Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory

I have always wondered about Truman Capote and the duality of his life. I would see him on talk shows when I was young and he seemed like such an odd, little bohemian intellectual. His decadent New York life style rubbing elbows with the Studio 56 crowd did not surprise me nor his odd obsession researching the killers in In Cold Blood but what did floor me was  that he wrote A Christmas Memory. Could it have been written by the same person?

I believe A Christmas Memory to be one of the most heart warming and beautiful Christmas stories ever written. It is about a friendship between two lonely people, one a small boy and the other an unusual elderly woman. Their love for one another and the their shared loneliness touches me every Christmas when I see the film, re-read the short story or simply remember the characters. The story is a retrospect of his childhood in Alabama. Everything I have learned about his early years in the South contradicts the face paced, drug immersed, life style he chose in New York City and I am not only fascinated, but saddened by Capote's writing and life style choices over time. Nevertheless, I will be grateful to him my entire life for one of the most beautiful stories every written.

Christmas at Bracebridge Hall-Washington Irving

Anyone who loves Christmas traditions in bygone days will love Irving's Christmas at Bracebridge Hall. It is somewhere between a short story and a novella describing a visit to Bracebridge Hall in Yorkshire, England at Christmas time.

It starts with the narrator's stagecoach ride through the English countryside in late December, his impressions of the great estate of Bracebridge Hall and the inhabitants. In rich detail, Irving describes everything about the holiday festivities over the next two days, from food to decorations to games they played. This story is a wonderful narration of an 18th Century Christmas and is not only a historical description of the traditions and customs of England in the past but a cozy and cheerful story which will put anyone into the Christmas spirit who reads it. 

Please don't miss the terrific review of my novel The Pride of the King

http://reganromancereview.blogspot.com/2012/12/new-review-amanda-hughess-pride-of-king.html

A Christmas Carol-Charles Dickens

Well, it is Christmas and I just have to post about A Christmas Carol. Over the course of forty years, I have accomplished the goal of reading every work of Charles Dickens, and I owe it all to the first book I read by him, A Christmas Carol. I was first exposed to A Christmas Carol at a department store display in Mpls., MN. If any of you reading this live in Minnesota , you may remember the Dicken's London Towne animated figure display at Dayton's Department Store. A Christmas Carol. Initially I thought it was sacreligious, (being a good little Catholic girl) pairing ghosts with Christmas, but I soon set my narrow views aside and devoured the book. To this day I give this short novel and Daytons Dept. Store credit for giving me my life long love affair with Charles Dickens. What are your memories about A Christmas Carol or other books about the season?

It was a magical, wonderful exhibit in their auditorium with moving figures (like at Disneyworld) all dressed up as Dickens characters. Spectators would wind through the snowy streets of 19th Century London and peek through mullioned windows at the characters inside. Some of the scenes were Fezziwig's warehouse during the Christmas Eve ball, Fagin's hideout in Oliver Twist and many more. I wish I could revisit it because, at the time, I was a child and unfamiliar with all of his books, so I did not know who all the figures were representing. I did recognize though, Ebenezer Scrooge and his ethereal guides. I was captivated and from that point I was determined to read every work of Charles Dickens.

The World According to Garp

I just commented on another blog, that I am reading outside my comfort zone and it is not always a pleasant experience. This is the second novel I have read recently that I thought was a waste of time. I must be narrow minded, but I like to know what I am reading. If it is a comedy, great. If it a tear jerker, fine, but I do not like it when a writer combines quirky comedy with graphic violence. This is what John Irving did in the World According to Garp. This style of writing reminded me of the movie Fargo, exceedingly violent but the characters are "real cards." I also did not like the way Irving portrayed the Feminist Movement either, as if it was only odd balls, fanatics and "wanna be men" embracing the idea of equality.

I watched the movie The World According to Garp yesterday, and they did a terrific job of staying true to the book but beyond that the only redeeming quality was John Lithgow's portrayal of Roberta Muldoon, the transsexual former line-backer. I really loved the movie version of The Cider House Rules, but after reading The World According to Garp, I am apprehensive about other Irving novel.

Emily Bronte-Wuthering Heights

Although Dickens is my favorite author of all time, Emily Bronte is a close second. I should say that the novel Wuthering Heights is a close second. I don't even know if Emily Bronte wrote anything else so I cannot say that I like her body of work. She died so young that I don't think she wrote anymore novels (Just a little gruesome sidebar here, I was reading that there is speculation that the parsonage cemetery of Haworth was contaminating the Bronte drinking water causing premature deaths in the family).
Early on, Wuthering Heights activated my love of the tragic romance. When I was a teen, I was interested because my mother told me there was a ghost involved.

