Background: Before the wedding, I was completely stressed (you all know that, I vented here!). So I was reading completely nonstressful material—Nora Roberts, here I come! Those books are easy to read, and always, ALWAYS have happy endings. Which I love. And they were one of my stress relievers—I could go watch people struggle over seemingly irrelevant problems and eventually everyone would be happy and together, evil was vanquished and ta-da! Happy ending. Now that everything is getting back to new normal and I’m not nearly as stressed (house stuff is stressful, but in an entirely different way). Consequently, I’ve been reading heavier stuff. Not that it’s heavy search-your-soul-for-a-new-truth stuff—just heavier than NR heavy. Books that take a bit more concentration to finish and that require some thought to really get it. I recently finished Wuthering Heights (a classic!) and King of the Cats, which is a compilation of cat fairy tales. Now I’m reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, about Hitler’s rise to power and reign.
Wuthering Heights: First of all, let me just say, I hated all the characters in this book. I did not even remotely like a single one of them. But I could not put the book down. I had to know what happened, even though, being a classic tragedy, this was definitely not having a happy ending. I had to see for myself if Heathcliff, Catherine 1, Catherine 2, Linton and all the other annoying people would manage any sort of happiness from the misery they concocted for their own lives. (One of the reasons I hated the characters is that they were all miserable, and it was all a huge misunderstanding! Completely frustrating to read, let me tell you.) And the ending actually turned out to be not as bad as I was expecting—the original main characters had to die to be happy because they were so spiteful they couldn’t be happy together while they were alive so they had to wait until they were dead. The second couple who made you think they would end up in misery together actually turned out ok, because the cruel husband died and the wife fell happily in love with his half-brother (or cousin or whatever…genealogy was a little hard to follow) and they got married and lived happily ever after. Which I guess in a convoluted fashion is a happy-ever-after ending after all.
The King of Cats: I thoroughly enjoyed this one. Partly because I love cats, and partly because it was very interesting to see how different cultures thought of and thereby portrayed cats. Some of the stories presented were precursors of the others and some were ancestors of today’s most famous fairy-tales (Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel were a couple I noticed). If you could wade through the sometimes difficult bard vernacular, it was all in all a very nice read.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: Haven’t finished this book yet, so this review is a little hasty. But even though I know what’s going to happen (duh, leader of the whole WWII thing), that Hitler was one crazy guy! His ideas were absolutely nuts! And people fell for him! Mainly because they didn’t take the time to read what he was writing (he apparently gave ample opportunities for people to see what Germany/the world would be like if he was in charge in books like Mein Kampf) and only listened to what he told them—bald-faced lies! The whole thing (and I’m still in the 1930’s, not even close to the war yet) was, and still is, absolutely amazing! I’m very intrigued to see more of how the whole situation evolved.
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