BIbliography of Suggested Reading for Teens

     For Dr. Dial-Driver's Children's Lit class. This bibliography, too, was extremely difficult to narrow down to ten examples. I tried to be diverse when it comes to genres.

Rawls, Wilson. Where the Red Fern Grows. Doubleday, 1961.
     Billy Coleman lives near Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and he diligently saves up for two years in order to buy a pair of coonhound puppies, which he names Old Dan and Little Ann. His grandpa helps him teach the dogs to hunt raccoons, becoming one of the Ozarks’ most accomplished hunters. After Dan dies following a mountain lion attack, loyal Ann dies from a broken heart, and the Colemans move out of the mountains at Mama’s request, settling in Tulsa.
     The chief heartbreaker of all dog-story-tearjerkers, this ought to be required reading for Oklahoma children due to the local setting. Loyalty is the chief virtue expressed in these pages, though there are many virtues scattered throughout. I was five when I first heard this story, which was plenty old enough to understand it. Wilson Rawls wrote his books for “people,” and hated the idea that publishers marketed them as children’s literature. Therefore everyone ought to read it, as an example of true love and the power of patient hard work. Especially teenagers.

Kaye, M.M. The Ordinary Princess. 1980. Doubleday, 1984.
     In the far-off kingdom of Phantasmorania, there is a seventh princess born to the king and queen, her royal highness Amethyst Alexandra Augusta Araminta Adelaide Aurelia Anne – and the seventh princess is always the prettiest, the most graceful, the most blessed of all the fairies. Everyone knows that. But everyone also knows how contrary fairies can be – and this is what caused this princess to be ordinary, of all things. An ordinary princess would be an embarrassment to the kingdom, so Amy becomes a scullery maid in the royal castle of the next country over, where she eventually falls in love with a man-of-all-work.
      This was mystery author M.M. Kaye’s only fairy tale, but it works supremely well, mainly because it has such an emphasis on the ordinariness of life, while at the same time clearly being a fairy tale and containing all the classic ingredients. These elements are treated with respect, unlike so many things which claim to be modern fairy tales (glaring at you, Shrek).

Schaefer, Jack. Shane. 1949. Bantam, 1975.
     In 1880’s Wyoming, the Old West was dying quickly. This novel is narrated by a man named Bob Starrett, who was eleven when a dangerous stranger rode onto their farm one day, signed on as a hired hand and then found himself defending the group of local homesteaders in the middle of a range war with a devious cattle rancher.
     It’s a straightforward and formulaic Western plot, but the writing quality alone makes it worth reading for the strength of Schaefer’s descriptions. Bob Starrett is one of my top ten narrators across all books ever.

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. 1960. Grand Central, 2010.
     This tale set in a Depression-era southern Alabama town chronicles Scout and Jem Finch’s childhoods dealing with their father Atticus’s occasionally absent-minded parenting, in addition to the trials of public education and racism. Character and setting are much more important than plot.
     Scout Finch is probably my favorite narrator of all time, and Atticus is one of my favorite characters. This is a classic of southern American literature, and therefore almost has to be read at some point. Lee deals with a lot of big questions in this novel, and doesn’t provide all that many answers, which appeals to teenagers everywhere. If the reader has writerly ambitions, then studying Lee’s Go Set a Watchman shows how important the revision process is.

Goldman, William. The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure. 1973. Del Rey, 1987.
      In the country of Florin, long before Europe and just before glamour, but after America and blue jeans, lived the most beautiful woman in the world. She was a farm girl named Buttercup. Forced to marry Prince Humperdinck against her will, she is kidnapped and then reunited with her first love, Westley. Once Buttercup is recaptured, Humperdinck brutally murders Westley. He is resurrected (this is a fairy tale, after all) and teams up with Buttercup’s original kidnappers to break her out of the castle. The novel ends on a wonderfully ambiguous note, as they’re running away as fugitives with their end unknown.
     There’s the first sentence, to start with: “This is my favorite book in all the world, although I have never read it.” So many quotable quotes. So much more character depth than in the movie. This is a fairy tale for grownups, which claims neither to be more nor less. It is presented as an abridgement of a longer satirical Florinese history by fictional author S. Morgenstern. To paraphrase an A.A. Milne quote (from Once On a Time), the reader will either love this style of narration, or he/she will not. It’s that sort of book.

Shakespeare, William. Much Ado About Nothing. 1598. The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller. Penguin, 2002, pp.365-400.
      After the conclusion of a civil war, many people gather at the house of a rich man named Leonato. His daughter Hero is engaged to Claudio, whose best friend is Benedick, former lover of Hero’s cousin Beatrice. Everyone schemes to get Benedick and Beatrice back together. Complications ensue.
     William Shakespeare is one of the greatest storytellers in the history of English. His comedies are the easiest for modern readers to understand, and Much Ado follows most closely the formula of a modern comedy. And Benedick and Beatrice are amazingly snarky, slinging insults at each other with gleeful abandon. There is also the brilliant Joss Whedon film adaptation.

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. 1953. Simon & Schuster, 2013.
     In a bleak dystopian future, humanity is enslaved by addiction to technology, books are banned, and firemen create fires. After making the acquaintance of his quirky neighbor Clarisse, fireman Guy Montag comes to question everything he knows about his life and his society, to the point of becoming a wanted fugitive.
     The idea of dystopian literature is to serve as a warning of what society could become. Thus, while it may be uncomfortable to read, it is an important genre to be aware of, in order to avoid the futures described in the books. Bradbury’s Fahrenheit, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 together make up the triumvirate of essential dystopian literature.

King, Stephen. On Writing. Scribner, 2000.
     Almost everyone has read at least some of Stephen King’s works while a teenager, so why not read about the man behind the stories? The first half is a memoir, detailing his life from childhood up until the struggling early years of his marriage. The back half is a “how to write well” book. Both of those genres are necessary sometimes.

Crichton, Michael. Jurassic Park. 1990. Ballantine Books, 2015.
     A billionaire with no common sense creates a theme park featuring live cloned dinosaurs. During a cold opening of the park as a final measure of readiness before allowing the general public, a traitorous employee sets a catastrophe in motion which severs all power and communications, letting all the dinosaurs loose from their enclosures. Lots of people are eaten over the weekend.
     While mostly a bit of thriller fluff, there are some profound questions raised by this novel, mainly dealing with the role of science and technology in our world. And a quote from Dr. Ian Malcolm is interesting: “In the information society, we expected to banish paper. What we actually abolished was thought.” Loads of academic jargon make this somewhat difficult to wade through, so I would estimate high-school-age as a target audience.

