2018 – DonaldJClaxton.com | The Timberlander

War and Peace–A Profound Novel and Book Review, 2018

by Donald J. Claxton | Dec 26, 2018 | Book Reviews from My Book List

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy–Add to my reading list and book reviews

My daughters gave me a copy of the 1,358-page version of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace for my birthday in early December. I began reading it on Dec. 7 and finished seventeen days later on Christmas Eve. (Note the previous link to Amazon is an affiliate link where if you make a purchase, I may receive minimal compensation at no additional cost to you.)

Considered the best novel ever written, I shall not ever disagree with this assessment. (You may find additional books to read on my Book List Page.)

War and Peace is the most profound book I have read

War and Peace is the most profound book I have read in dealing with the human condition and with Tolstoy’s discontent and outright contempt for the oversimplification of journalists and historians.

In fact, it was these parameters that he sought to overcome in writing this book. In his research and own experiences in battle, he saw that far too much was eliminated in the reporting and recording of journalism and history for them to be even close to accurate, so he set about to write this book, which he did not consider to be a novel–for it does not really have much of a beginning, middle or end–in an effort to tell the fullest story as possible about the Napoleonic wars.

The beauty in this book is in the depth of the writing, and yet the simplicity of it as well. As daunting as it may seem to pick up a 14-hundred-page book, it flows like water flowing from a stream or a tap in your kitchen. And while there are in fact about one hundred characters within the work, once you lock on to Pierre, Natasha, and Prince Andrey, all the rest of them essentially revolve around these three and then crisscross because these three are intertwined with each other. Pierre and Andrey are best friends.

Pierre has known Natasha since she was little. Andrey becomes engaged to Natasha, whom she in part knows through Pierre. Add in support characters around those three and you have the other hundred or so, including Napoleon and Russia’s Emperor Alexander I.

The beauty of War and Peace

There are descriptions of great battles from 1807-1812 in War and Peace. There are love stories. There are stories of hardship and strife. There are stories of death and suffering. There are explanations about how historians got things way wrong. There are glimpses into the spectacle of Russian high society and its aristocracy. There is even a duel for honor. All are explained and told with the simplicity noted above so one who is reading feels immersed in the scene and empathetic to the characters looming large.

My Similarities with Count Pierre Bezukhov

Pierre Bezukhov, the main protagonist of the work, and I seem to share several life experiences. Nasty marriages leave us in emotional and financial tatters not necessarily our own fault. We share a longing to help others no matter the cost or consequence to our own selves. And we also savor a quest for knowledge, to right our own wrongs, and to leave the world a better place.

Pierre is a trusting soul and gets abused for being one by many. The question one must experience is whether he will survive to the end and not finish in the state in which he began.

Last week I saw my pain doctor. I’m down 26 pounds now since October, largely due to meds, but I’m also trying. As I was leaving, he said when he was younger, after one of his first heartbreaks, someone told him that the most important thing in life isn’t money or property or anything of that like.

“The most important thing in life is your health,” he said. “If you have your health, all those other things can get taken care of.”

Ways Pierre changes throughout the story

That isn’t necessarily how Pierre lives his life, but as the war turns in 1812 and the French are retreating from Moscow, Pierre has epiphanies about life and living and he becomes a new man.

Two hundred years after the events of War and Peace, I am learning as well, after so many hardships, that the self-inflicted wounds and experiences, as well as those done by others, while they affect me in ways that may never cease, I have a choice. I can permit them to rule me, or I can take control, disavow them, and ensure they do not repeat themselves. For too long I abdicated power over me to others, either because they abused my vulnerabilities, maliciously acted, or I was too worn down to stop them. Even if those events now are memories.

No mas!

Get behind me, Satan!

There are still those out to get me, those who think they can ruin me. I think that boat sailed long ago. The only way for me to go at this point in life is up, so knock yourself out trying if you feel so low as to try. You’re wasting your time.

I have recommitted myself to God and living every day of the rest of my life working to his glory and toward living healthier.

Despite my continued back and leg pain, Crohn’s, and whatever else is going on inside me, I’m still fighting. Yes, I go to Medical City of Dallas nearly five days a week it seems for one doctor’s visit or another, but I am doing so to get myself well. To find the cures to what ails me.

Why do I read so many novels?

I read to enrich my mind.

I finished my goal of reading 101 fiction novels a few years ago.

Now it is time to start revising my own novel writing again. But only now is this a worthy effort, armed with more strength, more knowledge, and more skill.

