Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, 1937

Read in 2003. ** SPOILERS AFOOT! **



Synopsis: This classic story of a pair of unlikely friends is probably the most moving of Steinbeck’s novels. A discerning comment on the loneliness and alienation of California’s farm laborers in the 1930s, Of Mice and Men is also a gripping tale of one man’s selfless love for another.

Lennie, a lumbering hulk of a man with the mind of a child, and his caretaker and good friend George, dream of owning a farm together. Now that they’ve landed a job on a vegetable farm in the Salinas Valley, the dream seems within their grasp. But the boss’ son has a flirtatious wife, and guileless Lennie is no match for her. In a few fateful minutes alone with her, he dashes all hope of leading a normal life. And George must make the most difficult decision imaginable.

At the end of the book, there is a note describing the way Steinbeck wrote this novel. It was an experiment in playable novel; that is a novel written as if it were a play. With limited locales, lots of dialogue and the chapters representing acts. It comes off very well. I could picture in my mind the bunkhouse, the barn and the little glade by the river. Equally well described were the men themselves. The action was swift and the characters very sympathetic. Even though there was so much foreshadowing, I still cried at the end when George had to kill Lennie before the irate laborers, led by the boss’ son got to him.

At the very beginning, Lennie has a dead mouse in his pocket (he is obsessed with petting soft things – kittens, mice, rabbits etc). He is quick to tell George that he didn’t kill it this time, but found it that way. Later, George remembers an earlier event where Lennie wanted to feel the pretty dress of a lady and scared her so badly that the whole farm took out after them and they had to hide in an irrigation ditch until nightfall when they could make their escape. Still later, Curley the boss’ son picks a fight with Lennie because he is the biggest among the men and Curley has a severe case of short man’s disease. Lennie takes a few in the face and belly before George’s encouragement to strike back sinks in. When it does, Lennie grabs Curley’s fist out of the air and crushes it, breaking every bone. Another event that is even more poignant is when one of the men shoots the dog of another because the dog is so old he is useless and miserable. The owner can’t bear to do it even though it needs to be done. Oh boy can you ever see the end of Lennie.

Meanwhile all through the story, George recounts the farm they plan to buy with their stake. Another guy on the farm hears it and offers to go in with George and Lennie. He already has $300 saved up and is due another $50 at the end of the month. That with George and Lennie’s $50 each for a month of work, they could probably swing it. The dream, which seemed out of reach for so long, just might come true after all. They will grow wheat and alfalfa and have a cow and some pigs and of course rabbits. George promises that if Lennie is good, he can tend the rabbits. The rabbits are all to Lennie. But tell about the rabbits, George. Because the title of the book is taken from the Robert Burns line; the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, you know that this little dream will never come true, but your hope never dies completely and you want them to get it. Because they deserve it. They are good men who try as best they can.

Then much later, Lennie accidentally kills the pup that he chose from a new litter. It is while he is mourning the pup in the barn, that Curley’s flirtatious wife finds him. Even though she is drawn as a tart and good for nothing, I think she really started to feel like she could be herself with Lennie, and she tells him a semi-sympathetic story of how she came to marry Curley. One thing leads to another and she encourages Lennie to touch her hair. He does and then she becomes excited that he might ruin her hair do and he panics and hangs on. She screams and he covers her mouth to shut her up. He shakes her and breaks her neck. Now two accidental corpses lie in the straw.

As prearranged with George, Lennie goes back to the glade where they spent the night before going to the farm. The men are out for blood. Curley has a shotgun and one of the other men goes for his Luger only to find it gone. Lennie must have it.

