"Sons & Lovers" by D.H. Lawrence

Author> 1885-1930, died of TB, books banned for sexuality

note> 1st great Freudian Oedipal allegory

intro> "While ever it lives, the fire of sex, which is the source of beauty & anger, burns in us beyond our understanding...Sex and beauty are on thing, like flame and fire....If you hate sex you hate beauty. Lawrence wanted through sex to understand beauty, through beauty, mystery, through mystery spirituality - Lawrence defined this as intuition, his talent for writing

p.xviii> "...the anvil on which I hammered myself out" - re: childhood friend

p.xix> Lawrence conceived the novel during his own mother's terminal illness

note> modernism - loosening plot constraints and character development, more emotional language, Joyce & Lawrence

note> Part One - Victorian social realism......Part Two - Romantic, sexual, symbolic

note> he aimed for sublime/spiritual....deep need of Brits as seen by Lawrence

p.8> "Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplishes one's history and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were, slurred over." Mrs. Morel

p.28> "...after a time the child too melted with her in the mixing pot of moonlight, and she rested with the hills, the lilies, and houses, all swum together in a kind of swoon." - Pregnant w/ Paul

p.15> "...he saw a drop of blood fall from the averted wound into the baby's fragile, glistening hair. Fascinated he watched the heavy dark drop hang in the glistening cloud pull down the gossamer. Another drop. He watched, fascinated, feeling it soak in - then finally his manhood broke."

p.71>" He was an outsider. He had denied the God in him..."

p.135> Visit to Leiver's farm, lush description of countryside, romantic, lover-like relationship between Paul and his mother

note> part one ends with William's death and the rebirth of mother's life and maternal love during Paul's illness....again, floral images for love in walk to Leivers, Paul/Wm/Lily in fields of flowers, and Father bringing tulips to Paul when he was ill, dying, then he recover............beauty/love/nature/life

PART TWO

p.159> "...such women as treasure religion inside of them, inclined to be mystical, breathe it in their nostrils, and see the whole of life in a mist thereof" - Miriam and her mother

p. 168> sexual innuendo, "thrusts" of the swing, "...in his hands"

p.169> spiritual reference - "...it's because there s scarcely any shadow in it, its more shimmery, as if I'd painted the shimmering protoplasm in the leaves and everywhere, and not the stiffness of the shape. That seems dead to me. Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really." - Paul, painting @ sunset, to Miriam

p.173> Miriam tempts Paul w/ apple....the Garden of Eden reference.....knowledge is evil

p.176-177> sexual tension - Paul & Miriam "into the wood"

p.183> "She could very rarely get into human relations with anyone, so her friend, her companion, her lover, was Nature." - Miriam

p.184> "annunciation", Miriam realizes her love

p.185> Easter excursion - "In that atmosphere Miriam's soul came into a glow. Paul was afraid of the things he mustn't do; he was sensitive to the feel of the place....Her soul expanded into prayer beside him. He felt the strange fascination of shadowy religious places. All his latent mysticism quivered into life. She was drawn to him...He was a prayer along with her."

p.208> "But there, it's autumn....everybody feels like a disembodied spirit then"

p.210> "Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued, so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether."

p.223> "All his passion, all his wild blood went into this intercourse with her, when he talked and conceived his work. She brought forth to him his imaginations. She did not understand any more than a woman understands when she conceives a child in her womb. But this was life for her and him."

p.257> "You'll find you're always tumbling over the things left behind you."

p.269> "A son's a son 'til he takes him a wife , but a daughter's my daughter the whole of her life."

p.315> "To be rid of our individuality, which is our will, which is our effort...to live effortless, a kind of curious sleep....that is very beautiful I think; that is our after life - our immortality."

p.341> Sexual innuendo - "cucumber"

note> conflict between spiritual & physical love

?> Is it enough to be loved? Does that engender love?

"Chain of Command" by Seymore M. Hersh

p.71> "In an odd way, the sexual abusers at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized."

> "These choices may haunt us in next war....The bar has been lowered."

p.72> "When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have very clear red lines."

