All in The Classics

Excellent Women

Excellent Women

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

One of the things I love about reading books like Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952) is the way the characters and language transport me to mid-20th century England—London in this case—and highlight the myriad Britishism that a Yank like me pauses and considers. Surely, we think “slut” must mean something else; as in: “‘You'd hate sharing a kitchen with me. I'm such a slut,' she said, almost proudly” (4). And, indeed it does. But the linguistic differences is just the start of what makes Excellent Women so, well, excellent. Pym’s novel emerges from the first person perspective of Mildred Lathbury, “an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties” (in her own words on page 1). Her world quickly alters as Mrs. Napier moves in to the flat below her; the flat with which she shares a bathroom. Mrs. Napier and her husband, the much-anticipated Rockingham, are not what one might expect from a married couple. Excellent Women quickly populates—around the life of Miss Lathbury—with eccentric and entertaining characters. While the novel is set in London, it has a decidedly village feel and Mildred Lathbury is a wildly likable narrator.

The Summer Book

The Summer Book

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

Tove Jansson (1914-2001) is perhaps the most famous Finnish writer and artist of the twentieth century, but it is worth noting, she was of the Swedish speaking minority. She is best known for her Moomintroll books of animated characters that continue to charm generations of readers. Jansson also wrote crisp, flowing prose. Her slender book, The Summer Book (originally published in 1978) is a beautiful story about life on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland during the summer months.

Valentino and Sagittarius

Valentino and Sagittarius

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

Valentino and Sagittarius are two novellas, both by Italian modernist, Natalia Ginzburg, translated from their original Italian. Both novellas are told in first-person, from the perspective of a young adult woman, an insignificant daughter. Both include parents with seemingly unrealistic expectations for one of the narrator’s siblings. Both come to life in post WWII Italy as they grapple with the theme of disappointment and generational divides.

To The Lighthouse

To The Lighthouse

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics, Books for Writers

Virginia Woolf is a household name when it comes to lyrically figurative writing, rambling through the interior lives of characters. Her brand of modernism pairs the poetic with the complex; she champions an intellectualism that many other modernists (as well as readers and critics that have come since) have branded snobbish and off-putting. And yet, Woolf’s writing, like that of other modernists (James Joyce, for example), attempts to capture the inner life of humanity. Her fiction and nonfiction alike, excavate the uniqueness that is human thought, love, experience. In her novel To The Lighthouse (originally published in 1927 and one of my favorites among her oeuvre) Woolf again takes up this project. In this version, her investigation is Beauty (yes, with a capital “B”), the artistic process, and the muse.

Gilead

Gilead

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

Certain novels are slow and contemplative; they paint a portrait of a life or a time using carefully selected shades and hues to capture a mood. There may not be much action beyond that of memory, but it is enough. More than enough even. Marilynne Robinson’s winner of the Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle Award, Gilead (2004) is one such novel. Contemplative, slow-burn writing like hers gets at the big questions of life with a hefty serving of earnest feeling sprinkled throughout. Written in first-person, Gilead is one man’s reflection upon his life, his family, and the meaning of human goodness.

West With the Night

West With the Night

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

Beryl Markham’s West with the Night (1942) is an eloquently written memoir that paints a series of powerful portraits of 20th-century Africa. Markham was a woman who boldly worked in male fields—race horse training and aviation—during the early- to mid-1900s. Unlike some memoir, Markham’s prose is eloquent, her imagery rich. West with the Night describes in vivid, suspenseful detail her experiences in eastern Africa, even after she left it. Among other things, this memoir reflects Markham’s love affair with Africa and the many ways that the continent formed her as a child and young adult.

Emily of New Moon Trilogy

Emily of New Moon Trilogy

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics, Books for Writers

This winter I enjoyed all three of L. M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon books: Emily of New Moon (originally published 1923), Emily Climbs (1925), and Emily’s Quest (1927). Titular character and heroine, Emily Byrd Starr, feels the call to the creative life at a young age. There is a magic tug that draws her to put pen to page. As such, her story, told over the course of this trilogy, is very much a portrait of the artist as a young woman of sorts.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the story of one girl’s coming of age in the 19teens. Set, as the title suggests, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the first two decades of the twentieth century, this rich novel focuses on the story of Francie Nolan. It is also, however, the story of her parents and their love, her aunts and grandmother, her neighborhood at large. Ultimately this moving coming-of-age novel explores the American promise that poor American kids, the grandkids of immigrants perhaps, might realize and the magic of that promise.

The Big Sky & The Way West

The Big Sky & The Way West

Chris Mathers Jackson
Reading The West, The Classics

After experiencing the tragedies of Boone Caudill and his companion and best friend, Jim Deakins, alongside the level-headed wisdom of Dick Summers in The Big Sky, I eagerly reached for Gutherie’s second novel, The Way West. The Big Sky had certainly impressed me, and I looked forward to reading The Way West, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, wondering how Gutherie would continue the story.

Barnaby Rudge

Barnaby Rudge

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

While many have certainly heard of Dickens’ other history (A Tale of Two Cities), few know his first. Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘Eighty was originally published in installments throughout 1841 and it fictionalizes the very real Gordon Riots of 1780.

Stoner

Stoner

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

John Williams’s Stoner (originally published in 1965 and re-released in 2003) follows the life of titular character William Stoner from his childhood home on the Missouri plains to the University of Missouri where he found his calling in the study literature. Williams’s prose is as plain and straightforward as is his protagonist, but the emotional depth of this novel as it weaves through decade upon decade from the 19teens onward, is deeply moving.

Desperate Remedies

Desperate Remedies

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

Desperate Remedies (1871) was Thomas Hardy’s first published novel. Written chronologically by date, from 1835 to the 1860s, the chapter title move the reader through “The Events of Thirty Years,” “The Events of a Fortnight,” “The Events of Eight Days” and so on. With every passing hour, day, week, year, Desperate Remedies leads its reader through the coming-of-age events in young Cytherea Graye’s life.

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics, Reading The West

Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (originally published in 1927) is the story of Fathers Jean Latour and Joseph Vaillant as they arrive in the New Mexican dioceses in 1851 as its new, young Bishop and Vicar respectively. The novel follows their lives as they grow to love and respect the land and its people: the various indigenous groups with their many ways of life, the Mexican families who settled the land generations before, and the newly arrived Euro-American settlers.

A Pair of Blue Eyes

A Pair of Blue Eyes

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

Thomas Hardy is famous for his later novels like Tess of the d’Urbevilles and Far From the Madding Crowd, but this winter I decided to pick up one of his early works, A Pair of Blue Eyes (originally published in 1873) and I did not regret it. A Pair of Blue Eyes was Hardy’s third novel (published serially) and the first he published under his own name.

Slaughterhouse 5

Slaughterhouse 5

Chris Mathers Jackson
The Classics

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 is at once startlingly gritty and wildly sci-fi. Somehow it is both a critical response to the wartime atrocity of Dresden’s bombing, and also a trippy, ironic, even disturbing thought-experiment about the nature of nonlinear time. Originally published in 1969, Slaughterhouse 5 looks back at the end of WWII’s European conflict from the perspective of a handful of American prisoners of war held in Dresden (in slaughterhouse building 5 or, in German, Sclachthof-funf).

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