My book list for the past three months...

My life has been so busy and crazy with vacation, school and family activities that I haven't been able to write down the books I've read these past three months. So, although I don't have much time right now to really share my personal thoughts and opinions about these great books, here is the list with some explanation for each of them:

JULY

1. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
My book club was reading this book this month, so I had the pleasure of reading it once again as I traveled from one airplane to another throughout Europe. It definitely is one of my favorite books of the English language. The Mill owner from the North falls in love with the Preacher's daughter from the South while trying to understand and live in the newly industrial Manchester of the 18th century England. I love the story, the characters, the issues it brings, the romance, and how, although it was written two centuries ago, it still pertains to us today. And I have to say, if you haven't watched the movie adaptation of this classic novel, go ahead and rent it on Netflix because it is one of the most beautifully done BBC productions, and it has the best kiss in the whole movie industry.

2. Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
The poet, who with her imagination bridged the world of poetry to that of the American literature, amazes me every time I read her poems. She touches me with her originality, her talent for capturing small, unimportant things with powerful words, similes, and metaphors. She grabs my attention as she speaks with so much love and longing about life, and with so much tenderness about death and immortality. I will never tire reading her poetry, and this time it was amazing to read them with my poet cousin while I was visiting him in Paris. Here is one of her traditional ones, if you ever called her a traditional poet:

Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.


And here is another one that I really like and every time I read it I'm enveloped in its own world:

I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise--

And I cannot but share my favorite Dickinson poem that although morose in feeling is powerful in writing:

I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable, —and then
There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.

3. Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot
This was a poet that I had read but not studied thoroughly till my cousin grabbed this book of poems and started reading them one day as we were resting in a cafe after a long day of sightseeing Paris. Having T.S.Eliot read to me made me think as if I were Joyce or Fitzgerald or Ezra Pound or even Hemingway enjoying a sunny day in Paris reading each other's poems. We kept reading more poems as we entered the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, an epicenter of literary figures during the late 1800's and early 1900's, which continues to carry and sell still great books of the English language. T.S.Eliot's poems have this wisdom, philosophy and profound arrangement of words that leave you speechless. There were times when I didn't grasp the meaning of the phrase but just the beauty of the words and the particular usage of them in that specific order, and I was left in wonder. He didn't write short poems, so the pleasure of reading them was elongated as you read and try to understand while feeling the words and being engulfed by the power and the music of the English language. I'm sorry I'm sharing such a long poem, but to feel T.S.Eliot's poetic spirit you need to go through his conscious as written in his poems:

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate,
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

4. The many lives and secret sorrows of Josephine B. by Sandra Gulland
The first book of three in the Josephine Bonaparte series by Gulland. I have read a lot of books about Napoleon and very little on Josephine and whatever I've read on her wasn't very positive. This book is told in the form of a diary kept by Josephine starting when she was about 13 living in the Creole Islands. The more I read about her the more I liked Gulland's representation of Josephine, a much softer, more graceful and much purer Josephine than all of the past historians have made her to be. I really enjoyed it, and looked forward in finishing the series.

5. Napoleon Bonaparte by Alan Schom
I visited the specific wing of the Louvre that showed Bonaparte's room and his many artifacts, as well as the very interesting and full of Bonaparte ego paintings in the other areas of the Louvre as well as in Versailles. Needless to say I'm mesmerized by the history and genius of this little man in statue by grand in mind and ego. This book recounted the many battles and strategies of Bonaparte throughout his life, but was a bit dry in recounting the personal and intimate Bonaparte that I had so enjoyed in the historical fiction of Sandra Gulland. It's a very long book, and if you aren't very interested in battle strategies you might find yourself doing what I did, reading and skipping and skimming.

6. Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Frasier
A very well researched book on the historical figure that has been misunderstood and misinterpreted the world over. I learned a lot about her as I strolled her gardens in Versailles and as well as in Vienna where she was born and raised by a devoted mother and father. I enjoyed the book; it brought to life her childhood, her innocence, her foolish caprices, as well as it made you understand the life in the French court and what she had to do to be taken seriously coming as Austrian princess.