Fear of Moving On; Fear of Moving Out

Since 2018-2019 when I invested so much study into Russian Literature and novel reading as well, my willpower toward overcoming the Fear of Moving On and the Fear of Moving Out has increased substantially. (Check out my post about this on Medium.com.)

It is time to take back the life that has been stolen from me by others for whatever reason, to give back what is owed, and to live out the remainder of my life on firmer footing and in the best health I can achieve.

Sure, others will continue to block my pathway.

My conclusion is this pattern is part of the human experience.

These days I find myself more equipped than I was several years ago; when so much of my world fell apart.

One of the greatest things I learned from Pierre in War and Peace is that while one is still living, there remains the chance to keep fighting for what is right, for what is best, and for the good of the world.

Such encouragement and objectives are what I intend to keep endeavoring toward.

My Reading Goal of 101 Novels

by Donald J. Claxton | Dec 6, 2018 | Book Reviews from My Book List, Donald J Claxton, Novel Writing

Heather Sellers’ 2007 writers’ guide Chapter After Chapter encourages anyone interested in becoming a better writer to read 101 Fiction Novels.

Heather Sellers’ Chapter After Chapter encourages writers to read at least 101 novels.

In December 2016, I set out to do just that, having suffered an injury that was keeping me from working like most, one that continues to plague me even today.

Other complications and illnesses have been added since, making working and concentrating even harder, but thankfully, I’ve been able to keep reading, and on Nov. 29th, I put down Javier Marías’ The Infatuations, book number 101, satisfied and fulfilled in a way I could not have imagined two years before.

You see, while I have been physically disabled the past two and a half years, I have been able to mentally travel around the world and through time through the power of fiction.

I’ve made a study of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, the three geniuses edited and managed by Maxwell Perkins. Through them I’ve been bullfighting in Spain in the 1930s, been all over Italy and Europe during World War I, and Paris afterward.

Then through various authors I’ve been in Paris as the Germans invaded it during World War II, and in many ways I felt what it must have been like, to have gone from such heydays after World War I with the Lost Generation to the starkness of the Nazi invasions, their lists, the killings.

But I’ve also been to Australia for a road race around the continent in the 1950s with Peter Carey in his book A Long Way From Home, and returned to experience the power of Big Little Lies with Liane Moriarty; experienced The Plague in Africa via Albert Camus, a non-existent war in Africa during Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, and been to South America for a hostage situation via Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. (I’ll read anything now written by Ann Patchett–Commonwealth was so good, too.)

I have been to Tennessee and South Carolina to figure out the mystery of the woman who stole river children in the 1900s for adoption in Lisa Wingate’s Before We Were Yours. (Lisa is under the impression US senators ride around in limousines all the time. Reporters should know better.)

My thinking about trees was forever changed by Richard Powers’ The Overstory, one of the most incredible books I’ve ever read. To think about living in the canopy of a redwood in Oregon for nine months, 100 feet off the ground. Something I’d never thought of, but might consider, given the chance and with better health. A wonderful, wonderful book that haunts me now whenever I see someone cutting down a tree because I know how long it takes for a tree to grow, the history behind it and how we snuff out a tree with a chainsaw and don’t give it a moment of thought.

Gosh, I’ve forgotten how many times I’ve been to England. Ian McEwan’s Atonement. What a great story about the power of love. Don’t forget to also read his On Chesil Beach. If you want to read some of the first murder mystery genre setting books, don’t forget John Fowles’ The Collector, who kidnaps a woman he fancies and drags her off to live in his flat north of London. The Lodger is another prolific book that brilliantly explores the murders surrounding the mystery of Jack the Ripper. Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje was also one of my favorites from my journey.

Then there are the books about the States. The Summer that Melted Everything by Tiffany McDaniel remains a favorite, a story about a boy who shows up in an Ohio town the summer of 1984 claiming to be answering an ad in the local paper calling on the Devil to present himself. Steven King’s The Outsider was something new for me. It wasn’t scary, but definitely a different read. Tommy Oranges’ There There shed new light on the Native American culture I did not know about. A.J. Finn and The Woman in the Window, Ottessa Moshfegh and Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, as well as Lauren Weissberger’s When Life Gives You Lululemons all gave me new perspectives about the modern woman.

Celeste Ng took me back to Ohio in Little Fires Everywhere, a very good book, and Rachel Kushner seemed to have much the same thematic in The Flamethrowers—Fac Ut Ardeat (made to burn); perhaps that theme was also being explored in The Summer that Melted Everything as well. Even Stephen King’s The Outsider.

