Recently, I wrote a post about the dollar value of rare books, and was interested to learn that a pristine copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922) by T.E. Lawrence is valued at around $120,000.  If you’re interested in reading some of Lawrence’s ramblings, The Seven Pillars… is reproduced in its entirety on this website, and it’s totally free.

I know next to nothing about The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, but I am kind of an expert on Lawrence of Arabia (1962), which is an excellent film.  I’m not going to write a gushing review of Lawrence because that has been done to death.  Instead, I’m going to think of actors whom I would consider casting as the new T. E. Lawrence in my imaginary 2008 remake of the epic film.  Why am I doing this?  It will all become clear in a little while.

Before I begin my little journey, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on what this movie means to me.  My dad took us to see a rerelease on the big screen when I was around 11 or 12 years old.  I was enthralled the entire time.  It was just so BIG–I’d never seen anything like it.  I was very impressed with Peter O’Toole because he reminded me of my maternal grandfather.  Physically, they were quite similar, tall and lanky, and their aquamarine eyes were almost the same color.  I think I must have been smitten because I’ve had a soft spot for tall fair-haired, blue-eyed men ever since.

It wasn’t until years later, when I began reading about T. E. Lawrence, that I found out that he was short.  Lawrence was not just a little short, he was very short.  T. E. Lawrence was 5′ 5 1/2″ tall.  This kind of blew me out of the water because Peter O’Toole is 6′ 3″ tall.  Quite a disparity there!  I can completely understand why O’Toole was cast in the movie, because the movie was larger-than-life, so a larger-than-life actor was essential to play the hero.  But what if the same film were being cast in the ’70’s or 80’s or today?  What if David Lean decided that he needed to find a short actor in order to preserve the historical integrity of the film?  Who would he choose?  (I know David Lean has been dead for 15 years, but this is pretend, remember?)

Here are some of the actors he could choose from:

Dustin Hoffman - 5′ 5 1/2″ - Mr. Hoffman is the perfect height, and he’s very versatile.  In Tootsie, he said he could wear lifts and be taller, or he could be younger or older.  He could even be a woman!  The only problem is that I can’t picture Mr. Hoffman being in the correct frame-of-mind.  I keep imagining him saying in his nasally voice, “Uh-oh, I’ve got sand in my underwear.  I need to get more underwear at K-Mart.”

Joe Pesci - 5′ 5″ - Mr. Pesci is definitely ferocious and brave enough to play T. E. Lawrence.  The problem with Pesci is that he might mistake some of his Arab allies for Utes (or is that youths) and beat them to death with shovels.  Joe has a real attitude problem.  He’d say, “What the f**k are you looking at” once too often, and, the next thing you know, he’d be buried in the sand with a mud brick tied around his ankles.

Woody Allen - 5′ 5″ - Mr. Allen is not right for this part at all.  He’s too neurotic and wimpy, and he’s probably allergic to sand and camels.  He’d be sneezing all over the place and sand would be flying.  I just can’t see him leading anyone to victory, and he’d look comical in long flowing white robes.  Plus, by now, I believe he’s way too old and bald.

Sean Astin - 5′ 5″ - Mr. Astin proved himself to be loyal and courageous in The Lord of the Rings movies.  He fought orcs, cave trolls and a giant spider.  He could withstand pain, although he did weep a bit too often.  He had a very close relationship with Frodo Baggins, but he turned out to be hetero (or at least bisexual) in the end.  Scholars have questioned T. E. Lawrence’s sexuality as well. Many think he was homosexual, but his brother claimed that he was asexual and completely turned-off by the merest mention of sex.  Sean Astin’s head seems to be a bit large in proportion to the rest of his body, just like T. E. Lawrence’s.  Could Mr. Astin be an effective military leader?  I think so.  He’s determined and methodical, whereas Lawrence was often crazed and maniacal, but I think Mr. Astin could be trained to let go a little bit.  I think we have a winner here!

So there you have it.  Sean Astin will play T. E. Lawrence in the 2008 remake of Lawrence of Arabia.  It will be a huge success.  I wonder who will take Omar Sharif’s role?