It’s not Lennie, but George who has the .45. He separates from the posse (you better come with us so we don’t think you’re mixed up in this, George) and finds Lennie alone by the river. Lennie is very frightened and thinks about finding a cave to live in where he won’t bother anyone and won’t be a burden to George any longer. When George shows up he is like a little child whose father has returned with a special present for him. Once again, George is pressed to tell about the farm and how they’ll live off the fat of the land and of course, the rabbits. And George tells. His voice is soothing and almost singing. He brings the gun up to the back of Lennie’s head without Lennie noticing, so entranced by the story is he. When George squeezes the trigger, Lennie’s face is suffused with the joy of the farm and when the men catch up, the more sympathetic Slim reassures George that it had to be done. That Lennie would have been locked up like an animal in a cage and have been miserable and afraid the rest of his life. Killing him here, when he was feeling secure, was the best way for him. Curley’s lust for revenge goes unfilled and George is led back to the farm.

It is unbelievably sad. I cried at the end. Can’t Steinbeck write happy books?? I guess if he did, we wouldn’t remember them so well. I read that he actually became a migrant worker for 2 years before writing many of the books that made him famous. It certainly shows that he loves and respects the men who did this job and lived this life. He shows their loneliness well and the fact that they live with the most tenuous hopes to keep them going. I don’t think this book will ever diminish in my mind.

Shock by Robin Cook, 2002

Read in 2003.



Synopsis; In exchange for a generous fee, Deborah and Joanna have donated eggs at the Wingate Fertility Clinic. Months later, the young women are still curious about what has happened to their eggs, so they disguise their appearances and get jobs at the clinic. But instead of answers, they begin to discover experiments in cloning that are more terrifying than anything they could imagine.

Well this was dumb. Why did these women go back? Because they were curious and thought they had a right to know what happened to their eggs. So they come up with this stupid scheme to get jobs at the clinic. They take the names and social security numbers of a couple of dead women and use those. But what trips them up is the fact that they used Deborah’s car. When the security guard guy checks it out, he sees that it isn’t registered to Georgina Marx, but this other woman. They shouldn’t have laid open that easily.

The drama, suspense and/or terror just didn’t pay off either. There was hardly any build up for it and when it was finally revealed that one of the doctors was cloning himself and implanting the embryos in various women and even in pigs, it just didn’t seem scary. The dialogue was pretty lame too. No one outside of a 1950s sit-com would talk like that. Yuk.

Jolie Blon's Bounce by James Lee Burke, 2002

Read in 2003.



Synopsis: Two women have been brutally raped and murdered. The most likely suspect is Tee Bobby Hulin, a heroin-addicted Cajun blues singer, but Dave doesn’t think Tee Bobby is capable of such violent crimes. The detective’s investigation soon leads him to a man named Legion – a man so evil, he could be Satan himself. And as the case becomes darker and more violent, it summons old personal demons in Dave’s life.

So I got through this, but it took forever. There is not one likeable or good person in this book. The language in which it was written is so harsh. The life in this area is brutal and awful things happen all the time. It was really a grinding and extremely violent story. Legion was just awful, but in a visceral way. He brutalized and humiliated everyone around him. Not just the black women that worked under his authority on a plantation, but everyone around him. He was in his 70s but he trounced everyone who tried to cross him. Guns under restaurant tables, truncheons and saps – he was prepared. It was awful.

And even the ‘good guys’ were kind of awful. Dave is an alcoholic who resorts to violence whenever policy doesn’t work. His buddy, and ex cop, Clete is equally awful. Then there were a bunch of other people who were just brutal and had no class and lived hand to mouth. It was depressing.

Turned out that while Tee Bobby didn’t do the actual deed, he stood by while someone else killed one woman. The other was killed by a traveling bible salesman, but he wasn’t convicted. I was expecting Legion to have a huge revenge scheme do away with his ass, but no. Dave and the mysterious drifter who claims he was the medic that saved Dave’s life in Vietnam, chase Legion into a swamp and he is struck by lightning. Damn – ripped off! I wanted greater satisfaction. I wanted him to pay. He was a gross, degenerate and cruel man. He should have paid more than just getting struck by lightning.