? > How does an open society deal with the threat of future terrorism?

p.150> "Winning a war calls for more than defeating one's enemy in battle."

p.152> "From January 2002 on, we were in the process of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory."

note> Opium production increased 20 fold between 2001 and 2003

p.203> per Al Gore, a preemptive strike policy would replace a world in which states consider themselves subject to laws with a world in which there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States

p223> Bush administration destroyed intelligence filtering process which had prevented invalid intell from reaching decision-makers. They developed "stovepipes" allowing intell they "wanted" to bypass filtering and go straight to the top

p.252> Rumsfeld has done the same with military

? > Why aren't Hersh's findings published in local papers, instead of only in elite intellectual reads like "The New Yorker"?

note> Niger documents were forged....by whom? unknown to date

note> War required leading Americans to inaccurate conclusions

p.253> "Hope is not a plan of action."

note> Current joint chiefs as "Stepford Wives"

p.285> policy of deliberate indifference to bad news - hoping something good would happen led to short notice troop call-ups

p.288> short sighted policy in Pakistan is keeping a despot in power and not helping the people

"I Am Charlotte Simmons" by Tom Wolfe

> Audiobook

note> "a fine distinction between the origin of a species and the origin of the impulse to live" - discussing Darwin's concession to not knowing the source of the first living single cell organism.....Darwin credited "the Creator"....always claiming to be a religious man, a believer......Atheism ws basically unheard of in his era.....Nietschze was history's first prominent atheist

note>Was Darwin avoiding scandal or was he truly a believer?

note> ultimately....conformity, belonging

"World Light" by Haldor Laxness

Note> Harsh Icelandic life.......fertile ground for mysticism, poetry

"Snow" by Orhan Pamuk

p.52> "It's because we failed to find happiness in poetry that we find ourselves longing for the shadow of politics."

p.60> "What brings me close to God is the silence of snow."

p.61> The idea of a solitary westernized individual whose faith in God is private is threatening to you. An atheist who belongs to a community is far easier for you to trust than a solitary man who believes in God. For you, a solitary man is far more wretched and sinful than a nonbeliever."

p.86> "Like a snowflake, he would fall as he was meant to fall; he would devote himself heart & soul to the melancholy course on which his life was set."

p.87> "Much later, when he thought about how he'd written this poem, he had a vision of a snowflake; this snowflake, he decided, was his life writ small; the poem that had unlocked the meaning of his life....determined by the hidden symmetries this book is seeking to unveil."

p.111> "The sight of snow made her think how beautiful and short life is and how, in spite of all their enmities, people have so very much in common measured against eternity and the greatness of creation, the world in which they lived was narrow. That's why snow drew people together. It was as if snow cas a veil over hatreds, greed and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another."

p. 142> "To become a n atheist, then, you must first become a Westerner."

p.172> "...this would never measure up as a real revolution until all the radio and television stations in the city were broadcasting celebratory folk songs."

p.228> "Can the West endure any democracy achieved by enemies who in no way resemble them?"

note> snow is a veil...suicides are committed by girls forced to remove the veil....Turgut Bey stays in hotel to hide from the truth of his city

p.261> drawing of 6 pointed star, each point with a name: memory, reason, imagination, memory, reason imagination

note> 1) secularism v. extremist fundamentalism 2) How can one ever understand those who have suffered more deeply? 3)women avoid suicide to avoid punishment

"Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert

> "For one can know him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the ethereal heavens like the ancients."

>"Future joys are like tropical shores, like a fragrant breeze, they extend their innate softness to the immense inland world of past experience, and we are lulled by this intoxication into forgetting the unseen horizons beyond."

>"The human tongue is like a cracked cauldron on which we beat out tunes to set a bear dancing when we would make the stars weep with our melodies."

> "...pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing was left; whatever entered there, more heedless than children did not even, like them, leave a name carved upon the wall"

Last rites for Emma:

> "...the eyes that so coveted worldly goods the nostrils that had been so gredy of the warm breeze and the scent of love..."

> "...the mouth that had spoken lies, moaned in pride, cried out in lust..."

> "...hands that had taken pleasure in the textures of sensuality....."

> "...the soles of the feet so swift when she had hastened to satisfy her desires and that would walk no more...."

