Dewey's Read-a-thon: Hour 4

Progress: None.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.

But I have an excuse!  I spent the hour working on my R.I.P. Deal Me In blog post for the week.  So it was still spent in books and writing about reading and books.  So it's all good!

I'm going to try to spend much of the fifth hour getting back into my book and hopefully finishing it before noon.  We'll see!

R.I.P. Deal Me In Lite: Stories by Oscar Wilde and Robert Philips

It's Week 7 of the R.I.P. version of Deal Me In Lite, and this week the synchronicity machine broke down -- I couldn't find a single similarity between the two stories I read.  Except: they're both good.

I drew the three and Queen of spades from my "Tragic Royalty" deck:

The Queen looks pretty evil, doesn't she?  That's because she IS.

(In the background you can see part of my short story collection shelf.  So many stories to read!  I'm already gearing up for next year's Deal Me In.)

The first story this week is "The Canterville Ghost," by Oscar Wilde.  I was familiar with Wilde's works such as "The Importance of Being Earnest" and "The Picture of Dorian Gray," but not so much with anything else.  This is a longish short story, but highly entertaining and pretty humorous as well. 

The story opens as the Otis family, an American family with typical American brashness (in the eyes of Wilde, at least), buys Canterville Chase, an old English estate complete with furnishings, land, and a resident ghost.  The family, being a modern American family, pooh-poohs the idea of a ghost, despite all the warnings to the contrary.  Their first encounter with the supernatural consists of a mysterious blood stain on the floor of the sitting-room which has never been able to be removed.  One of the family members whips out a tube of Pinkerton's Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent, and promptly makes the stain disappear, to the consternation of the housekeeper.  And this sort of becomes the theme to the story.  There IS a ghost, and he tries his best to scare the family and make them believe in him -- and they DO eventually believe in him, but after a fashion: they begin to play tricks on him and try to thwart his every effort at haunting.  It's a truly amusing story (although I think Wilde goes on a little too long with the gag), and it eventually winds up to an interesting and satisfying conclusion.

The second story this week was "A Teacher's Rewards" by Robert Philips.  Old Miss Scofield, a retired schoolteacher, gets a visit from a former student, Raybe Simpson.  She doesn't remember him at first, although he certainly remembers her.  And unfortunately, she remembers him too... at the end, when it's too late.  This story is an interesting game of cat and mouse on the part of the author, where he leaks out one little detail after another, all of the details adding up to a more and more unsettling story.  As it turns out, Raybe is fresh out of prison, and while he was locked up, he got to wondering how he ended up there.  He decided it was his mistreatment as a child in Miss Scofield's class, from her and his classmates, so he has come to visit her and settle up some old scores.  This is an excellent story with a type of horror that gradually creeps up on the reader and produces a good old-fashioned shudder at the end.

Dewey's Read-a-thon: Hour 3

Progress: I'm on page 177 of All Hallows' Eve.  Really enjoying this book.  I forgot to mention in my last post that all the stories take place on Halloween.  I'm thinking I may break this book back out on Halloween night in case I want a little atmospheric reading.

So far, my favorite story in the collection has been "Pretending."  It's one of those stories where the protagonist (and the reader) is constantly kept off-guard, wondering what's real and what's not.  In the end, the pretenders are NOT what the reader has been assuming they are all along... because they're something MUCH WORSE.  A good, shivery story.

Dewey's Read-a-thon: Hour 2

Progress: Now on page 113 of All Hallows' Eve.  Still enjoying it -- these stories have quite a few murderous ghosts, which is a kind of interesting twist.  It's a YA book so all the protagonists are teenagers, but I don't mind that too much.

I made a little less progress this hour because I had to stop and eat breakfast.  At the breakfast table.  Breakfast that my sweet wife had made for me.  So the smart man stops his reading and goes to eat.

In the next hour, I might take a break from the short stories and start on the Neil Gaiman.  I love short stories, but sometimes I find it hard to read a bunch of them in a row -- the continuous jolt with changing characters and plots is a little irritating.  But so far, overall, I am enjoying my first Dewey's read-a-thon!

