1759 - The Year Britain Became Master of the World (Frank McLynn, 2004)

I didn’t like this as much as many other items I’ve read. The author picked 1759 as the pivotal year. The book was quite interesting and McLynn clearly knows a lot, but the premise felt forced. He drew some “conclusion” that if 1759 hadn’t turned out the way it did, the colonies may not have made their break in 1776 with who knows what consequences. That is not a very interesting premise. You always can always tweak some historical episode and speculate what might have been. (I always think of Homer and the toaster.)

The guy generates numerous books, many on related topics, and probably recycled some of his material into this one.

It was quite useful seeing the pieces fit together with a single-year focus: North America, West Indies, Europe, India. I’ve never read much about North America in that time period. He described the slaughter following the French/Indian victory at Fort William Henry; James Fenimore Cooper placed the main characters into this scene as part of The Last of the Mohicans.

Probably the most interesting discussion regarded the interactions between Europeans and American Indians – their practices, comparisons to pretty brutal tactics of whites, etc. Also good discussion about the causes for England's successes and corresponding French reverses. It truly was a world war going on.

And I liked the lead-in to each chapter, which discussed what was going in the literary and artistic world. The best feature of the book was that it integrated a bunch of topics that normally are presented separately.

The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton, 1905)

A few months ago I had read a collection of Edith Wharton’s short stories and novellas between 1911 and 1937 (here’s a link to that book). I didn’t know a thing about Edith Wharton (photo to left) and liked the short stories quite a bit. She was a society person that lived in wealth on both sides of the Atlantic; somewhat like Hemingway, she worked an ambulance during WW I. I liked the stories; many dealt with the foibles in the “high society” in which she lived; a few had WW I themes; a few were very imaginative (for example, one was about a castle where murdered dogs came back to take down their oppressor).

So I decided to try a full-length novel, The House of Mirth. I listened to this in the car (10 cassettes, 13.5 hours). Started slowly, but was worth finishing. The heroine, let’s say, is a beautiful but relatively poor woman named Lily Bart; she was orphaned in her teens and lives with her aunt. She has a great touch for hanging out with wealthy society types but blows it when it comes to landing a wealthy husband, gets disinherited, blows it again with the love of her life (a comfortable-but-not-wealthy lawyer), gets ostracized by her erstwhile society buddies, and things go downhill from there. Notwithstanding, I liked it. Amazon posts customer reviews here; a biography on Edith Wharton is here.

I hadn’t realized that a movie was made out of this book in 2000 with some fairly well-known folks. Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame (middle photo) played Ms. Bart; Dan Ackroyd played the slimy Gus Trenner. Having read the book, I’d be interested in seeing the movie. It’s reviewed here.

Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy

I read this novel at the gym in 30-minute sessions on the Stairmaster. So it took a little over two months. And well worth it. In addition to being a fantastic author, Tolstoy is a larger-than-life character in his own right.

I’m not sure how to compare, but many folks seem to think Anna Karenina is Tolstoy’s greatest novel. (It was published between 1875 and 1877, after War and Peace and before he started getting preachy.) He takes 900+ pages going over seven main characters (Anna Karenina and Aleksey Karenin, Dolly and Stiva Oblansky, Konstantin Levin + Kitty, Vronsky) and, through them, revealing so many dimensions of married love, family life, the consequences of infidelity, and much more.

The most interesting character is probably Konstantin Levin (perhaps portrayed sympathetically because the character is so obviously based on Tolstoy himself, as this biography by A.N. Wilson explains). Supposedly Tolstoy actually wrote expressions of love with chalk on a tablecloth to his wife-to-be (just as Levin does with Kitty Shcherbatskaya). Like Levin, Tolstoy gave his diaries to his wife right after the wedding (though Tolstoy’s diaries caused much more disruption than the diaries in Anna Karenina). Like Tolstoy, Levin is an aristocrat who enjoys working on his estate in the country rather than hanging around in Petersburg (or even Moscow) society. The deathbed scene involving Levin’s brother mirrors Tolstoy’s own brother’s death. Levin, like Tolstoy, tried to run schools for the peasants on his estate. Etc.

I understand that Levin didn’t even appear in the first draft of the story, which focused on the title character. The book was published in installments in a Russian magazine, and the story ran off in different directions over the course of several years. But the parts work.

Tolstoy has a way of making his characters ridiculously realistic. When reading his things, I constantly have the reaction “yes, that’s how people, including me, really think or feel about things.” His description of going to meet Kitty Shcherbatskaya at the skating rink when he was in love with her but completely uncertain whether he “had a chance” is dead on. His descriptions of mowing hay with the peasants, the interactions with Kitty, the politicking among the Russian gentry, etc. are thoroughly enjoyable.

The novel has been filmed many times, typically with big-name leads. Details about the book are here.

By the way, the novel begins with one of its most quoted lines, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." A Tale of Two Cities, described below, also had a pretty famous opening line ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times").