> romanticism v. realism

2005 READING LIST

"When one reads these strange words of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once......."
from "Ulysses" by James Joyce

1. "Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert
2. "Snow" by Orhan Pamuk
3. "World Light" by Haldor Laxness
   
4. "Chain of Command" by Seymour Hersh
5. "I Am Charlotte" by Tom Wolfe
6. "Sons & Lovers" by D.H. Lawrence
7. "Dude, Where's My Country" by Michael Moore
8. "Raj" by Gita Mehta
9. "Study in Scarlet" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
10. "The Footprint of God" by Greg Iles
11. "King Leopold's Ghost" by Adam Hochschild
12. "Iceland's Bell" by Haldor Laxness
13. "The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini
14. "Tears of the Giraffe" by Alexander McCall Smith
15. "The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson
16. "Alias Grace" by Margaret Atwood
17. "Evidence of Things Unseen" by Marianne Wiggins
18. "The Island of the Day Before" by Umberto Eco
19. "Blue Horse Dreams" by Melanie Wallace
20. "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" by Anne Fadima
21. "The Master" by Colm Toibin
22. "A Suitable Boy" by Vikram Seth
23. "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien
24. "At Swim, Two Boys" by Jamie O'Neill
25. "Had A Good Time: Stories from American Postcards" by Robert Olen Butler
26. "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro
27. "Love in the Driest Season" by Neely Tucker
28. "To Sleep With The Angels: The Story of A Fire" by David Cowen & John Knester
29. "The Club Dumas" by Arturo Perez-Reverte
30. "A Fine Balance" by Rohinton Mistry
31. "In The Lake of the Woods" by Tim O'Brien
32. "The Bookseller of Kabul" by Asme Sierstad
33. "A Conspiracy of Paper" by David Liss
34. "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi
35. "The Turtle Warrior" by Mary Ellis
36. "In The Time of Butterflies" by Julia Alvarez
37. "Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson
38. "Paradise of the Blind" by Duong Thu Huong
39. "Year of Wonder" by Geraldine Brooks
40. "Ex-Libris" by Ross King
41. "The Sixth Lamentation" by William Brodrick
42. "Cold Sassy Tree" by Olive Ann Burns
43. "Shalimar The Clown" by Salman Rushdie
44. "Beasts of No Nation" by Uzodinma Iwenla
45. "Torrents of Spring" by Ivan Turgenev
46. "The Romantic" by Barbara Gowdy
47. "Specimen Days" by Michael Cunningham
48. "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger
49. "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" by Umberto Eco
50. "In the Heart of The Sea; The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex" by Nathaniel Philbrick
51. "The Book of Disquiet" by Fernando Pessoa
52. "I Capture The Castle" by Dodie Smith
53. "War Talk" by Arundhati Roy
54. "My Sister's Keeper" by Jodi Picoult
55. "Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy" by Irwin D. Yalom
56. "The Disobedience of Water" by Sara Jeter Naslund
57. "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexandre Dumas
58. "Ragtime" by E.L. Doctorow
59. "The Sea" by John Banville
60. "Bone" by Fae Nynne Ng
61. "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion
62. "Oryx & Crake" by Margaret Atwood
63. "The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco
64. "Son of a Witch" by Gregory McGuire
65. "Bel Canto" by Ann Patchett
66. "The Mapmaker's Wife" by Robert Whitaker
67. "Lakota Woman" by Mary Crow Dog
68. "The Master of Ballantrae", by Robert Louis Stevenson
69. "A Maggot" by John Fowles
70. "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe
71. "The March" by E.L. Doctorow
72. "The Runaway: Stories" by Alice Munro
73. "The Icarus Girl" by Helen Oyeyemi
74. "The Known World" by Edward P. Jones
75. "Fahranheit 451" by Ray Bradbury
76. "Too Loud A Solitude" Bohumil Hrabal
77. "Istanbul: Memories & The City" by Orhan Pamuk
78. "The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character" by Thomas Hardy
79. "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood
80. "Planets" by Dava Sobel
81. "Adrift" by Steven Callahan
82. "City Room" by Arthur Gelb
83. "The History of Love" by Nicole Krauss
84. "The Right Hand of Sleep" by John Wray
85. "Far From The Madding Crowd" by Thomas Hardy
86. "Independence Day" by Richard Ford
87. "Buffalo Girls" by Larry McMurtry
88. "Young Men & Fire" by Norman McLean