Great Books Week

Poster courtesy: http://greatbooks.naiwe.com/

GREAT BOOKS WEEK (Oct. 7-13) begins today. This year they are celebrating the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Victor Hugo’s LES MISERABLES.  I’ve never read it, but I’ll try to pick up a copy at the library next time I go.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with reviews of some of the "Great Books" I have read recently:




BLACK ELK SPEAKS: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux by Black Elk (as told through John G. Neihardt) (244)
©1932   Black Elk, a young cousin of Crazy Horse, had a great vision when he was only nine years old, which led him to become a medicine man before he was 20. He was illiterate and unable to understand English, so the stories he tells are through an interpreter and written down by the author in 1931. The book tells of his early life during the time of the big change, when white settlers were moving across the plains in vast numbers, and the U.S. Cavalry was in charge of keeping them and the miners seeking the gold of the Black Hills safe. So many broken treaties by the U.S. government led to the bitter Indian Wars.

This book was both beautiful in its Native American mysticism and heartbreaking in it’s violence and despair. There was one uproariously funny story about an Indian brave of the tribe trying to win the heart and hand of a beautiful young maiden. Black Elk also related stories of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the betrayal, arrest and killing Crazy Horse at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, and the Massacre at Wounded Knee.

Black Elk was a truly wise old man who said: “You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round…The sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. …Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. …Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and they were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.
But the Wasichus [white men] have put us in these square boxes [cabins and shacks]. Our power is gone and we are dying, for the power is not in us anymore. You can look at our boys and see how it was with us. When we were living by the power of the circle in the way we should, boys were men at twelve or thirteen years of age. But now it takes them very much longer to mature.”

This book should be required reading in high school history classes, so future generations will always remember how disgracefully the Native Americans were treated by land- and resource-hungry whites and the U.S. government. It, like slavery, is a bloody blot on our nation’s history that I’m sure many people would rather forget.


RAMONA - Helen Hunt Jackson (424)
©1884 A very old story about the early history of California and the injustices that Mexicans and Indians alike suffered when the U.S. came to own the region and ruthlessly kicked them off their land, as our government opened it up to white settlers.

This is the moving, though sometimes sentimental, love story of the beautiful, young, half-Indian/half-white orphan Ramona, who was raised as a foster child on a rich Mexican estate, and an Indian shepherd named Alessandro, who wins her heart when he and his people go there to shear the hacienda’s sheep.

The novel was written to call attention to the plight of Native Americans, much as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for slaves. This book from the late 19th century has never been out of print, with over 300 reissues. If you like history and romance, Ramona has plenty of both.

[sidenote] My family lived in Ramona, California (named after the book’s heroine) when I was in kindergarten and first grade. I have also visited Helen Hunt Falls in Colorado Springs, Colorado twice --- it’s named after the successful author, who moved to Colorado Springs in 1873 for health reasons. 


GIANTS IN THE EARTH - O. E. Rolvaag (453)
©1927 An epic novel of Norwegian immigrants settling the Great Plains at the end of the 19th century. I don’t know of any book that has captured the harsh, unforgiving environment or the sturdy determination of the settlers better than this one. I especially felt for the wife/mother in this story, who suffered miserable depression from the utter silence, expansiveness and loneliness of the prairie. If you like stories of perserverence in the face of hardship and neighbor helping neighbor to survive, I recommend this one for your reading pleasure.

Look What I Found

I'm sorting and boxing up books that are scattered about the house today. Boxes are labeled My Library (books I've read and want to keep), TBR, and Giveaway (I'll probably drop them off at the Goodwill store). Some of these books I haven't even seen for about 20 years! And then I came across a stack of booklets I bought when I was a kid. 

I must have been about 12, because that's when an older teenage friend of the family got drafted and sent to Vietnam. Before he left, he gave his old horse to me and my sister. Big mistake! Queenie had been rode hard by a teenage boy who knew how to handle her. For two little girls with almost no riding experience, she was downright mean and dangerous. :o( A real disappointment!

To learn more about horses, we answered an ad we'd read in Western Horseman magazine for a course in Horse Training from the Beery School of Horsemanship, of Pleasant Hill, Ohio. When they sent back info, the course cost a lot of money --- something like $25, a lot of money for two kids in the '60s who only made $1 an hour babysitting and $1 a week allowance.

We had to really badger our mom to loan us the money, but we did get the booklets. Along with the basic horse training set, they included three other sets of booklets: Saddle Horse Instructions (about English-style riding), How to Ride and Train the Western Horse, and Home Course in Animal Breeding. I really loved these booklets and learned alot about riding from them. Oh, and the course in animal breeding was my introduction to the topic of sex, with its crudely drawn pictures of the reproductive organs of horses, cows and pigs and it's descriptions of animals breeding, with forbidden words like vag*** and pen** (we CAN say those words now, right?) LOL! 

Professor Jesse Beery (1861-1945)  was a true pioneer in the field of horse training.  For 16 years he toured the country, demonstrating his training skills at county fairs and expositions. Then in 1905, when he realized he was becoming overwhelmed with demands for his performances, he went back home to Pleasant Hill, Ohio and began a very successful mail-order course in horsemanship. 