Montgomery, L.M. The Golden Road. 1913. Kindle Direct Publishing, 2012.
     This novel meanders here and there, so there isn’t much a plot. It follows a group of friends and the adventures they had together just before going their separate ways as they grew up, narrated by the adult version of one of the characters. That makes it a perfect read for panicking high school graduates going to college to destress with as they reflect on memories made. This is another book with the target audience of “people.” I love most of Montgomery’s works, but this is my favorite of hers. 

BIbliography of Suggested Reading for Children

     I LOVED Dr. Dial-Driver's Children's Literature course. This assignment was really difficult, because there are so many wonderful choices to pick from, and we could only use ten examples.

Eastman, P.D. Are You My Mother? 1960. Random House, 1993. 

     A small baby bird gets lost after falling out of his nest, and he has to look for his mother. Once he finds quite a lot of things which are not his mother (including a dog, a cow, and a gigantic Snorting Power Shovel), he gets back home in time for a warm hug from Mom and a yummy worm dinner. 

     This is one of the Beginner Books series, so if your child is learning to read, this would be a good bet. P.D. Eastman’s pictures are spectacular, though, so this would be a great choice to read aloud to toddlers, as would his other books.

Bond, Michael. A Bear Called Paddington. 1958. HarperCollins, 2014.

     This is the first of the Paddington series; each of the chapters-work-as-short-stories variety like P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins books. Paddington is a small bear adopted into a rather bland London family, and he gets usually himself into a variety of strange and sticky situations. Literally sticky situations, since he loves marmalade. However, things always work out in the end.

     I would guess this is written for seven-year-olds just starting to read “big chapter books” on their own. They work well at introducing that indescribable quirky British sense of humor, which is their chief merit. If anthropomorphized animals are not a family’s cup of tea, then they should skip these books.

Barrett, Judi. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. Illustrated by Ron Barrett.1978. Aladdin Paperbacks, 1982.

     A grandfather tells his grandchildren a tall tale about the small town of Chewandswallow, which had no grocery stores, because the town got all its food from the sky, because they didn’t have normal weather. Eventually, something went wrong, and terrible storms forced the evacuation of Chewandswallow, because it wasn’t safe to live there any longer, what with the tomato tornadoes and five-ton pancakes.

     Food connects people of all ages, and everyone has their favorite food they wish it would rain (like milkshakes or gumdrops, according to the Barney song.) The pictures add a wonderful dimension to this tale, which I would estimate as appropriate to first introduce anywhere from four to seven, depending on if it were read aloud or not. The imaginative concept appeals to a child’s mindset very well, and it could be used to learn about the different food groups, as well as the idea of tall tales and their history.

Rawls, Wilson. Where the Red Fern Grows. Doubleday, 1961. 

     Billy Coleman lives near Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and he diligently saves up for for two years in order to buy a pair of coonhound puppies, which he names Old Dan and Little Ann. His grandpa helps him teach the dogs to hunt raccoons, becoming one of the Ozarks’ most accomplished hunters. After Dan dies following a mountain lion attack, loyal Ann dies from a broken heart, and the Colemans move out of the mountains at Mama’s request, settling in Tulsa.

     The chief heartbreaker of all dog-story-tearjerkers, this ought to be required reading for Oklahoma children due to the local setting. Loyalty is the chief virtue expressed in these pages, though there are many virtues scattered throughout. I was five when I first heard this story, which was plenty old enough to understand it. Wilson Rawls wrote his books for “people,” and hated the idea that publishers marketed them as children’s literature. Therefore everyone ought to read it, as an example of true love and the power of patient hard work.

Wallace, Bill. Upchuck and the Rotten Willy. Aladdin Paperbacks, 1998.

     Chuck, a young orange kitten, has just lost his friend Louie, who got smushed by a car on the highway. And then an enormous monster of a Rottweiler moves in down the road. And then his best friend Tom moves away. And then, to top it all off, his Person Katie moves to somewhere far away and cagelike called “College.” What’s a lonesome, scared cat to do?

     This is a terrific first-person narrative starting around age seven, illustrating well the emotions of life as only Bill Wallace can. It deals with loneliness, abandonment, the changing of life-seasons, in addition to offering some humorous insight on dating and emphasizing the power of friendship, especially the friendship found in overlooked corners.

Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds. Shiloh. Atheneum, 1991.

     Eleven-year-old Marty Preston lives in the extremely rural town of Friendly, West Virginia, where he comes across the new beagle of infamous-dog-mistreater Judd Travers. Marty and his little sisters nurse the dog, now called Shiloh, back to health, trying to decide if it’s ethical to steal Shiloh in order to prevent certain future cruelty by Judd.

     This novel is appropriate for readers around nine, because they would likely have a deep bond with their pets by then, and the beginnings of an understanding of empathy and the complexity of this world we live in. The first-person tone draws the reader in, and if he or she is of a writerly turn of mind, they can study how that first-person POV can be used to describe the rural setting, poverty, and ethical dilemmas within. Real life is often very gray, and this novel explains that while keeping a kid-appropriate tone.

Brink, Carol Ryrie. Caddie Woodlawn. 1935.

     Caddie Woodlawn and her brothers grew up in Wisconsin after their parents moved to Boston, and this novel tells about some of their adventures growing up. It doesn’t really have a plot, but it’s the kind of book that doesn’t really need one.

     This is included because it is clearly historical fiction, as the author makes note of in the introduction, and that is a good genre to be introduced to. She is retelling the childhood of her grandmother, based on the stories that she heard as a child. If Laura Ingalls Wilder is seen as too girlish for boys to think they’d enjoy, this might be a good alternative. Girls could appreciate Caddie’s indecision between wanting to be a tomboy at times, and a lady at other times.  

Sachar, Louis. Holes. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.

     After being accused of stealing a pair of sneakers, Stanley Yelnats gets sent to a juvenile detention facility in the Texas desert, where he gets to know his coworkers as they dig holes “to build character.”  Interspersed with the mystery that follows is a history of the outlaw Kissin’ Kate Barlow, a former schoolteacher who turned rogue after her romance with a black man was discovered.

