Faulkner, William "Light in August"

Faulkner, William "Light in August" - 1932

What a book. This could be a follow-up to "Gone With the Wind" seventy years later. A book about the Deep South, about country life, families, hard work, racism, crime, religion, morale, everything a story about this region and time should have.

Faulkner has a brilliant way of writing, I like his style, even though he jumps around from time to time, he still follows his path and you can follow it well without any confusion. There are a few major stories with several subplots but William Faulkner manages to tell them all in a way that it's not difficult to follow. An accessible story with both likeable and non-likeable characters.

I'm not surprised he received the Pulitzer Prize for two of his works, "A Fable" and "The Reivers", both of which have gone on my wishlist.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:
https://momobookblog.blogspot.com/2025/11/faulkner-william-sound-and-fury.html
"One of William Faulkner’s most admired and accessible novels, Light in August reveals the great American author at the height of his powers. Lena Grove’s resolute search for the father of her unborn child begets a rich, poignant, and ultimately hopeful story of perseverance in the face of mortality. It also acquaints us with several of Faulkner’s most unforgettable characters, including the Reverend Gail Hightower, plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen, and Joe Christmas, a ragged, itinerant soul obsessed with his mixed-race ancestry. Powerfully entwining these characters’ stories, Light in August brings to life Faulkner’s imaginary South, one of literature’s great invented landscapes, in all of its unerringly fascinating glory."

William Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 "for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel."

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Book Quotes of the Week

"What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial & unfailing returns as books & a garden." Elizabeth von Arnim

"I read like a flame reads the wood." Alfred Döblin

"Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die." Franklin D. Roosevelt

"You are the books you read, the films you watch, the music you listen to, the people you meet, the dreams you have, the conversations you engage in. You are what you take from these. You are the sound of the ocean, the breath of fresh air, the brightest light and the darkest corner. You are a collective of every experience you have had in your life. You are every single second of every single day. So drown yourself in a sea of knowledge and existence. Let the words run through your veins and let the colours fill your mind." Jac Vanek

"Those books you know you'll love forever even before you start them. And after reading it for the x-th time, you smile to yourself about how right you were." N.N.

Find more book quotes here.

Austen, Jane "Northanger Abbey"

Austen, Jane "Northanger Abbey" - 1818
The Motherhood and Jane Austen Book Club

This was the fifth book I read with this blog and the challenge to read and discuss Jane Austen's novels with a view of the mothers in the stories.

The first four novels we discussed were "Pride & Prejudice", "Mansfield Park", "Persuasion" and "Emma" which I have already reviewed earlier here.

If you have not read this novel, I refer you to my more general review here because this one will contain spoilers.

The heroine of this novel is Catherine Morland, a young girl who loves reading gothic novels. We accompany her on her first outing to Bath where she is taken by her neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Allen.

Same as in "Emma", there are not many mother figures in this novel but I think they are more prominent here even though they might be less visible. They might not be mentioned as much but you can see their influence nonetheless.

Non-Mothers with influence on our heroine: Mrs. Allen
Mothers: Mrs. Morland, Mrs. Thorpe,
Mothers not present: Mrs. Tilney

Mrs. Allen
Mrs. Allen has no children of her own and therefore serves as chaperone, takes our heroine Catherine Morland to Bath and tries to introduce her into the society there. This leads to the Thorpe's assumption that Catherine will inherit their wealth. She does not seem to be very organized, though, and small problems of any sort are a major hurdle for her. She means well, though, and really likes Catherine for herself.

Mrs. Morland
Mrs. Morland, Catherine's real mother, certainly is a good and loving woman who wishes her children all the best but in the end is not much better than Mrs. Allen. After all, she lets her daughter go with the latter to a place she does not really know herself. She is quite kind and more practical, though, and probably believes it is for the better to send her daughter away.

Mrs. Thorpe
Mrs. Thorpe, the third mother who has quite an influence on Catherine Morland's life, though not necessarily the way she would like to. She is also not the kind of person you would like to raise your children, seems to be more occupied with herself and her clothes rather than her own children. She is not very successful with their upbringing, either, although she does want what every parent wants: the best for her children.

Mrs. Tilney
We don't really meet Mrs. Tilney as she has been dead for almost a decade before our story even starts. However, she is important to the story and the life of her children and also our heroine Catherine Morland.

