Bridge of San Luis Rey Review

So just when I thought I had the Pulitzer books figured out, I came to this book. All the books until now have been about the shaping of America, the wars, politics, and social issues. This book so far is the exception.

The book centers on a bridge (obviously The Bridge of San Luis Rey) in Peru. It is a very old and sacred bridge that the people in Lima love and respect. One day the bridge suddenly falls and no one understands why. There is a priest who witnesses the bridge falling and decides it is an act of God. Five people were on the bridge and fell to their death. The priest wonders why these five people were chosen to die by this act of God and so he does great research into each of these people. That is what the book is about, it's about the lives of the five people and what was happening in their lives leading up to their death. It ends with a look into the life of the priest.

When I understood what the book was going to be about, I was excited. I love learning about people's lives. Unfortunately, the writing was a little abstract for me and a bit hard to understand. I got most of the stories, but I failed to feel a connection with the characters because the writing didn't flow for me. I felt that the writing was supposed to be deep and make you ponder and think about life and death and if there really are accidents or acts of God. I did think about it, but not long and hard. It didn't move me to do that, it just made me wonder.

It was an interesting book and a good way to have a look into the Peruvian culture, something I don't know a lot about; maybe if I did know more about it then I would appreciate this book more. It's a short book and one I would recommend, but not highly.

Early Autumn Review

I actually finished this book about a week ago and I've been struggling with what to write about it. It wasn't a bad book, in fact I enjoyed reading it very much, but it also wasn't a memorable book. As I've remembered I need to write this review I had to stop and think, "What was it about?"

This book reminds me much of other romantic mystery type books I've read in the past. It centers around a woman named Olivia Pentland. She marries into the Pentland family and is in a very unhappy marriage. Her husband, Anson, appears to be self centered and self involved. He doesn't see what's happening around him. Olivia and her father-in-law, John, have a special bond; he only trusts Olivia with his concerns and when he passes away leaves everything to her instead of his son. He also confides in Olivia and tells her things that no one else knows. There is of course a meddling old aunt, Aunt Cassie, who tries to make everyone's business her own and also a cousin of the family, Sabine, who left and went abroad, had a failed marriage, and a daughter, and came back to make fun of the family and try to make their lives miserable. One of the themes that I liked in the book was between these two women. They both disliked each other and disapproved of each other's way of life, but in the end they were very similar. As John Pentland points out, Sabine is Aunt Cassie turned inside out.

Olivia is miserable and unhappy. She wants to escape from the routine of her life. There are many things that keep her there though. One is her son, Jack, who has a heart problem and eventually dies; another is her daughter, Sybil, who has just returned from school abroad and is looking for a husband. Another is her mother-in-law who is crazy. She lives in a wing of the house under the constant care of a nurse and doesn't come out. Most people can't visit her, but Olivia can talk to her and can sooth her. There is a reason that the woman is shut up, but for those of you who want to read the book I won't tell it. I don't want to completely give the book away. However, she and Olivia also know some family secrets;only they know them and they're bad enough that they could ruin the Pentland family.

There is another man who is an outsider to the Pentland family who buys up some of the property. His name is Michael O'Hara. Michael is an Irishman and was raised in the streets and lived a rough life, but he has fought his way through and came into some money and is now trying his hand at politics. However, he has a problem: he is in love with Olivia. They begin riding together and eventually she falls in love with him, too. Now, just an observation, but 9 out of 10 of the Pulitzer books I've read have had something to do with an affair happening. I don't know if this is a requirement, or just a coincidence, but it's just sad. Anyway, he asks her to run away with him and she wants to. At this point in the book your not sure what to root for. You want Olivia to be happy and to have a happy life, but you don't want her to be unfaithful to her husband - even though he's kind of a loser.

