Little Women

The other day I finished a book while on the subway and I had enough of a commute left and no internet that I decided I had to read something that was already on my Kindle. Because of copyright law and the Gutenberg Project, there are many free books available online, and I've downloaded quite a few classics for times of need or ambition. This was a time of need and not ambition, so I decided to reread one of my absolute favorites: Little Women.


Little Women
Louisa May Alcott

Growing up, my parents limited the amount of television my sister and I were allowed to watch, so I spent most of my years before middle school playing pretend with my little sister, running around the backyard, and reading. I was also really shy when I was younger, and reading was a wonderful escape for me in awkward situations and most social environments. But more than any of those things, I learned early on what a fantastic, magical thing reading can be for its ability to take you anywhere and let you be anyone.

When I read (and reread) little women, I always felt so inspired by the girls, and have felt varying degrees of empathy for their situations. Each time I read it, I notice different details and commiserate with the characters in different ways. But overall, I feel the most for Jo, and I don't believe it is just because she is the main character to a certain extent. I understood her love of reading and escapism, her desire to write and perform, her awkward and stubbornly blunt way of dealing with others, and her impatience for that which doesn't make sense. I love this book for its comforts, lessons, stories, and lovely portrait of a family.

Below are some of the underlines I made this time around. There is so much that I love in this book, but these were the ones that stood out to me this time. Partly I was in the framework to think about love and loss due to what people in my life are going through, and partly these just seemed to be really lovely moments and thoughts.

"But I lost her when I was a little older than you are, and for years had to struggle on alone, for I was too proud to confess my weakness to anyone else. I had a hard time, Jo, and shed a good many bitter tears over my failures, for in spite of my efforts I never seemed to get on. Then your father came, and I was so happy that I found it easy to be good. But by-and-by, when I had four little daughters round me and we were poor, then the old trouble began again, for I am not patient by nature, and it tried me very much to see my children wanting anything." "Poor Mother! What helped you then?" "Your father, Jo. He never loses patience, never doubts or complains, but always hopes, and works and waits so cheerfully that one is ashamed to do otherwise before him. He helped and comforted me, and showed me that I must try to practice all the virtues I would have my little girls possess, for I was their example. It was easier to try for your sakes than for my own.' 

Jo's breath gave out here, and wrapping her head in the paper, she bedewed her little story with a few natural tears, for to be independent and earn the praise of those she loved were the dearest wishes of her heart, and this seemed to be the first step toward that happy end. 

Laurie thought that the task of forgetting his love for Jo would absorb all his powers for years, but to his great surprise he discovered it grew easier every day. He refused to believe it at first, got angry with himself, and couldn't understand it, but these hearts of ours are curious and contrary things, and time and nature work their will in spite of us. Laurie's heart wouldn't ache. The wound persisted in healing with a rapidity that astonished him, and instead of trying to forget, he found himself trying to remember. He had not foreseen this turn of affairs, and was not prepared for it. He was disgusted with himself, surprised at his own fickleness, and full of a queer mixture of disappointment and relief that he could recover from such a tremendous blow so soon. He carefully stirred up the embers of his lost love, but they refused to burst into a blaze. There was only a comfortable glow that warmed and did him good without putting him into a fever, and he was reluctantly obliged to confess that the boyish passion was slowly subsiding into a more tranquil sentiment, very tender, a little sad and resentful still, but that was sure to pass away in time, leaving a brotherly affection which would last unbroken to the end.

In spite of the new sorrow, it was a very happy time, so happy that Laurie could not bear to disturb it by a word. It took him a little while to recover from his surprise at the cure of his first, and as he had firmly believed, his last and only love. 

His second wooing, he resolved, should be as calm and simple as possible. There was no need of having a scene, hardly any need of telling Amy that he loved her, she knew it without words and had given him his answer long ago. It all came about so naturally that no one could complain, and he knew that everybody would be pleased, even Jo. But when our first little passion has been crushed, we are apt to be wary and slow in making a second trial, so Laurie let the days pass, enjoying every hour, and leaving to chance the utterance of the word that would put an end to the first and sweetest part of his new romance. 

It seldom is, at first, and thirty seems the end of all things to five-and-twenty. But it's not as bad as it looks, and one can get on quite happily if one has something in one's self to fall back upon. At twenty-five, girls begin to talk about being old maids, but secretly resolve that they never will be. At thirty they say nothing about it, but quietly accept the fact, and if sensible, console themselves by remembering that they have twenty more useful, happy years, in which they may be learning to grow old gracefully. Don't laugh at the spinsters, dear girls, for often very tender, tragic romances are hidden away in the hearts that beat so quietly under the sober gowns, and many silent sacrifices of youth, health, ambition, love itself, make the faded faces beautiful in God's sight. Even the sad, sour sisters should be kindly dealt with, because they have missed the sweetest part of life, if for no other reason. And looking at them with compassion, not contempt, girls in their bloom should remember that they too may miss the blossom time. That rosy cheeks don't last forever, that silver threads will come in the bonnie brown hair, and that, by-and-by, kindness and respect will be as sweet as love and admiration now.

