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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is one of my favorite books of all time. There, I said it.
Clock Without Hands has the same distinctive voice, the Jim Crow pre-Civil Rights setting, and a cast of characters who range from slightly to very unlikeable. It reminded me a bit in parts of "Everything Rises Must Converge" by Flannery O'Connor: the contrast between an old generation clinging to its prejudices and a new generation trying to find its way without a moral core.
Clock Without Hands has the same distinctive voice, the Jim Crow pre-Civil Rights setting, and a cast of characters who range from slightly to very unlikeable. It reminded me a bit in parts of "Everything Rises Must Converge" by Flannery O'Connor: the contrast between an old generation clinging to its prejudices and a new generation trying to find its way without a moral core.
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
Read for book club, and curious if the discussion will change my mind. I was disappointed that the writing didn't capture me like Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The dialogue, which there was a lot of, was really uninteresting to me, and though the story may have felt more compelling years ago, it's not that fun to read about a racist hypocritical white guy getting his comeuppance. The plot picked up in the last tenth, which was more exciting, but overall this was a miss for me.
challenging
dark
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Sigh. There is great weight to this book, which I somewhat unknowingly lined up with the presidential inauguration and other horrors.. McCullers writes characters into their firm place, with storyline twisting an edge so sharp and sorrily exacting.
Looking downward from an altitude of two thousand feet, earth assumes order. A town, even Milan, is symmetrical, exact as a small grey honeycomb, complete. The surrounding terrain seems designed by a law more just and mathematical than the laws of the property and bigotry; a dark parallelogram of pine wood, square fields, rectangles of sward. On this cloudless day the sky on all sides and above the plane is a blind monotone of blue, impenetrable to the eye and the imagination. But down below the earth is round. The earth is finite. From this height you do not see man and the details of his humiliation. The earth from a great distance is perfect and whole.
Looking downward from an altitude of two thousand feet, earth assumes order. A town, even Milan, is symmetrical, exact as a small grey honeycomb, complete. The surrounding terrain seems designed by a law more just and mathematical than the laws of the property and bigotry; a dark parallelogram of pine wood, square fields, rectangles of sward. On this cloudless day the sky on all sides and above the plane is a blind monotone of blue, impenetrable to the eye and the imagination. But down below the earth is round. The earth is finite. From this height you do not see man and the details of his humiliation. The earth from a great distance is perfect and whole.
But this is an order foreign to the heart, and to love the earth you must come closer. Gliding downward, low over the town and countryside, the whole breaks up into a multiplicity of impressions. The twin is much the same in all its seasons, but the land changes. In early spring the fields here and like patches of worn grey corduroy, each one alike. Now you could begin to tell the crops apart: the grey-green of cotton, the dense and spidery tobacco land, the burning green of corn. As you circle inward, the town itself becomes crazy and complex. You see the se Greg corners of all the sad backyards. Grey fences, factories, the flat main street. From the air men are shrunken and they have an automatic look, like wound-up dolls. They seem to move mechanically among haphazard miseries. You do not see their eyes. And finally this is intolerable. The whole earth from a great distance means less than one long looo into a pair of human eyes. Even the eyes of the enemy.