Deaf Tranquil Life

Reading Classic Novels for 2011

 One of the FaceBook friends posted "100 Books You Should Have Read (According to BBC)" on my FaceBook page.  Curious, I checked it out and liked what I just saw.  I got an idea... and here I am writing this blog.  This dear friend is the owner of Deaf Pagan Crossroads blog and she is VERY intellectual, widely read, widely travelled, etc.  Check her out:

http://deafpagancrossroads.com/

Anyway, "100 Books You Should Have Read" states that you"bold"ed the books you have read in the entirety; "italic"ed the books you've started or read parts from, but not read entire book; and "underline"ed books you've seen movies of.  For anyone who wants to know what BBC stands for, it's British Broadcasting Corporation.  Of course, where else but Great Britain, well-known for the novel classics... as well as William Shakespeare.

Out of 100 books, I have read only 21 books in entirety.  That's too few, I realized.  I have seen the movies based on several books... 26 movies.  Still too few.  Hmmm... a light bulb switched on in my head and an idea for me...to have a "New Year Resolution" for the year of 2011.  I'd read a book from the list, per week and watch the movie based on it.  And at the end of 2011 I'd be able to claim to be "literate" in classic novels and movies.  Oh yes, I read widely, but I could use to be a bit more familiar with the classic novels... for some reasons, I feel a little intimidated by the idea of reading the classic.  Well, anyone feels daunted by the idea of reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy?  That's how I feel toward the idea of the classics... which deals a lot of Europeanized English.  I am SO used to Americanized English.  I just checked the list and I see it's on the list, umph.

I have MANY graphic novels and many of them have "Graphic Classics" in volumes, which exhibits the classics in the abridged comic form.  So I will "warm up" with the comic before progressing to read the unabridged novel and then upon the completion of the novel, I will watch a movie based on it.  Luckily, many novels are free for downloading on my Kindle, so I won't spend a cent at all.  Yes, I did spend a few pennies on the comics, but they are well worth spent.  Check the website out:

http://www.graphicclassics.com/

I tend to buy them on Amazon because they are cheaper. 

Right now, I am reading (AND enjoying...) the anthology of the comics called "The Flight", which presents an unique approach to fantasy:

http://www.flightcomics.com/

 

Anyway, copied and pasted here on my blog:

 

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 

4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee 

6. The Bible

7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8. 1984 – George Orwell 

9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 

13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare 

15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger 

19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20. Middlemarch – George Eliot   

21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24.  War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 

25.  The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26.  Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 

27.  Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 

28.  Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29.  Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Graham

31.  Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 

32.  David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33.  Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 

34.  Emma – Jane Austen 

35.  Persuasion – Jane Austen

36.  The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37.  The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38.  Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere 

39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40.  Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

41. Animal Farm – George Orwell  

42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 

46.  Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47.  Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48.  The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 

49.  Lord of the Flies – William Goldin 

50.   Atonement – Ian McEwan 

51.  Life of Pi – Yann Martel  

52.  Dune – Frank Herbert  

53.  Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 

54.  Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55.  A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56.  The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 

57.   A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58.  Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59.  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60.  Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62.  Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov  

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 

64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65.  Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66.  On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67.  Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68.  Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

69.  Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

70.  Moby Dick – Herman Melville 

71.  Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72.  Dracula – Bram Stoker

73.  The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74.  Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 

75.  Ulysses – James Joyce                

76.  The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

77.  Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78.  Germinal – Emile Zola

79.  Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80.  Possession – AS Byatt

81.  A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82.  Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83.  The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84.  The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85.  Madame Bovary – Gustave Flauber

86.  A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry 

87.  Charlotte’s Web – EB White

88.  The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89.  Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90.  The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton  

91.  Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 

92.  The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery 

93.  The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 

94.  Watership Down – Richard Adams

95.  A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96.  A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 

97.  The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98.  Hamlet – William Shakespeare

99.  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 

100.  Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

 