A few years later, when I read it I was moved by their despairing love. I traveled to the modest home of the Bronte's on the moors and loved the landscape, again the romantic in me. Years later when I re-read the novel, I was moved in a different way. I saw Cathy and Heathcliff as less romantic characters and more as selfish brutes.
That is what I love about the classics. They speak to you differently at different times in your life. When my oldest daughter read Wuthering Heights, she hated it, saying Cathy and Heathcliff were selfish pukes, but she has since re-read it and feels differently again (maybe she will comment).
My mother always wondered how these Bronte women with so few life experiences outside the lonely moors could write such wrenching romances and I wonder too, but then inspiration, I guess, is not necessarily an outcome of life experience. Obviously.
On Cathy and Heathcliff, I would love to hear what you think...
Although Heathcliff, became an abusive brute as an adult, I was more sympathetic to him, and I felt like he was more of a victim. Whereas Cathy was a spoiled brat from beginning to end. What do you think?
I LOVE this book!

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being was unbearable.

If a writer wants to write philosophy, write a non-fiction book about philosophy, don't cloak it in fiction. Ken Follett said something to the effect, that good fiction should, and must be. about good storytelling. I couldn't agree more.
Milan Kundera writes about four people living in Eastern Europe in the 1960's when the Russians rolled into Prague.  It is about how they look at life and respond to each other, and the chaos around them. It is too much work for me to say anything more about this book. Thank goodness it was short. I do not recommend it.

Conrad Richter-The Awakening Land

Conrad Richter-The Trees, The Fields, The Town
This is the Awakening Land Trilogy of Conrad Richter and I believe it is some of the best writing of the 20th Century. I never knew that his work existed until the 1980's when I happened to watch the miniseries starring Elizabeth Montgomery(remember Bewitched?) and fell in love with the story.

He captures the day to day life and problems of everyday people on the Ohio frontier with such richness, intensity and drama that to this day I still think about his characters. Memorable scenes from his books have had a profound influence my writing. He traces the evolution of an Ohio settlement from the early days of hardship in the wilderness, to the prosperous development of a town years later, a theme and evolution which is repeated time again across our entire continent. In 1951, he was awarded Pulitzer Prize for this work.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

For Halloween-If there is one classic that terrifies me the most, it is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Ever since I was a child my worst nightmares have been of the monster pursuing me while my running gets slower and slower. Call it a psychological hang up, I call it terrifying.

It is yet another Victorian commentary on the Industrial Revolution or science gone wrong like Jekyll and Hyde. Neverthelss the idea does not seem so outrageous anymore, not in a world that is developing cloning.

All in all, I thought Frankenstein was an excellent book until the end when Shelley puts the monster up in the Arctic or was it down in Antarctica? It seemed so random and unnecessary, like she was filling space. Am I missing something? Anyhow, if you want to complete the tour of classic horror, don't miss it.  

Book Trailer for Amanda Hughes' Novel The Pride of the King

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

When I was in Edinburgh, I went to Brodie's Close, to the home of a man who was a respectable cabinet maker by day, violent criminal by night. It is said Deacon Brodie along with Jack the Ripper were templates for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This short novel is based on the Jack the Ripper killings and like Frankenstein is a commentary on man dabbling in science, sometimes with disastrous results. All heady analysis aside, the book was scary.

Sometimes it is hard to put aside a story that you have heard about your whole life and read it as if it was the first time, but I tried. Yes, it was frightening and not at all far-fetched. We see this sort of violence in the news all the time. Like Dr. Jekyll, the killer was the "quiet neighbor" next door, a hideous monster by night.  Even though it was written over a century ago, Stevenson really nailed it. It is a timeless story of the nature of some "humans".

Hawthorne-The House of Seven Gables

Nathaniel Hawthorne-The House of Seven Gables

How come they have not made this into a movie recently? I know of one black and white film from the forties with Vincent Price (which isn't even on Netflix) but no other screen adaptations.

I was surprised when I was reading the movie trailer that the The House of Seven Gables was about one brother framing another brother for murder. I read the book in my college days, and I don't know if I can't remember the plot line because it is not memorable, or if my mind is simply thick with cobwebs. I do remember the house itself, which still stands in Salem, and it still haunts me. It is a dark and gabled structure and every bit as creepy as you might think. And I also remember vaguely that the story is about the sins of the father revisiting the sons through the ages. It is about the later generations of a family in Massachusetts, whose ancestors had been involved in the Salem witch trials.
The tourist dept. in Salem tries to make you think this book is hair raising but that much I do remember, it is not! The House of Seven Gables was different than what I had thought at the outset, but I do remember liking it. Why did I write this review? Maybe I shouldn't have, time to re-read this book.

