The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
As recorded on Librivox, 28 mins long

Our narrator is a woman who has recently moved to a summer rental in hopes of "curing" her of a malady her husband, a physician, is not convinced she has as there are no physical manifestations.  His prescribed for her "nervous depression" is to cease all physical exertions, including writing.  Once they arrive at the house she is almost entirely limited to time spent in what she determines must have been a nursery.  She is convinced that she might do better if she were allowed to work and have more freedom.  Instead she does manage to keep a journal, chronicling her thoughts which more and more begin to be about the yellow wallpaper in the room which she initially finds "revolting."  Eventually she becomes convinced that there is a woman caught behind the "bar" of the wallpaper and that she must set the woman free by tearing off the wallpaper.

I was first introduced to this story by Care of Care's Online Book Club (her review here).  She was clever enough to get me very intrigued but didn't tell me enough to have any idea what the story was about. So - wow!  Apparently when Care was substitute teaching they talked about this story and some of the kids said it was boring.  Boring?  First of all, how can you get bored by something that is only 80 pages (or 28 minutes) long?  Maybe it just went by them so quickly that they weren't picking up on what was happening and so thought that nothing much had happened.

What did happen to our increasingly unreliable narrator?  She mentions a baby a couple of times; perhaps she was suffering from post-partum depression or psychosis, something that people of the time (this was written in 1892) would not have been familiar with.  Or perhaps the entire story is a feminist statement about a woman's need to escape from the bars of her life.  I'm still not entirely sure what happened in the story but I do know that it was fun to be able to get on to Twitter after I listened to it and talk to Goodreads friends about their thoughts.

This is just the kind of short story to make me understand why some people love them so much.  This story was included in a volume of short stories on Librivox.  I'm eager to try some of the others now.  What short stories might you recommend?

The Sense & Sensibility Bicentenary Challenge 2011

In honor of the bicentenary anniversary of the publishing of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Laurel, of Austenprose, is hosting a challenge to celebrate.  Now you know I cannot resist anything Austen related and I've been wanting to reread Sense and Sensibility so I'm breaking my self-imposed ban on more challenges to join this one.  I'm joining at the Neophyte level to keep the pressure off so I only have to read/watch 1-4 related things.  My plan for the challenge is to read:

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman
The Three Wiesmans of Westport by Cathleen Schine
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
Becoming Jane Austen by Jon Spence

Chances are I'll also be watching at least one movie adaptation of the book as well.  And maybe another book...or two.

Sunday Salon - January 2

Happy New Year!  I hope you were all able to usher in the new year in the perfect way for you.  We spent a lovely evening with friends at their home--good eats, good drinks, embarrassingly bad showing at Beatles Trivial Pursuit.

I was all done signing up for challenges for this year.  Absolutely done.  Was not going to even look at A Novel Challenge.  So, of course, you know I did.  Where I found about about the 2011 Fairy Tale Challenge, hosted by Tif of Tif Talks Books.  How in the world was I going to pass that one up?  Since I'm already reading fairy tales for my weekly Fairy Tale Fridays feature, this one should be no problem so I'm signing up for the Happily Ever After level which means I need to read 12 things.  There are several other challenges I'm keeping my eye on--I may yet have to sign up for them.  But I'll see where I'm at in a couple of weeks before I commit.

Couldn't wait for the Bloggiesta being held in three weeks; I had to do some work in my Google Reader this weekend.  I haven't been able to keep up with the number of new posts in my reader for the past couple of months and there were several blogs on my list that haven't posted anything in many months.  Hopefully I haven't deleted any of you--if I did, please shoot me a comment so I can add you back on the list!  Also, I did something I've never done before.  I gave myself a set amount of time to read posts today and when the time was up, I marked the rest as read.  Need to start the new year with a clean slate!

I got a Christmas present this week from my son and his girlfriend.  They gave me Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales with gorgeous illustrations from Arthur Rackham.  You'll be hearing much more about this book on Fairy Tale Fridays. There are tales in this book that are new to me.  Have you ever heard of one titled "Fred and Kate?"  

What's on your reading agenda for this week?

2010 Wrap Up and Looking Forward to 2011

2010
The best books of the year: In a year of quite a lot of really good books, there were a few that stood out.  You can see my top ten books of the year on the tab above.  But only a couple of books really stood out as books I loved and two of them belonged to Thrity Umrigar: The Space Between Us and The Weight of Heaven.  Also on that love list would be To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee and The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.

What I read: I finished 89 books this year--29 fewer than last year which is a huge disappointment.  But when I changed jobs, I couldn't listen to books on CD at work any more and that accounted for about 20 of my books last year.  On the other hand, about 20 of my books this year were childrens books and probably shouldn't even be counted!

Challenges: I had both success in challenges (completing the Gilmore Girls Challenge, Our Mutual Reads Challenge, You've Got Mail Challenge and Everything Austen Challenge) and failures. Those failures hurt--I had every reason to believe that I could finish all of them.

Books for review: I had absolutely sworn that I was going to cut back on books I accepted for review in 2010.  Yet in the end, I read over 50 of them. Some of them were among my favorite reads, but the majority of them were, for me, only good and some were even really bad.

2011
Books I'm looking forward to: 


The Great Night by Chris Adrian (April)
Galore by Michael Crummey (March)
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (June)
The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier (February)
The Coffins of Little Hope by Tim Schaffert (April)
The Relief of Missing Children by Sarah Braunstein (February)

There is, of course, a long list of books that were published this year that I didn't get to and am looking forward to reading in the coming year.  But I'm most eager to get to the great books that have been patiently waiting for me to get to them that are in stacks and on shelves all over my house.  This year I will add far fewer books for review and tours to my reading.  Will you all please be kind enough to remind me of that periodically?  I'm always afraid I'll miss something great and always looking for those really unique stories. 


Challenges: So far so good on my goal to cut back on these in the coming year.  It helps to be in charge of one of the challenges; I've cut back on the books needed to reach the levels of the Gilmore Girls Challenge and added movies to the options.  I'm also participating in the Michener Challenge and the War Through The Generations Challenge.  If Our Mutual Reads extends into 2011, I'll do that one as well.  That's it.  No more.  None.  Stop me if I even suggest I'm thinking of adding anther one.

Fairy Tale Fridays: I'll continue with this throughout 2011.  Thanks to Mini-him for the Christmas gift of "Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales."  There are a lot of stories in it that I've never even heard of before.

Mystery March: This is something that I've been thinking of doing.  My mom and dad read a lot of mysteries and have been passing them along to me. It's time to make a dent in those.  I know I'll enjoy a month filled with them.

After not getting through 90 books this year, you'd think I'd be realistic and cut back and the number I hope to read in the coming year. But 50 sounds like so few and nothing else has that nice ring to it like 100 does.  But I'm not going to stress about it. The real goal is to make reading enjoyable in 2011!