Joshua Henkin, 2007, 291 p.

I must say that I’ve been awfully lucky with the novels I’ve been dipping into lately. First, there was The Whistling Season, which was the sweetest of my recent reads, followed by Hearts and Minds (the goofiest), Never Let Me Go (the most frightening) and The Daughter and Watch Me Disappear, which were both very touching. Now I’ve just completed Matrimony, which I will list as the most realistic of all of these novels, and thank goodness for that! I didn’t realize until I was well into Matrimony how much I’d been missing a good modern novel. There is no surrealism, satire, sarcasm or any of the other big “s” words in Matrimony. In this novel, what you read is what you get.

First of all, I’d like to thank Mr. Henkin for sending a copy for me to read and review. I’m loving this! I think it’s terrific the way novelists are so much a part of the book blogging community now—it’s like the Borg Collective for readers, but in a good way. There is nothing that thrills me more than receiving an e-mail from an author, either wanting me to read or thanking me for my review. This is a joyous occession for little ol’ me because novelists are my heroes. I got an “A” on an essay I wrote in college saying that when I die I want to meet Dickens, Lovecraft and Twain and try to find out all I can about them. I’d like to meet Mr. Henkin too, (preferably while he’s still alive). I just know we’d have a great time discussing the meaning of life and joking about the absurdity of it all.

Now, before I babble any more, let me get into the novel. The title is perfect, because all of us are married to practically everthing we do. We’re married to our jobs; we’re married to our routines, our drugs, our thoughts and our emotions. There is not a single person in the world who is not bound to something, so every one of us is married in some way. Matrimony is about marriage in the conventional sense, but it’s also about other ties that bind us and other ties that break. It’s about the choices we make when these ties are severed. Do we repair them or let them stay unbound forever?

Matrimony is deceptively simple. Two college guys become friends, even though they are opposites in many ways. Justin is from a wealthy New York family, Carter is poor and from the West Coast. Both men graduate and marry and live through their 20’s and 30’s in different parts of the country. They get together every once in awhile, and one of their reunions leads to a dramatic change in Justin’s life.

I think what I liked most about Matrimony were the little details of early marriage—the minutiae and day-to-day stuff. Mr. Henkin must have worked very hard to get them just right. There would be times when I’d be reading a passage, thinking, “yeah, I remember feeling that way.” In marriage, once the honeymoon feeling has worn off, you’re left with a kind of ennui; a feeling of disillusionment and the realization that “this is it.” The dream and the reality are often miles apart. This is the “danger zone,” and I think it’s probably a deal breaker in quite a few marriages.

I also really enjoyed the characters. They were all flawed, but I could relate to every one of them, even Justin’s wife, Mia, who was much more OCD than I am. Mr. Henkin did a great job of treading that fine line between letting the characters become yuppie stereotypes or creating totally hateful and unsympathetic parodies of modern young marrieds. Sometimes realism can go overboard and become a ridculous imitation of life. I never felt that way while reading Matrimony.

Matrimony does a excellent job of showing that the decisions we make (or don’t make) during our 20’s often follow us for the rest of our lives. At some point during our early adulthood most of us dive headfirst into our future without really thinking about the consequences, and our lives rarely turn out the way we thought they were going to. In my youthful dreams I was going to be a swimming goddess, and when that came to nothing, I was going to be the the E. F. Hutton of the literature set. When it turned out that the literary community was underwhelmed by my genius, I got married, popped out a couple of kids and became a librarian. Go figure! This is not where I thought I’d be at this time of my life, but it’s not too bad. We all marry our decisions and some of these marriages turn out to be okay while others haunt us for the rest of our lives.

In August, the paperback edition of Matrimony will be released. Mr Henkin will be sending a copy to give away, so keep visiting me! Perhaps you can win the paperback edition of this wonderful novel.