Devil in the White City, part 1

So my boyfriend, sister, sister's best friend, and I started a long distance book club together. Initially, my boyfriend and I were doing one together because we are so far apart, and then my sister got excited and pulled her friend in. This is the first book the four of us are reading together, and this was my first email about Part 1. 

Note: since I read on a kindle, I have locations instead of page numbers (and my kindle is old, so it only has locations). 

Devil in the White City

By Erik Larson

Part I: Frozen Music

Chicago 1890-91

"The Black City"

Women able to leave home alone for the first time in modern history, work, and live away from home.

"Anonymous deaths came early and often" 

"Men shot women, women shot men, and children shot one another by accident."

How is this similar or different to today? On one hand, I think there would be less random and reckless deaths based on how deaths are described as so common with trains etc, but then again we still have plenty of accidental deaths and dangerous crimes. I'd be curious to know how those compare as a percent of population between now and then. Which society was "safer" from that standpoint?

Location 238

This book makes me curious about psychopaths/killers in that I wonder if their sensory experience is different so that smells we find offensive are pleasing to them, for example, and not because they enjoy killing per say but the actual smelling experience. 

Location 259

Windy city because of political talk - same as today (everywhere)

Location 282

France's set up of its exhibition and organization vs America's:

Pleasure in a unified and intentional design; and the benefits of that still in showing one's strengths

Location 296

Chicago spirit, civic pride as tangible

Unifying culture after tragedy and crisis -to what degree can a large society feel that they are a group with an "other" to compete/contrast with or a crisis/tragedy to endure together (modern: 9/11, sandy, sandy hook shooting, Osama bin laden, etc)

Also it says more powerful in Chicago - is it tied to it being an underdog city? Are there other qualities that create this type of an environment and attitude? (collective pride: Boston, NYC, Chicago, Texas, etc)

Location 355

Chicago fire took 18,000 homes and left 100,000 homeless: was it the largest scale tragedy at that point in history besides a war?

Location 415

Meals men ate in 19th century prevented them from walking up stairs - how does this compare to modern meals?

Location 491

Miasma of smoke... Description of city is bleak, cold, gross, dark, foul

Location 555

Whitehall Club

Really? So creepy and gross and morbid. What did they really do?

Location 607

His nature broke common decency rules yet was appealing because of it. Is this always true for people? Are we attracted to whatever breaks contemporary rules? Why? What evolutionary benefit did we find in pursuing the ones who diverge from society's paths, whether it's within a small range or extreme enough to be dangerous. Is it always a sexual attraction? Why is sex and rule breaking so intoxicating and attractive to humans? There must be benefits otherwise it wouldn't be such a common trait. Do those traits parallel other traits that are beneficial so it's just a coincidental/linked benefit that helps reproduce both traits and attractions?

Location 636

Related to my previous comment/question as to whether psychopaths find the sensory experience different or if it's just symbolic of their misguided/twisted desires. 

Location 648

The descriptions of doctors 100 years ago made me really curious as to when doctors became more credible and well educated. The corollary to that is to wonder to what degree they have made significant improvements. I'm not really trying to say that I don't believe that doctors aren't well educated at all or aren't doing their best (or that the vast majority aren't). I'm more interested in whether we have a similar blindness as to the real limitations of our current knowledge and methods that parallels what they did at the time. While we have certainly made great strides and discoveries and improvements, how can we really assess where we fall on a greater spectrum of the full knowledge and best practices for health. I'm not at all an expert either way, so I can't really give my own opinion with any confidence in its accuracy, but my guess is that we overestimate and have overconfidence in what we know and the medicines we prescribe and treatments we use. 

Location 1242

The attention to details like that is probably better understood and more familiar now, but even so perhaps we don't pay attention to the right details or allow ourselves to determine correctly which details will really matter and to what degree. And as a solution, we pay too much attention to too many details and waste time and resources on things that don't truly warrant it. 

Location 1413

"besides his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath."

This sort of shocked me because, as a loose definition, it made me wonder how many psychopaths I knew. (more on this later perhaps, just sort of wanted to finish up at this point)

I Feel Bad About My Neck

This was another random download from the Austin public library account, and I mostly picked it because I think it was on the main page and sounded funny. I always like a book that is simple and makes me laugh or smile, especially for reading while in transit. It makes 45 min on the subway go by more pleasantly in spite of crowds or smells or even just time. And this definitely did the trick - not necessarily for everyone, but I enjoyed it.