     The braided nature of these interweaving stories is a very interesting stylistic technique to take notice of, and given the complexity of the issues raised (mainly juvenile delinquency, the justice system and interracial relationships) I would say a reader should be around eleven or twelve before tackling this one. Those subjects are handled in an age-appropriate way, but given the general meanness of the characters to survive, some thick skin must have already been developed.

Pyle, Howard. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. 1883.

     A retelling, perhaps the first aimed at children, of the legendary antiheroic character of Robin Hood, from his first coming to Sherwood Forest to his death by treacherous arrow. Little John, Friar Tuck, Maid Marian and the Sherriff of Nottingham are all here, as well, as is King Richard the Lion-Hearted.

      What kid doesn’t like adventure? Pyle’s book abounds with it, though the reading difficulty might present problems unless the reader was an especially-determined nine-year-old. This would be a good candidate to read aloud for younger children, giving a chance to practice comprehension skills by asking them to summarize the action at various points throughout each chapter.  

Neville, Emily. It’s Like This, Cat. Illustrated by Emil Weiss. 1963.

     This Newbery Award winner tells how a 14-year-old named Dave deals with problems of early teenagerdom, including hero worship, fights with his father and first love. His cat, who was given to him by a family friend named Kate, serves as a sounding board in figuring out all these problems.

      This would be appropriate for readers about eleven, I would estimate, because parents aren’t perfect, and they have as many flaws as anyone. There are scenes of smoking, if I remember right, some interest is taken of the opposite sex, and the characters wander around New York City entirely unsupervised a vast majority of the time. Knowing some history of what was going to happen later in this decade, this novel gives a better picture of the day-to-day life of those growing up in this era, and reminds readers that human nature is much the same everywhere. The first-person narration is used well to highlight the urban setting, providing literary-minded readers a glimpse (especially in contrast with Shiloh) of how the basic tools of writing can be used in interesting ways. 

Marveling at Superheroes

     The final mini-essay for the Study of the Novel course at Rogers State University during the Spring 2015 semester. We were supposed to give a quick recap of a novel from the last fifteen years and recap the main course concepts.

      What I chose for this project was a 2008 graphic novel called Marvels, which is a Marvel Comics collection of a 1994 comic-book miniseries of the same name written by Kurt Busiek and illustrated by Alex Ross.
     The plot follows the life and career of everyday photojournalist Phil Sheldon while he tries to come to terms with what it means to live an ordinary life in a world filled with incredibly-gifted people, set against the semi-seen background of the biggest events of Marvel Comics' history. He also struggles with how to best take care of his family; observes how society ought to and does in fact act towards heroes; battles the human instinct of prejudice, and ponders what our reaction should be when our heroes fail us.
     The story is told through first-person perspective, mostly through Phil's eyes, but it opens in the eyes of the original android Human Torch, seeking an escape from a prison which society placed him/it into, much like Meursault in Camus' Stranger. Like many of the protagonists in the novels we've studied this semester, the Torch comes to a moment of individual realization. This realization leads to a breakout that changes Phil's life, and all of New York, forever - signaling the dawn of the superhero era. "Their faces told a different story - A story of fear and awe, and a world cut loose from its moorings" (Busiek). Change is terrifying, and so is uncertainty. Then World War II added its anxieties and pressures onto life, but also (in this world) gave us Captain Americac. His actions against the Nazis, along with the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, changed public opinion into supporting these gifted "Marvels", as Phil terms them, as heroes. But then came the X-Men and mutants. It is unclear exactly what they are supposed to represent, so that can be interpreted as teen alienation, racism, homophobia, Communism or religious intolerance, to name a few. It was the 60's, there was a lot going on. They are different, and that can lead to irrational hate on both sides. Gabriel's attitude towards whites in Baldwin's Go Tell It On the Mountain and the town's attitude towards Sula are good examples (Baldwin 34, Morrison 122). This tension leads to wild rioting in the streets: "They weren't thinking. They were just afraid and angry, and they were lashing out" (Busiek). Phil comes to realize that though the mutants are very different, they are still people and ought to be treated like it. A comparison would be Craig's contact with Raina's family in Blankets (Thompson 233-242).
     After having their world saved from an enormous calamity yet again, Phil thinks that people ought to be grateful. But instead: "The whole city seemed embarrassed, somehow - ashamed of their terror, now that it was over and they were still alive" (Busiek). And to conceal that terror, people blame the heroes. But yet they remain, not trying to win the approval of the "petty and small-minded", but to protect those everyday citizens, those innocents (Busiek). Phil is haunted by Gwen Stacy's death, feeling betrayed by Spider-Man's failure to save her. He retires, disgusted and worn out with following the exploits of the Marvels. But our heroes are human, too; as Marianne found out about Willoughby, Nick discovered about Gatsby, or Craig realized about Raina (Austen 152-164; Fitzgerald 64; Thompson 520-527). Even though they inevitably fall short, we still hold them high as examples because they give us hope. And as long as we have hope, we an keep going about whatever our mundane tasks are, with our heads held a little higher and our stamina increased to where we can hang on a second longer.
     Though graphic novels are still seen as having an aura of being disreputable, the format is evolving much like the novel did - beginning with something paint-by-numbers simplicity but gradually diving into deeper themes about this life, in addition to wrestling with questions of critiquing society and experimenting with perspectives and choice of narrators. And superheroes fight our tendency towards cynicism by reminding us that basic concepts like right and wrong are concrete; not relative. These stories can run across the near-infinite pathways of human experience. At the end of the day, we need that reminder.

WORKS CITED
Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. 1811. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.

Baldwin, James. Go Tell It On the Mountain. 1952. New York: Vintage International, 2013. Print.

Busiek, Kurt. Marvels. Illus. Alex Ross. January-April 1994. New York: Marvel Publishing, 2008. Print.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. 1973. New York: Vintage International, 2004. Print.

Thompson, Craig. Blankets. Marietta, Georgia: Top Shelf Productions, 2003. Print. 
    

Short-Story Critique - How To Become A Writer

      This was an assignment for my Creative Writing course.

