The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells

Things I knew about this book going in:
1) I should have read it a long time ago.
2) Time travel.
3) Something about a morlock.

Strangely, there's not actually much more to the story than that! There is, obviously, a time machine, and a Time Traveller, as he is called. And it's a frame story, so there's a narrator who has dinner with the Time Traveller and hears his stories and then recounts them to us, which is always a good time. And so through our narrator we learn about how time travel theoretically works (just moving really really fast through time, basically) and then later how the Time Traveller is now called Late for Dinner and also managed to travel to the year 802701. That is a big number, dudes.

In the future there are some perfect-ish people who are also totes lazy and boring, and also some terrifying people-ish creatures, the aforementioned Morlocks, who are industrious enough to steal Mr. for Dinner's time machine. Social commentary ensues, Mr. for Dinner gets his time machine back, he goes home, no one believes him, and then he and his machine disappear. The end!

I'm sure that when this book came out in 1895, people were like, holy moly this Herbert fellow is a genius and also possibly insane! But unfortunately here in 2011, I've read one or two books that involve time travel and so I already had that part down and the rest of the book had to carry itself, which it didn't do terribly well. So, as a novella experience, not so great.

But I totally enjoyed the book on its historical merits of introducing time travel (I mean, travelling really fast through time is a genius idea) and the intriguing future that Wells devises. It's not exactly a dystopian future, since there's no real sense of utopia, but it's obviously not the future to which Victorian gentlemen aspired and those Morlocks are pretty creepy. I also like the Time Traveller's nods toward literary convention — he mentions once that in a novel the author could tell you all the intricacies of society, but he was a little too busy experiencing the world, thanks, and while sometimes that can be really annoying, Wells does it just fine.

My only problem with the story is that I'm pretty sure that the Time Traveller should have gotten his time machine stuck somewhere along his travels, considering his explanation of how it works, but I suppose I can forgive Mr. Wells, just this once.

Recommendation: For people who like to know where their contemporary literature came from, also future time travellers (or past time travellers?).

Rating: 7/10

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

Ohhhhhh, Pride and Prejudice. This is a book that many of my trusted friends have been obsessed with for many many years, and which I have avoided like the plague because all I ever hear about it is how sexy Colin Firth is. Which, I mean, he totally is, that's not in question, but I wasn't too keen on a book whose primary lure is the attractiveness of an actor. I knew there was more to it, but I just wasn't that interested.

But then I found it for cheaps at Mac's Backs, and I told myself I was going to sit down and finally read it. And I did. Last January. Side note: I started trying to read this last January. I got married four months before that. I have been attempting to finish this book for most of my marriage. That's intense.

And so I read through about half the book over the course of six months, then decided I couldn't remember most of it and started over, and then I read more than half the book in a month but got utterly sick of it right around the point when Darcy gives Elizabeth the letter, and so I moved on to more delightful pursuits. Then this February I downloaded the Kindle app for my phone and tried P&P as an e-book, but I couldn't be arsed to load it up to read. So THEN I found it for the OverDrive app for my phone as an audiobook, and I forced myself to listen to it last week.

It turns out that Pride and Prejudice is quite good.

I had the same troubles with the audiobook that I did with the print version, namely that if Mrs. Bennett and Mr. Collins wanted to run off and be batshit crazy together I don't think anyone could complain, and maybe we could send Lady de Bourgh over to judge them. I absolutely hated these characters, but of course I imagine I'm not supposed to like them. I also, having gotten to Darcy's letter, was not a fan of The Darcy, which is supposed to be the draw, right, and I could not imagine how Austen was going to make Darcy sympathetic in a couple hundred more pages.

And yet, she did. I am definitely more in the Jane and Bingley camp, but by the end of the book I was like, "That Darcy isn't so terrible after all, is he? I do so hope that those two crazy kids work it out." Darn you Jane Austen!

Aside from the 'shipping, I was actually most interested in the culture of Longbourn and environs, as I have not read too deeply in or about this time period. I was intrigued by the particulars of politeness and society and how incredibly scandalous pretty much every little thing seemed to be. And with the characters, I loved how Austen was able to make me hate the sympathetic characters and like the antagonists (with the notable exception of Lady de Bourgh, who can go jump off a cliff if she pleases) in their turn.

Verdict: I need to read some more Austen. I think I might go after Emma and see if Mr. Knightley is as enchanting as Paul Rudd.

Recommendation: Yeeeeah, you should probably read this. I wouldn't quite recommend the audiobook version I listened to, but there are probably better ones out there.

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge, TBR Challenge)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

The moral of this story: Don't be friends with Tom Sawyer. Just, really. Don't. I haven't even read his book, and maybe I won't. What a crazy person.

I'm not sure how I managed to avoid reading... any Mark Twain at all during my school years. It was never assigned, and I was too busy reading various other things, I guess. And after listening to it now, I can tell you I would never have made it through this book even if it were assigned — straight to SparkNotes I would have gone.

This is largely because of the dialect business, which is hard enough to understand as spoken to you via a lovely audiobook narrator, and which, upon opening up my paperback copy of the book, is a little overwhelming in print. It is also because of the distinct lack of plot, which I am getting more accepting of in my old age but would have bored me to tears in high school.