Thomas Wolfe intrigued me for days with his You Can’t Go Home Again. The language and writing is beautiful.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell. Funny, at times. But with an important message nonetheless.

Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin was strange to me at first, but I came to enjoy the writing once I got my bearings. The initial passages about the blind assassin himself, and the girl, were just strange, and I’ve found I’m not much for reading sci fi or dystopian nonsense.

I also flat out skip sections in books about explicit gay sex. Chloe Benjamin, Adam Haslett, take note. Your books were good, but I skipped large portions of The Immortalists and Imagine Me Gone and don’t think I missed anything, which means, those sections could have been left out (note to authors, agents and publishers). Those sections didn’t add anything. And in the case of Andrew Sean Greer’s book Less, once I learned that’s what it was, I’d actually ordered it from Amazon, I cancelled the order. I have no desire to read anything like that. Period.

I’ve read my share of spy novels: Daniel Silva’s The Other Woman, T. Jefferson Parker’s Swift Vengeance, Karin Slaughter’s Pieces of Her, and the over-hyped ridiculous Bill Clinton/James Patterson The President is Missing.

In Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone I spent time in Washington state and Oregon, and then the wilds of Alaska. This was not a great book by any means, but people recommended I read Hannah’s The Nightingale and I honestly believe it is the best book I’ve ever read. Goodreads has it rated at a 4.65 or something close and that seems to be the highest rating I could find. I highly recommend this book above all the rest. It is the one I described above as helping me understand what it must have been like when the Nazi’s invaded France in World War II. Maybe you should read some of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and their antics in Paris beforehand to learn about how gay and charming the city was 10 years before, that way you may get the full impact.

WHAT’S NEXT?

I’m going to start revising my second novel once again, with new knowledge.

And I’m going to keep writing.

It’s my 53rd birthday today and I’m getting a copy of War and Peace. I’m planning to also read Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov as a study in the next few weeks. I also need to finish Anna Karenina. The movie version is good, but not good enough.

I also have asked my girls for a series of books that PBS and my local book store, Interabang Books put together this summer–100 supposed best loved novels–that I intend to read. Some of them I don’t think belong on the list and won’t read, but a good many I will. Some I already have and just have never read.

The goal in all of this is to make me a better writer, but what it’s also doing is making me a better person. Opening my mind and horizons. Making me think and relaxing my soul. My body is not in a condition to do what it once was able. I’ve been doing all I can the past two and a half years to get help from doctors to get it fixed. In the meantime, I’ve been getting my heart, mind, soul and writing ready for when I am free to walk normally in the world again.

Two years later, that’s the greatest gift I can give myself.

When Life Gives You Lululemons, to Me is 1 Big ‘Eh’

by Donald J. Claxton | Oct 1, 2018 | Book Reviews from My Book List
When Life Gives You Lululemons–Eh….

When Life Gives You Lululemons

Reading Lauren Weisberger’s When Life Gives You Lululemons is out of character for me. Like picking up Cosmopolitan magazine and reading cover-to-cover. (This is an affiliate link to Amazon. If you make a purchase of the book I may earn a small commission for the sale at no additional expense to you.

(Check out other books to read on the Donald J. Claxton | The Timberlander Book List Page.)

Yet several weeks ago it was big on the New York Times Bestseller Hardcover List and it spent several weeks there.

In my quest to become a better reader, I bought it, read it, and studied the novel in hopes of finding ways to make myself a better writer.

US Senators don’t ride around in limousines all the time.

Donald J. Claxton | The Timberlander giving myself an emoji facepalm.

To her credit, Weisberger at least knows that U.S. senators don’t ride around in limousines all the time.

Someone needs to share that with Lisa Wingate, who errantly seems to think in Before We Were Yours in modern-day South Carolina.

Weisberger’s plot hinges on a senator being in cahoots with a local police department being able to frame his wife with DUI on a holiday.

That, and a Hollywood-based spin doctor being able to get her out of trouble after finding the senator’s wife and the spin doctor have a mutual friend in the suburbs of Connecticut.

So the story winds around the three women who learn new things about themselves.

The plot is mostly about the spin doctor who learns that she’s not a washed-up spin doctor.

She gives herself relevance and establishes that there is more to life than helping the country’s elite lie their way out of their sick problems.

At the end of the book….

So much so that at the end of the book … well, I don’t do spoilers, you’ll have to read it for yourself.

