The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. I must have liked this book. I was extremely interested in it, and I found myself wanting to go back and continue reading it when I was not. It is about rich people in the 1920′s, and this book amused me just like Arrested Development and Dirty Sexy Money amused (or is amusing) me. But it is also a sad kind of love story as well, so it is not exactly the same.
The things that left the biggest impression on me are the story and the unique things that the characters said. I just want to mention a few of those things the characters said because they are probably even more noteworthy than the story itself since you can find a melancholy love story anywhere.
1) This story revolved around the introduction of automobiles in the United States. And according to the story, they were not all that reliable. So when they broke down people would yell “Git a hos!”. Yeah, I find that extremely amusing.
2) George, who is the rich dandy home from college, calls everyone a “duck”. Oh rich people, you are so entertaining.
3) George, the same one I just mentioned, says the same thing whenever he is introduced to someone. Someone says, “This is so and so.” George says, “Oh, that’s a funny name.”. He says it no matter what the name is. It’s rather annoying, and it is also rather funny as well.
Middlemarch by George Eliot. This book was long. I felt the relief of a runner after a marathon when I finished this book. It is like War and Peace with no historical chapters. It is all about marriages–good ones and bad ones. Lots of people marry for the wrong reason in this book, and we just read along and see how they play out. In the end there is peace, but you can kind of tell the peace is due to the people adjusting to their good or bad positions. It isn’t exactly a happy ending, in my opinion.
Tags: books, cars, horses, magnificent ambersons, middlemarch, reading
Oh, I felt the same way about Middlemarch — that same sense of *finally* at reaching the end. One of my professors insists it’s the best deployment of omniscience point-of-view in history, though, so I will probably need to read it again soon.