     The short story I read this week was written by Lorrie Moore, which I found in Penguin Academics’ Fiction: A Pocket Anthology, but was originally published in her short-story collection Self-Help. The story’s title is “How to Become a Writer”. It was interesting. Most things are, in some way. People tend to often use “interesting” to describe something they don’t know what else to do with, which has always struck me as the wrong usage. Everything has some aspect of interest within it; even if it’s unpleasant or mainly irrelevant to your life in terms of enjoyment or study.

     Why did I enjoy it? First off, because of the subject matter. You enjoy reading about other people enjoying or doing the same types of things you do. It’s part of human nature, somehow. And it kind of seems like there’s no set destination for writers; the journey is long and never-ending at times, but it’s necessary. And people either understand that, or they don’t. The people who get it are rare. Secondly, this story is written in second person. That’s unusual, and so it stood out. Also, the second-person tone really draws the audience in, because it’s a conversation with the reader.

     Another thing that stuck out to me was that it’s really written in the style of a recipe. I read cookbooks for fun, so it was neat to see that style used in fiction. It felt very autobiographical, so you admire the honesty and intensity Moore put into the story, however true(or not) the events were.

     She did a very good job of capturing the essence of college life in a short space; though the setting wasn’t mentioned much, you felt how important it was to the story. (After all, it’s because of Francie’s school projects that her failures of stories are being written.) And the glass breaking while loading the dishwasher was a brilliant touch. It’s the common moments like that which make great writing stand out. Most of Francie’s stories sound atrocious; but I wanted to read them for their bizarre happenings, if nothing else. And they sound hilarious.

     It didn’t exactly have much of a plot, more like a letter of an older Francie writing a letter to her younger self describing what her life will be like, but covered from her high school days to sometime after college. Maybe it’s more of a character study than focused on plot. Anyway, most of anyone’s writing will be far worse than what the writer thinks it is. But this writing journey is kind of like digging for gold; most days you throw out a lot of unneeded rocks, but every once in a while you find a nugget. Those strikes keep us going, keep us panning through the dirt of failed stories that didn’t quite work.

     I hope to be able to play with second-person narration at some point on a later project, perhaps called No, THIS Is the Way You Do That; a humorous collection of play-by-play instructions for everything from making peanut-butter sandwiches to braking on ice skates to doing homework. That project has simmered for a while, with a ways to go before it’s ready to get itself written, but reading this story reinforced the way I’ve planned to write that project. 

Short-Story Critique - "The Green Door"

     Another assignment for Creative Writing, critiquing a short story.

     The short story I chose to critique is “The Green Door”, from a 1968 mass-market paperback called O. Henry’s Short Stories. It was originally placed in Henry’s 1906 short-story collection The Four Million.

     It opens with several paragraphs addressed directly to the reader in a formal second-person conversational tone, presenting a highly unusual scenario of a beckoning adventure, then pointing out that most people would ignore the call to action. Our narrator then continues on for several more paragraphs in defining what a “true and pure adventurer” was, and then begins the story in third-person limited, but going inside our main character’s thoughts and impulses. Our narrator tells us that Rudolf Steiner, music-store piano salesman, was one of these true adventurers, who go out on journeys and quests with no goal in mind other than seeing what will happen.

     Rudolf sets out one night walking with nowhere in particular to go, as he does most nights, and a man handing out a dentist’s business cards gives him one with a message marked upon it: “The Green Door”. Rudolf wonders a bit, then walks by the man again. “The Green Door”.  He flips over some of the discarded cards on the nearby sidewalk. They all feature the dentist. Rudolf enters the nearby apartment building and explores around the top floor, seeing a green door lit almost in a halo. Our adventurer takes this for a sign and knocks upon the door, which is opened by a beautiful and very ill young girl, who immediately faints. Rudolf picks her up and carries her to a couch, noticing the cleanliness and poverty of the apartment. The girl explains that she is out of work due to illness and hasn’t had money to eat in three days, whereupon Rudolf buys groceries for the girl and promises to check on her the next morning. The story implies that they will become a couple. As Rudolf leaves, he notices that every door in the building is painted green. He then asks the man what the “Green Door” cards mean; it turns out they are advertising a play.

     In this way, Henry illustrates in his memorable way that most happenings in life, both good and bad, come about by taking chances and seeking to seize opportunities. Fortune may not always follow the brave, but those who are courageous have a better chance of finding happiness. There is a large element of fate involved with any decision or action we undertake, and coincidence is often the means fate chooses to work through. Adventure should be accepted whenever the chance comes. You get good material to work with writing them down afterward. 

Searching for Meaning in the Modern Novel

     The second major essay for the Study of the Novel at Rogers State University for the Spring 2015 semester.