I Feel Bad About My Neck
Nora Ephron

The random quotes that I underlined while reading are below. Some really cracked me up because they were familiar, some just because her wording was great, and others just rang true even though I'm not yet her age or with all her experiences. I think she also provides good perspective on a lot of things I stress and worry about, which most women older than me can do (usually significantly older because 30somethings sometimes seem more stress or stress-inducing). Plus there are things I totally, fully agree with - like the things about reading or cooking.

A recipe for them appears on page 36 of the book, but it doesn’t begin to convey how stressful and time-consuming an endeavor it is to make egg rolls, nor does it begin to suggest how much tension a person can create in a household by serving egg rolls that take hours to make and are not nearly as good as Chinese takeout.

Just before I’d moved to New York, two historic events had occurred: The birth control pill had been invented, and the first Julia Child cookbook was published. As a result, everyone was having sex, and when the sex was over, you cooked something.

By the mid-sixties, Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Craig Claiborne’s New York Times Cookbook, and Michael Field’s Cooking School had become the holy trinity of cookbooks.

Okay, I didn’t have a date, but at least I wasn’t one of those lonely women who sat home with a pathetic container of yogurt. Eating an entire meal for four that I had cooked for myself was probably equally pathetic, but that never crossed my mind.

The point wasn’t about the recipes. The point (I was starting to realize) was about putting it together. The point was about making people feel at home, about finding your own style, whatever it was, and committing to it. The point was about giving up neurosis where food was concerned. The point was about finding a way that food fit into your life.

We begin, I’m sorry to say, with hair. I’m sorry to say it because the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.

Black was for widows, specifically for Italian war widows, and even Gloria Steinem might concede that the average Italian war widow made you believe that sixty was the new seventy-five. If you have gray hair, black makes you look not just older but sadder. But black looks great on older women with dark hair—so great, in fact, that even younger women with dark hair now wear black. Even blondes wear black. Even women in L.A. wear black. Most everyone wears black—except for anchorwomen, United States senators, and residents of Texas, and I feel really bad for them. I mean, black makes your life so much simpler. Everything matches black, especially black.

I want to ask a question: When and how did it happen that you absolutely had to have a manicure? I don’t begin to know the answer, but I want to leave the question out there, floating around in the atmosphere, as a reminder that just when you think you know exactly how many things you have to do to yourself where maintenance is concerned, another can just pop up out of nowhere and take a huge bite out of your life.

The best thing about a pedicure is that most of the year, from September to May to be exact, no one except your loved one knows if you have had one. The second best thing about a pedicure is that while you’re having your feet done, you have the use of your hands and can easily read or even talk on a cell phone. The third best thing about a pedicure is that when it’s over, your feet really do look adorable.

Speaking of the pain of labor, which I seem to be, I would like to interject a short, irrelevant note: Why do people always say you forget the pain of labor? I haven’t forgotten the pain of labor. Labor hurt. It hurt a lot. The fact that I am not currently in pain and cannot simulate the pain of labor doesn’t mean I don’t remember it. I am currently not eating a wonderful piece of grilled chicken I once had in Asolo, Italy, in 1982, but I remember it well. It was delicious. I can tell you exactly what it tasted like, and except for the time when I returned to the restaurant six years later and ordered it again (and it turned out, amazingly, to be exactly as wonderful as I remembered), I have never tasted chicken that was crisper, tastier, or juicier. The song has ended, but the melody lingers on, and that goes for the pain of labor—but not in a good way.

Exercise, as you no doubt know, is a late arrival in the history of civilization. Until around 1910, people exercised all the time, but they didn’t think of it as exercise—they thought of it as life itself. They had to get from one place to the other, usually on foot, and harvest the crop, and wage war, and so on. But then the automobile was invented (not to mention the Sherman tank), and that pretty much led to what we have today—a country full of underexercised (and often overweight) people—and a parallel universe of overexercised (but not necessarily underweight) people.

Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

Here’s what a parent is: A parent is a person who has children. Here’s what’s involved in being a parent: You love your children, you hang out with them from time to time, you throw balls, you read stories, you make sure they know which utensil is the salad fork, you teach them to say please and thank you, you see that they have an occasional haircut, and you ask if they did their homework. Every so often, sentences you never expected to say (because your parents said them to you) fall from your lips.

But eventually the baby in question began to manifest its personality, and sure enough, remarkably enough, that personality never changed. For example, when the police arrived to inform you that your eight-year-old had just dropped a dozen eggs from your fifth-floor window onto West End Avenue, you couldn’t help but be reminded of the fourteen-month-old baby he used to be, who knocked all the string beans from the high chair to the floor and thought it was a total riot.