I want to state that I Googled for the best novels and I have come across a few... worthy for you to check them out:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/12/features.fiction

http://www.listsofbests.com/list/5884-100-classic-novels

http://www.empirecontact.com/novels/

 

Susanna Hutchinson--Important Person in US History

                                                       

My daughter read a book titled Trouble's Daughter, written by Katherine Kirkpatrick,  about Susanna Hutchinson and she loved it.  She insisted... no, DEMANDED that I read it, after learning that I did not know her, never heard of her in my life.

http://www.katherinekirkpatrick.com/book_2.html

To humor her, I picked it up and read it.  Wow.  I learned many new things, like what happened after the first Thanksgiving dinner, the relations between Native Americans and the Europeans (mostly the Dutch), and the supposedly first American women's first movement.  I first learned of Susanna's notable mother, Anne Hutchinson, who was one of the earliest America's feminists.  More information on Anne, check out this link:

http://www.johnpratt.com/gen/0/4/7/1.a_marbury.html

To read the transcript of what happened in the court that had her family banished from the community:

http://www.piney-2.com/ColAnnHutchTrial.html

All because she spoke truth and stood up for women, believing that women were capable as men.

Anyway, back to her daughter, Susanna.  During the Native Americans' raid on the family due to the war between them--the Lenape tribe-- and the Dutch who was responsible for the massacre of the Lenapes in the first place,  the Hutchinson family, being from England and not of Dutch nationality, happening  to live on the Dutch-owned land, Susanna, then 9 years old, was taken captive.  The family had the misfortune of being killed (yes, Anne was killed as well.)  The book explained on the kind of captivity that Susanna must have had and that she could have learned the ways of the tribe.  I suspect that the captivity was harsh.  After a few years, she was traded back to the Dutch community with the promise of peace from the Dutch.

Susanna went on to marry John Cole and to have eleven children. Anyway, I discovered that we have four US presidents tracing their family lines to Anne and Susanna Hutchinson...James Garfield, Frederick D. Roosevelt, George Bush, and William Bush.  Just an interesting historical tidbit, hm.

Actually, not much information on her... there appears to be more information on her mother, Anne. Looks like Susanna decided to keep low profile, not wanting to follow her mother's footsteps.  For anyone who want to know more about Susanna, check this link out:

http://www.esthersscrapbook.com/Susanna.html

Out of curiosity, I checked the Native American tribe, the Lenape, and it sounds like it was one of the more peaceful tribes with an emphasis on matrimonial lineage in the early US history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenape

The Hunger Games Trilogy and ROOM Reviews

Well, I got some reading done...three books of The Hunger Games trilogy (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay) written by Susanne Collins, as well as ROOM written by Emma Donoghue.

First... The Hunger Games trilogy.  My 13-year-old son insisted that I read them and I did notice that a few of my FaceBook friends who are middle-aged like me did read them and loved them, even though the books are suited for "young adults".  As soon as my son finished breezing through them, I started reading the first few pages... and I got swallowed into the storyline.  Second book.  Third book, with an interesting twist in the ending.  Got a new understanding of how power corrupted people, especially with over life and death.  Wow.  I am glad that the ending was not bad (for a moment I felt dismayed that it might end in the wrong way.)   Made me to look at how the contact sports are played... in a different way.

Now I understand how people felt during the Roman times, with the "sports" in which gladiators played at the Colosseum, as well as many victims (Christians) were forced to suffer and die at the jaws of hungry lions and tigers.  Ugh. 

Out of curiosity to see if there are any movies being made, I Googled and saw that there's one soon to come out, in 2013... I will watch it for sure. The trailer...http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbvj78_the-hunger-games-trailer_shortfilms

Now, for ROOM... it is a bit disturbing, but understandable.  Makes me think of Jaycee Lee Dugard who was kidnapped and spent her almost 2 decades as a "sex slave", breeding two girls who grew up thinking that their mother was their oldest sister.  And, of course, Elizabeth Smart who is attending the trial now for her being kidnapped and being treated like a sex slave... luckily there were no offsprings (I don't know if she ever got pregnant, resulting in  miscarriages...) 