     World War I was proclaimed as "the war to end all wars". In theory, that sounded great. In practice....it really did not work that way at all; creating far more problems that it solved. Most people had no idea how to cope with this terrifying new landscape they found themselves in; as their former lives had been vaporized by the devastating war. So the survivors were left restless(Fitzgerald 3, 6, 64), idle(Hemingway 180) and, in some cases, hopeless. In general, Daisy Buchanan spoke for her generation when she described herself as "pretty cynical about everything", as did Brett Ashley when she complained of being "so miserable" (Fitzgerald 16, Hemingway 32). Some people tried to discover or create new meaning to their existence, while others were content to drift along.
     Once Joyce had led the charge into literary modernism, many other writers jumped on this chance to play with language in seeking the Holy Grail of placing reality-as-it-was onto the printed page. Some succeeded more than others, but most often remembered of the group are William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Albert Camus was greatly influenced by this group of writers in his work about twenty years later. Journalists like Camus and Hemingway did well with this new style; as they were used to telling the facts as accurately as possible with as little opinionated ornamentation as necessary. Questions abounded in the post-WWI world, and answers were difficult to find. So modern novels do not typically provide answers, instead they get readers to grapple with the problems presented and come to their own conclusions. Part of the modernist language experimentation take place shifted the focus of the novel gradually inward; conflicts within oneself rather than in the world one inhabits. Also, in The Great Gatsby, by Fitzgerald, The Sun Also Rises, by Hemingway, and The Stranger, by Camus, the narrator was allowed to observe and take some role in the events of the tale; but he was no longer exclusively the protagonist. Nor were these first-person tales told with an explicitly educational or moral focus in mind; they were just stories that must be told.
     Among other things Nick Carraway observed about his neighbor, Jay Gatsby had an extraordinary war record, perhaps because in part due to his equally extraordinary gift for hope(Fitzgerald 150-151; 2). Combine this gift with incredible faithfulness in all things, and you understand how he found meaning; in the lost hope of reclaiming Daisy (Fitzgerald 98). Because she is so achingly nearby yet distant at the same time, his possessions derive meaning from their associations with her memory(Fitzgerald 45-46, 91), as does the green dock light(Fitzgerald 20-21, 93, 180).
     Machines were on the rise during this time, too, and that was hard for people to deal with. As Meursault states in Stranger, they "destroyed everything" (Camus 112). And in that destruction, mankind no longer mattered. One met their demise violently and without total finality; machines like Gatsby's car or the guillotine ruthlessly and without error cut the Fates' string of life. Though Meursault is talking of the machine which will bring about his own death in this passage, Gatsby's Myrtle Wilson was also "killed discreetly, with little shame and great precision" (Fitzgerald 137, Camus 112). Meursault is, in a way, a machine himself; with his abject apathy to anything outside his own phsyical well-being and his incapability to feel remorse (Camus 100). As the prosecuting lawyer states, he doesn't really have a soul and moral principles are foreign objects (Camus 101). Because machines are without souls, they do not seek a meaning or reason for their existence. And so the closest Meursault ever comes to a life philosophy is when he says that life is absurd (Camus 121).
     Strange thigns are part of life, yes. Besides killing you, the machines could woud or maim, as it is implied that Jake Barnes' injury occurred due to a plane crash (Hemingway 120). Jake manages to adapt to the postwar world best of anyone we meet in these three novels. He has a steady job(Hemingway 19-20) and gets along with folks well. In some ways he might have replaced religion with his ardent following of bullfighting(Hemingway 136-37), which seems like a common response in the small Spanish town we visit (Hemingway 157-73). That seems to be a very modern sentiment; as our football stadiums and basketball arenas have been described as our American cathedrals. Perhaps our 21st-century society is one filled with domestic expatriates (Hemingway 120).
     While Meursault obviously could not care less about religiion, because he lacked the understanding of what it is to be human, and Brett has the rather hopeless substitute of "not being a bitch" (Hemingway 248), perhaps the answer is the church. Nick and Jake and readers can't help but be a little interested, confused and disgusted about the careless people(Fitzgerald 20), and while Jake may be "technically" a "rotten Catholic", he still strives to be a better person (Hemingway 128, 103). Nick wishes the world would stay at a sort of moral attention forever(Fitzgerald 2), which is understandable. There will always be careless people in the world like Jordan, Tom and Daisy(Fitzgerald 58, 179), but on the other hand, there will also always be people like the magistrate or the priest(Camus 66-71, 115-122).

WORKS CITED
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. 1942. Trans. Matthew Ward. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Print.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. 1926. new York: Scribner, 2006. Print.     

Joyce Character Study

     This was the first major essay for the Study of the Novel that I took at Rogers State University during the Spring 2015 semester. 

      The protagonist of James Joyce's A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, has much in common with one of the protagonists of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Marianne Dashwood, as well as with the main character of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Edna Pontellier. Like Marianne, his sensibility hates commonplace expressions passing for witticisms(Austen 38, Joyce 200-06), they each scorn cultural expectations(Austen 124, Joyce 268-69), and they both launch into detailed explanations of their life philosophies at the slightest notice(Austen 31-33, Joyce 211-33). Like Edna, who lives "her own small life within herself" as a child into adulthood, Stephen also externally follows his society's rules, secretly questioning why they exist and what they could mean(Chopin 26, Joyce 88). 

     Similarly, all three lose the love of their lives, whether that's based on reality's appearance or mere fantasy; as Willoughby callously deserts Marianne, Edna leaves Mr. Pontellier and is in turn left by Robert, and Stephen loses Emma. Here, however, a difference emerges. Marianne, after her near-death experience, realizes what a fool she has been and is remorseful about it. She forgives him as much as possible and then moves on with the next chapter of her life, accepting the role she is to play in the world (Austen 300-05). Stephen explicitly states that in his rejected state he will not serve what he does not believe in (Joyce 260, 268). He then exiles himself, leaving his old world full of disappointments behind, letting down all those who have placed their expectations on him (Joyce 267). Edna takes Stephen's position even farther; once her world crumbles, she gives up, stating that she will give up the unessential in her life as a mother, even her life, but not sacrifice herself, later on becoming even clearer in her sentiments: "I don't want anything other than my own way. That is wanting a great deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the hearts, the lives, the prejudices of others - but no matter" (Chopin 88, 184). Edna shortly thereafter commits suicide, just to prove her point (Chopin 188-90).

     In Portrait, Joyce creates a character that is an outsider among everyone, standing on the fringes of everything. As a child, "he thought he was sick in his heart, if you could be sick in that place" and as a teen, his heart is again sick as he thinks about his place in the world: "A leader afraid of his own authority, proud and sensitive and suspicious, battling against the squalor of his life and the riot of his mind" (Joyce 10, 96). Even his name is confounding; "Stephen" was the name of the first Christian martyr, who gave up his earthly life for a more eternal reward, juxtaposed with "Dedalus", as Daedalus was the brilliant Greek engineer who created the Labyrinth and escaped Minos' tower; keeping himself alive while indirectly responsible for the deaths of his son, Icarus, and numerous Athenian youths. 

     When Stephen is unjustly beaten by the unfair, cruel world in the form of Father Dolan's pandybat, he then courageously goes to the rector and complains(Joyce 56-60). Like most of his time at Clongowes, this was an early formative experience, but this time he found out for the first time that priests were not infallible; neither was he helpless. By writing his father quickly for a new pair of glasses, and then speaking to the rector shortly after the humiliating punishment, he could to some small extent control what life throws in his way in order to improve his journey. 

     At Belvedere during the play, another important realization occurs: Priests are just men. As men, they can be just as coarse and stupid as his father(Joyce 89). Almost more memorable; in losing himself to the character he plays, Stephen finds himself "clothed for a moment in the real apparel of boyhood", proving that he can truly live in the same world as his fellow creatures(Joyce 90). While he seems to have forgotten this by his time at the university(Joyce 204), it is important for us as readers for the purposes of dramatic irony. 

