To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under green cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country.

After I read that paragraph, I knew I'd be able to get through this novel. Whole (short) chapters like these are interspersed with the actual plot.

As with Crime and Punishment, this book is so widely read that it has its own Cliff's Notes, so I'm not going to bother with a real summary. It's basically about a family from Oklahoma who gets forced out of their house during the Depression and the Dust Bowl, moves to California (with all the other farmers), and tries to survive. It's sad but soooo rewarding. I had a hard time not crying.

I've read two other Steinbeck novels: Travels with Charley and Of Mice and Men. The former was required reading before my senior year of high school, which was a looong time ago, and all I really remember about it is that I liked it. I read Of Mice and Men a couple of years ago, and I liked that one, too. The language, though isn't what stuck out for me about those novels - okay, I don't remember enough about Travels with Charlie to make that statement fairly. Both are very short novels, and I think Steinbeck might work best with a longer form.

The other day, my mom asked me what I was reading, and when I told her, she said that she liked it and that it was sad. I said, "Wait. You've read The Grapes of Wrath?" I really wasn't expecting that. I guess she read it in high school or college. Which brings me back to my earlier point on professors not assigning long books anymore. This novel is the kind you assign to make people love literature and language. Sure, Of Mice and Men is great, but I've found it hard to get absorbed in a short book, and I think most authors do best when they have some space to dig in their roots.

Until very recently, I haven't been a fan of long books. I've always had an attention span issue, and I'd lose interest after a couple of days or a couple hundred pages. And I think the shorter books I've always been assigned is what made the difference. The syllabus, for instance, would you have five days to read The Awakening (it's very short), and then we'll discuss it for one (maybe two!) class periods. That's not what college should be. Isn't the point to learn to analyze and write about literature? How are you supposed to do that when you never really get into anything beyond surface level? It's impossible if you're only discussing it for an hour. Reading longer books for my 50-Books-in-a-Year challenge has totally changed my mind about this stuff. Professors are pressured to fit a ton of stuff into their syllabi, and it's the students who are suffering. It's become quantity over quality (Must Prepare for the Lit GRE!), so it's no wonder universities are churning out English majors who are barely even literate.

BONUS (I couldn't help myself):

I enjoyed Brideshead Revisited sooooo much more than I thought I would. In fact, I think it's one of my favorite books ever. Evelyn Waugh has a lot in common with Fitzgerald and Hemingway, though it was published twenty years after The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises. Brideshead Revisited is about wealthy English families between the World Wars. In college, Charles Ryder befriends Sebastian Flyte, and they run around together. Then Charles becomes involved in Sebastian's family, and due to a flaw, of sorts, in Sebastian's character, bad things begin to happen, and they part ways. But Charles can't shake the Flyte family, and we hear about what happens to them through the rest of the novel while Sebastian remains on the periphery. It's really depressing, though not in the family-loses-its-money-etc-etc way that you might expect. The characters are empty and remain so. No one is happy for long.

Dismal.

Though, again, it's up there with my favorite novels. I spent a long time reading this one because I didn't want to leave it. I liked the atmosphere. At the end, I found myself in a daze like I did with For Whom the Bell Tolls, when I felt like I was in the mountains of Spain during their Civil War for a few hours after.

Before this novel, I didn't know much about Waugh, and I guess I still don't. I most clearly associate him with my chronic confusion over his gender: I've embarrassed myself several times calling him "she". In my defense, though, Evelyn is a pretty girly name. I also don't understand why he's not taught in universities. I have an English degree, and I feel like I should have at least heard of him while I was in college. At least for GRE purposes.

I'll certainly be reading more Waugh in the near future. A Handful of Dust is probably next. It's funny: sometimes I use a site called The Book Explorer for recommendations, and the list for Brideshead Revisited includes several of my favorite novels. One Hundred Years of Solitude, my Very Favorite Book, is at the top. I wish I'd been introduced to Waugh much earlier.

The Blue Sword

The bottom line is, it isn't my choice. You don't write stories like you might build a bookcase. You don't get up in the morning, decide that you're going to put seven chapters together to make a novel, whip out your tape measure and decide how many words, order the paper by the square foot from the office supply shop, sit down and start stamping the pages with black ink in a quantifiable pattern, and polish off the rough edges with a sander at the end. It's not up to you. You write what you are given to write, and you just go on hoping you will go on receiving those gifts. Damar hasn't seen fit to oblige me to write about it lately.

All of this, of course, seems like corny crap to me. It's funny how a photo of an author will immediately bias me for or against him or her. Robin McKinley reminds me of one of my high school teachers. It's actually kind of creepy. She also loooooves horses. The author blurb on the back flap of the first edition of The Blue Sword says that "Robin McKinley lives at present on a horse farm in eastern Massachusetts where she divides her time between the fascinating occupants of the barn in the mornings and the tyranny of her typewriter in the afternoons." She totally wrote that herself. What matters, though, is that I enjoyed her novel, and I'll be reading the next one in the near future. I like to put a couple unrelated books between ones in a series. 

Literature is what we passed and left behind, that more than men and cactus. For years I had been held fast by the great unwinding mystery of this deep sink of land, the thick paragraphs and imposing photos, the galop of panting adjectives, prairie truth and the clean kills of eagles, the desert shawled in Navaho paints, images of surreal cinema, of ventricles tied to pumps. Chaco masonry and the slung guitar, of church organ lungs and the slate of empires, of coral in this strange place, suggesting a reliquary sea, and of the blessed semblance of God on the faces of superstitious mountains. Whether the novels and songs usurped the land, or took something true from it, is not so much the issue as this: that what I was engaged in was merely a literary venture, an attempt to find pattern and motive, to make of something wild a squeamish thesis on the essence of the nation's soul. To formulate. To seek links. But the wind burned across the creekbeds, barely moving the soil, and there was nothing to announce to myself in the way of historic revelation.

DeLillo's style is beautiful. It's just that I've become as jaded as the characters in his novels. David Bell would have no interest in reading Americana.
So. On to the Thesis Monster. Now, as reconnected with the novel as I can be, I have no excuse not to write. My outline is done: all I have to do is fill in the blanks between quotes. Because that's what the Thesis Monster is: a series of quotes. The postmodern problem.
I've made a schedule of sorts. On weekday mornings, I work on the Thesis Monster, and that's that. I've never been good for much after lunch, so the afternoon is mine. If I can be productive in the mornings, it'll be done soon, and I'll never have to look at it again. I'll also be done with academia, which is another - much scarier - issue. But I have some time left.

This afternoon, I'll ride my bike up to Palmer's, water some plants, and try to tackle The Moviegoer. I hated it when I read it at least ten years ago, but I change my opinions of books pretty frequently. The weather is nice, and I'm looking forward to propping my feet up and giving Walker Percy a second chance.

In other news, the Shreveport Library Book Sale was last Saturday. I usually don't buy much of anything since everything is so disorganized and it's so crowded. Here's what I got this time: