after finishing chapter one, we learn that Mary, who lives in India, is a most disagreeable, ugly, spoiled child: unloved and unwanted by her parents who leave her care to servants whom she orders around and bullies at will.  Then a cholera epidemic leaves her orphaned and abandoned.

The child is sent to her uncle's home in the wild moors of Yorkshire and we see her slowly transform into a curious, open and caring child.   Other flawed characters enter the story and when Burnett adds in a "talking" robin, an abandoned secret garden and a mysterious cry in the middle of the night, a.k.a Jane Eyre, I was hooked.

Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides by Aeschylus.  Translated by Richmond Lattimore
Published: 458 BC
Rating: 4
Goodreads

Agamemnon is the first play in Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy and tells of Agamemnon's less than triumphant return home from the Trojan War and his subsequent demise at the hand of his wife, Clytaemestra and her lover, Aegisthus who is his cousin.

The Greek tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides) often used their work to expound on the characters that had their source in Homer's epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey.  This trilogy is a perfect example.

Read full post of Agamemnon.

In the second play, The Libation Bearers, the setting is several years after the gruesome regicide of Agamemnon.  Of the three children born to Agamemnon and Clytaemestra, only Electra is at the palace.  Iphigenia had been sacrificed to appease the gods at the start of the Trojan War and Orestes, her brother was sent away by Clytaemestra when she and Aegisthus had become lovers.  Key questions to be answered by the end of the trilogy are:

• How does Thyestes' curse on the house of Atreus play out? 
• Does it get resolved?  If so, how?
• What are the consequences?

Read full post of The Libation Bearers.

In the last play of the trilogy, The Eumenides, Orestes goes to Apollo's temple in Delphi to beg relief from the Furies for after all, Apollo himself told Orestes to avenge his father's murder.  The Furies, goaded by Clytaemestra's ghost and their own belief that matricide must be punished regardless of the circumstances, refuse to back down.

Apollo says that all should go to Athena's temple in Athens and appeal to her wise judgement.  She does not feel qualified so brings together a jury of 12 Athenian citizens to hear the case.

I will pick the finest of my citizens, and come back.  They shall swear to make no judgement that is not just, and make clear where in this action the truth lies (487-489).

Long story short, the jury is divided, Athena casts the deciding vote in favor of Orestes and placates the disgruntled Furies by renaming them and providing a new, enlightened, humane purpose.  They will be called The Eumenides or Kindly Ones and will help Athena uphold law, order and justice.  The need for personal revenge is over.

Audiocourse: Part 3 - Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition - Middle Ages by Professor Thomas Noble
Rating - 3

Part 4 - Neoclassic and 18th Century Literature by Professor Susan Heinzelman
Rating - 3

See this post for bibliography

The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton
Published: 1930
Rating: 4
Goodreads
Post on Josh's blog

I came across this excellent reference book via my daughter, who had taken a class in Greek tragedies while in college.  I have read Hamilton's classic book, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes and reference both books while working my way through the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.  A list of chapters will give a feel of all the information contained in this rather short but meaty book.  She has also written The Roman Way which I may have to get.

• East and West
• Mind and Spirit
• The Way of the East and the West in Art
• The Greek Way of Writing
• Pindar, The Last Greek Aristocrat
• The Athenians as Plato Saw Them
• Aristophanes and the Old Comedy
• Herodotus, The First Sight-seer
• Thucydides, The Thing That Hath Been is That Which Shall Be
• Xenophon, The Ordinary Athenian Gentleman
• The Idea of Tragedy
• Aeschylus, The First Dramatist
• Sophocles, Quintessence of the Greek
• Euripides, The Modern Mind
• The Religion of the Greeks
• The Way of the Greeks
• The Way of the Modern World

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Published: 1977
Rating: 4
Goodreads

A quick, enjoyable read once I was able to suspend a good amount of disbelief that a child (6 - 9 years old) could think, act and command a battle as if a mature adult.  I could swallow more if Ender was an adolescent like Katniss and Peeta in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy.

That said, I LOVED the ending.  A very big, satisfying twist that I did not see coming but made perfect sense.

