Book # 88 The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

This whole "reading the top 100 books" project is most rewarding when I read an exceptional book that I end up totally loving for the very first time. And after reading a few books in a row that I was kind of 'blah' about, it was even more rewarding to read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. I will say it is somewhat classified as science fiction and presents a pretty bleak picture of the future, so those are two big pluses to start off with for me (though P.D. James' Children of Men had those two things going for it also and I didn't enjoy that book at all).

The story is about Offred, a women that is forced to become a 'handmaid', which basically means that she is assigned to some rich and powerful guy to try and have his baby. Due to dropping fertility rates, an anti-feminist religious group has taken over society and stripped all power and money away from every woman. This group then has the power to assign women to other men just for breeding, or to send the women to work colonies. Other religions are banned and basically no one is free anymore.

There's some weird dark stuff (and a few games of Scrabble) in this book and it was a welcome change after reading Jane Austen! It is at times a pretty depressing book and the narrator has such a sad story that it was hard to put the book down. While it would be pretty far-fetched to believe that anything like this could ever happen in America, it would be more believable in other parts of the world were women do not have equal rights and society is completely dominated by men. The book has a bit of an ambiguous ending, which doesn't bother me and actually ends with a bit of a 'commentary' on the 'text' from someone in an even further future reflecting back on this dark period. So I have to give it even more points for ending with a bit of meta-fiction that reveals that the possible double meaning of the book is not a coincidence.

I'll add this one to my top 50 for now and give it an A.

Book #37 Emma by Jane Austen

Jane Austen is my wife's favorite author, she literally has shelves full of books that are sequels to Pride and Prejudice. She has a t-shirt with Jane Austen's face on it, an "action" figure of Jane Austen, and her license plate holder says "I'd rather be at Pemberley". So I should only say very nice things in my thoughts on Emma...

Much like in The Guermantes Way, much of Emma is about people that don't seem to have real jobs paying visits to each other and gossiping about whoever in their social circle isn't there at the moment. At least in Emma most of the characters are a bit nicer and are well intentioned. The plot centers on Emma Woodhouse, her friend Harriet, and a bunch of neighbors. Most of their time is spent discussing who should end up marrying who. Characters fall in and out of love, have secret engagements, and have minor misunderstandings. And of course, in the end everyone is paired up with that perfect someone and everyone lives happily ever  after. Along the way they have dances and picnics and have to listen to old ladies talk on and on.

I gotta say it was a bit boring but sweet. Emma is a likeable character and really so is everyone else. Maybe that was a bit of the problem for me. None of the characters have major disagreements with each other and in the end they all get along and forgive each other once everything gets explained. I'll have to give this one a B+.

Book # 48 Remembrance of Things Past (Part 3 of 7)- The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

The first two volumes of Remembrance of Things Past were enjoyable mostly because of Proust's insights into life and the way he described and remembered everything people experience. The third volume The Guermantes Way picks up right after the end of the second volume with the Narrator moving into a new home after his vacation. And then pretty much nothing happens for the next 600 pages. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but instead of the narrator describing his own life, he becomes obsessed with his neighbors, The Guermantes, and wants to get to know everything about them. He eventually worms his way into their social circle and he just goes on and on and on about the lives of all the upper class Dukes and Duchesses he meets. And that is pretty much the bulk of the book. And to make it worse, all of the people he meets seem to be really snobby and just spend all of their time putting each other down. Plus I started to get all the characters confused because they have weird French titles and names; but that doesn't matter because there is no story. Still... at some points the Narrator tells of a few events that happen to him and these sections are really good. The sequence when his grandmother becomes ill is very touching and the inner conflict he describes when he can't decide if he should tell his best friend that his friend's girlfriend is actually a prostitute is memorable. It becomes clear in this volume that the Narrator is a weird sorta guy that becomes obsessed with people for no reason and has a knack for inserting himself into different social circles by just being persistent. When the novel focuses on his thoughts about life I really enjoyed it, but too frequently he gets lost in describing all the conversations between rich snobby French people about the politics of the time. I'll give this one a B.