Dewey's Read-a-thon: Hour 1

Progress: I've read 60 pages of All Hallows' Eve.  The stories are quick reads, as I anticipated, and they are super creepy.

Second cup of coffee now.  All is right with the world.

Dewey's Read-a-thon: Opening Meme

It's 7 AM Central time, so here we go!  I have a trusty cup of coffee at my side (the brain simply doesn't do ANYTHING without coffee at this time of day), a comfy chair, and a book.  First up: All Hallows' Eve by Vivian Vande Velde.  I'm hoping it's a quick read -- we'll see.

So here's the opening meme:

1. What fine part of the world are you reading from today?
South Mississippi, just outside of Hattiesburg

2. Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to?
The Ocean at the End of the Lane -- everybody RAVES about this book, so I might hate it.  (ha) But I want to read it!

3. Which snack are you most looking forward to?
I didn't really lay in any snacks for this, but I'm sure there will be some.  There's always some snacks when I'm reading, somehow....

4. Tell us a little something about yourself!
I have recently been getting back into paper books (rather obsessively, as is my fashion), after quite a long time of preferring nothing but ebooks.  But now I am finding a pleasant balance between the two.

5. If you participated in the last read-a-thon, what’s one thing you’ll do different today? If this is your first read-a-thon, what are you most looking forward to?
First Dewey's Readathon here, so I am a blank slate.  I think I am most looking forward to just the immersion in reading and finishing my two books in 24 hours, something I have never done.

"The Man Who Was Almost A Man" by Richard Wright

Deal Me In Lite, Week 16: "The Man Who Was Almost A Man" by Richard Wright

The seven of diamonds this week sends us down South (again) to a writer from my home state of Mississippi: Richard Wright.

   

I wrote about Wright a few days ago when I told the tale of my trip to Natchez.  Wright is, arguably, one of the most famous of many famous writers who called Mississippi home for even a short time.  And he is remembered in countless ways throughout the state.  Here, in south Mississippi, we have a wonderful public library in Hattiesburg, and outside is an "Authors' Walk," with plaques commemorating the state's most famous writers.  I went to the library today, just because, and as I walked down the sidewalk, who should I encounter but Mr. Wright!  Or at least, his plaque:

And yet, for as long as I have lived in Mississippi, I have never read any of Wright's work.  Until this week.  Go figure.

As this week's story opens, Dave, a teenaged black boy, is headed to the general store to look into buying a gun out of the Sears Roebuck catalog.  He thinks he needs a gun so the other field hands will treat him more like he deserves, more like a man.

OK, so is it just me, or does this immediately put one in mind of Chekhov's famous maxim, which goes something like this:

"If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there."

Well, Wright eventually puts a gun in Dave's hands, but he gets it in a rather roundabout way.  Dave works on a farm, and all of his wages go directly to his mother.  So he has to beg his mother for two dollars to buy a second-hand gun, and the only reason she lets him have the money is that she plans for Dave's father to have the gun, I suppose for safekeeping until Dave is deemed old enough to handle it.  However, Dave hides the gun and tries to figure out a time and a place to fire it, although he is not sure he even knows how to shoot it, this being the first gun he has ever handled.

Right about now, while I was reading this story, my stomach began tying itself up in knots because I just knew this was going to end badly.  And it did, of course, with Dave taking the gun out with him in the field early the next morning.  He decides to try firing the gun, and accidentally shoots and kills the mule he is using to plow the field.  Ironically, the very act Dave thought would prove he was finally a man, ends up confirming in everyone's mind that he is still a dumb little kid who can't be trusted with something like a gun.

There's more to the story than this brief synopsis, of course, but I don't want to ruin it for you.  I liked this story a lot, but one thing that made it harder to read was the dialect that Wright used for the black characters' dialogue.  Dialect of any kind is notoriously hard to read.  However, this is really a minor quibble for a very interesting story.