Oscar Wilde-The Portrait of Dorian Grey

Oscar Wilde-The Picture of Dorian Gray

I am glad that the general public is noticing Wilde again, but I must confess, it annoys me. Wilde is all the rage right now, like Austin was a few years ago, but I believe many of these people are not sincerely interested in the works of Wilde and that they are simply name-dropping in an effort to look cutting edge. They act like someone just unearthed an old manuscript of his and published it. I've got news for them, some of us have been reading his works all along. Next week, Wilde will be long forgotten for someone new and ever so trendy.

Now onto The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is dark and immensely preachy but in a GREAT way! I know very little about Wilde, but I find it ironic that he was imprisoned for his "morality" yet the Victorians could not see what high standards he had for human behavior...such were the times. The book is about one man's descent into evil and depravity, and how in spite of his sins, he retained a beautiful outward appearance. Such is the glamour of evil (now I am being preachy). This is a short novel with a terrific impact.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Victor Hugo-The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Spoiler Alert in this review

I am going through and I am including this in my Halloween posts about the classics but with reluctance. Before I read this book, I assumed that this was was horror, but on the contrary. It is a Gothic novel filled with tragedy and pathos. ^Spoiler alert^  Every screen version, I have ever seen, has a happy ending. Not so!

All of the main characters die tragically in the end, and it is a very sad book. Nevertheless, as incredibly difficult as it is to wade through, I loved it. Try not to get discouraged, the first chapter is a minute description of the Cathedral for pages and pages, but if you are a lover of the classics, you know sometimes you have to slog through the verbosity (is that a word?). The classics are tough, but this one is worth it. The book has stuck with me for years. The concept of The Court of Miracles, a community of handicapped people (in this case a sham to beg money), I used in The Pride of the King. The imagery of the Gothic architecture complete with gargoyles, the evil depraved priest, the flamboyant gypsy Esmeralda and, of course, dear Quasimodo (who I named my parakeet after) are timeless. Don't miss it.

Henry James-The Turn of the Screw

Henry James-The Turn of the Screw

Back in the early 1980's when I first read The Turn of the Screw, I had heard that it was terrifying, but at that time, I did not find it particularly unusual or unsettling. At best, it was eerie. Last year, I saw a BBC version of it with Colin Firth and Jodhi May, and I found that version too to be unremarkable. The Turn of the Screw is about two children living on the large estate who are possessed by ghosts and their nanny's efforts to save them. Dracula, and Frankenstein have endured for generations. I don't think The Turn of the Screw has held up the same way. The themes of preying on the innocent are the same as Dracula, but The Turn of the Screw does not shock and terrify today's reader in the same timeless way. It  really did not move me.

I think part of the problem is that Hollywood has inundated me, and all of us, with so many ghost stories and hauntings that we are jaded and unimpressed with the original versions of these tales of the occult. For the Victorian sensibility, this tale was probably novel and terrifying. The occult for them was all the rage, and James certainly fed that frenzy.

Bram Stoker's Dracula

I am in the Halloween mood and realize there are a ton of classics that are scary!
I read this novel so many years ago that I sometimes confuse the plot line with the hundreds of movies made about the Count and his minions. I have decided not expound on any passages or scenes in case I am yet again confused. Confusion and all, the book is nevertheless chilling. When I read the novel at about the age of twenty, it dawned on me that maybe Dracula was having sex with his victims while he was drinking their blood. Knowing everything when you are twenty,(wink) I told my mother this revelation and she said sarcastically, "You really think so?" I think these themes of rape and exploitation of the vulnerable are why this book continues to repulse and seduce readers and is why it is the best horror classic ever written.

Whitby in the north of England was the inspiration for Stoker's setting and I traveled there on two occasions in my twenties. The town is gothically gorgeous. It is a fishing village nestled between two bluffs along a rocky coastline where it always seems to be raining. The beautiful ruins of an ancient abbey stand vigil on one of the cliffs overlooking the town. I was so taken with the landscape that I used it as the template for Kilkerry in my first novel Beyond the Cliffs of Kerry. It is not hard to imagine Mina seated on one of the benches by the abbey in a trance waiting for the Count. Believe me, my imagination raced when I walked along cliffs. Bram Stoker's Dracula will continue to hypnotize and seduce readers too for centuries to come. 

