The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Last weekend, Lucinda and I went to another library used book sale and we both ended up getting a whole bunch of books not on our list. After taking a whole month on Gone with the Wind I needed to read something short so I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The story is told by a teenager who seems to have Asperger's or something similar. One night he finds his neighbor's dog dead with a garden fork sticking out of it. He then sets out to figure out who the killer is and to write about it for a novel he is creating. While trying to solve it he finds out family secrets and forces himself to go outside his comfort zone and do some things that he isn't used to. I don't really have much to say about it except that it wasn't bad and that some of the logic problems he talks about are interesting. I'll give it a B.

Book # 14 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

According to my movie diary, it has been more than 19 years since I've seen the film of Gone with the Wind, and apparently I really liked it. However since then I've forgotten pretty much the whole story except that Atlanta gets destroyed, there is a really sad horse riding accident and that Rhett leaves at the very end. So I entered into reading the book with a pretty clean slate.

While reading it I was a bit conflicted. First off the book is very "readable" since Mitchell's style is fairly modern and the actual plot moves along and is interesting. Plus it was different to read about the Civil War from the South's point of view and it got me started on watching Ken Burn's Civil War miniseries. Though on the other hand... Scarlett and Rhett are incredibly unlikable people. Scarlett is in pretty much every scene and if you follow someone for over a thousand pages it helps if you actually like that character. I don't even know where to start... At the beginning she is just a spoiled teenager that loves being the center of attention. From the very start it is clear that she is in love with the wrong type of man for her, Ashley, and that Rhett is a perfect match for her. Scarlett however doesn't realize this until page 1022 at which point it is too late. Let me  a make a list of what makes me dislike Scarlett so much

-She marries her first husband to spite someone else.
-She honestly doesn't feel bad when that husband dies and doesn't want to mourn him.
-She never cares for her son and is usually kind of mean to him
-Not only is she a slave owner, in one scene she beats a slave
-After her slaves are freed she complains about having to do stuff herself and wants her slaves back
-And she makes a lot of racist remarks.
-And some Anti-Semitic ones too
-She lies to her sister's fiance that her sister has broken off the engagement
-So she can marry him instead... for his money
-She tries to steal away her sister-in-law's husband
-She doesn't love her first daughter either
-When she can't get slave labor she uses convict labor
-She shoots a Union soldier in the face and steals his money
-She lies about her business competitors

I'm sure I'm forgetting some other stuff, but she isn't a nice person. And Rhett isn't any better. He profits from the Civil War, brags about killing a freed slave for being "uppity to a lady", and is probably having an affair the whole time he's married to Scarlett. Really, the two characters totally belong together.

Even after all of that, I would have liked the book if I had felt that the author wanted us to dislike them and disapprove of her actions... but that isn't the case I feel. The way that slavery and racism is so casually accepted, the dislike of being a part of the United States, and the whole thing where the KKK is accepted really left a bad taste for me (which required I rewatch Django Unchained to feel better). Mitchell just idealized the whole Southern culture too much. Maybe she was just a bit naive and didn't study her history enough before writing the book. I actually started to feel a bit self-conscious about reading the book in public. 

The book mentions Les Miserables... it reminded me that I'd rather follow Jean Valjean for a thousand pages than Scarlett O'Hara. I guess I'll give it a C+.

Book # 3 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Of all the books on this list, The Great Gatsby is probably the one that I had read most recently before we started this project. Even though I had read it only about two years ago, I couldn't really remember too much about it. My opinion on a second reading is pretty much the same: it is a really good book, but I don't know how it could really be considered one of the top 5 books of all time. Maybe so many people read it in high school because it is so short.

The story is pretty simple. A rich guy, Jay Gatsby, throws big giant expensive parties in his huge house and is trying to win back a girl, Daisy, that he fell in love with five years earlier when he was poor and felt like he couldn't provide the lifestyle that she wanted. Unfortunately Daisy is now married and has a really unlikable husband. Then *spoiler* there is an accident and more bad stuff happens and everyone ends up either dead or sad. The end.

