The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (20 of 166)

One Sentence Summary: The Moonstone, a mysterious gem of India, supposed cursed, brings mayhem, theft, and death to the lives of those who possess it.

Excerpt: 

“We had our breakfasts--whatever happens in a house, robbery or murder, it doesn't matter, you must have your breakfast.”

This is the first Wilkie Collins book that I have read and as I was able to get through it and have never been able to get through a Dickens tome (with the exception of A Christmas Carol, which is decidedly un-tome-like) , it looks as if Collins has already pulled ahead in my affections for authors of their time. Collins seems underappreciated to me and I have to wonder if it is because he was operating in the shadow of his friend and contemporary, Dickens. Granted, my impressions of him have been swayed by a reading of Dan Simmons' fictional Drood. What is true from that thoroughly unimpressive book is Collins' opium dependence, which comes across in an alarmingly close and telling manner in The Moonstone. At one point, a character with a dark history and an issue with the nefarious drug, gives an extensive account of the effects. They are so intimate and accurate, you can't help but feel a little uncomfortable, considering the author's history.

The Moonstone is a classic detective story- a whodunnit of the old tradition. Agatha Christie probably cut her reading teeth on it. Daphne DuMaurier must have curled up in a bay window, rain pelting against the outside, and devoured this tale of robbery, blackmail, and mayhem. The mark of a great mystery, in my mind, is when it pushes the reader to feverishly try and solve it before the characters get around to the task. I had a running list of ten possibilities, each shifting up or down the list and morphing as the pages turned. There were at least two shock-worthy moments where the story took completely unexpected turns. I can't imagine how this must have driven readers mad when this was first published in serialized form. So many miniature cliff-hangers! How did they bear the wait between editions? 

Collins's use of unreliable first-person narrators throughout kept you guessing what was truth, what impression, and what was outright untruth. While I have great praise for nearly all of them, I am especially obsessed with Miss Clack. She was absolutely hilarious. Why is she forgotten when we list the great comic moments of canonized literature? I was sad when her part of the narrative ended, but its briefness gave a great roundness to an otherwise very straightforward plot.

On the negative side, but keeping in mind the time when it was written, there is the classic Oriental fetish of the Victorians at play here. I mean, a cursed Indian stone- undercover Brahmin traveling jugglers- mystical Hindu ceremonies? Yeah, okay. I get it. The colonies are the heart of darkness. The Temple of Doom is now. But still, that was the stuff of romps in the day. It is telling and intriguing to look at the culture through the prism of its popular media. 

I am going to be passing this along to my mother and grandmother, fans of Jane Eyre and crime stories, respectively. Bordering on gothic and thoroughly intriguing and delightful with its touch of the tragic and mystical, it's a great read. If you can't get through Dickens, maybe you should hang out with one of his best friends. If the popularity isn't there, the technique and imagination certainly meet, if not surpass those of the famous champion of the poor.

Shelf Status: Passing along
If you liked The Moonstone, you may like: Rebecca, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Turning of the Screw

Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling (14 of 159)

Book covers of this type always make me wonder
 if they were painting from wooden models

One-Sentence Summary: The insufferably spoiled Harvey Cheyne topples off of his cruise-liner and into the lives of his rough fishermen saviors, only to be transformed by the manly virtue of their craft.

Excerpt:

“It was the forty-fathom slumber that clears the soul and eye and heart, and sends you to breakfast ravening. They emptied a big tin dish of juicy fragments of fish- the blood-ends the cook had collected overnight. They cleaned up the plates and pans of the elder mess, who were out fishing, sliced pork for the midday meal, swabbed down the foc'sle, filled the lamps, drew coal and water for the cook, an investigated the fore-hold, where the boat's stores were stacked. It was another perfect day - soft, mild and clear; and Harvey breathed to the very bottom of his lungs.” 

Teddy Roosevelt was probably all over this book. It was definitely designed to be read by people like this:

Ten bucks says that backdrop is painted.