The lovely and talented Eva over at A Striped Armchair piqued my interest in this one.  It sounds like great fun, so without further ado, here it is:

What was I doing 10 years ago?
This was shortly after my divorce was final, so I was still in pretty bad emotional shape.  I remember slumping on my empty bed night after night, chain-smoking (I have since quit) and bemoaning my lot in life.  Other major life transitions also occurred during this time:  I started a new job (which I still have) and I bought a new home in the wannabe wealthy north end of the city.  I have since moved back to the poor side of town, and I fit in much better here.  My older daughter says it’s because I’m just one step up from trailer trash.  I think I agree with her.

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Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect non weight-gaining world

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Five Snacks I Enjoy in the Real World

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Five Jobs I have Had

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(I’m just a tad more attractive than Pam)

• Lifeguard
• Swimming Coach
• Grounds Maintenance
• Dispatcher
• Librarian

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Five of My Habits

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Five Things I Would Do if I Were a Billionaire

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Five Places I’ve Lived

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Five Fluffy Things About Me
I’m not very fluffy, but I’ll give this a shot.

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All right, that’s it!  Consider youself tagged if:
You have “verklempt” problems.
You enjoy giving gifts more than receiving them.
You think flannel is a totally underrated fabric.
Butterflies and/or kittens are at least a small part of your decor.
You “ooh” and “aah” over itty-bitty things.

Jill Dawson, 2006, 260 p.

A few months ago, I read Kirsty’s insightful review over at Other Stories and knew I had to read this novel.  It was hard to locate a copy to borrow, because Colorado public libraries don’t own it.  Sometimes it’s almost impossible to find contemporary British novels in the U. S., and I’ll bet it’s because we think we’re better than they are.  I mean, come on, what do the English have but the monarchy and Big Ben and cricket?  America is far superior.  We have Starbucks and Wal-Mart and “High School Musical.”  (Notice how all of our great institutions and entertainments are capitalized)?  We even have David Beckham now, although the Brits can take Posh Spice (and her strange breasts) back, and the sooner the better!

Ms. Dawson is highly regarded in her native inferior country, and I can see why.  She writes very well.  She was nominated for the Orange Prize in 2001 for Fred & Edie and lost out to Kate Grenville.  Perhaps someday I’ll get around to reading Fred & Edie or one of her earlier novels.

Childhood definitely has dark undertones because kids are not always the sweet little darlings we like to pretend they are.  Oh no, they can be sneaky and nasty and treacherous.  Even though adults are loathe to admit it, young children are sexual creatures, and Watch Me Disappear focuses on the burgeoning sexuality of little girls as they approach puberty.  It is also a novel about pedophilia, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Tina has her first sexual experience when she’s twelve with a pervert named Russell.  Her perceptions about sex are terribly skewed due to her exposure to pornography and women’s magazines that declare that women should always be ready and should always enjoy sex:

“Girls always want sex, I realized at once.  Even when we said we didn’t, we did, after a while.  If we didn’t feel like it, we could be persuaded unless we were frigid….  Especially girls in uniforms (nurse, teacher, waitress, hotel maid), they were most likely to be nymphos, quite filthy in what they were hoping for.” (pp. 116-117)

This is so messed-up!  I wonder how many gullible young girls (and boys) actually feel this way about female sexuality.  Probably more than we’d like to consider, due to the strong influence the media has on nearly every aspect of a child’s life.

In addition to being victimized by a sexual predator, Tina also has to deal with the disappearance of her best friend, another twelve-year old girl named Mandy Baker.  As the novel progresses, Tina begins to remember more and more about the events leading up to Mandy’s disappearance and realizes that Mandy was herself the victim of a predator, and the predator is…hey, I’m not going to tell you that!

The more I think about it, the more I appreciate this novel.  Ms. Dawson did a great job of conveying many of the more sordid aspects of childhood and family life and our so-called “civilized” societ(ies).  Watch Me Disappear further supports my belief that we are not really civilized, and we never will be.

P.S–I also learned something really cool from this novel.  Tina was a marine biologist studying pygmy seahorses.  Pygmy seahorses are like chameleons; they can change color and blend in with any scenery in order to ward off predators (great symbolism, huh)?