The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Published: 1888
Rating: 4
Goodreads

A sweet Cinderella story, the protagonist Sara Crewe is as different to Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden as can be.  Rather than bullying her French maid the way Mary surely would have done, Sara is sweet, polite, gentle and charming.  She reminds me of Anne in L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series with her sunny disposition; optimistic outlook; thoughtful, intelligent, and honest conversation; and most of all, her big imagination.

Like Anne, Sara sees the best in people.  She is warm and caring to those less fortunate and even when orphaned, penniless and starving, she gives food away to a beggar-girl who is more hungry than herself.  The antagonist, Miss Minchin, is an evil villain - a thoroughly cruel and heartless woman who has no business running a boarding school for girls.

While I enjoyed the story, the characters are flat, meaning they do not change or surprise.  Despite the loss of family and fortune, Sara remains a sweet girl and Miss Minchin is unrepentant to the end.  In contrast, the characters in The Secret Garden are round and therefore more interesting, so TSG is the preferred book between the two.

My favorite quote:

Despite her calm, gentle manner, even bookish Sara could get annoyed when her reading was interrupted.

Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book.  People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment.  The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage.

Gilgamesh: A New English Version by Stephen Mitchell
Rating: 4
Goodreads

The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus

The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus.  Translated by Richmond Lattimore

Published: 458 BC

Rating: 4

Goodreads

In the second play, The Libation Bearers, the setting is several years after the gruesome regicide of Agamemnon.  Aegisthis and Clytaemestra are king and queen of Argos.  Of the three children born to Agamemnon and Clytaemestra, only Electra is at the palace.  Iphigenia had been sacrificed to appease the gods at the start of the Trojan War and Orestes, her brother was sent away by Clytaemestra when she and Aegisthus had become lovers.  Key questions to be answered by the end of the trilogy are:

• How does Thyestes' curse on the house of Atreus play out? 
• Does it get resolved?  If so, how?
• What are the consequences?

At the start of the play, Electra and some slave women are at Agamemnon's tomb, pouring out libations at the request of Clytaemestra, who had a nightmare of giving birth to a snake that suckled at her breast, drawing both milk and blood.   Electra has been reduced to a slave-like status herself and prays fervently for the return of Orestes so they can avenge their father's death.

Unbeknownst to her, he is there, listening to her prayer.   They are joyously reunited and plot their revenge.  After the dreadful deeds are done, both king and queen are dead.  Justice for Agamemnon's death has been served but Vengeance continues.  This is the problem with revenge killings; it never stops.

Memorable quotes:

Chorus at Agamemnon's tomb - this reminds me of the dead King Hamlet in Shakespeare's Hamlet:

And they who read the dream meanings
and spoke under guarantee of God
told how under earth
dead men held a grudge still
and smoldered at their murderers (39-41).

Electra and Orestes work themselves up to the conviction needed to kill mother and step-father:

For we are bloody like the wolf
and savage born from the savage mother (Electra: 421-422). 

Warstrength shall collide with warstrength; right with right (Orestes: 461). 

I turn snake to kill her (Orestes: 550).

Powerful metaphor give by the chorus before Orestes goes to the palace:

Right's anvil stands staunch on the ground
and the smith, Destiny, hammers out the sword.
Delayed in glory, pensive from
the murk, Vengeance brings home at last
a child, to wipe out the stain of blood shed long ago (646-651).

But there is no peace for Orestes for the Furies have come in full force to avenge matricide (the killing of one's mother).  The descriptions are horrifying:

Women who serve this house, they come like gorgons, they
wear robes of black, and they are wreathed in a tangle of snakes....
how they grow and multiply,
repulsive for the blood drops of their dripping eyes (1048-1050 and 1057-1058).

The chorus ends on a cliffhanger:

Where is the end?
Where shall the fury of fate
be stilled to sleep, be done with? (1075-1076).

The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton

The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton

Published: 1930

Rating: 4

Goodreads

Post on Josh's blog

I came across this excellent reference book via my daughter, who had taken a class in Greek tragedies while in college.  I have read Hamilton's classic book, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes and reference both books while working my way through the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.  A list of chapters will give a feel of all the information contained in this rather short but meaty book.  She has also written The Roman Way which I may have to get.

