St. Augustine: Confessions

Mom and I had the pleasure of reading excerpts from a translation of St. Augustine's Confessions. Though, this book is not typically considered European literature, mom still wanted us to read it because of its classic nature.
After reading "Beowulf," St. Augustine's prose seemed flowery and embellished. But not in a bad way. I like his writing style.
Something interesting to me was how modern his life seemed. Maybe modern isn't the correct word. By modern I mean he seems like he could have the same experience living today. Reading his confessions, I felt as though people today could really relate to his life.
Augustine talks about how he was so cool because he was smart and intellectual, probably wealthy, and he got a lot of ladies.
His life would make an interesting film.
Read his confessions. You won't regret it!

Sarah

BEOWULF: The Review is Here at Last!

SARAH'S REVIEW OF BEOWULF THE BELOVED:

When it was related to me by my dear mother that we would be reading the epic narrative poem "Beowulf," my initial thought was: "Oh goody! A werewolf story!" Please do not mock me for my ignorance, for I am now fully aware that there are no wolves at all in the tale. In fact, let it be known that Beowulf is not half-wolf, nor was he raised by wolves, nor did he meet with any wolves during his adventures. Still, his name sparks confusion.

I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed this book! It's exciting and suspenseful!

The story is about- guess who?! Beowulf!! And it begins when he travels to a nearby kingdom to rid them of a terrible monster, Grendel, who wreaks havoc upon their mead hall (FYI: mead hall=bar) and kills a lot of thanes (FYI: thane=BFF of the king). King Hrothgar is the ruler of these people.

Grendel is a great monster: terrifying and grotesque! He munches on the organs of the beer-drinkers.

But Beowulf is a beast. And he knows it. He pretty much thinks he's Jesus (a.k.a. bit of an ego). He says he will slay the beast and guess what? He does! Actually, he only succeeds in getting the arm of Grendel, but no one seems to care and they have a big party and give Beowulf lots of gold.

But then...guess who comes back for revenge?! Grendel's MOM! That's right. Grendel's mom is ticked off that some random guy ripped off her kid's arm and so she goes back to show them who's boss.

She kills King Hrothgar's BFF, like his ultimate BFF. So Hrothgar is heart-broken but Beowulf says, "No worries. I'll go kill Grendel's ma."

Beowulf travels to the lair of Grendel's mother and has a showdown, which, of course, ends in his favor (he kills her).

So Beowulf receives more cash and such from Hrothgar.

Time goes on and Beowulf fights a dragon.

Oh horror! I have given the whole story away.

Anyways, I loved this book! Yes, loved it. The translation I read was wonderful.

Oh, and just in case you were planning on watching a movie about Beowulf, DON'T. Just say NO. Mom and I watched like 7 and they all sucked. (More on that later...)

Part Two of Sarah's American Literature Reviews

Okay, here are the rest of the books we read last school year!

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain – This book is absolutely hilarious! There are parts that made me laugh out loud! Every character in the book is really stupid which makes everything so funny!

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott – I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed this book, though there will always be a part of me that wishes Jo and Laurie ended up together… But anyways, this book made me laugh, cry, and smile. Perhaps my view of the story of Little Women has been tainted by the movie, which is not an accurate depiction of the book in my opinion. The book really explains the character of Amy in a way that makes the reader understand her and grow to love her. The book showed how the relationship between Laurie and Amy grew and changed. (It’s till weird though.) And also, Professor Bhaer is not such a creeper in the book. (He is still slightly creepy though…just kidding…) Anyways, every girl should read this book!

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass – Very interesting but extremely sad. This book will make you angry. But you should read it because it is so, so good!

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane – Waste of time. I know this is considered a classic, but…why? I couldn’t tell you what happened. I couldn’t even tell you the name of the main character. Who, by the way, is such an annoying slacker. Basically, the story is about this guy who runs around during the Civil War and eventually dies. Woop-dee-doo. Maybe I missed something major. If you know what it is please tell me!!!

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beacher Stowe – A wonderful surprise! I thought that the book would be dull, but it was anything but! The characters are so well-drawn and the story is captivating from the beginning! There are so many wise words throughout the book that remain relevant even today. This is a sad book, and it made me very angry at times, but I really loved it.

Giants in The Earth – Umm…I didn’t exactly finish this one yet… AAHH!! But I will, I promise!! I am going to force myself!! Everyone tells me it’s a great book so I mustn’t give up!

Part One of Sarah's American Literature Reviews

Hello there! This is Sarah! It's been some time since I have written anything on here but I have decided to write a quick review of the books I read for school last year!

The Crucible by Arthur Miller - Definitely enjoyed this one. It's not a long book and even though the dialect is really weird, it isn't hard to understand. I probably appreciated it more than the average person because I was in the play. Everyone knows that it's about the Salem Witch Trials but it also parallels the Red Scare during 1950's America. Abigail Williams is a great villain (haha :) and Elizabeth Proctor an unlikely hero. I recommend it to all!