See if you can spot the seahorses in these photos:

1. Who is your all-time favorite author, and why?

This is quite difficult to answer, because there are lots of authors I adore. Geez! I guess if I absolutely had to choose one, it would have to be Mark Twain. He was very prolific: he wrote novels, short stories, essays and (not so good) poetry. He had a razor-sharp wit, and there was no better satirist than Twain. I love The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi (and should reread both of these books). What I like most about Twain is that he was kind of a prophet. Many of the things he said way back when still hold true today, like this quote: “The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise…” Twain hated war and man’s inhumanity to man—and he was one of America’s first true libertarians.

Hemingway said, “…all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” I totally agree.

2. Who was your first favorite author, and why? Do you still consider him or her among your favorites?

My first favorite author was A. A. Milne–unequivocally and without question. When We Were Very Young is still my favorite book of poetry, and I occasionally reread a Winnie the Pooh story, especially if I’m having a bad day. This sounds so dumb, but the major characters in Winnie the Pooh speak to me when I read about them because every one of them shows a different aspect of my personality.

• Pooh = selfishness & generosity
• Piglet (my favorite) = fear & courage
• Rabbit = OCD to the max!
• Owl = intelligence & single-mindedness
• Eeyore = self-pity and moroseness

I have issues with Tigger, because he’s way too happy and he’s a total moron.

One of the most traumatic experiences of my childhood occurred when Mom washed my Piglet doll, and he lost an eye. She fixed him, but I never felt the same about him after that. Why do Mom’s do that? Sure, he was filthy, but it was my filth, so it was okay. A little bacteria never hurt anyone!

3. Who is the most recent addition to your list of favorite authors, and why?

This one’s easy. It’s Kazuo Ishiguro, and it’s due to this book: Never Let Me Go. (See my review here). He’s not very prolific, but I’m sure his novels will live on for a long, long time. Never Let Me Go should be taught to lit. majors. It should be dissected and examined by the best literary minds in academia. I will be reading When We Were Orphans soon, and I’m totally psyched about it.

4. If someone asked you who your favorite authors were right now, which authors would first pop out of your mouth? Are there any you’d add on after a moment of further reflection?

Okay, here they are, in no particular order:

• George R. R. Martin
• S. M. Stirling
• Paul Auster
• Michael Chabon
• Neil Gaiman
• Kate Atkinson

Upon further reflection, I’d add Jonathan Lethem and Douglas Coupland. Oh, and Carl Hiassen too!

Go ahead and give this a shot. It really makes you think! If you write about your favorites, let me know in the comments and I’ll go to your site and check them out.

Hooray, I’m finally going to be able to spend an entire weekend at home, relaxing.  Thank God!  This will give me some time to catch up on a couple of memes (thanks Julie and T Y) and write a couple of book reviews to post next week.  Just for fun, and because it’s Friday and I don’t want to work too hard, I’ve decided to write an easy post about highly regarded and/or popular novels that left me wondering about all the hoopla. 

     1.  Housekeeping–Marilynne Robinson 
This novel was a dead bore.  I managed to finish it and then wondered why I bothered to waste all that reading time.  It got such good reviews that I still feel like a dumbass for not enjoying it.

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     2.  Gilead–Marilynne Robinson

     This was even worse than Housekeeping.  I didn’t finish it.  I guess Ms. Robinson just isn’t my  style!

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     3.  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time–Mark Haddon 

     I could not suspend disbelief at all while reading this one.  Aspberger’s, smaspberger’s; the author didn’t know what he was talking about.

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     4.  The Time Traveler’s Wife–Audrey Niffenegger 

     Boooring!  Jesus, get together already!  Do something, anything!  Shoot each other (or me) in the head, just get this over with!

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     5.  The Pact–Jodi Picoult
 Actually, anything by Jodi Picoult.  I do not like the way she writes.

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     6.  The Dogs of Babel–Carolyn Parkhurst
Once again, suspension of disbelief problems.  Also, I read the first couple of chapters, and then became afraid that there was going to be animal cruelty somewhere along the way.

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     7.  The Historian–Elizabeth Kostova 

Incredibly monotonous, and I really tried with this novel–twice!

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     8.  White Teeth–Zadie Smith
I just could not get into this.  Something about her writing really grated on me, so I only read a couple of chapters.