Conclusion about When Life Gives You Lululemons

When I read books I usually actively underline passages that I might like to come back to or find insightful about the human experience. I didn’t underline anything in this book.

This is/was not my genre and it does have a happily-ever-after ending.

How nice.

But if you want to read anything that’s based upon reality or anything that will advance the cause of humankind, this is not the book.

And that’s probably the deal with writing it.

Write, edit, polish, publish, splash, and then in a few weeks Barnes and Noble and the remaining physical bookstores left on the planet are selling this for 1/4 of what it originally sold for.

It’s that kind of a non-sense kind of book.

The Nightingale: My review of Kristin Hannah’s No. 1, Most Excellent Book

by Donald J. Claxton | Aug 22, 2018 | Book Reviews from My Book List
The Nightingale by Kristin Hanna is in the top tier of books I’ve ever read.

Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale is one of the best books I have ever read. On Goodreads, it scores 4.55 out of 5. There are few books out there with a cumulative score that high.

I read The Nightingale having recently read Hannah’s latest bestseller, The Great Alone. A book I reviewed and said there were several issues I had with it.

This was not the case with The Nightingale; The Nightingale is the better of the two books. There almost is no comparison.

Set in World War II France, the story involves two sisters who are at odds with each other following the death of their mother and subsequent abandonment of their father. As France is invaded by the Germans, the older sister, Vianne, remains home with their daughter, Sophie, and is compelled to billet German officers. The younger sister, Isabelle, goes from the country home to Paris to join their father, who is said to be working for the German high command. This disgusts the younger daughter who has decided she is going to resist the offensive Germans. The story then evolves into an account of what each of the three do to resist the foreign invaders in their own ways.

Quotes from the Book

In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are. pg 1

Generally, Madame, the failure of a student to learn is the failure of the teacher to teach. pg 21

Because of them I know now what matters, and it is not what I have lost. It is my memories. Wounds heal. Love lasts. We remain. pg 438

This was not a book I spent a lot of time underlining for great phrases or prophetic insights. But the writing is excellent and the story compelling.

Modern v. Old Frame

This story uses a modern-day frame to leap back into the old. Right up until the end, Hannah seeks to make it unclear who the narrator of the story is–which of the two sisters. She also begins the story in Oregon, in 1995, and then retreats to August 1939. This works. It helps make it so she can hide the identity of the narrator until the end, and then pull the survivors out of the past into the present. And she does it quite well.

Paris

I have never been to Paris, perhaps one day. But what I found the most troubling in my mind was the chronological timeline. What I mean to say is that I have been reading a lot about Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the others of the Lost Generation and their time in Paris–all BEFORE World War II, in the 1920s and early 1930s. I have that imagery well planted in the visual descriptions of my mind. Given all that, it is hard then to supplant those thoughts with what happens in this book, what happened in real life, to Paris, with the invasion of the Nazis.

Reading The Nightingale truly played tricks with my mind, as in, how could this possibly have happened?!

I think that is the magic and power of reading. Reading history, even if it is fiction.

This makes me all the more understanding of what life must have been like for Parisians when the German tanks came rolling in. And then when the Germans began rounding up non-French-born Jews and sending them off.

The way I have done my reading, a totally random act, reading the Hemingway and Fitzgerald stories and accounts of 1920s Paris and then contrasting that with a book like The Nightingale really created a stark amplification for me personally. I am not sure I would have received the same impact had I read The Nightingale first.

Conclusion

I encourage you to read this wonderful book. The writing is excellent.

The drama and story are superb and realistic.

There weren’t any moments when I jumped out of the story and said to myself, “Come on….”

I was under Ms. Hannah’s spell from page one until it ended.

And several days after having read it, I still am and probably will be for a long time to come.

There There by Tommy Orange–Book Review

by Donald J. Claxton | Aug 21, 2018 | Book Reviews from My Book List

There There by Tommy Orange.

There There by Tommy Orange is one of those profound books that only come along once in a long while.

This is a book that should be considered for a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize.

It offers such dramatic insight into the human soul the likes I’ve read in but a few works ever in my life.

There There by Tommy Orange is one of the most profound books I’ve ever read.

The There There Story.

The story itself tracks several Native American characters as they eventually make their way through life to rendezvous at a pow-wow in Oakland, California in modern times.

They’re off the reservation, urban Indians, struggling with their past, struggling with their present and futures all rolled into one.

Tommy Orange provides a rich, real, and fulfilling story.

The harsh life of Native American history.

For all of us, life often becomes harsh.