• East and West
• Mind and Spirit
• The Way of the East and the West in Art
• The Greek Way of Writing
• Pindar, The Last Greek Aristocrat
• The Athenians as Plato Saw Them
• Aristophanes and the Old Comedy
• Herodotus, The First Sight-seer
• Thucydides, The Thing That Hath Been is That Which Shall Be
• Xenophon, The Ordinary Athenian Gentleman
• The Idea of Tragedy
• Aeschylus, The First Dramatist
• Sophocles, Quintessence of the Greek
• Euripides, The Modern Mind
• The Religion of the Greeks
• The Way of the Greeks
• The Way of the Modern World

Agamemnon by Aeschylus

Agamemnon by Aeschylus.  Translated by Richmond Lattimore
Published: 458 BC
Rating: 4
Goodreads

The first play in Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy, this tragedy tells of Agamemnon's less than triumphant return home from the Trojan War and his subsequent demise at the hand of his wife, Clytaemestra and her lover, Aegisthus who is his cousin.

The Greek tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides) often used their work to expound on the characters that had their source in Homer's epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey.  This trilogy is a perfect example.

Long story short, the house of Atreus (father of Agamemnon and Menelaus) had been cursed by his brother, Aegisthus' father.  Really icky story that involves seduction, jealous rage, unforgiveness, infanticide and cannibalism.

It is Menelaus' wife, Helen who was abducted (or went willingly) to Troy which started the Trojan War.  Agamemnon led the expedition to retrieve Helen, but faced obstacles from the onset.  The entire fleet was held at port due to weather and when Agamemnon was told he needed to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigeneia, to appease the goddess Artemis' wrath, he did it, albeit reluctantly.  Clytaemestra never forgot nor forgave and nursed her bitterness through ten long years of war.

The themes in this play are big: the sacrifices of war and price paid by all; the affects of war on the home which can lead to a domestic-type warfare and the love of a child that feeds a mother's revenge so big that nothing short of a bloody death can satiate.

I am a huge Lord of the Rings movie fan and was fascinated to read about the beacons in Agamemnon which were used to signal the fall of Troy. This is how Clytaemestra and the people of Argos knew to prepare for Agamemnon's homecoming.  I wonder if this was the source of Tolkien's beacons of Gondor.

Favorite quotes:

This quote tells of the steep price of two brother's pride to get one woman back - thousands dead, widowed and fatherless and whole cities sacked.

The god of war, money changers
of dead bodies,
held the balance of his spear in the fighting,
and from the corpse-fires at Ilium
sent to the dearest the dust
heavy and bitter with tears shed
packing smooth the urns with
ashes that once were men.

I have put down two translations of the same passage - Clytaemestra's speech after the bloody deed - to show that a reader may prefer one translation to another.

Richmond Lattimore's translation:

Thus he went down, and the life struggled out of him;
and as he died he spattered me with the dark red
and violent driven rain of bitter savored blood
to make me glad, as garden stand among the showers
of God in glory at the birth time of the buds... 

Were it religion to pour wine above the slain,
this man deserved, more than deserved; such sacrament.
He filled our cup with evil things unspeakable
and now himself come home has drunk it to the dregs... 

That man is Agamemnon,
My husband; he is dead; the work of this right hand
that struck in strength of righteousness.  And that is that. 

Robert Fagles' translation:

So he goes down, and the life is bursting out of him -
great sprays of blood, and the murderous shower
wounds me, dyes me black and I, I revel
like the Earth when the spring rains come down,
the blessed gift of gods, and the new green spear
splits the sheath and rips to birth in glory... 

And if I pour upon his body the libation
it deserves, what wine could match my words?
It is right and more than right.  He flooded
the vessel of our proud house with misery,
with the vintage of the curse and now
he drains the dregs.  My lord is home at last... 

Here is Agamemnon, my husband made a corpse
by this right hand - a masterpiece of Justice.
Done is done.

In this instance, I prefer the Fagles' translation as it is more dramatic and powerful.  This teaches me that word choice can make a big difference.

