I read Never Let Me Go. Probably some other stuff too, but that crowded it out. Wow.

Erin, who do you see as the villain in Ethan Frome? And what symbolism do you see in the pickle dish? I made my husband read that book after I read it, many years ago, so I could talk to him about it, and I wrote one of my first blog posts about it.

Hi Laura, I remember Never Let Me Go! I read it during my year teaching boarding school -- and it provided much food for thought viz the social engineering going on there. As for Wharton -- I think she worked hard not to have a villain, though I have to say I could not stand Zenobia, even though she was getting cheated on and had a right to want to remove Mattie. Wharton named her after the suicidal amazonian figure in Blithedale Romance, which adds some layers to the portrayal--and to the failed suicide attempt of Ethan and Mattie.

Pickle dish: a red glass vessel stored up high in Zenobia's closet, and shattered by another woman: it's hard not to get Freudian with that.

Recent reading has included C.J. Sansom's Matthew Shardlake Series, the adventures of a hunchbacked lawyer/detective in tudor England, along with James Ellroy's _My Dark Places_ (his memoir of the murder of his mother and his revisiting of the investigation years later); Robert Polito's _Savage Art_, his bio of Jim Thompson; and currently working on Anna Beer's _Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot_. I'm not positive yet, but I think John Milton dies at the end...

I took advantage of my winter break to do the reading for pleasure I don't get to do as a high school English teacher (no one tells you about that when you go into the profession!) I've been trying to fill out the gaps in my Dickens knowledge by reading at least one novel per winter, and this year's choice was "David Copperfield," which I liked more than "Oliver Twist," but not as much as "Bleak House."

After reading Peter Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," about the era of the New Hollywood auteurs (1960's/1970's), I plowed through his follow-up "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of the Independent Film." Biskind's central conceit is that, due to the box office fallout of the 1980s and rise in popularity of the blockbuster (Jaws, Superman, etc.), mediocrity and sentimentality passed for artistry in 1990s Hollywood, aided and abetted by the Weinstein brothers and Robert Redford. Appropriately enough, the book is less about the movies "indie" filmmakers made, but the commercial aspects of getting them produced. The biggest figures, besides the Weinsteins and Redford, are the men (and less often women) behind major distribution companies. It's bitchy, gossipy, fun, and a nice antidote to the media frenzy that inevitably occurs each year as we approach Oscar season.

I finally got around to reading the Harry Potter series, which means I'm about 10 years behind the times. I read at a rate of about one book a day, and found that they were just the sort of absorbing, entertaining thing I needed after a really tough semester. Ditto Robert Graysmith's "Zodiac," which was sufficiently gripping and creepy to keep me enthralled.

Up next: Cox's "Meaning of Night" (which I learned about on this site), revisiting John Trimble's "Writing with Style," which has been invaluable for me as I try to teach composition to 9th graders, and David Grann's "The Lost City of Z." He's my favorite New Yorker writer, so I'm excited to read his account of a real-life search for El Dorado.

I re-read 1984 for about the fourth time. I read this book about every three years, discovering something new in it with each return. What struck me this time was the Party's war against sex (Julia is a member of the "Youth Anti-Sex League," and on two occasions Winston notices how the red sash she wears as an emblem of her membership accentuates the womanly shape of her hips). Orwell's timeless insight is that the Party hates sex not because it is exploitative, but because any non-political source of pleasure is anathema--much in the way that campus speech and sexual behavior codes seem bent on destroying the pleasures of verbal wit and eros, all in the name of political enlightenment.
1984 is the epitome of a classic--so insightful about human nature that it never loses its relevance.

All murder mysteries over Christmas break - but I just started on my pile of Christmas books, including the new Flannery OConnor bio by Brad Gooch.

Erin, if you're interested, here are my thoughts, copy-and-pasted from my blog.

I may be the only person in the country who sees Mattie as being the villain of the book. She is like her father - charming, stupid, and worthless, with a habit of taking other people's things and making them disappear. In Zeena's moment of truth, she tells Mattie this - that she was warned against taking her in, because Mattie was just like her father, but she did it anyway out of the kindness of her heart; and now she was paying for it.

What would have happened if Mattie had decided to marry Denis Eady? She would have expected, and gotten, parties - presents - a pretty wedding dress, paid for by Denis's family - a new home with nice things, ditto - all the things a woman could hope to get when she married and established her household. Mattie had only to put out her hand and all this was hers. The pickle dish, empty as it was, and designed to hold sourness, had to represent all those things to Zeena. It was a gift from a relative, upon her marriage, and it was beautiful to her. She loved her pickle dish, and she knew how fragile it was, so she kept it in a safe place. As soon as her back was turned, Mattie took that pickle dish and broke it. Then she took Zeena's husband and broke him. He was a spineless wretch who let all that happen. At the end of the book we find out what Mattie's sweet nature is worth: when she no longer gets attention for being pretty, and can't dance, she's the harsh and spiteful one.