Hmm... the book just showed that Jack, a recently turned 5-year-old boy, the narrator who thought the room was the whole world and that "outside" world happened only in TV, all fictional.  Ma (never learned of her real name in the book...) was fierce in defending him from his abusive father who kidnapped her.  And how Jack dealt with the acceptance that there was an "outside" world.  The strings of my heart were tugged when reading his saying "good bye" to the room, using GoodNight Moon way of speaking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodnight_Moon), because I read that book aloud to my babies and that we always said that to anything in their bedrooms when they settled down to sleep.  Ma... wow, a very brave person, and Jack, full of innocence and goodness and full of love for his mother.  I loved it. 

A Short Book Review about "The Legend of Five Great Deaf Ghost Stories"

Happy Hallowe'en :-P

One blogger, Candy, mentioned the book The Legend of Five Great Deaf Ghost Stories, written by James "Casey" Gillies, in her posting which grabbed my attention.

http://candysweetblog.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/scary-enough-without-sounds/

I LOVE reading any books that have Deaf characters,  so I purchased it online, from Amazon.com.  I don't recall reading any ghost stories about the DEAF ghosts who signed. 

I got it yesterday so I settled down in my bed to read it.  I finished it early this morning upon rising (oh I slept all right.)  It's a relatively easy book to read, good for everyone.  What Casey, being Deaf himself, did was to gather the  oral ghost stories from the older generations of Deaf people who storytold them in ASL, and for preservation, he translated them into written English.  One can immediately tell that those Deaf ghost stories are best told in ASL.  The book tells five ghost stories in which the ghosts were Deaf people who signed.  And it gives an idea of how they struggled as Deaf people in 19th and 20th centuries... three stories are somewhat macbre, inspiring outrage at how the Deaf victims died.  The last story in the book is funny, reminding me of an old rhyming song "The MacDonald Had a Farm..."  I am not going to give out any more spoilers other than giving this link:

http://www.myshelf.com/horror/03/legendoffivedeafghoststories.htm

Warning:  The book has several grammar errors, so please don't be quick to criticize it.  Casey did a good job in defining the settings, using descriptive vocabulary words which help us imagine where and how the stories took place.  The point is that he is preserving the Deaf ghost stories so that they could be passed down over the generations, giving hearing people an idea of how Deaf people lived in the 19th and 20th centuries.  He said that he planned to compile more Deaf ghost stories so I am looking forward to reading more of his future books.  These ghost stories, as I said before, are best told in ASL, so anyone can read them and then sign them to any receptive audiences ;-)

                                         
     

 

Vampires and Zombies

One of my bemusment moments... VAMPIRES...zombies.  Capital letters, I understand and small case letters, I don't get it.

As we approach Hallowe'en, the bookstores have been hot selling the books about vampires and zombies, as well as ghosts.   As a middle-aged lady with salt and pepper colored hair, I am having a little difficulty comprehending the meaning of zombies.  I did ask my children about it and they did not really care about it; they understood vampires. 

VAMPIRES... I dig them.  When I was in preteens, I got hooked on Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire and other books written by her.  Oh, mysterious, brooding, aloof, gentile vampires who blended with the shadows, with a promise of kiss of everlasting love.  Of course, as a preteen and a teen, I was a sucker for the idea of everlasting love... that came with a price of embracing and becoming one with undead.  Even watching the vampire movies, I'd logically cheer for the vanquishment of the vampires, but in my heart, I'd mourn a little for the squashing the promise of everlasting love, because the vampires were the lonely beings desiring for permanent partners who they never got.  They somehow made death beautiful in a strange way.

Two decades later, in my thirties, I watched the TV series,  "Buffy the Slayer"... I rooted for Angel and Spike.  I irritately thought why Buffy could not stop slaying the vampires and just embrace either Angel or Spike?  It was a good, old-fashioned fast-paced TV series while it lasted.  It was so teenage-ish, peer pressure, jealously, etc... that was a good distraction for me.