     9.  The Book Thief–Markus Zuzak

I’ve tried this several times, and I can’t seem to get past the first two or three chapters.  Maybe I’ll try again later.

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     10.  Twilight–Stephanie Meyer

I got about halfway through this and then wondered why I stuck with it so long.  This is pedestrian tripe with terrible grammar.  The main characters are beautiful, of course, and oh, the vampires “glitter!”  Ugh.  Please don’t hate me if you’re a Twilight fan. 

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Are there novels like these that leave you cold?  I’d love to hear about them!

Pavlos Matesis, translated from the Greek 2002, 214 p.

This novel was the first of my self-initiated World Book Day challenge picks, and I’m really glad it was the icebreaker.  The Daughter explores something I know next to nothing about; the Axis occupation and subsequent civil war in Greece during the World War II era.

Quite a while ago, I decided to avoid war novels due to their unerring ability to leave me emotionally shattered for a long time after finishing them.  I resolved that novels about World War II and/or the holocaust are especially damaging to my psyche and should be pushed aside and essentially ignored for the remainder of my life.  Like most of my reading resolutions, this didn’t last too long, because I ended up reading Schindler’s List* and then saw the movie afterwards.  This is one of the few times that I wished I hadn’t read the book before seeing the movie, because I knew what was going to happen during the film and started sniffling almost immediately after the lights went down.  By the end of the movie–when the Schindler families are laying rocks on the graves–I was a sodden, sniveling, weepy mess, and I snuck out of the theater early in order to avoid being seen.  My family was not at all empathetic because they had witnessed a similar incident when I was about eight or nine years old.  After watching a rescreening of the old Robert Donat version of “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” I was afflicted by painful, gulping, post-weeping hiccups which lasted almost all the way home from the theater.  Chartroose and war just do not mix.

Thus it was with a little trepidation that I approached The Daughter.  I needn’t have worried, though–while the story is quite sad, it’s not nearly as heart-rending as Schindler’s List, and I was able to make it through with only an occassional sigh or a shudder now and then.  It’s written entirely in first-person, in fact, I remember thinking as I was reading that it is one of the “first-personiest” novels I’ve ever read because both the narrative and the dialogue are conveyed in a kind of off-the-cuff diatribe by the narrator.  There are hardly any quotation marks, but this fits in well with the character of the writing, so it works.

The narrator is an elderly actress named Roubini who relates what happened to her family during the war.  She grew up poor in the Greek countryside, and when the Italians and then the Germans took over in 1941, things quickly fell apart for everyone.  Neither the Germans nor the Italians seemed to care that the Greek people were starving as long as their troops were being fed.  Roubini’s mother (her father had disappeared) had sexual relationships with a couple of Italian soldiers in exchange for food.  It was the only way they could survive, and even then, they were always hungry.  One of the saddest parts of the novel occurs when Roubini’s little brother tries to grab a few potatoes in front of some German soldiers:

“Little Fanis makes a bee-line for the potatoes and picks up all three of them.  Nobody makes a move, then the smiling German with the machine-gun leaps down and smashes the boy’s hand with his rifle butt.  The potatoes tumble to the ground.  Fanis bends down to pick them up and the rifle-butt comes smashing down on his fingers over and over again…His hand was twisted backwards in the direction of his elbow…” (p. 52)

Fanis was crippled for the rest of his life.

After the War is over, members of the community round up all the women they can find who were suspected or real mistresses of Italian and German soldiers.  The women’s heads are shaved, and they are placed in a cart and paraded around town all day in front of jeering, abusive crowds.  Roubini’s mother was shorn and placed in the cart, and she did okay until she noticed Roubini get hit in the eyes with a filthy wet rag while trying to climb aboard the cart to be with her.  Then she falls apart:

“…her mother went berserk and started to scream ‘Get that Dog out of here, get that Dog away from me, get it away…I’m not its mother.” (p138-139)

It was the last time Roubini’s mother ever spoke until a few hours before she died.

