50 Books to Read Before You Die

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Tag: Mark Haddon

Mia Wasikowska as Jane in Jane Eyre (2011)

Jane Eyre

June 7, 2017 /

Good morning, class.

On April 23, 2006, the U.K. and Ireland celebrated World Book Day—a charity event focused on encouraging children to read—by making a list of the top 10 happy endings of all time (link courtesy of The Free Online Library). The top 5 are all on the 50-books list:

5. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

4. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

2. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The only one I haven’t read is Rebecca (blog post pending for both Rebecca and To Kill A Mockingbird), but I’m willing to bet something about that happy ending—there are absolutely no promises about a happy beginning or a happy middle. That’s the case with the other four novels, perhaps especially with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles as Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre (1943)

Jane Eyre’s childhood is full of abuse: she is the unloved adopted orphan of her home, attacked, terrorized, defamed, and ultimately cast aside by her family. She falls back on her resolve and determination, which may get her into trouble, but never makes her sacrifice who she is.

As she grows up and leaves school, she finds a job caring for the daughter of a rich man, Mr. Edward Rochester. Jane and Mr. Rochester discover their love for each other—but, of course, there are complications that threaten the future of the relationship. For what it’s worth, as we already know, there’s a happy ending.

Jane Eyre isn’t simply about a romance—its focus on class and gender issues help it stand out, much like Pride and Prejudice a few decades earlier. I might argue that Pride and Prejudice carries wit and wordplay, thanks to Jane Austen’s style, but it’s only an interesting comparison.

Author Charlotte Brontë

However, there is something Jane Eyre has which Pride and Prejudice lacks . . . something I did not at all expect—horror. The mansion where Jane cares for Mr. Rochester’s daughter is, for lack of a better word, haunted. Sudden fires threaten to burn the place down, and eerie laughter can be heard through the halls at random times. The secrets of Mr. Rochester’s past endanger the lives of his staff and his daughter, giving the novel a sense of urgency, foreboding, and distrust—even in the happiest of scenes.

From a feminist standpoint, I think the idea is that there’s a particular horror for women trapped in social conventions designed by men. Jane seems to live her life entirely as a rebel, if only for the sake of remaining good and true to herself. But this is Victorian England—there are consequences when you choose to unreservedly be yourself. The consequences for Jane have something of a supernatural flair, making the novel that much more interesting. (The same Gothic influences appear in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Charlotte’s sister—blog post pending.)

But, Gothic influences aside, what makes this story great is Jane herself. She is an excellent heroine, knowing and understanding who she is and what she deserves. She faces the consequences of her actions, refuses to let her emotions cloud her judgement, and defends her body, spirit, and worth in the face of anyone who hurts her. Even when it costs her everything, she does what any person is supposed to do—she respects herself.

This may make her sound too fierce, or even too heartless to develop relationships with others, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Jane is also compassionate, grateful, and caring to everyone. Her childhood hardships could have hardened her, but instead, they made her more empathetic and kind; not many others could boast the same. Jane is the epitome of a good person in charge of their destiny, which is a rare find.

It’s been a while since I enjoyed something as much as Jane Eyre (besides Ulysses, that is). It is a really good story, and at the end of the day, that is the best thing a novel can offer.

My next book is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I have read it before, so I already know what I’m getting into—a really good story.

More on that next time!

Prof. Jeffrey

March 15, 2017 /

Welcome back, class.

With the exception of the final few Harry Potter book installments, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is the youngest book on the 50-books list, published in 2003. For me, it carried a stigma before I even began reading it—contemporary works are supposed to have a freshness about them, like they’re a new take on what’s been written before. When a novel like this is compared with The Lord of the Rings, Ulysses, and even the Bible, it has expectations to meet.

Meet them it did.

The Children’s Edition of the novel

Let’s not talk about plot yet. Let’s talk about how the first chapter is chapter two—every chapter afterwards is a prime number: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc. Our main character, Christopher Boone, likes prime numbers, and how they explain the nature of life: like someone has taken all the patterns away, so that you could never figure out the rules.

Like I wrote last week, it is heavily suggested that Christopher has autism, which explains the interesting way he sees the world. It means that his brain limits his ability for social interaction, and that metaphors and abstract concepts usually mean nothing to him. Christopher is also incredibly smart, and the way he tells his story never ceases to prove that.

Author Mark Haddon writes Christopher’s voice matter-of-factly, so that all scenes sound the same. One scene may be Christopher enjoying a math problem, and the next may be Christopher trapped in public, surrounded by strangers that terrify him, with his pocket knife ready in his hand in case anyone touches him. It all sounds the same—Christopher struggles so much with empathy that Haddon forces us do the emotional heavy lifting.

The Original/Adult Edition of the novel

And then there’s the plot. The neighbor’s dog has been murdered—stabbed with a garden fork. Christopher loves dogs because he doesn’t have to figure them out (not like people). So when the dog is killed, Christopher decides—just like his favorite detective, Sherlock Holmes, would do—that he’s going to solve the mystery of who killed it.

His single father doesn’t care for this plan at all, so Christopher has to do his detective work in secret. Of course, he causes far too much mayhem, but the plot thickens with every passing discovery. And like any good mystery (and any good story, for that matter), it’s full of surprising twists, powerful character drama, and a sense of humor.

Haddon has said that this is a story more about difference than disability. Christopher’s view of the world helps with that . . . he sees people in ways others wouldn’t. We get to see his judgement of others on his journey, as well as others’ judgement of him. Similar to novels like The Catcher in the Rye and Ulysses, the characters start looking like cells in a body, each with their own roles and reactions, colliding every now and then for some good and honest tension. And because each character is fleshed out so well, The Curious Incident made it’s way on to the 50-books list.

Up next, I’m diving back into the past with Robinson Crusoe. The promising adventure story has a lot to live up to . . . I’ll let you know how it goes.

Prof. Jeffrey

March 13, 2017 /

“And Father said, ‘I love you very much, Christopher. Don’t ever forget that. And I know I lose my rag occasionally. I know I shout. And I know I shouldn’t. But I only do it because I worry about you, because I don’t want to see you getting into trouble and I don’t want you to get hurt. Do you understand?’

I didn’t know whether I understood. So I said, ‘I don’t know.’

And Father said, ‘Christopher, do you understand that I love you?’

And I said, ‘Yes,’ because loving someone is helping them when they get into trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth, and Father looks after me when I get into trouble, like coming to the police station, and he looks after me by cooking meals for me, and he always tells me the truth, which means that he loves me.”

—from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

March 10, 2017 /

“All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I’m not meant to call them stupid, even though they are. I’m meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult, and also everyone has special needs, like Father who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Siobhan who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.”

—from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

March 6, 2017 /

“When people die, they are sometimes put into coffins, which means that they don’t mix with the earth for a very long time until the wood of the coffin rots.

But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burned and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash, and I couldn’t ask at the crematorium, because I didn’t go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air, and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rain forests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.”

—from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

March 3, 2017 /

“Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classified as Military Material, and if you find one over 100 digits long, you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not be a very good way of making a living.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical, but you can never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.”

—from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

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