His first edition of the booklets came out around 1908-1909, with reprintings in the 1940s, 1960s (mine), and 1970s. I searched on-line and discovered that these books are indeed rare and collectible.  The 8 book basic  set I have is selling for $125 in excellent condition.  The Saddle Horse set is worth $65 and the breeding course is $50. The complete 30 book set  is worth $300 in excellent condition. Mine is in very good, used condition with a few stains, and two books missing from the Western set. But I can sell the ones I do have, individually, for from $10-$25 each

It's really good to find this "blast from the past." Now I need to decide if I want to sell them or not…

A Famous Wager

Photo courtesy of NASA

Today is Phileas Fogg’s Wager Day. In Jules Verne’s adventure novel AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, Fogg bets 20,000 pounds that he can make a tour of the world in eighty days or less. When asked when he would leave on his journey: "This very evening," returned Phileas Fogg. He took out and consulted a pocket almanac, and added, "As today is Wednesday, the 2nd of October [1872], I shall be due in London in this very room of the Reform Club, on Saturday, the 21st of December, at a quarter before nine p.m.; or else the twenty thousand pounds… will belong to you…”


This classic can be read, for free, on-line at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/103/103-h/103-h.htm

A Few Selections from John Steinbeck

Modern Day Monterey, photo courtesy http://pdphoto.org/   Thanks, Jon!

TORTILLA FLAT - John Steinbeck (207)
©1935 This is an early novel of Steinbeck’s, and the one that put him on the road to literary success. The author based his characters on actual people he knew and liked, but the book is still being criticized as a stereotypical view of Hispanics as drunk and lazy.

The dialog of the characters is also strange. They use words like “thee,” “thou” and “thine,” which threw me off a little, because Mexican-Americans don’t speak like that.  In the author’s biography I read recently, it said that this book was based on the Arthurian legends that Steinbeck read and enjoyed so much as a boy.

That said, the story is not much of a story, but more of a character sketch: in this case, the character is Tortilla Flat, a shabby village on the outskirts of Monterey, California where the jobless and homeless and poor paisanos live a hand-to-mouth existence. The reader gets to know the parish priest, shady ladies, local business people, and a band of drunken, petty thieves quite well.

Danny is a young man who returns from service in WW1 to find that he has inherited two houses in Tortilla Flat from his grandfather. He invites a friend to rent one of his houses, and the friend invites a friend, and the house gets sublet a number of times, but nobody pays any rent. When the house accidentally burns to the ground, its occupants move in with Danny. At any one time there could be 6 men and 5 dogs living in Danny’s house. Only Danny has a bed. Everyone else sleeps on the floor.
This set-up reminds me of the hippie communes of the late 60s. Somebody would rent a house, then invite a friend to share the rent, who invites a friend, and pretty soon you have one crowded house where nobody is working or paying rent. Instead they’re partying all day and night.

Steinbeck’s little round-table group spend much of their time drinking wine, chasing women, and gossiping about their Tortilla Flat neighbors. Except for occasional work cutting squid for Chin Kee, all these friends are unemployed. They cheat, borrow, beg or steal whatever they need from their neighbors. Their principal activity is getting drunk together.

As I was reading this book, I kept thinking, “Come on, somebody do something!” But by the time I got to the end I realized that I was only reading it superficially, for a plot. So much more is being said here about friendship, loyalty, love, hard times, alcoholism, etc. The characters are well-drawn, lovable bums and the story is lightened with comedy, sharpened with drama, and sweetened with romance. The ending was a surprise to me. I think this is a book I might like to read again someday. I’d also like to see the old 1942 Spencer Tracy movie of it.


CANNERY ROW - John Steinbeck (196)
©1945 This book reminded me a lot of Steinbeck’s earlier novel, Tortilla Flat, except that it is a bit longer and the plot is more involved. Both books were set in the same area (Monterey, California), different neighborhoods, different people. They both featured the lives of the Depression-era poor. Tortilla Flats had a group of six homeless, shiftless vagabonds and five dogs living in one house. Cannery Row had five men and one dog sharing an abandoned warehouse they fixed up and named the Palace Flophouse and Grill. The theme of both books seems to be “Let’s Party!” and even though the characters couldn’t afford to, they found ways to have fun despite the bad times they were going through.

I think the reason Steinbeck was such a brilliant writer is because he wrote about what he knew. He was born in nearby Salinas and lived much of his life in the Monterey area. He got to know the people. One of the main characters in this book, a marine biologist named Doc, is based on his good friend Ed Ricketts who collected and sold marine specimens. Steinbeck often helped him on his collecting trips to tide pools, so he was able to write about such a life convincingly. All of the characters in this book, from Mack and the Boys to shopkeeper Lee Chong to Dora, the outrageous madame of the Bear Flag “restaurant,” are so finely rendered, as is the landscape of the Monterey area and the waterfront district called Cannery Row.

Tortilla Flat was a simple, comedic sketch of a neighborhood and some of its residents. Cannery Row was more like a string of short stories that came together as a heart-warming novel of a poor neighborhood, filled with interesting people, plenty of humor, and friendship. Of the two, I recommend Cannery Row as an introduction to Steinbeck’s literary brilliance.

THE MOON IS DOWN - John Steinbeck (188)

©1942  This minor novel by Steinbeck is a war novel in which the townspeople of an occupied village in Northern Europe resent being taken over by a foreign army. Although he doesn’t name the country, it’s presumed to be Norway, and the town is a strategic coastal shipping center for the coal region. It is also assumed that the invaders are the Nazis.

In 1945, Steinbeck received the Haakon Vll Cross of Freedom for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement. While not my favorite of his many works, it was still good reading.