Not that this was an uncommon audience. Kipling wrote in a time when men were men and boys beat each other up over damaging repressed emotions and daddy issues (but valiantly). I'm not saying there is anything wrong with the turn of the century's boy adventure story genre. One has to be sensitive to the times in which they were written- but Captains Courageous is a whole 'nother story. Robert Louis Stevenson was a contemporary of Kipling's, and while I would have loved to put them in one room to have it out over the treatment of island natives, let's focus on a comparison of their literary work. Where I find that Treasure Island reads as a pure adventure story, Captains Courageous can come across as a bit heavy-handed. Harvey begins the story by being characterized as effeminate and spoiled, a spiney little mother's boy who generally drives others mad with his demanding behavior. He ends it as the ideal son- quiet, composed, just in ways both economical and moral, and smelling ripely of cod. It's a little too clear cut of a moral tale. I was glad to say that Harvey was not impervious to weakness- Kipling may have seen Harvey going the way of the flawless convert and so throws in a fainting spell for good measure. Good work, Rudyard. Crisis averted. More than anything, this is just a reminder to take moral character tales of the time with a grain of salt. Or, you know, a whole ocean of it.

I don't want you to think that I didn't enjoy Captains Courageous. I am a huge geek for good naval yarns and history. I like to stand waste-deep in boat jargon and sit down to cramped dinners with swarthy mixed bags of callused crew. As a matter of a fact, reading this instilled in me the strong desire to re-read Moby Dick and In the Heart of the Sea, simultaneously. Good thing Melville's White Jacket is on my shelf, just waiting for its turn in The Great Book Liberation Project. I'm an ocean girl and I always have been. There may be a bit of the selkie in me yet. Kipling captured my favorite elements of the sea story with passion and precision- the fresh air, the colors of the Atlantic, the sense of unbridled curiosity for a secretive and ancient force. I actually stayed up until 12:30, totally immersed in the very satisfying conclusion of the little story. I don't know if Captain's Courageous is as deep as its main subject, but it is still fun and full of little jewels of description and character. 

Shelf Status: Being released to the great and bounding main

You May Enjoy Captains Courageous If You Enjoyed: Moby Dick, Treasure Island, In the Heart of the Sea

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson (11 of of 159)

One Sentence Summary:

 1) The dignified Mr Utterson investigates the mysterious connection between his friend, the esteemed Dr. Jekyll and his new, grotesque paramour, Mr. Hyde.

2) The trader Wiltshire arrives at his new station to find the goings-on of the island being manipulated by the conniving Mr. Case.

3) Three ne'er-do-wells of varying morality set out to improve their fortunes and end up invariably worsening them. 

Quote (from the dedication):

It's ill to loose the bands that God decreed to bind;
Still will we be the children of the heather and the wind;
Far away from home, O it's still for you and me
That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie.

The dedication feels like the correct thing to include because there is a reason that Stevenson chose to include that little verse. What follows are more or less morality tales which dabble in some seriously major questions: is there any such thing as absolute morality? Do we endanger ourselves by completely denying our inherent darkness? Is a person with no dimensions or conflicts of conscience even a person at all?

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a great tale, just as I'd hoped, and definitely one that you think you know, but probably do not. There have been so many iterations of the story in pop culture that it has strayed from the root- this wonderful, lengthy short story. Stevenson has a great appreciation of tone and it is consistently his portrayal of a dank, mist-suffused London that give you the shivers. It is not difficult to imagine yourself alongside Utterson on a midnight amble to track down the deplorable Hyde. You can feel Stevenson's personal conflict surging beneath the surface of this story. I have to wonder how much of himself he saw in the fallible, mostly well-intentioned Jekyll and how much that writing this took out of him.

I wasn't terribly fond of the second story. Certain unlikeable characters can be survived for the sake of the story, but I didn't feel powerfully compelled enough by the plot to get over how obnoxious Wiltshire was. 

I was feeling a bit downtrodden by the time that I reached the third story, but it sucked me in- perhaps even more so than Jekyll and Hyde. My heart went out to Herrick, a hapless sort who has never applied himself enough to anything to amount to much. His moral compass is still in there, harkening to North, if weakly. Then there is Davis, pursued by his personal demons of failure and yet unwilling to adjust the habits and mentality that led him there in the first place. And, of course, Huish, the human leech. Setting the three together on their common course begins a game of the moral, immoral, and amoral that reaches its climax on the island of a dapper tyrant who is a dizzying combination of the three. The action moves along at a clip and it seems as if Stevenson found, in The Ebb-Tide, a way to combine his more exalted literary inclinations with his natural penchant for adventure tales. I wish it were a more famous work- it has the power to be a more fitting legacy.

Reading these three stories, so far from the clear-cut good and evil adventure tale of Treasure Island makes me wonder if Stevenson was feeling pigeon-holed in his career by his reputation for "ripping good reads". I think differently of him now, though, as a literary force in his own right, instead of merely a talented man with the imagination of a naughty boy.

"You must suffer me to go my own dark way."

- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Note: I could not finish The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, which makes this eleven, instead of ten.

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (5 of 147)

One Sentence Summary: An awkward, innocent young heroine walks haplessly into the aftermath of the death of the lady of Manderley, only to find the poison of the mysterious event seeping into the waters of her new life.

Subtitle: Jane Eyre got nothin' on me.

Excerpt: 

"We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic- now mercifully stilled, thank God- might in some manner unforeseen become a living companion, as it had been before."

Now this is my kind of Gothic literature. My personality and tastes pin me as a Bronte sort as there really seem to be two fawning camps- Team Austen and Team Bronte. I certainly don't fall into the former, as I have never been able to push through the first chapter or so of anything Austen (although I confess, somewhat shame-facedly, to loving the films where I do not enjoy the books), but I really don't fall into the latter, either. I have never read Wuthering Heights and, while I enjoyed Jane Eyre sufficiently to complete it, something fell flat in it for me. I think it had a lot to do with this:

http://harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=202
Click on me to make me bigger!

Appalling male characters aside, I also didn't find that Bronte possessed the same knack for creating momentum that Du Maurier had such a grip on. The way she spins out the tale is nothing short of masterful. From "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again," I was totally taken in. Every time I thought that I knew what was going on, I was wrong and when it comes to thrillers- of any time period- I love being wrong.

This was the perfect end of winter book. All of the lush descriptions of spring-to-summer on the grounds of a grand and half-wild English estate had me lying in bed, washing the half-light drain from the treetops with longing. Soon, life will return to everything and all of the intrigues of nature will conspire to bring personality back to the land. I fell in love with Manderley as our heroine did, a beautiful thing to be kept at arm's length- deceptive beauty, a place for hiding things where they would be neglected for lovelier imaginings. Next, our nameless narrator- watching her grow into herself, sharing her (very familiar) daydreams, her anxieties, her child-like fits of passion, made me want to embrace her over and and over again. I felt for her, enormously, and her emotional journey struck an intense chord with me. My heart accelerated with her Belle-esque poking in the West Wing, with her horrifying failures, and her little triumphs.

This is the rare sort of book in which you can lose yourself completely. The language is absolutely incredible, the descriptions transport and turn common-place perceptions into the author's play-things:

"There was something rather blowsy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like women with untidy hair."

In the same vein, the changes of mood, the most minute tweaks in wording and landscape, give you the best variety of literary whip-lash. It is a book for hyper-vigilance, for hearing voices in an empty room, for seeing the water move when there is no wind, and it doesn't let you go until the very last possible moment. The violin string finally snaps, and then you are alone with the trappings of the 21st century room slowly becoming concrete around you again. The world you are surfacing from seems so much more real, the world you belong in has new shadows and grades of light than it did before. 

I read somewhere that du Maurier is sometimes credited with the creation of the modern thriller. I am not in the least bit surprised. I read the whole book in a couple of days spent at home in which I was finally required to erect a strict rewards system in order to get anything done: work for one hour, read for one hour. I stuck to it... mostly. The deviation couldn't be helped. I was so desperate to get back into the story, to brew another cup of tea and sip it furtively while attempting to hold up this heavy leather-bound copy with the other hand.

Upon finishing, my wrist hurts and I am content. There is a certain impenetrable sense of calm that comes only at the end of the finely tuned instrument of agitation that is a great mystery, and Rebecca left me with that, in just the way I'm sure it will leave me upon many stormy nights to come.

Recommend this for: cast-iron gate and flower symbolism lovers, Bronte fans, Turn of the Screw fans, Downtown Abbey people
I Do Not Recommend this for: people who are into jump-scares, sociopaths

Note on this Copy: Leather-bound, gold leaf, heavy enough for self-defense- I don't really know where I got it, but it is beautiful and, according to the gently penciled in price in the front cover, only cost me $7. Whoop!

I Have a Problem: Book II

It looks like "I Have a Problem" is going to be an ongoing series because, well, I can't stop buying books.

I have been looking longingly at this one for a while and I finally just broke down and purchased it. I'm obsessed with good, ol' fashioned ghost stories, which is weird because I'm a bit of a pussycat when it comes to all things spooky. Still, back in November I participated in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and I wrote a novel that takes place in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and so I bought this for research. 

Yeah, research. 

No one believes that.

The lad and I nabbed this in an antique store the other day for three dollars and it will probably be one we read together. Is James Bond suited to cozy reading out loud nights? I think so.

These books are, respectively, 146 and 147.