     Perhaps, though, Stephen does remember the lost exquisite joy of the play, as by the novel's end he is seeking to recapture that feeling through hesitant stumbling attempts at journaling(Joyce 270-76). This act of creation has the status quo of his thought process's dreamlike non-reality; in writing his poem he seeks to adapt the trappings of the priesthood he rejected(Joyce 174-79) to fit into a shape more becoming to the first steps of artistic adventurings(Joyce 235-43). We don't ever fully (or even mostly) understand ourselves and why we do the things we do, but that doesn't stop us from searching. By switching to first-person at the end, Joyce provides a hint that Stephen is beginning a new epiphany; that he might use his imagination and peculiar outlook on life to provide a public good through his writings, whether that be in the form of stories or the form of essays. 

     Joyce used a radical form of stream-of-consciousness style in writing this novel, which while a nightmare to read, opened the doors to an entirely new class of possible nonlinear narrative styles and demolished the walls currently holding novels in place. It works amazingly well at capturing the thinking of a child or of someone extremely ill. We could argue that Stephen is often both childish(Joyce 8-14, 62-74, 188-89, 200-10) and sick(Joyce 8-11, 18-24, 96-98, 146-52) throughout his lifetime. 

     While there could certainly be more written expounding on these and other themes in much more depth, as Lucy Steele wrote in one of her letters, 'my paper now reminds me to conclude" (Austen 242). 

WORKS CITED

Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. 1811. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. 1899. New York: Avon Books, 1972. Print. 

Joyce, James. A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. 1914. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Print.

Obscure Details From "The Princess Bride"

  Since I love The Princess Bride so much....

     Okay, quick question: What is one characteristic of a really gripping, extremely well-crafted story? Details. Would we believe that Star Wars took place in a galaxy far, far away if Tatooine didn't have two suns? Would we appreciate the tale of David and Goliath as much if we didn't know that David gathered five stones from the riverbed or tried to wear King Saul's hopelessly-too-large armor? We wouldn't understand Maycomb County as well without knowing the little things Scout Finch takes for granted. The Arables' kitchen smells of "coffee, bacon, damp plaster and wood smoke from the stove", providing us an idea of exactly what Fern's family's house is like. That we learn J.C. Hogan's wife left him in 1978, because it's referenced by him and Mule Skinner as "the year the Chicago Daily News went belly-up" and "the year the Cowboys beat the Broncos in the Super Bowl 27 to 10." (Further wonderful detail is that neither of these tidbits help Father Tim understand what year his friends are talking about in the least.)

     Well, that's just barely scratching the surface of what I mean here, only covering George Lucas, the Bible, Harper Lee and Jan Karon.  This post is concerned with the brilliant detailing of the satirical abridgment of S. Morgenstern's satirical history of the Florinese royalty known as The Princess Bride, written by William Goldman. First off, as the narrator highlights, the full title is The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, he points out that you've got to love somebody who calls his own book a classic before it's been published or anybody else has had a chance to read it. And you do, just for the audacity of the deed. Furthermore, the extensive, extremely dry and entirely fictitious prologue explaining how the book came to be abridged is a masterstroke of Sicilian-level genius. Anyway, there's so many wonderful little details hidden all throughout the prologue and the book itself; creating an entirely plausible world that a lot of people would love to visit. I mean, the very first sentence has a hook that fuels a ferocious desire to find out what happens next: "This is my favorite book in all the world; though I have never read it." (Jaw drops in admiration for his writing skill. Isn't that just a wonderful beginning?) I named this blog after a passage from the sword-fight scene. So, much like the one about the little-noticed details of "The Big Green", this post takes a look at the terrific details fromThe Princess Bride(the book version.)

     This sentence - the writer casting himself as the narrator describing his childhood - could have totally been written about my growing-up: "Basketball, baseball, marbles - I could never get enough. I wasn't even very good at them, but give me a football and an empty playground and I could invent last-second comebacks that would bring tears to your eyes." And he continues in the next paragraph with this: "I seemed busy, busy, busy, but I suppose, if pressed  I would have admitted that, for all my frenzy, I was very much alone." And that's just on the first page!

     That the narrator's radio is a Zenith; and it was a fall Friday in 1941 when he caught pneumonia, trying to catch the Northwestern-Notre Dame football game over the airwaves. And that his father was a Florinese immigrant whose English always stayed ridiculously immigranty; he worked all his life as the number-two-chair barber at the least popular barber shop in Highland Park, Illinois. His father died in that barber chair, and it took an hour for the number-one-chair barber to realize this because he thought the corpse was taking a nap.

     S. Morgenstern had a head shaped like a giant balloon.

    "Does it have any  sports in it?" "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and pain and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truth. Passion. Miracles." "Sounds okay."

     I've always read the prologue in the voice of The Wonder Years's narrator. Only recently I just realized that's probably because Fred Savage plays the Grandson in the movie.

     THE BOOK -

     All these side notes about who the most beautiful woman in the world was and why she yielded that position...the first sentence of the actual book begins: "The year Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette." Can you get a much more fairy-tale opening than that, not using the whole "Once upon a time..." cliche?
     Anyway, Annette worked in Paris for the Duke and Duchess de Guiche, and it's not long before the Duke discovers that someone extraordinary is polishing the pewter. The Duchess notices this, and begins studying Annette for some flaw in her character(or appearance would be close enough). Annette's Achilles heel is chocolate, which the Duchess plants in strategic places all throughout the castle, and Annette grows from delicate to whopping inside a season. That takes care of the whole "most beautiful woman in the world" thing. She marries the pastry chef afterwards and they both ate a lot until old age claimed them.
     And when Buttercup was ten, the most beautiful woman was an Indian woman, the daughter of a Bengali tea merchant, with skin of such dusky perfection unseen for eighty years. Then smallpox came, and that took care of that.
     And when Buttercup was fifteen, the most beautiful woman was Adela of Sussex-on-the-Thames, who had 104 suitors, and one night worried her perfect complexion away over the fact that she would not always be young and beautiful.
    