I have always thought that "Northanger Abbey" is not comparable to Jane Austen's other novels, it has always been my least favourite. However, in rereading it, the story definitely grew on me and I came to like Catherine Morland who seemed to become a good kind of person despite all the mother figures (or shall we say non-mother figures) in her life. I do prefer her own mother over all the others but that is not necessarily a praise.

From the back cover: "Catherine Morland is an Austen heroine unlike any other--youthful and naive, with a lively imagination fed by the popular Gothic novels she so loves to read. But when Catherine meets the wealthy and charming Henry Tilney during a vacation in Bath, and visits his family's sinister and mysterious estate, she begins to suspect that some of the dark doings she's read about just might be true... One of Austen's earliest works, Northanger Abbey offers fascinating insights into her perspective as a writer and a reader. The world's greatest works of literature are now available in these beautiful keepsake volumes. Bound in real cloth, and featuring gilt edges and ribbon markers, these beautifully produced books are a wonderful way to build a handsome library of classic literature. These are the essential novels that belong in every home. They'll transport readers to imaginary worlds and provide excitement, entertainment, and enlightenment for years to come. All of these novels feature attractive illustrations and have an unequalled period feel that will grace the library, the bedside table or bureau."

Other Jane Austen novels I have read with regard to Motherhood:
"Emma" - 1816
"Mansfield Park" - 1814
"Northanger Abbey" - 1818
"Persuasion" - 1817
"Pride & Prejudice" - 1813
"Sense & Sensibility" - 1811

Find a link to all my Jane Austen reviews here.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2022.

Harris, Joanne "Blackberry Wine"

Harris, Joanne "Blackberry Wine" - 2000

I have read several books by Joanne Harris. My first one was "Chocolat" in which I was a little disappointed but probably due to the hype around it at the time, I just expected it to be more. Her reads are nice, that's probably about the best I can say about them, they tell a little about French life, usually with a foreigner thrown in, contain recipes, are a little on the chick lit side but not entirely because they rarely are about love.

So far, I have also read "Five Quarters of the Orange" and "Coastliners", and the latter has been my favourite.

Until I read this one. "Blackberry Wine" is an interesting story about some old wine, an old farm, everything old, really. It reminded me a little of Isabel Allende and her magic realism stories.

Easy but good read.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"Jay Mackintosh is a 37-year-old has-been writer from London. Fourteen years have passed since his first novel, Jackapple Joe, won the Prix Goncourt. His only happiness comes from dreaming about the golden summers of his boyhood that he spent in the company of an eccentric vintner who was the inspiration of Jay's debut novel, but who one day mysteriously vanished. Under the strange effects of a bottle of Joe's '75 Special, Jay decides to purchase a derelict yet promising château in Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. There, a ghost from his past waits to confront him, and his new neighbour, the reclusive Marise - haunted, lovely and dangerous - hides a terrible secret behind her closed shutters. Between them, there seems to be a mysterious chemistry. Or could it be magic?"

Shields, Carol "The Stone Diaries"

Shields, Carol "The Stone Diaries" - 1993

An interesting book about an interesting life.  So far, I had only read Carol Shield's book about Jane Austen but somehow, this fiction book of hers has escaped me.

I like books with a map or a family tree in the back. This is one. I love being able to go back and forth and see who is connected to whom, where they come from, what is going to come next, even though sometimes I am annoyed that it spoils part of the book for me because I already know that someone is going to die soon or getting married etc.

Having said that, "The Stone Diaries" would be comprehensible even without that family tree. Daisy Stone Goodwill goes through many hardships in her life, being born an orphan under weird circumstances, she manages her life quite well. She is a smart woman and gets an education at a time where that is far from the norm for any woman let alone one in her circumstances.

While reading this, I often wondered how much of Carol Shields is in this fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodfellow. There is everything about life in this book, birth and death, marriage and divorce, education and work, problems with parents and children, just anything a normal life encounters.

A good read.

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman's story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. Her life is vivid with incident, and yet she feels a sense of powerlessness. She listens, she observes, and through sheer force of imagination she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling misconnections she discovers between. Daisy's struggle to find a place for herself in her own life is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era. A witty and compassionate anatomist of the human heart, Carol Shields has made distinctively her own that place where the domestic collides with the elemental. With irony and humor she weaves the strands of The Stone Diaries together in this, her richest and most poignant novel to date."

Carol Shields received the Pulitzer Prize for "The Stone Diaries" in 1995.

