Tag: sena jeter naslund

WWW Wednesdays

WWW Wednesdays—August 3, 2011

Posted on by Dana

WWW WednesdaysTo play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

I’m currently reading [amazon_link id=”0451531388″ target=”_blank” ]A Room With a View[/amazon_link] by E. M. Forster. It’s not much like anything I’ve ever read before. The characters are perhaps the most realistic characters of any books I’ve read recently. I’m liking it.

I recently finished [amazon_link id=”1402241372″ target=”_blank” ]The Winter Sea[/amazon_link] by Susanna Kearsley (review). I enjoyed it. A nice book to finish my summer on. Our new school year starts on the 15th, but I came in this week to prepare some technology training materials for faculty. I expect my reading will slow down, now.

The next book I will probably read is [amazon_link id=”0061579289″ target=”_blank” ]Adam & Eve[/amazon_link] by Sena Jeter Naslund. I have to admit I’m nervous about it. I agreed to read it for a book blog tour, but it has pretty low ratings, and most of the reviews read something along the lines of “What was she thinking?” and “I loved [amazon_link id=”B000FC10KC” target=”_blank” ]Ahab’s Wife[/amazon_link], but what is this?” I actually really loved Ahab’s Wife (review). We’ll see.

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Booking Through Thursday: Una’s My Beach Buddy

Posted on by Dana

Seagull

This week’s Booking Through Thursday question asks: “Which fictional character (or group of characters) would you like to spend a day at the beach with? Why would he/she/they make good beach buddies?”

I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of hours, and I keep coming back to the same character: Una Spenser from Ahab’s Wife. Now, I realize this is a really unorthodox choice. After all, she probably isn’t the first person to come to mind when you think of the beach. Then there is the episode at sea after the whale destroyed the ship she was stowing away on. In fact, it might strike most readers as distinctly odd that anyone would want to hang around with Una anywhere near the ocean, but hear me out. The New York Times review of the novel includes this paragraph:

“Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last,” begins Naslund’s heroine, Una Spenser, as she lies on her back on a Nantucket beach after Ahab’s death, watching the clouds go by. One of them, she thinks, looks a bit like Ahab’s face, a face that she always recalls as ”mild” if somewhat excitable. She waves goodbye. With one dreamy, casual gesture, Una thus waves aside a century’s worth of canonization and goes on to talk about what’s really on her mind: her mother. Over the course of the next 667 pages, Una unscrolls her life story, a long and winding tale in which Ahab is one player among many, and not necessarily the most important one.

Now tell me you wouldn’t like to lie on the beach next to Una and listen to her tell her story. Sena Jeter Naslund brings the nineteenth century alive in her novel. Una Spenser is someone I would want to lock arms with and stroll down the beach with in early fall before it gets too cool. She would tell me all about her adventures at sea and with the freethinking friends she’s made on Nantucket. She would tell me about creepy Nathaniel Hawthorne skulking around Concord in a black veil, and we should share a giggle over that, as well as a long-suffering sigh over his comment about the publishing world being dominated by a horde of scribbling women. We would watch the fat seagulls waddling away from the waves rolling onto the beach.

Perhaps not the vision of a beach buddy that most folks have in mind, but Una Spenser remains to me one of the characters in literature that I would most like to to know, and how better to get to know her than a walk on the beach?

Booking Through Thursday

photo credit: anneh632

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Living the Literary Life

Posted on by Dana

NovelWhore tweeted a good question: “What book most represents what you want your life to be like?”

This is a tough questions to answer. I would love to be able to go to Hogwarts and do magic like the characters in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, but Harry and Company go through some very rough times. They lose their loved ones, they’re tortured and outcast for their beliefs, and they experience a great deal of pain and suffering. Not even magic can eradicate these types of problems.

Una Spenser of Sena Jeter Naslund’s novel Ahab’s Wife is one of the strong female protagonists I most admire. She touches so much history, and she’s truly a remarkable woman. However, she also is forced into cannibalism to survive a shipwreck, an experience that drives her husband insane. I certainly wouldn’t want to have some aspects of Una’s life, but others sound truly amazing.

While I admire the passion and windswept beauty of the landscape in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, the characters again must live through such ordeals, much of it at the hands of other people who are cruel for reasons that are difficult to fathom. Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange, and Thornfield Manor might be interesting to visit, but I can’t honestly say I’d want to live there.

Manderley seems like a great house to explore. I love Daphne DuMaurier’s descriptions of her unnamed narrator in Rebecca. However, if Mrs. Danvers must come with the house, I have to decline.

No, if I had one choice, one book in which I could live, one book that represents what I wish my life could be like, it would be Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Here are my reasons:

  1. Empire waists are flattering. The clothes are simply gorgeous.
  2. Despite the supposed repression of the time, Lizzie manages to express her true thoughts quite well, especially when she’s been insulted. She does not accept Mr. Collins’s proposal: she knows she will be miserable. When Mr. Darcy insults her with his first proposal, she lets him know in no uncertain terms, exactly where he can stick that proposal.
  3. England. You will not meet a bigger Anglophile. If I could live anywhere in the world and money/job were no object, I’d pack my bags for the U.K. this red hot minute.
  4. Austen’s economy of description evokes just enough of the setting to give the reader an idea without becoming bogged down in detail. Even so, I can see all of it, and it’s so beautiful.

In Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, characters are able to jump inside books, and Thursday even lives inside one for a time. If anyone ever works out how to visit books, I want to book a trip inside Pride and Prejudice.

In which book would you like to live? Blog about it and tag others (we can make this a meme) or leave your answer in the comments.

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