Then, the Twilight novels and movies came along...in my 40's.  Ahhh... they brought me back to my memories of teenage stirrings and longings for the idea of permanent love that went beyond death.  Instead of dreaming wide-eyed, innocently believing that there was such thing as undead love as a teenager, I just regretfully look back at my memories with a bemused smile, realizing that it was my budding hormones which made me think that way. 

Then this year, I started noticing more books about zombies and I went like... huh?  Zombies?  Then I started to see the increase in the numbers of zombie books on the displays.  Hm.  I read the back covers and flyleaves and hmm... okay.  I decided not to buy any... but why would the teenagers would want to read them?  Zombies make death so ... UNattractive.  There's no promise of love.  Zombies' limbs just decay and fall apart, they are very clumsy, and... wet and smelly, eww!  Given a choice, I'd rather accept a vampire's kiss than have my brain eaten by any zombies.  If there's anything that I am missing, be my guest and leave a comment... I am very interested in understanding why zombies appear to be the rave nowadays...

Happy Hallowe'en, folks ;-)

 

10/29... came across the article about zombie being the rage this year:

http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/pop-vox/2010/10/27/when-the-zombies-come-i-ll-be-ready.html

The Movie "The Kite Runner"--The Meaning of A Bystander

                                                      

Last night my 10-year-old daughter and I watched the movie called "The Kite Runner" based on a novel written by Khaled Hosseini.  It was about the boys' friendship which was put into turmoil after one tragic event (bullying and sexual assault), taking place in Afghanistan.  It got me thinking about the parallels in everyone's lives, actually, and in the societies all over.  Mostly, the movie addresses the meaning of the bystander, being "neutral", and  being "independent".  I admit to viewing myself as "independent" and "neutral" a lot of times... meaning a bystander?  Yeah. Good or bad?  Depends.

Being the bystander usually brings fear, embarasment, a feeling of being stuck in muck, a feeling of helpless, a feeling of guiltiness (a LOT of it), to name a few.  We all have had experiences of being bystanders, not wanting to be involved out of fear of being targeted, out of fear of losing one's status in the society, out of fear of being caught on the crossfire, etc.  The disadvantage of being the bystander is that it ENABLES the emotional and physical pain of a victim or victims.  This leads to the bystander feeling guilty and responsible for the victim's pain.  So, the one would attempt to bury it under the rug, pretending it never happened, or one would turn on the victim to justify one's choice to be the bystander, placing blame on the victim, or one would "atone" by doing the acts of kindness, getting involved in some kind of the community activies.

Plus, the definition of "neutrality" is challenged... what does it really mean?  Okay, come up with Switzerland... it was a "neutral" country, not being involved in the World War II.  It knew about the concentration camps.  It helped with getting people out of troubled countries AND at the same time opening the bank accounts for people who were involved in advocating the Nazi movement, enabling the abuses in other countries.  It sure sent conflicting messages, all right...

One ASL vlogger discussed the meaning of neutrality in the Deaf community AND it applies to all the communites--it's captioned:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Zi3H6FFJU0

The questions we often face...  WHEN should we become involved?  OR should we steer away from whatever is happening?  WHAT would happen if we choose to get involved?  WILL we gain something or lose something if we get involved?  The questions we often face when it comes to witnessing the questionable behaviors have us debating our sense of morality (what's right and what's wrong) and our desire to be involved in any degree.

Anyway, the movie delivers a powerful message... people do suffer because of the enablement by the bystanders.  And that it's never too late for the bystanders to become involved in preventing any further pain.  A warning... there's a sexual content in the movie, addressing pedophilia (the act of sexual abuse against male children), which might be disturbing... I had to explain to my daughter about it and she understands with dismay that it happens in the real world. 

For more information about the novel The Kite Runner , check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kite_Runner

Or buy or rent the movie... it does not follow the novel 100%, of course, but it's a really good movie and I highly recommend it.  There are a lot of parallels in real life which we see in this movie.