↑          ↑          ↑

(A French collaborator is shorn after the liberation)

The entire head-shaving thing makes me very sad for women and ashamed of humankind.  These women shouldn’t have been judged and they shouldn’t have been punished.  They had their reasons for collaborating. 

I appreciate novels like this because they leave me wanting to learn more.  Here are some interesting facts about Greece during World War II:

• The Greeks are a proud and feisty people and they don’t surrender easily.  The resistance movements (both Communist and Republican) were comprised of about two million members.  The fighters drove the Italians into the mountains and harassed the Germans from all sides.  In 1943, the resistors begin attacking each other (thus the civil war).

↑         ↑

(Greek resistance fighters)

• The Germans fought the resistance ferociously by killing any men (and often women and children) found in an area of real or suspected sympathizers.  The isle of Crete, where both sides suffered heavy losses, was burned to the ground along with many towns and cities along the west coast.  Groups of Greek citizens from some of these towns were marched into the woods and shot by German soldiers.
• 100,000 Greeks died of starvation in 1941, and about 7 million Greeks died altogether.  700,000 people were left homeless.  Athens was totally decimated, so lots of refugees were able to move into abandoned houses for free and repopulate the city.
• Almost all Greek Jews were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.  Many Greek citizens tried hard to hide and save their Jewish neighbors, but the final count of Jewish survivors was very small.  Only about 14,000 (out of almost 80,000) Greek Jews survived.

I think The Daughter has been adapted into a play entitled Dog’s Mother.  I’d like to see it if it’s ever performed in English.  Mr. Matesis has written quite a few plays, so I’ll bet it’s pretty good.

*The movie adaptation of Schindler’s List is much more moving than the book, so if you haven’t read it yet, don’t bother.

About a month ago, Chris over at Stuff as Dreams are Made On wrote a great post about his favorite books from his personal collection.  I’m still envious about the Mirrormask script that was sent to him in a “grab bag” from Subterranean Press.  I never get lucky like that!

I have a very special favorite book.  It’s a first edition Arkham House copy of The Outsider and Others by H. P. Lovecraft.  It was published in 1939, and it’s quite rare.

It doesn’t have a dust jacket anymore and it’s pretty worn out, but it’s still worth about $1,500.00.  If it were in excellent condition, like the above example, it would be worth around $10,000!  I don’t collect books, but if I had known the value of this little gem, I wouldn’t have stolen it out of my father’s collection and toted it around with me during my high school days.  This was another of my “show off” books, which, along with getting loaded, I was sure added to my “coolness” factor.  What a total doof I was!  Oooh, I read dark and scary fiction!  I wanted to die!  Oooh, oooh!  Good God!

Lovecraft helped me graduate from college (well, not really, but it sounds good).  Actually, he did in a way.  I was so knowledgeable about ol’ Howard Phillips that I gave several speeches about him in various English classes, and I wrote my graduation essay about him.  I’ve always thought that if I were to study any writer extensively for publication, it would be Lovecraft.  I still enjoy his stories, even though the last time I read “The Dunwich Horror,” it seemed kind of silly.  Maybe I was just in a bad mood.

Lovecraft is still a presence in my life.  I have this bumpersticker on the rear window of my car:

I love it so much, I don’t think I’ll ever remove it!
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Addendum:

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, and was reminded of it yesterday when I was trolling the net searching for an out-of-print management book for my boss and a few of his cronies.  The book was published in 2004 and it’s really dumb, but the upper crusters here in the workplace seem to love it.  The price for a pristine hardback copy of this tiny little book now hovers around $130.00. I bought three used paperback copies for around $80.00.  Unbelievable!  This made me wonder what other 1st edition books are super valuable.  Here are a few of them (all are approximations because they continually increase in value):

• Ulysses — James Joyce (Shakespeare & Company, 1922) $200,000

• The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribner’s, 1925) $100,000

• The Maltese Falcon — Dashell Hammett (Knopf, 1930) $50,000
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Bloomsbury, 1997)  $50,000 and rising rapidly!

It’s pretty unbelievable, don’t you agree? 

Is softdrink, which is hyper lala because she’s totally cooha and she’s really bad ass too!  Woot!