Parenting meant that whether or not your children understood you, your obligation was to understand them; understanding was the key to everything. If your children believed you understood them, or at least tried to understand them, they wouldn’t hate you when they became adolescents; what’s more, they would grow up to be happy, well-adjusted adults who would never have to squander their money (or, far more likely, yours) on psychoanalysis or whatever fashion in self-improvement had come along to take its place. Parenting used entirely different language from just plain parenthood, language you would never write in big capital letters in order to make clear that it had been uttered impulsively or in anger.

It was so much a part of our lives, a song sung again and again, and no matter what happened, no matter how awful things became between the two of them, we always knew that our parents had once been madly in love. But in a divorce, you never tell your children that you were once madly in love with their father because it would be too confusing. And then, after a while, you can’t even remember whether you were.

I’ve just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture—with a book. I loved this book. I loved every second of it. I was transported into its world. I was reminded of all sorts of things in my own life. I was in anguish over the fate of its characters. I felt alive, and engaged, and positively brilliant, bursting with ideas, brimming with memories of other books I’ve loved. I composed a dozen imaginary letters to the author, letters I’ll never write, much less send. I wrote letters of praise. I wrote letters relating entirely inappropriate personal information about my own experiences with the author’s subject matter. I even wrote a letter of recrimination when one of the characters died and I was grief-stricken. But mostly I wrote letters of gratitude: the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read, but it doesn’t happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I’m truly beside myself.

Here’s a strange thing: Whenever I read a book I love, I start to remember all the other books that have sent me into rapture, and I can remember where I was living and the couch I was sitting on when I read them.

After college, living in Greenwich Village, I sat on my brand-new wide-wale corduroy couch and read The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, the extraordinary novel that changed my life and the lives of so many other young women in the 1960s.

And finally, one day, I read the novel that is probably the most rapture-inducing book of my adult life. On a chaise longue at the beach on a beautiful summer day, I open Wilkie Collins’s masterpiece, The Woman in White, probably the first great work of mystery fiction ever written (although that description hardly does it justice), and I am instantly lost to the world. Days pass as I savor every word. Each minute I spend away from the book pretending to be interested in everyday life is a misery. How could I have waited so long to read this book? When can I get back to it?

There’s something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can’t tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he’s liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can’t adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere. All this happens to me when I surface from a great book.

The book I’ve currently surfaced from—the one I mentioned at the beginning of this piece—is called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. It’s about two men who create comic-book characters, but it’s also about how artists create fantastic and magical things from the events of everyday life.

Plus, you can’t wear a bikini. Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re thirty-four.

Well, not quite exactly. Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really going to have to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in America is so unbelievably delicious? And what about chocolate? There’s a question for you, Gertrude Stein—what about chocolate?

The Night Circus

I really enjoyed reading this book. I picked it relatively at random because it was on the homepage of the library's website for downloadable library books and the snipped didn't look terrible. A couple friends of mine read it and didn't like it as much, which surprised me because I liked it a lot. Maybe I was just in the mindset or mood to be entranced by something and let my imagination run wild with this magical imagery and quasi-romantic storyline. Regardless of the exact reasons, I read this very quickly because I could barely put it down and felt that envy for the supernatural that you feel when reading something like Harry Potter. 

The Night Circus 

By Erin Morgenstern

I think another thing I liked about this book was that the first snippet or so that I read reminded me of Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, which I don't even remember particularly well other than the beginning about a mysterious circus or something coming to town (did I even ever read it all? I'm not sure). Come to think of it, I'm not sure I ever did read it. But the first chapter is quite mysterious with the introduction of this strange lightning rod seller and a shift of the air, and the night circus that pops up out of nowhere and only opens at night has that same tangible otherness that is not so different as to be unbelievable but is just unusual enough to be completely entrancing.

 

I didn't really underline much in this book - I focused less on individual details or passages or sentences and instead was mostly just racing along to find out what happened next. Like I said, this book really captured me for some reason. These are the two things I clipped from it, which isn't terribly surprising to me based on the sentiment. One, that a great dinner party of kindred spirits does wonders for loneliness and that sometimes being special isn't what's required, but just putting yourself out there to be in the right place at the right time. My dad often told me that most of life was about luck and about putting yourself in the position that luck could happen to you. 

They sit over their drinks smiling like children and they relish being surrounded by kindred spirits, if only for an evening. When they depart, they shake hands and embrace like old friends, even if they have only just met, and as they go their separate ways they feel less alone than they had before. 

“But I’m not  …  special,” Bailey says. “Not the way they are. I’m not anyone important.” “I know,” Celia says. “You’re not destined or chosen, I wish I could tell you that you were if that would make it easier, but it’s not true. You’re in the right place at the right time, and you care enough to do what needs to be done. Sometimes that’s enough.”