The Secret Garden and The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Published: 1911

Rating: 5

Goodreads

I have been meaning to read this book for quite a while and for some reason, on a night when I felt particularly ornery and crochety, I began and LOVED IT.

Swept away from the first sentence - "When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen" - I did not close my iPad until finished.

I found Burnett's writing extremely economical.  The chapters are not very long and yet after finishing chapter one, we learn that Mary, who lives in India, is a most disagreeable, ugly, spoiled child: unloved and unwanted by her parents who leave her care to servants whom she orders around and bullies at will.  Then a cholera epidemic leaves her orphaned and abandoned.

The child is sent to her uncle's home in the wild moors of Yorkshire and we see her slowly transform into a curious, open and caring child.   Other flawed characters enter the story and when Burnett adds in a "talking" robin, an abandoned secret garden and a mysterious cry in the middle of the night, a.k.a Jane Eyre, I was hooked.

The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Published: 1888

Rating: 4

Goodreads

A sweet Cinderella story, the protagonist Sara Crewe is as different to Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden as can be.  Rather than bullying her French maid the way Mary surely would have done, Sara is sweet, polite, gentle and charming.  She reminds me of Anne in L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series with her sunny disposition; optimistic outlook; thoughtful, intelligent, and honest conversation; and most of all, her big imagination.

Like Anne, Sara sees the best in people.  She is warm and caring to those less fortunate and even when orphaned, penniless and starving, she gives food away to a beggar-girl who is more hungry than herself.  The antagonist, Miss Minchin, is an evil villain - a thoroughly cruel and heartless woman who has no business running a boarding school for girls.

While I enjoyed the story, the characters are flat, meaning they do not change or surprise.  Despite the loss of family and fortune, Sara remains a sweet girl and Miss Minchin is unrepentant to the end.  In contrast, the characters in The Secret Garden are round and therefore more interesting, so TSG is the preferred book between the two.

My favorite quote:

Despite her calm, gentle manner, even bookish Sara could get annoyed when her reading was interrupted.

Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book.  People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment.  The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage.

King Lear by Shakespeare

King Lear by William Shakespeare (No Fear Shakespeare version)
Published: 1608
Rating: 4
Goodreads

This play is about a dysfunctional family headed by an old king who prefers flattery to truth and so is blinded from seeing the loyal people in his life, daughter Cordelia and nobleman Kent.  He rashly disinherits Cordelia and divides the kingdom between his other daughters, Regan and Goneril, both consumed with greed and ambition which breeds jealousy, rage, cruelty, violence and sheer evil.  They remind me of the horrible, cold, unfeeling Lady Macbeth.

In a parallel story line, the Earl of Gloucester also turns against the loyal child, Edgar, in favor of the manipulative bastard, Edmund whose conniving and theatrics remind me of Iago in Othello.  Both fathers suffer tremendously from trusting the wrong child(ten).  The mutilation of Gloucester is one of the most gory, intense scenes I have read thus far.  And similar to Hamlet, dead bodies litter the stage by the end of the play.

One reviewer on Goodreads made some comparisons between King Lear and The Oedipus Trilogy (Oedipus the King, Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus) by Sophocles.  I agree.  It is so gratifying to see connections between great works of literature.

• Edgar leading blind Gloucester - Antigone leading blind Oedipus
• Siblings fight for overall rule of the kingdom with disastrous consequences
• Dutiful daughter - Cordelia and Antigone 

My favorite quotes:

Cordelia is being asked by King Lear to speak her love for him, as her sister's flattering tongues have done.  She feels that true love and honor is shown by actions and so says:  "I cannot heave my heart into my mouth" (1.1.90-91).

A most intense verbal thrashing given by a disguised Kent to Oswald, Goneril's steward who gives aid in her conspiracies: 

Oswald:  What dost thou know me for? 

Kent:  A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound-filth, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave; a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service; and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel birth; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition (2.2.12-21).   Wow, Kent, what do you really think?

In my reading, I make note of sentences that sing.  A disguised Edgar is giving his father a made-up description of himself:  Wine I loved deeply, dice dearly, and in woman outparamoured the Turk.  False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand - hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey (3.4.83-86).