The Works of Edgar Allen Poe

Edgar Allen Poe-His works

Since I was a teenager, Poe's poem, From Childhood's Hour has resonated for me in a way I am sure it resonates for many artists. It is about being different and thinking differently. I have always loved his melancholy verse and, of course, his down right terrifying Gothic short stories.
I was so inspired by Poe's work that I wove a scene into my novel, The Pride of the King from The Fall of the House of Usher and The Premature Burials (A woman in a coma was buried alive, woke up, pulled the bell cord from the coffin before she suffocated just in time to be "saved by the bell.").
I also took inspiration from his rich description of the rooms in The Masque of the Red Death as well. To this day I can still see the brilliantly colored rooms. Poe makes the point that, no matter how hard you try to physically protect yourself from evil, it will find you.

It reminds me of the themes in M. Night Shyamalan's movie "The Village."
Back in 2009, I toured Poe's home in Philadelphia where he and his wife rented rooms. It was empty and soooo much better than going to a museum fully renovated and furnished with period pieces. The structure was undergoing its first renovation to become a museum after being a private dwelling since the time Poe had live there. It was run down and the museum staff had stripped out the modern fixtures revealing the original flooring and wallpaper. The best part of the tour was when the guide pulled up a floor board in one of the rooms Poe and his wife had rented. She showed us the hairpins that had been dropped down accidentally between wood flooring by some woman that has lived there years and years earlier. Perhaps it had been Poe's wife. It was almost as if they had just moved out. The guide said that Poe's wife had died there. It was such a personal and intimate glimpse into their lives, all because of a few hair pins. I have never forgotten it.

Dickens-The Pickwick Papers

Charles Dickens

Somewhere along the line Dickens has become known as quaint. Hollywood producers and animators have made his work to be almost in the genre of Children's Lit. Anyone who picks up Dicken's novels will find his writing to be dark and violent. Oliver Twist is a prime example. It involves child labor and exploitation, child abuse, domestic violence, kidnapping and murder. Although I adore the movie musical Oliver and love that animation has brought Dickens to kids, the book is heavy with troubling themes. Dicken's novels are much more than cute characters eating plum pudding; they are an expose' of HIS present day society. Imagine if a contemporary author wrote about these issues today and in our current vernacular. Wow! I probably wouldn't want to read them.
In Dec. of 2010, I completed The Pickwick Papers. It was the last Dicken's novel for me to read. It has taken many years to complete the goal of reading every work of Charles Dickens, but I have NO regrets! To me, he is the finest story teller and character creator of all time.

THE PICKWICK PAPERS
This was not one of Dicken's novels that I was excited about, but I found it to be a really fun book (now I contradict myself about all his books being dark).

It was different from his other novels in that it seemed to be more of a series of unrelated vignettes about the various adventures of the Pickwickians as they traveled England, rather than a novel that followed a linear plot line. I loved Joe, the carriage boy who had Narcolepsy and Sam Weller, the valet and friend of Mr. Pickwick, such a "solid citizen with great common sense.
Although these impressions stand out for me, I found it fascinating to see, in the various adventures of the club members and characters, a glimpse into future Dickens novels. Since it was his first(or thereabouts) novel, I saw characters and settings that he used later and created entire books around. It was almost as if he had an entire host of characters already in his mind just waiting for future incarnation. I struggle now for an example, but I cannot remember even one without opening and skimming the entire book again. If you read or have read The Pickwick Papers, I would love to see if you agree. 

Refer to home page

Please refer to home page for which pages have posts. Most are blank. I am just getting started.

Washington Irving-The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

In honor of Halloween, I have posted my impressions of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Washington Irving-The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

This post is in honor of Halloween. Sleepy Hollow terrifies me this time of year.

When I lived in the woods in Northern MN., and I would walk to the shed or down the dirt driveway in Oct. I was on edge. The leaves were gone from the trees and the branches were like sharp gray spikes thrashing in the wind. It was easy to get goosebumps thinking "The Horseman" could burst out of the woods at any moment. During the day, or in the city this seems silly, but at night in the seclusion of woods, you would believe too. I took this illusion and ran with it at some "killer" Halloween  trail of terror parties for my teenage kids. Irving took a legend, or created one, put it in words and succeeded in speaking to something primal in all of us. I love this short novel with it's fireside dance in the colonial home, the dork Ichabod and the bully Brom Bones.

Been away for almost a year

Been away for almost a year on book tour, promoting my novels Beyond the Cliffs of Kerry and The Pride of the King. Next on my list is getting a blog up and running and sticking with it. I will try to complete one personal book review every few days with the hopes of finding like minded lovers of the classics.