There There provides insight into the lives most would never know exist.

This book opened my eyes to the struggles characterized in Orange’s writing.

The beauty in this novel lies in how the tapestry of words applies to more than the Native American soul.

There There rips away the scab covering the soul in us all.

Henceforth think, of Tommy Orange; author of a monumental great American novel.

Quotes from There There by Tommy Orange.

We stayed because the city sounds like a war, and you can’t leave a war once you’ve been, you can only keep it at bay–which is easier when you can see and hear it near you, the fast metal, that constant firing around you, cars up and down the streets and freeways like bullets. pg 9

…nothing is original, everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing. Everything is new and doomed. pg 11

“We don’t have time, Nephew, time has us. It holds us in its mouth like an owl holds a field mouse. We shiver. We struggle. for release, and then it pecks out our eyes and intestines for sustenance and we die the death of field mice.” pg 36

No There There anymore.

…the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone there was no there there anymore.” pg 38-9

But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there. pg 39

‘Stories and stories about stories.’

She told me the world was made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories. pg 58

‘…A mean curveball thrown by … a steroid-fueled kid pitcher.’

Even the old people in charge, they’re acting like kids. There’s no more scope, no vision, no depth. We want it now and we want it new. This world is a mean curveball thrown by an overly excited, steroid-fueled kid pitcher, who has no more cares about the integrity of the game than he does about the Costa Ricans who painstakingly stitch the balls together by hand. pg 82-3

Being bipolar is like having an axe to grind with an ax you need to split the wood to keep you warm in a cold dark forest you only might eventually realize you’ll never make your way out of. pg 88

‘You can’t sell life is okay when it’s not.’

You can’t sell life is okay when it’s not. pg 98

When we see that the story is the way we live our lives, only then can we start to change, a day at a time. pg 112

Jacquie can’t remember a day going by when at some point she hadn’t wished she could burn her life down. pg 152

The essence of secrets and shame.

Secrets lie through omission just like shame lies through secrecy. pg 165

The poor dog was probably just trying to spread the weight of its own abuse. pg 170

To get injured and not recover is a sign of weakness. pg 214

Most addictions aren’t premeditated. You slept better. Drinking felt good. But mostly, if there was any real reason you could pinpoint, it was because of your skin. pg 217

Speaking the broken tongue of angels and demons.

Maybe we’ve all been speaking the broken tongue of angels and demons too long to know that that’s what we are, who we are, what we’re speaking. Maybe we don’t ever die but change, always in the State without hardly ever even knowing that we’re in it. pg 224

Places Featured in There There by Tommy Orange.

Oakland, CA, USA
Oklahoma City, OK, USA
Phoenix, AZ, USA

« Older Entries

Search Here

Search for:

Recent Posts

Mastering Off-Grid Living: The Timberlander’s 2023 Guide

Fall Foliage in UP Michigan September 2023: Some Color

Essential Safety Tips for Hungry Black Bears 2023

Starting Your Off-Grid Journey 2023? Some Essential Advice

8 Great Reasons to Build Rex Krueger’s Minimum Timber Bench

Categories
Categories

War and Peace–A Profound Novel and Book Review, 2018

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy–Add to my reading list and book reviews

War and Peace is the most profound book I have read

The beauty of War and Peace

My Similarities with Count Pierre Bezukhov

Ways Pierre changes throughout the story

Get behind me, Satan!

Why do I read so many novels?

Fear of Moving On; Fear of Moving Out

My Reading Goal of 101 Novels

WHAT’S NEXT?

When Life Gives You Lululemons, to Me is 1 Big ‘Eh’

When Life Gives You Lululemons–Eh….

US Senators don’t ride around in limousines all the time.

At the end of the book….

Conclusion about When Life Gives You Lululemons

The Nightingale: My review of Kristin Hannah’s No. 1, Most Excellent Book

The Nightingale by Kristin Hanna is in the top tier of books I’ve ever read.

Quotes from the Book

Modern v. Old Frame

Paris

Conclusion

There There by Tommy Orange–Book Review

There There by Tommy Orange.

The There There Story.

The harsh life of Native American history.

Quotes from There There by Tommy Orange.

No There There anymore.

‘Stories and stories about stories.’

‘…A mean curveball thrown by … a steroid-fueled kid pitcher.’

‘You can’t sell life is okay when it’s not.’

The essence of secrets and shame.

Speaking the broken tongue of angels and demons.

Places Featured in There There by Tommy Orange.

Search Here

Recent Posts

Categories