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne - Interesting, but all the characters are major creepers. I like how Hawthorne mixes in a sort of surreal fantasy element with his references to fairies, witches, the Devil, The Scarlet Letter itself and baby Pearl. Oh, and speaking of Pearl, that child is downright disturbing. She is the kind of baby that would touch you at night. Hester Prynne is sort of stick in the mud but she is a good person. Arthur Dimmsdale is an annoying pastor who doesn't do anything except whine about his life.

The Last of The Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper - I loved this book! It is so suspenseful and full of adventure! The story is extremely interesting and it moves fairly quickly. Some parts are scary, and others hilarious! There are even some sad parts. The book tells the tale of two sisters who are captured by an evil Indian (Magua) and how Hawkeye (the hero) and his friends try to rescue them. Magua is an extremely terrifying bad guy and Hawkeye is a really cool character! The movie is alright...oh, except for the mullets.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville - I realize that this is considered one of, if not the greatest American novel of all time but I just didn't see it. I didn't actually finish it, which I normally might feel bad about, but in this case I feel justified. The book is extremely peculiar and oddly humorous. I might have kept on reading if it wasn't for the BILLIONS of weird pages about paintings of whales during the renaissance, paintings of the tales of whales, stories of the blue whale from the Orient, the whiteness of the sea, the whiteness the whale, the hair on the lower side of his left pinky toe. I mean, hurry up and get to the action! Kill the dang thing!

Where the Broken Heart Still Beats by Carolyn Meyer - This is the story of a white pioneer girl who is captured by Indians as a child. She grows up as an Indian girl and gets married to a chief and has two sons and a daughter. She is then "saved" by her white relatives who take her away from her home and her family to try to "civilize" her. The book is really quite sad but also very interesting.

True Grit by Charles Portis - I despise everything to do with this book and the film being made about it. No, no, I'm kidding. It's not like I'm bitter because I waited for seven hours to audition for the movie and didn't get chosen to play the main character. Of course not. So anyways, this is a really incredible book about a kick-butt girl named Mattie Ross and the terrifying adventure she goes on to find her father's murderer. Mattie is a very interesting and complex heroine. I loved this book and I truly hope they don't screw up the movie.

I'll review more of the books later!

-Sarah

No Life Is Ordinary

It has been more than a week since I finished "My Antonia", and even longer since I finished "Giants in the Earth". So...finally, here are my reflections:

Both books incorporate the Land as a character in the story, both are pioneer stories, both take place on the Great Plains, both are the story of immigrants. The prose in both is simple, sparse, profound and beautiful. I highly recommend reading these two books back to back.

"Giants in the Earth" by O.E. Rolvaag, takes place in the 1870's in Dakota Territory (in what would later become the state of South Dakota). The immigrants are Norwegians who are determined to make a life for themselves in America. Throughout the book there is a constant tension between those who embrace the life of the pioneer, with all its hard work and incredible challenges and setbacks, and those who find the life lonely, depressing, and overwhelming. To the latter, home will always be in the old country. This conflict is played out most vividly between the two main characters, Per Hansa and his wife Beret. Throughout the book, there is this sense of foreboding, which climaxes in the ending. The Land seems headstrong, forbidding, challenging, vindictive, relentless, and only sometimes fruitful. The last chapter of the book is entitled "The Great Plain Drinks the Blood of Christian Men and is Satisfied". That says it all.

Musings from "Giants":

I loved the relationship between Per Hansa and Beret - he called her his "Beret-girl" and their love for each other was evident, but also incredibly realistic, and sometimes painful and heart-breaking. A biographer of Rolvaag says "Rolvaag had an exalted view of love, including both the physical and spiritual basis for marriage. He found that in much contemporary literature this important and beautiful aspect of human life was either taboo or presented as something unworthy and unclean. Some even exploited it speculatively in order to titillate the senses. Rolvaag felt that the great writers of the past usually had a healthier view of sex, and none more so than the Bible."

The Christian faith of the various characters is woven into their everyday lives, but for Beret it becomes an obsession. Her view of God as vindictive and Man as utterly depraved, sets into motion the events that lead to the heart-wrenching conclusion.

A discussion takes place among the various pioneer families as to what their surnames should be in the new country, because between the Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes, there are already too many Hansens, Olsens, and Johnsons. I learned that many Scandinavian immigrants took the names of the place they had come from in the old country. Hence the many American names now ending in -dahl, -gaard, -stad etc. (and including last names like Berg(h) and Woldum!) This also explains why we could have been the Olesons - because Grant Horace Woldum's father was named Ole, so had he kept to the traditions of the old country, his son would have been Grant Oleson. Also, this explains why my grandpa, Peder Berg, was called Peder Edvardson in some documents, because Edvard was his father's name, but yet he took the last name of "Berg" when he came to America, probably because it had something to do with the place in Norway where he was from.