So I cannot really tell you what this book is about, if you haven't already had the pleasure of reading it yourself, except that there's a kid and he fakes his death and goes off down the Mississippi with a runaway slave. And while he's doing it, some seriously nutty stuff happens.

But I can tell you that I quite appreciated the book, which I felt portrayed Huckleberry Finn as a very realistic kid, even if his circumstances were not realistic at all. He faced tough decisions that he reasoned his way through as best he could, and went against some of his greatest instincts in doing so. I can definitely get behind that.

And of course, there's been that whole thing recently about the use of the word "nigger," which is in fact quite prolific throughout the book. I personally think its use is quite valid, and that "slave" would not have quite the same effect of placing this book solidly in the time period and mindset that Twain is writing about. It's obviously not a word I'd like to bring back into fashion, but you can't deny its existence any more than you can deny the fact that Jim was running away from slavery in the first place.

Recommendation: Totally worth a read if you haven't managed it yet; best if read with a sense of Twain's sarcasm.

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge, TBR Challenge)

Dracula, by Bram Stoker (6 May — 6 November)

Wow... I spent six months reading this book! That's gotta be a record. I mean, I'm not like Slowpants McGee over here; see, the book was written as a series of dated letters, so some crazy blogger put up the entries as though they were just posted this year. It was a pretty neat concept, and it was kind of fun to read it in "real time", as it were, but unfortunately I couldn't tell you much about how the book goes because, well, see the first sentence up there. And the fact that I read it in my Google Reader, so the shorter entries didn't stay in my brain much longer than my Dinosaur Comics, which I love and adore but could not repeat to you except in general terms. Sigh.

So. Um. I think I'm going to skip out on reviewing the book proper; but I'll say that I enjoyed reading it and you should, you know, check it out. It's a classic for a reason.

Rating: 7/10

See also:
book-a-rama

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

La Bête Humaine, by Émile Zola (17 April — 26 April)

So, after what seems like forever to me, I have finally finished La Bête Humaine. Hooray!

This book is all about the human beast, which is either the man who murders or the intangible thing which drives him to murder, or both, I'm not sure. But I agree with the quote in the introduction, from The Athenaeum, which says that the book should have been titled Murder. Because oh my goodness.

At first there is no murder to speak of; the book seems like a dry cataloguing of the events in the life of M. and Mme. Roubaud, he an assistant train station-master, she his young and pretty wife. But then a secret of her past is revealed and he decides that murder is the best way to make himself feel better about the whole thing. As one does, I guess. Meanwhile, we meet a young man called Jacques whose aunt is possibly being poisoned by her husband and who himself has a gnawing urge to kill women, though he has not yet. He just wants to, like, any time he sees a woman looking all sexy. Oh dear.

So the first murder happens, and we follow along as the authorities sort of try to figure out what has happened and the killer tries to hide his deed. And it works! Sort of. Except that other things happen and lives start falling apart and then suddenly everyone and his sister wants to kill someone else. Because everyone has a bit of the murderer in himself, whether by cold calculation or a fit of passion.

Although I nearly gave up the book within the first hundred pages, I'm glad I stuck around, as all of the plotting and planning of people all trying to kill each other left me very curious as to who would end up dead in the end. And I kept being surprised! Definitely a good book, but not for light reading at all.

Rating: 7/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge, Orbis Terrarum Challenge: France)

Audiobook Round-up

I got back last night from a week-long camping trip in Alabama, which was awesome. Less awesome is all the internet catching-up I have to do!

Because of the twelve-hour drive, I decided to collect a bunch of audiobooks from the library's fancy-pants online trove of such things. Scott loves them, but I'd never given them a real try. Now I have, and... well. I was right — I can't focus on an audiobook to save my life. So. No ratings (or even decent reviews) for these until I read them proper, but here's the list of things I listened to in the car last week.

Dave Barry's Greatest Hits, by Dave Barry (22 March)
This is a 1988 collection of Barry's columns, which shows in all his talk about Reagan as president! I like Barry, so I enjoyed listening to this hour-long book while I tried to stay awake (we left home at 6am!). Bonus points for having John Ritter as a narrator.

More of Dave Barry's Greatest Hits, by Dave Barry (22 March)
I can't seem to find this listed anywhere but fancy-pants online troves of audiobooks, so this is possibly audiobook-only. Unsure. Anyway, this is the 1996 collection of awesome columns. Still entertaining. Still narrated by John Ritter. Still capable of keeping me awake, if not listening properly.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (28 March — 29 March)
I knew the general idea going in, of course — Dorian Gray has a painting that ages while he stays young. That turns out to be a gross over-simplification of this novel, which deals with heavy themes of morality and ethics and deception. Grey likes his painting at the beginning, but as it ages and the bad things he's done show up in it he comes to loathe it. And his loathing of it has him doing even more bad things that show up in it. And all the while he has an angel-friend telling him how good he is, and a devil-friend spouting off ridiculous (even to him) notions of how the world works. I definitely enjoyed this book, but I will have to go back and read it to pick up on the hour or two I missed of it!

(Support Your Local Library Challenge)