     All these wonderful asides to the audience(but of course, this was before audiencial asides.) It confuses you so much as to when this story takes place, but at the same time adds to the heightened realism. (This was before ulcers. And before Voltaire. After mirrors, obviously. They had acres then, and arguments too. It was before Europe, but after Paris. And after taste, too, but only just. This was before glamour. It came after stew, but so does everything else; and long after spats. This was after taxes, but they were here even before stew. This was after blue jeans, which were invented considerably earlier than most people suppose. It was just after America, but long after fortunes. It was long, long after hairdressers. This was before trains, but well after carpenters. It was before emergency wards, but not before doctors, although in Turkey doctors hadn't started setting bones yet - that was the domain of the milkmen. Golf balls were around already, but this was before "The Lady or the Tiger", remember.) And the game of golf, as everyone knows, was invented by Brandobras Took, the only hobbit ever big enough to ride a horse, slicing off a goblin's head, which sailed through the air for a hundred yards before dropping into a rabbit hole. The game spread at some unknown time from the Shire to Scotland, and then to the rest of the world. (Okay, I went off-topic there and brought in some Lord of the Rings elements....back to Goldman now.)

     The parenthetical statistics given at every available opportunity: (There have only been eleven perfect complexions in India since accurate recording began; Adela Terrell had 104 suitors; Buttercup's parents were having their 33rd spat of the day when the Count and Countess drive up. Originally "jealousy" was a term solely relating to plants, which is how the term "green with jealousy" came to be, and Buttercup's current case was a close fourth on the all-time list. There have been five great kisses since its accidental invention in 1642 B.C., and while no one completely agrees on the exact formula, they all agreed that those five deserved perfect marks.) There are far more parenthetical statistics given throughout the rest of the novel, but as it's taken me a couple months to re-read it again for the sixth(ish? Possibly more) time, I forgot to keep a lookout for stats past this point.

     The Countess settled permanently in Paris at some point to indulge her passion for fabrics and ran the only salon of international consequence, naturally.

     Buttercup's parents did not exactly have what could be called a happy marriage; as all they ever dreamed about was leaving each other, but they died within a week apart. Her father is described as "a tiny mutt of a man, a terrible farmer, and not much of a husband either." Her mother was "a gnarled shrimp of a woman, a terrible cook and an even more limited housekeeper."

     After the wonderfully odd cow-feeding scene, Buttercup spends almost three full pages thinking about the Countess and Westley and how people don't look at each other that way because of their teeth. And then at dawn the next morning she tells him that she loves him, in one page-long paragraph, words rushing out incoherently in an onslaught of emotion, and then does the bravest thing she'd ever done; looking him straight into his eyes. And what is his response? "He closed the door in her face. Without a word. Without a word." 

     Buttercup's hair is the "color of autumn", which is a great way of expressing it - but I'm still having trouble seeing her as a redhead.

     Another great hallmark of William Goldman's writing, specifically this book, but also in a couple of his others, is the use of repetition, and then snapping into an analogy that makes you pause and think a minute before going on to the next sentence. Prince Humperdinck was shaped like a barrel, with a big barrel chest and big barrel thighs, and he walked like a crab sideways so that if he'd wished to be a ballet dancer he would have been doomed to an endless life of miserable frustration. 

     Sixty-six pages have been edited out of Chapter Two, The Groom, because they were irrelevant history of the Florinese monarchy. The resulting chapter is about three and a half pages long.

     Queen Bella was shaped like a gumdrop, colored like a raspberry and was easily the most beloved person in the kingdom; but as the only stepmothers Humperdinck had ever heard of were evil, he always called her "Evil Stepmother", or "E.S." for short.

     The chapter names and lengths, all choppy and mixed up from the typical formula. Prologue: 26 pages, Chapter One, The Bride: 23 pages. Chapter Two, The Groom: Three pages. Chapter Four, The Courtship: Seven pages. Chapter Four, Preparations: Zero pages, as it was entirely deleted. Okay, well, technically it's one page long, because the narrator has to explain why he took it out. Chapter Five, The Announcement: 92 pages long. Chapter Six, The Festivities: 52 pages long. Chapter Seven, The Wedding: 33 pages. Chapter Eight, Honeymoon: 16 pages.

     Florin and Guilder have mainly stayed alive by warring near-constantly on each other. There's been the Olive War, the Tuna Fish Discrepancy(which nearly sent both nations into bankruptcy), the Roman Rift(which did send them into insolvency) and the Discord of the Emeralds, where they both got rich again by banding together and robbing everyone else within sailing distance.

     Chapter Three, The Courtship, is possibly one of the best places in the book. The abridger slashed out 56 1/2 pages of packing, and leaves in these brilliant two paragraphs: "At 8:23 there seemed to be every chance of a lasting alliance forming between Florin and Guilder. At 8:24 the two countries were very close to war." Which is followed by three pages describing exactly what happened in those sixty seconds and the aftermath, and then by far the best courtship passage ever written in all literature.

     From a narrative point of view, in all 105 pages of Chapter Four, Preparations, nothing happens.So it can basically be summed up by the sentence, "What with one thing and another, three years passed." (Buttercup is made Princess of Hammersmith, since Humperdinck can't possibly marry a commoner, and is trained in the art of being a princess. Also, both her parents die during this time.)

     Vizzini is described as "dark". Sorry, but that just doesn't work....not complexion-wise, at least. Maybe he meant that as far as character goes? Also, he has the gentlest face, almost angelic.

      The Cliffs of Insanity were not actually impossible to scale; two men had been known to climb them in the last century alone.

     Inigo was raised by his father Domingo in the small village of Arabella in the mountains of Central Spain high above the city of Toledo, and he learned to cook from the age of six.

     Yeste the swordmaker's fame grows so great that though he raises his price by twelve times there's still a line of royalty waiting for three years to obtain one of his weapons. He is very heavy; he has the only fat thumbs in Madrid.

     Inigo searches for the six-fingered man all over Spain and Portugal; France, Italy, Germany, the whole of Switzerland, all of the Balkans, most of Scandinavia, he'd visited the Florinese and the natives of Guilder, gone into Russia and down step by step throughout the entire Mediterranean.
      Perhaps thirty men in all the world were the equal of Inigo when he fought left-handed; perhaps as many as fifty, perhaps as few as ten.

     Turkish hospital records list a total of eleven children who weighed over twenty pounds at birth, and ninety-five more between fifteen and twenty.