"My Antonia" by Willa Cather, takes place on the plains of Nebraska, and although the book never gives the time period, it feels somewhat later than that of "Giants", perhaps the very late 1800's to early 1900's. The introduction to the book is written in the first person, by a friend of the narrator of the rest of the book, Jim Burden. Jim Burden's story begins when he is ten years old, travelling from Virginia after the death of his parents, to live with his grandparents on their farm in Nebraska. On the train across the Great Plains, Jim gets his first glimpse of Antonia, a Bohemian girl a few years older than himself, travelling with her family to the same small town of Black Hawk. The rest of the book is the story of the people of the farms, and later those of the townspeople. But most of all, it is the story of Antonia and Jim, and the different paths that their lives take, and the ways those paths cross over more than twenty years. The story is simple and lovely and filled with a sort of longing for what once was or could have been.

Some quotes from the book that I loved:

"In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones." - Jim Burden

"Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again." - Jim Burden

"The trouble with me was, Jim, I never could believe harm of anybody I loved." - Antonia

"I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow had faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life." - Jim Burden

"Do you know, Antonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister - anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me." - Jim Burden

"Optima dies...prima fugit." - Virgil Translation: "The best days are the first to flee." - from the title page

So... in conclusion, these two books have given me a picture of the life of the pioneer (a life I don't think I could survive for even a day!), the land that was both fruitful and destructive, the passionate love of that land, the beauty of each human story. There is no such thing as an ordinary life.

Coming Soon...

Up next in our reading schedule - "My Antonia" by Willa Cather. If you would like to read and discuss with us, consider buying, borrowing, or checking this book out from the library. An excerpt from the back of the book: "The American pioneer, returning to his country today, would find himself a stranger in a strange land. The cities of the plain have grown large and they have darkened the landscape. The values of an earlier time have been deeply eroded. During her lifetime, Willa Cather wrote with increasing anger against this loss, and she sought in her novels to recover 'the precious, the incommunicable past.' In "My Antonia", her famous portrait of a pioneer woman and very likely her best novel, she captured intact the strengths and passions of the early settlers, their spiritual attachment to the land they worked and came to love. These values inform what is both a vital novel of the American experience and a classic of world literature."

Giants in the Earth

Sarah and I are presently reading "Giants in the Earth" by O. E. Rolvaag. We started this book just a few days before we ended school for the year. I am about three-fourths of the way through, and Sarah is about one-third of the way through. So far, I think that I am enjoying the book more than she is. :) The prose of this book is sparse - similar to the lives of these Norwegian immigrants who are making a new life in the Dakota Territory. The two main characters are Per Hansa and his wife Beret, together with their children Ola, Store-Hans, and And-Ongen, and a baby on-the-way. The life of a pioneer energizes and invigorates Per Hansa, but to Beret the endless prairie is lonely, terrifying, unexplainable. There is a gradual sense of foreboding building as the book unfolds. I feel as though it will not have a happy ending. There are two more books that make up this trilogy ( all written originally in Norwegian). Although not autobiographical, O. E. Rolvaag did experience some of the same things as his characters. He was born in a fishing village in Norway, only five miles from the Arctic Circle. One of seven children, his father did not have great hopes for him; he had an older brother and sister considered much more intelligent and gifted. When he was a boy, his mother once asked him what he would like to be when he grew up. He answered "a poet". That must have seemed a strange answer for the poor son of a fisherman! As a boy and then teenager, he became a voracious reader, even reading aloud to the other fishermen in the village. Amazingly, his small village had a good library provided by the government ! An uncle in America eventually purchased a ticket for him to travel there, which he did at the age of 20. He worked as a farm hand and at several other jobs, but he felt that none of these things were the life for him. He then decided to go back to school in South Dakota, and received a high school diploma. He was accepted into St. Olaf College in Minnesota, and graduated from there with honors. After further education in Oslo, Norway, he became a professor at St. Olaf, and eventually the head of the Norwegian department. The library at St. Olaf is named after him! "Giants in the Earth" is only one of many other books that he wrote, though it is probably his most famous work. The title of the book comes from Genesis 6:4, and his dedication reads "To those of my people who took part in the great settling, to them and their generations I dedicate this narrative". We are those people!

Welcome!

This is the beginning of our Summer Reading Blog!

We will be posting reviews of books we've read this past year in our American Literature course, and books we continue to read this summer.

We encourage you to read along with us and share your thoughts!

P.S. If you're wondering about the title of our blog, it comes from a poem at the beginning of Chapter 14 in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The poem is called "Evangeline" :)