The White: A Novel by Deborah Larsen 2002

Read in 2003



Synopsis: This is the voice of Mary Jemison, who, in 1758, at the age of sixteen, was taken by a Shawnee raiding party from her home near what would become Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In this intimate reimagining of her life story, Mary endures the brutal scalpings of her parents and siblings and is given to two Seneca sisters who treat her as their own – a symbolic replacement for the brother they lost to the white colonists. Renamed Two-Falling-Voices, she gradually becomes integrated into her new family, learning to assist with the hunt and to cultivate corn. She marries a Delaware warrior, raises a family in her adoptive culture, becomes friends with two former slaves, and eventually, remarkably, fulfills her lifelong dream “to own land bordered by sky, as my mother and father had once purchased woods and fields which were dappled with changing light.”

A testament to the resilience of the human mind and spirit, The White is a cut-crystal narrative of Mary’s life among the Seneca, lit by flashes of her own voice and revealing her curious, open heart. From the novel’s bloody opening to its arresting conclusion – by her own choice Mary does not return to white society – Deborah Larsen never flinches from the violence and the splendor that marked the settling of the New World.

I expected more from this somehow. What I read was detached and dreamlike in the fact that it didn’t mesh to reality very well. It seemed that Mary didn’t really believe what was happening to her and recounted events dispassionately. Her capture, she blames on her father and is ashamed of him when he gave in and didn’t try to defend his family. She called him weak. Her brother is given to an entirely different settlement and she never saw him again or gave him one moment’s thought it seems. Her mother she almost never recalls.

She tells of her days – hoeing corn or helping with butchering. She tells of how she learned the language – all of a sudden apparently after months of barely speaking a word. She tells of her marriages and births of her children. She tells of her husband’s death and the move to the Genesee valley. But all of it seems remote and unreal. Like she was describing what happened to another person.

All through the book we had paragraphs of inner monologue that seemed to be in an entirely different voice then the other paragraphs. At first I thought these were taken from the actual manuscript of Mary’s story, but they weren’t. They were just thoughts.

At the end of the book, Mary has much more contact with white settlers than she had in the beginning. The Revolutionary war is over and people are heading west. She is introduced to a man who wants to hear her story. He wants to write it down and she agrees and thus, we have the basis for this book. I wonder how a person can be so unaffected as she seemed to be. She just floated along like a leaf in a stream. In the end, she had over 10,000 acres of land deeded to her. From whom, I have no idea. I think it was from a local tribe. Why they gave it to her, I don’t know. Her second husband helped petition for it to be hers. He died right after she received it and she buried him there and later, her 3 sons.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt, 1992

Read again in 2006



Synopsis: These are the confessions, years afterward, of a young man who found at a small Vermont college the life of privilege and intellect he’d long coveted – and rarely has the glorious experience of youth infatuated with knowledge and with itself been so achingly realized. Then, amazed, Richard Papen is drawn into the ultimate inner circle; five students, worldly and self-assured, selected by a charismatic classics professor to participate in the search for truth and beauty. Together they study the mysteries of ancient Greek culture and spend long weekends at an old country house, reading, boating, basking in an Indian Summer that stretches late into autumn.

Mesmerized by his new comrades, Richard is unaware of the crime which they have committed in his dreaming, unwitting presence. But once taken into their confidence, he and the othes slowly and inevitably begin to believe in the necessity of murdering the one classmate and friend who might betray both their secrets and their future.

It’s been more than ten years since my last reading and the atmosphere of the cloistered college student’s life has enchanted me like it did the first time. having never been to college at all, much less a notable one, tales like this featuring the inner workings of academia always fascinate me. The kinship these students have with each other and with their teacher is one of many years, but they aren’t old so I’m not sure what to make of that. They are all classics students of varying ability and that in itself lends to the aura of mystery and seclusion that keeps them separate from the rest of the student body.