This is also a book about reading, a lot of books are mentioned in the novel:

Books Clarentine read:
Libby, Laura Jean "Struggle for a Heart"
Alexander, Mrs. "What Gold Cannot Buy"
Warden, Florence "At the World's Mercy"
Brontë, Charlotte "Jane Eyre"
Other books mentioned: (see below in alphabetical order, at least those that I could find)
Black Beauty, Anne of Green Gables, Freckles, Twice Told Tales, Beautiful Joe, Mill on the Floss, Pocahontas, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, Jane Eyre, The Unification of Italy, Beowulf, the Romantic Poets, In His Steps, Wild Geese, Gone With the Wind, Claudia, The First Six Years, The Grapes of Wrath, Forever Amber, The Egg and I, Cheaper by the Dozen, Lust for Life, The Web and the Rock, The Skutari Babies, Our Mutual Friend, Nellie's Memories, Helen's Saga, A Brief History of the Orkney Isles, Chekhov's Daughter, The Edible Woman, The Good Earth, Murder in the Meantime.

Alphabetical list:
Arnim, Elizabeth von "Elizabeth and Her German Garden"
Atwood, Margaret "The Edible Woman"
Brontë, Charlotte "Jane Eyre"
Buck, Pearl S. "The Good Earth"
Carey, Rosa Nouchette "Nellie's Memories"
Dickens, Charles "Our Mutual Friend"
Donnell, Susan "Pocahontas"
Eliot, George "The Mill on the Floss"
Franken, Rose "The Claudia Novels"
Gilbreth, Frank + Gilbreth Carey, Elizabeth "Cheaper by the Dozen"
Hawthorne, Nathaniel "Twice Told Tales"
MacDonald, Betty "The Egg and I"
Mitchell, Margaret "Gone With the Wind"
Montgomeray, Lucy Maud "Anne of Green Gables"
Saunders, Margaret Marshall "Beautiful Joe"
Sewell, Anna "Black Beauty"
Sheldon, Charles "In His Steps"
Steinbeck, John "The Grapes of Wrath"
Stone, Irving "Lust for Life"
Stratton-Porter, Gene "Freckles"
Winsor, Kathleen "Forever Amber"
Wolfe, Thomas "The Web and the Rock"

Book Quotes of the Week

"The whole word opened to me when I learned to read." Mary McLeod Bethune

"I opened a book and in I strode. Now nobody can find me." Julia Donaldson

"As a reader, I don't feel a story has an obligation to make me happy. I want stories to show me a bigger world than the one I know." John Green

"Some books you read. Some books you enjoy. But some books just swallow you up, Heart and Soul." Joanne Harris

"We become the books we read." Matthew Kelly

Find more book quotes here.

Dahl, Roald "The Best of Roald Dahl"

Dahl, Roald "The Best of Roald Dahl" - 1978

Before I knew that Roald Dahl was a children's writer, I knew him by his very "dark humour" short stories. They were published in Germany under the title "Kiss Kiss" and they made a few into a television series.

I have never been a huge fan of short stories but I absolutely loved these. My favourites would be "Lamb to the Slaughter" and "Parson's Pleasure". They are both hilarious!

If you are looking for some short stories, some in between reading, something funny that will make you laugh no matter what, this is the book for you.

These are all the titles included in this collection:
1. Madame Rosette
2. Man from the South
3. The Sound Machine
4. Taste
5. Dip in the Pool
6. Skin
7. Edward the Conqueror
8. Lamb to Slauhgter
9. Galloping Foxley
10. The Way Up to Heaven
11. Parson's Pleasure
12. The Landlady
13. William and Mary
14. Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat
15. Royal Jelly
16. Georgy Porgy
17. Genesis and Catastrophe
18. Pig
19. The Visitor
20. Claud's Dog
21. The Great Switcheroo
22. The Boy Who Talked with Animals
23. The Hitchhiker
24. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
25. The Bookseller

See more comments on my ThrowbackThursday post in 2025.

From the back cover:

"Twenty wickedly anarchic tales from the master of the unpredictable, chosen from his bestsellers Over to You, Someone Like You, Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch. Stylish, outrageous and haunting, they explore the sinister side of the human psyche with unexpected outcomes.

There's the wife who serves up a murderous new dish to her husband, the gambler who collects little fingers from losers, the sound machine that can hear the grass scream and the night-time seduction that has macabre consequences, to name a few."

I have also read "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" by this author which is, of course, a children's book.