Olivia decides to wait until her daughter, who has fallen madly in love with a young man, elopes and then she is going to run off with Michael. Somehow her husband comes out of his hole long enough to notice that something is going on between Olivia and Michael and approaches his wife. She asks for a divorce and he refuses so she tells him she is unhappy and that Michael could make her happy. The next day after her daughter runs off to get married, she goes out to find Michael to tell him her decision. While she is doing this she sees the stable man carrying someone on a gurney and she knows that Mr. Pentland is dead. (I forgot to mention that Mr. Pentland had a long time mistress or I guess you could say a long time good woman friend, because he shares with Olivia that he has never been unfaithful to his wife. ) At this point Olivia knows what she has to do. She tells Michael O'Hara he has to leave and she decides she has to stay. She has to be the glue to hold the family together. She also looks at John Pentland and how he has stayed faithful to his wife under hard circumstances and realizes that she admired him for this and feels that in the end she wouldn't be happy with herself if she didn't follow his example.

I'm glad that she stayed. It made me proud of her and glad that a book took that approach rather than the approach of instant gratification. Maybe she would have been happier with Michael, but she needed to stay with the Pentlands.

This book had a great story line and kept my interest. I was concerned for some of the characters and annoyed by the annoying ones. It just didn't seem as memorable and dynamic as you would expect an award winning book to be. This book will be on my like list, but not at the top.

A Break From Books

I will probably post my review for Early Autumn this coming week so look for that. Right now we're going to take a break from my book reviews for a recipe review. The other day my husband saw a post on CNN.com about a vintage recipe. You can read the article here http://eatocracy.cnn.com/2011/02/11/vintage-cookbook-vault-franks-a-lot/?hpt=Sbin. The recipe is for Frank and Corn Crown.

Now my husband and I love to cook and try new recipes so when we saw this we decided we had to try it. I was convinced that it wouldn't be too bad, my husband on the other hand was a little concerned and my kids were just plain excited. I mean, come on a crown made of hot dogs! What could be better? It was easy to make and kind of fun too (as a side note we omitted the green peppers as I have a complete dislike for cooked peppers ever since my second pregnancy).

What did everyone think of it? Well, the kids LOVED the hotdogs, each of them ate at least 3 of them but I'm not sure they liked the corn stuffing in the middle. What did the adults think? It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't that good. My main problem with it was the texture of the corn stuff in the middle, it was a little mushy and so I had a problem eating it. So my final thoughts - I think that this recipe is better if it was kept in the vault for good.

Early Autumn visited

So I'm about half of the way done with this new book and it is complete opposite of the previous book, Arrowsmith. The language is very emotional and flowery and detailed. There is a little Jane Eyre type mystery in it, as in there is a mad woman living in a wing of the huge house. I have been enjoying this book so far. Today while on the internet I decided to look up the author, Louis Bromfield. I don't know what I was thinking, maybe that the name was Lois, but I thought the author was a woman. According to Wikipedia, Louis Bromfield is a man, which makes since. It has changed the voice of the book for me, the language is now oddly flowery and emotional. For a woman it seems normal, but for a man, maybe a little over the top? I don't know, in any case, I'm enjoying the book.

Arrowsmith Review

Well, I finished it. This was a seriously difficult book for me to read and I'll tell you why (since this is the purpose of the blog!!). I am not interested in medical science to begin with and also I've discovered that I really like character novels, which this is not. Sure it has characters in it and follows one man through his career, but there is no real development of the main character, Martin Arrowsmith. When Martin's wife died I wasn't so sad, in fact I wasn't a hundred percent sure she did die. The book is not only written about science it is written very scientifically, just the facts.

Martin is a doctor who in college has his ideals and is forced to change those ideals several times throughout the book. At one point after he and Leora (his first wife) are married he moves to a small town to be a small town doctor and for a short time lives with his in-laws. This was not what I expected him to do and in fact after a few years does not turn out well for him, so he moves on to work for the Public Health official in Iowa. His boss, Mr. Pickerbaugh, is a politician. He writes silly little poems about health and makes public appearances to promote health. He's a loud, rather silly man and Martin doesn't think too highly of him. Mr. Pickerbaugh ends up being elected to congress and so Martin takes his place and he is more interested in his research than he is in kissing up to the public so again he needs to move on. He moves to Chicago to work in an expensive, "catering to the rich" type medical office and does okay, but he gets sick of the rich people and just wants to research and do his work so he finally ends up in New York working with Dr. Gottlieb (see my previous post) at McGurk Industries where he is able to just do research and is finally truly happy. Through all of this his wife (they are unable to have children) follows him around and supports him better than he deserves, especially since he casually cheats on her (mostly in thought and slightly in action) with Mr. Pickerbaugh's daughter, practically in front of Leora's face. She is truly the example of a supporting wife, but in my opinion she's a little too supportive and needs a little bit more gumption to stand up to Martin and give him a good talking to.