With the exception of Richard – he is basically an outsider and can mingle freely with both sides of the coin. He is accepted by neither though and continuously spends his time trying to find his proper place. The winter he spends freezing to death in his unheated room was hard to read about. I think Henry’s rescue of him puts Richard in a light that he probably would never have been in. His solitary suffering and expulsion from normality makes Henry see him as something he isn’t; stoic and worthy.

The other students continually keep him at arm’s length and his awe of them lets them stay there and fits neatly in Richard’s opinion of himself – that he doesn’t deserve their friendship. That his is nowhere near their equal. Even to that of Bunny, the most academically derelict of the 5 of them. And it is Bunny who must die.

Only Henry, Francis, Charles & Camilla killed the local man in the midst of their Bacchanalia. Bunny finds out and starts acting like an even bigger asshole than usual. Perpetually broke, he’s always had his hand out for funds and Henry has always been willing to fork over. Francis, too. But this has crossed the line and he’s becoming more and more unhinged.

But Henry is in more control than it appears and I think a large part of the action was orchestrated by him. I think he manipulated a lot what Richard thought were his own clear perceptions or insights, but really Henry was leading him down a path to a specific conclusion and collusion.

In the end, even their own beloved Julian cannot stand their presence and retreats with the knowledge of their two murders. I think it crushed him. Even though we never clearly see Julian, we have an idea that he idolized his students; considering them above mere mortals because they chose to study something so basically useless; truth, beauty, ethics and duty – all in a dead language.

The final dénouement reads like a Greek tragedy and I’m sure that is deliberate. It is highly staged and dramatic. The sacrifice. The suicide. The survivors. Thankfully, Richard gives us release with an extensive epilogue that details what happened after.

The writing is rich and slightly sophomoric, which only adds to the atmosphere and overall flavor of the novel. It is right that the prose should be a bit purple. Those drunken days at Francis’s aunt’s estate were especially poignant – I was so jealous of them at that moment. To live and dream, drink and read, dance and share the illusion of real and everlasting friendship. Richard really thought he was forming bonds for his lifetime during that semester. He thought they could just go on and on. It was beautiful while it lasted.

The Meaning of Night; A Confession by Michael Cox, 2006

Read in 2006.



Synopsis: set in London in 1854, cast as a confession, and written in the dense and formal style of a Victorian novel--tells the unusual story of Edward Glyver, bibliophile, photographer, and murderer. Ostensibly the tale of a man whose rightful legacy has been deliberately withheld, it casts a much wider net, and at its center is its vivid portrait of a teeming London, "brilliant and beautifully vile." That dichotomy is also expressed in the deadly rivalry between scholarly Glyver and his archnemesis, Phoebus Daunt, who is esteemed as a poet but makes his living by bilking people of their money through elaborate con games while insidiously cultivating the affections of the heirless Lord Tansor. Raised in near-poverty, Glyver gradually becomes aware of the fact that he is Lord Tansor's son and begins a years-long search for evidence, but he is thwarted at every turn by the wily Daunt. An intriguing blend of book lover and man of the world, Glyver becomes completely obsessed with his quest, which takes him from exquisite libraries to smoky opium dens, dank bars, and gaudy brothels. His obsession also turns him from a discerning scholar into a cold-blooded murderer.

At some point in this novel the protagonist is warned to ‘trust no one’ something the reader should do as well. From the outset I did not trust Edward or G as his best friend calls him. This was his story told from his perspective and so it seemed wise to take what he said with a grain of salt. Besides that, he already confessed to murdering a stranger in the first sentence. But I did fall into the same trap he did and was shocked and a little sickened when I shouldn’t have been. At that point, I knew that the tale wouldn't end well.