I really enjoyed Fitzgerald's writing style and the book is full of really beautiful passages. The narrator of the story is a pretty average guy that is easy to relate to and helps ease the reader into the type of world that Gatsby and Daisy live in. I really did enjoy it, but I can't say that I loved it. Most of the characters aren't really that likable at all, especially Daisy at the very end. It is hard to see what Gatsby really likes about her. The book does suggest that Gatsby loves the idea of what Daisy represents (wealth, the past, something to yearn for) and once he gets her back he is a bit let down by her. It also seems that the accident that drives the end of the book is almost too big of a coincidence and convenient for tying together all the story threads. Probably the fact that I could remember so little about it from my first reading just a couple of years ago should say something too. I give it an A, but it does not crack my top 50 list.

Book # 50 Harry Potter (Book 3 of 7) - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

After having Voldemort (in one form or another) trying to kill Harry Potter in the first two books, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban changes it up to make the main villain Sirius Black, an escaped "killer". SPOILER ALERT I put "killer" in quotation marks because as anyone familiar with the series knows, at the end it is revealed that Sirius isn't a villain at all and is actually looking out for Harry Potter. So upon a second or third reading it loses some of its enjoyment because there really is no threat to Harry at all for the whole book. I guess it could be argued that Scabbers/Pettigrew is the villain, but he doesn't do anything either except hide and then run away. That being said... the book is still very enjoyable. Rowling's writing and pace is a bit more relaxed and the book doesn't rush through the story quite as much as the first two did. The Quidditch scenes are a bit longer and a good amount of time is spent describing what the students are learning in their classes. Plus the Hippogriff is pretty cool. I'll give this one an A-.

 And just because, here's a picture of a hippogriff that I took last week.

Book # 24 The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner - A Second Opinion

For a few months now Lucinda has been wanting me to read The Sound and the Fury so that we could discuss it. She didn't like it at all but she thought I might enjoy it since I tend to like books/movies/music that fall on the weirder/experimental side of things. And she was right. I did enjoy it. I reread what she wrote about it and saw that she gave a pretty detailed synopsis of the plot of the book already. So I won't do that... but that has me thinking that this isn't a book that a reader enjoys for the plot and is probably a big reason that Lucinda did not like it.

The book is divided into four major sections and each of the first three sections gives us a glimpse into the mind of a different Compson brother. The first section shows us what the mind of someone with severe mental handicaps is like. Everything is disorienting and the only hope to make sense of things are to find the reoccurring patterns and try to stick to them. Time seems meaningless to this character and details just fly by without having a chance to make sense. The entire first section is a challenge to read, but it is meant to confuse the reader since it is narrated by someone that is completely confused. Trying to make too much sense of it isn't the point of the section. Being confused by it helps the reader better understand the limitations of the character and makes us feel bad for him. The second section is also a challenge because that narrator is totally depressed and gets lost in his own negative thoughts about the past quite frequently. The text goes from normal narration right into a long stream of disoriented thoughts about the past and the narrator's sister. Knowing that this character is so sad and has such hopeless thoughts made me feel really sorry for him.  I think it would have been difficult to really show this character's despair if the book had been written in a more traditional manner. The third section shows the youngest brother's thoughts and really show how horrible of a person he is. Almost every thought shows how he is totally bitter against everything in his life. He hates his family, steals money from his niece, is hung up on losing a job fifteen years earlier and is completely sexist and racist. Being able to see how his mind thinks really is unpleasant, and again would have been difficult to show in another way.

The book is written in a very experimental and difficult way, but I think it pays off quite well and is a unique reading experience. I wouldn't recommend it though if you don't like depressing book. I don't hold a book's depressing nature against it though. It gets an A.

Oh yeah, the book also mentions another book on the list, Tom Jones.

An updating of my rankings :
1. Les Misérables
2. Invisible Man
3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
4. The Hobbit
5. A Farewell to Arms
6. Great Expectations
7. The Stand
8. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
9. Pale Fire
10. The Chronicles of Narnia
11. The Name of the Rose
12.The Sound and the Fury
13. Frankenstein
14. Things Fall Apart
15. Wind in the Willows
16. Anne of Green Gables
17. Rebecca
18. Anna Karenina
19. Sons and Lovers
20. War and Peace
21. Winnie-the-Pooh
22. Charlotte's Web
23. Possession
24. Mrs. Dalloway
25. Atlas Shrugged