While at McGurk he finds a cure for the plague and goes to an island in the West Indies (his wife follows him there too so she can nurse him if he gets ill) to cure the people there of the plague and conduct his experiments. I actually enjoyed this part of the book. There was a little bit more focus on characters and the sorrows of the plague (kind of sad I enjoyed the sad part the best-- hmmm what does this say about me? Again Martin meets a woman while he's away from his wife (she stayed in another part of the island where it was supposed to be safer) he casually cheats again (mainly kissing and dreaming of her) and then runs to bring his wife with him and finds her dead with the plague. He mourns and kind of ruins his experiments and then returns to New York.

I could go on and on telling the story, but this is how it sums up. He gets married again to the woman he met in the West Indies; she is very wealthy and he finds himself in the world that he has always detested. It is a world where people are more concerned with money and finding favor than they are with the research and science. In the end I really didn't like Martin because of his final decision. In truth I never really did find myself liking him much, but when he decided he needed to work full time and so he left his wife and son to move to a cabin in Vermont with a fellow worker to do research uninterrupted, that was the last straw. A man who writes a note to his wife and says "maybe I'll see my son when he's grown, he can come out and work with me" is truly not a man, he is a coward. Don't get me wrong I'm thankful for the people who have done this kind of research which allows for immunizations for my children and cures people of horrid diseases, but I hope none of them acted so selfishly to do this.

If you choose to read this book I suggest you do it with a medical thesaurus nearby and many hours to devote yourself to reading a scientific tale. All in all, not one of my favorites.

You Can't Judge a Character

If you're looking for a review of Arrowsmith, you'll have to wait a couple of more weeks. This book has been a challenge for me. I really like books where I can identify with the main character or I actually care about the main character, I'm not there yet. I feel like this book is a chore, but we'll get into that more when I review it.

What I want to write about this time is one of the characters in the book. His name is Max Gottlieb and he is a professor of bacteriology at the university Martin Arrowsmith (the main character) attends. Martin has a fascination with Dr. Gottlieb, but through a falling out they separate and go their own ways. The author takes a break from Martin and focuses on Dr. Gottlieb. When I first started to read this chapter I was not at all interested. I pictured Dr. Gottlieb as a dark, bitter, angry man and maybe a little bit dirty and smelly. No one likes him, his home life is not the greatest and yet he deserves it in a way because he doesn't try to get people to like him and he is very harsh and just plain mean. As I followed him through some rough stages in his life - loosing his job, loosing his wife (she passed away), taking a job that questioned his ideals - I began to find myself caring for this character. When he did finally get the job he longed for I celebrated and found myself truly happy that he could find some happiness and satisfaction in his life. He has now made a comeback in the book and is still the cranky, stern man, but I don't mind it as much and I was actually glad to have him back in the story. Have any of you met a character like this in a book? If so, which book and who is the character?

Arrowsmith Beginnings

Okay folks, I think I have found the first Pulitzer that has me a bit baffled. So far I'm not too excited about this one, mostly because there are a lot of big medical words I don't understand. I get the basic underlining story, but I'm afraid a lot is going over my head because I don't know what he is talking about. So far the story is about a young man who is going to medical school because he has always wanted to be a doctor, thanks to an old doctor in his hometown that he assisted. While at medical school he realizes that he doesn't agree with all the commercialism that comes with being a doctor, namely getting patients and where to practice to earn the most money, etc. He loves the science and is in awe of a professor named Gottlieb who is a bacteriologist and Martin Arrowsmith (he's the main character by the way) wants to be just like him. He just got out of a huge bind with two girls and seems to be on tract to being happy. I'm only about 76 pages in and feeling a big overwhelmed. I really like to read books blind, meaning I don't want to know what it is about before I start, that way I don't have any expectations for the book. I've really enjoyed this approach with these Pulitzer books, so we'll see where this one leads.