     In the book, the Battle of Wits takes place at night. Vizzini always carries a knapsack around with him, and out of this he takes out a small handkerchief on which he then places  two goblets of wine, along with some cheese and some apples.
     And this exchange: "I cannot compete with you physically, and you are no match for my brains." "You are that smart?" "There are no words to contain all my wisdom. I am so cunning, so crafty and clever, so filled with deceit, guile and chicanery, such a knave, so shrewd, cagey as well as calculating, as diabolical as I am vulpine, as tricky as I am untrustworthy....well, I have told you that there have not been words invented yet to explain how great my brain is, but let me put it this way: the world is several million years old and several billion people have at one point or another trod upon it, but I, Vizzini the Sicilian, am, speaking with pure candor and modesty, the slickest, sleekest, sliest and wiliest man who has yet come down the pike."

     Humperdinck's four whites were snowy, tireless giants, twenty hands high. He rode them all four at a time, bareback, leading the other three at full gallop, leaping from one to another at mid-stride so that none of them would have to bear his great bulk past the tiring point. Very clever, really.

     "You think this is a trap, then?" the Count asked. "I always think everything is a trap until proven otherwise," the Prince answered. "Which is why I'm still alive."

     The way the narrator slices into Morgenstern's criticism of his wife's criticism about deleting the reunion scene.

     The largest known fire swamp in the world is, of course, a day's drive from Perth. It's over twenty-five miles square and completely impenetrable. The Florin-Guilder Fire Swamp is barely a third of that size, and nobody knows whether it's impenetrable or not.

     Buttercup is 18 when this story begins, when the Count and Countess visit and she realizes she loves Westley and he sails for America, etc. What with one thing and another, three years pass, so she's 21 now. Based on their conversation about nightmares heading into the Fire Swamp, Westley is somewhere between 21 and 23 years old.

      Nobody had ever explained to the cook of the Revenge the difference between table salt and cayenne pepper until Westley took the trouble, much to the Dread Pirate Roberts' relief.
     Of course, he wasn't really the Dread Pirate Roberts; no, his full name was Felix Raymond Ryan, who inherited the ship from Cummerbund, who inherited it from Clooney, who was first mate to the original Dread Pirate Roberts, who had been retired somewhere between fifteen and twenty years by then and was living like a king in Patagonia.

     It took them seven hours to walk through and get out of the Fire Swamp, and that first hour was by far the easiest. However, those following six hours are irrelevant to this story, so they're passed over in a sentence. WHAT. A. DAY. Whew....

     Chapter Six, The Festivities is pretty much about just that; going on for 44 (deleted) pages as Humperdinck grows more interested and mannerly towards Buttercup. Then in a handful of quick flashbacks Morgenstern gets back to the real story. Inigo hates the Thieves Quarter; everyone is so big and dangerous and muscular; and he looked like a skinny Spanish guy it might be fun to rob. We also miss a six-page soliloquy from Inigo about fleeting glory.

     A full page of elaboration on a three-word sentence(those seem to be the most mysterious and powerful of all sentence structures, don't they?) Anyway, the three-word sentence is this: Life isn't fair. 

     Buttercup's nightmares in Chapter Six are horrifying.  Just....terrifying and awful.

     Count Rugen has spent eleven years constructing The Machine, which appears to be an great conglomeration of soft-rimmed cups of infinitely varied sizes, together with some glue and a dial and a lever.
     The average Florinese male lives to about 65, and the Count sucked away ten years of Westley's life during the week that Yellin was assembling his Brute Squad.

   The narrator's retelling of the moment he learned that Westley died while Humperdinck lived. "I buried my head into the pillow and never cried like that again, not once to this day. I could almost feel my heart emptying onto my pillow.  I guess the most amazing thing about crying is that when you're in it, you think it'll go on forever, but it never really lasts as long as you think. Not in terms of real time. In terms of real emotions, it's worse than you think, but not by the clock."

     Max had married Valerie eighty years ago when they were both at Miracle School, she was a potion ladler, not a witch; but at that time every miracle man had to have a witch, so he called her one in public since she didn't mind, and she had learned enough of the witch trade over the years to pass herself off as authentic under pressure. In the old days, before Max was fired, the hut was where they tried experiments...and now it was their home. When Inigo and Fezzik bring Westley in, it's almost midnight, and Max was in the middle of reading a very-well-written article on eagle's claws. Valerie is described in the "Humperdinck! Humperdinck! Humperdinck!" speech as "an ancient tiny fury". (Isn't that just a wonderful description?)

     The narrator clips about twenty pages and thirteen hours' worth of unnecessary action while Max and Valerie are concocting the miracle pill, as it was all too "Wizard of Oz"-like, apparently.

     Switching swiftly back and forth minute-by-minute describing what action is taking place simultaneously all throughout the castle in Chapter Eight, The Honeymoon.

      In the book, the wedding is performed by the Archdean(as opposed to the movie's Impressive Clergyman). His full amount of speaking lines: "Mawidge. Mawidge-" (Interrupted by Humperdinck) "Mawidge is a dweam wiffin a dweam...the dweam of wuv wapped wiffin the gweater dweam of everwasting west. Eternity is our fwiend, wemember that, and wuv wiw fowwow you fowever. (Interrupted again) I'm not there yet. (Interrupted by a now-furious Prince) Man and wife. You're man and wife."

     This is the narrator's ending: "That's Morgenstern's ending, a "Lady or the Tiger" type of effect(this was before "The Lady or the Tiger", remember). Now, he was a satirist, so he left it that way, and my father, I guess I realized too late, was a romantic, so he ended it another way. Well, I'm an abridger, so I'm entitled to a couple ideas of my own. Did they make it? Was the pirate ship there? You can answer it for yourself, but for me, I say yes it was. And yes, they got away. And they got their strength back and had their share of adventures and more than their share of laughs. But that doesn't mean I think they had a happy ending, either. Because, in my opinion anyway, they squabbled a lot, and Buttercup lost her looks eventually, and one day Fezzik lost a fight and some hot-shot kid whipped Inigo with a sword and Westley was never able to really sleep sound because of Humperdinck maybe being on the trail. I'm not trying to make this a downer, understand. I really do believe that true love is the greatest thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say, for the umpy-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all."

     This is how I spend my weekends when snowbound by sleet, snow and negative wind chill. It was a fun project that took quite a while, recording all these little bits....I wonder if I could make an essay or speech based off it somehow? It worked for fairy tales...
     If you've never READ the book before...well, hopefully this didn't spoil it too much. But you really should, you'd enjoy it. But as LaVar Burton always used to say, "Hey, don't take my word for it..."