G reminded me of Mersault – he was a complete egoist and self-involved, but with a streak of reasonable humanity that kept him from loathing. Others compare him to Raskolnikov, but G’s lack of whining about his situation kept me from making that same connection. No, G’s attitude to his predicament is fairly sanguine, but determined to make it right. He places blame, but strives to rectify the situation rather than just wallow in self-pity. He knows somehow that he is worthy of his rightful inheritance, but knows he’s not perfect. He has the love of a woman and cannot return it, but he leads her on to get what he wants. He has the trust of his employer, but does not return that by revealing his true identity (Tredgold already knows this, but still the omission is telling). He routinely uses opium and whores to relieve the tension of his situation. He has no qualms about using anyone as a tool to get what he wants. Sympathetic because we truly believe he has been cheated, but not so much that we’re sad when this wrong is not righted.

He’s not the only character drawn this way – realistically for a change. Tredgold is an upright citizen and very learned, but he keeps G on to do some dirty work for the firm and loves it when G gives him a volume to add to his collection of 19th century pornography. His friend and lover, Bella, is forthright and trustworthy, beautiful and loyal, but a whore. The supporting players were also fun, like his downstairs neighbor (ultimately revealed as an ally of Daunt’s) – oily and unctuous he reminded me of Uriah Heep and I think he met a similar end.

The atmosphere in this book fairly drips off the pages. The footnotes were a great device to further the idea that this is an actual 19th century document, unearthed and researched and ultimately published. They were also useful as a tool to decipher some of the place names, events and people G peppers throughout his narrative. It sets the framework and the timeframe perfectly while maintaining the illusion of authenticity. Nice trick.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, 2006

Read in 2006



WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart
Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker’s troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille’s first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls.

NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her leg
Since she left town eight years ago, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed again in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille is haunted by the childhood tragedy she has spent her whole life trying to cut from her memory.

HARMFUL on her wrist, WHORE on her ankle
As Camille works to uncover the truth about these violent crimes, she finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the story. Dogged by her own demons, Camille will have to confront what happened to her years before if she wants to survive this homecoming.

This book is described as addictive and haunting and unforgettable. Is 1 out of 2 bad? Sure, I wanted to finish it, but it wasn’t unputdownable. It doesn’t haunt me either. But it will probably stick with me more than other thrillers. It’s not often you get a story about a cutter with a mom who has Munchausen By Proxy syndrome and a homicidal ½ sister. But the whole story just felt like a cross between Oprah and Jerry Springer. It was at once trying to be very sympathetic and healing, but had so much exploitation for expoitation’s sake – a lot of sex and voyeuristic details about horrible relationships and personal demons. One good chair fight followed by a crying jag with Dr. Phil would have clinched it.

Our protagonist is basically sympathetic if unappealing. She’s the cutter. She started carving words into herself in her mid-teens; just after the death of her younger sister who had been ill basically her whole life. Her mother rejected her early and all during the course of the novel reminded her, quite literally and in these terms, that she wished Camille was the one to die and Marian the one who lived. The hatred this woman felt for her illegitimate daughter finally culminated with a drunken scene where mom confesses that her ultimate desire is to someday carver her own name in the one spot of as yet uncut flesh on her daughter’s body. It is a vicious and violent thing to say to anyone, much less a daughter and it was that statement that made me suspect that she might be the killer of the little girls. Close, but no cigar.

It is said that it’s clichéd, this story of a troubled woman trying to exorcize her own demons while becoming involved in a murder mystery. Maybe it is, but I don’t think that Camille exorcized anything as a result of her confrontation with her past and her present. In the end she’s back to wanting to cut herself again and has to be constantly supervised and kept away from sharp objects. I get the feeling she will never be well. Being the daughter and sister of murderers tends to not be helpful in these kinds of cases.

Yes, it was the lovely Amity, aka Amma, who killed those little girls. As a lifetime victim (albeit knowingly in the end) of her mother’s MBP sickness, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to understand that when her mother paid attention to these girls that she became jealous and killed them (and, in a detail so creepy and gross, used their pulled teeth to fashion the dollhouse replica of her mother’s famous bedroom floor of ivory tiles). The author describes Amma well – “a child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”