The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

 

Title:  The Outsiders

Author:  S.E. Hinton

Narrated by:  Spike McClure

Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.

Length: Approximately 5 hours and 48 minutes

Source: Checked out with Hoopla through the Kewaunee Public Library.  Thank-you!

 

What is your favorite book that you read in middle school?  I don’t really remember being assigned books in middle school, just short stories, but I loved reading R.L. Stine, Christopher Pike, the Nancy Drew Case Files, and Sweet Valley High during that time.

I somehow missed reading The Outsiders.  My two boys read it and enjoyed it in middle school and my daughter has just started to read it at school this week.  I noticed it was one of the top hundred favorite books in the PBS Great American Read in 2018. I finally read The Outsiders myself in January as part of the #classicbuddyread hosted by @dees.reads.

Ponybox Curtis is a fourteen-year-old orphan.  He has two older brothers that take care of him and want him to have a better life.  Over a two-week period, he struggles with what is right and wrong in life between his group, the greasers, and the rich kids, the socs.  When a tragedy occurs, how will Ponyboy and his friends handle it?

My thoughts on the novel:

·       It started off slow for me, but I got sucked into the story and I couldn’t quit listening to the audiobook.

·       I was shocked and moved by the story.

·       It’s amazing to me that this book was written by a teenager, and I think it really helps it to speak to teens.

·       This is a found family story.  I love that Ponyboy learns to appreciate his brothers and understand their sacrifices as the story progresses.

·       Ponyboy realizes that his enemies are people too who make both good and bad decisions and are loved.

·       People make assumptions about the greasers, but they can also be heroic and good.  Don’t judge a person by their appearance.

·       There was a LOT of smoking in this novel.

·       I had never watched the classic 80’s movie.  I finally watched it over the weekend, and it was pretty good.  Bravo to whoever the casting director was.  I don’t know how they wrangled that many future stars into one movie.

Favorite Quote, “It seemed funny to me that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps was the same one. Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren't so different. We saw the same sunset.”

Overall, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton was a good book and definitely worth reading, even as an adult.

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

What is your favorite coming of age book, story, or movie?  Two of my all-time favorites are Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  This was my first time reading the coming-of-age novel, A Separate Peace by John Knowles and it was an excellent story.  This novel was chosen as the January selection by the Back to the Classics Book Club at the Kewaunee Public Library.  We had a great discussion about this book.

Set in 1942, intellectual Gene and athletic Phineas are best friends.  They are having a great summer at school until a tragic accident.  How will these two friends move forward?  I had never read this book and was surprised by the story.  I don’t want to ruin it for anyone else.

I liked the deep look at friendship and at bullying in this novel as it related to the different boys at the school. It was interesting to me to also look at how often there is a dominate friend and how does that impact your friendship?  It was a good coming of age story that looked at male bonding, friendship, jealousy, and betrayal.

This was a quick and thoughtful read that is interesting to discuss.  I really liked that it was set as a reflection of a man in the future looking back at the events that happened that summer and how they shaped him.  I thought the setting was fascinating as it was set in 1942 as this generation saw their friends graduate and go off to war.

My edition had a great afterward as well as good questions for a book club.  We went over some of the selections during our meeting.

I did not read this in high school or college, but I think it would be a great book to read in high school.  Although set in a different time period, it involves teenagers and would be more relatable than many of the classic books I read in high school. 

Favorite Quotes:

“Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.”

“All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attached that way – if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.”

Book Source:  Purchased from Amazon.com

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn has been on my “to read” list the last few years as it keeps popping up on lists of classics that are must reads.  After this novel was voted #13 on the PBS Great American Read last year, I knew I needed to read it.  I chose it as the October pick for the Kewaunee Library Back to the Classics Book club and it was also chosen for my Rogue Book club (aka FLICKS Book and Movie Club) for this month as well.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the story of Francie Nolan and her family.  She grows up in the tenements in Brooklyn and yearns to be educated.  She reads a book every day from the library and is determined to read them all.  Her brother Neeley and herself struggle to survive and collect scrapes and other items to try to get food to survive. Their mother Katie is a hardworking woman who cleans three tenement buildings to give them somewhere to live.  Their father, Johnny, is a dreamer who works as a singing waiter, but drinks away most of his income.  Will Francie be able to work her way to a better life?

This novel is a book that you don’t read fast for the action, it’s a book that you read slowly to enjoy the beauty of the writing and a look into the past that you don’t usually see.  Books tend to focus on the middle and upper class, and it is the rare book that actually delves into how hard life was if you were living in poverty.  What the kids had to eat and their lack of food was really sad.  I felt bad for Katie.  Johnny was the fun parent, but Katie kept it together and tried to make fun games so that her kids didn’t know what they were missing.  She did not receive the same love from Francie that Johnny did. 

The novel also takes a realistic look at alcoholism and its real impact on the family.  Johnny is a likeable guy, but I liked how people’s perceptions of him changed when they realized the hungry kids next to him were his own kids.  He was in the thralls of the disease of alcoholism and he couldn’t figure out to get out.  This book did not sugar coat the impact it had on him and his family.

The book did not have a straight forward narrative and had different sections that skipped around between 1912 when Francie and Neeley are kids, to around 1900 when Katie and Johnny meet and fall in love, back to 1912 and moving forward as the kids grow up.  I liked the way the narrative flowed.

There were so many scenes of this book that I loved.  I love how Johnny helped Francie to go to the neighborhood school that she really wanted to go to.  I couldn’t stop thinking about when Francie saw her neighbors stone an unmarried mother who was strolling her baby.  I read that author Betty Smith witnessed a similar scene as a child and it helped inspire this book.  I liked how Francie noted that the only difference in the unmarried mother and others was there the unmarried mother didn’t have a father to force her sweetheart to marry her. 

Francie had an interesting job toward the end of the novel.  It took me awhile to figure out what exactly she was doing and then I realized she was basically a human Google at the time reading through papers to find information that people would pay for research.  I thought it was fascinating.

I watched the movie version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn years ago on Turner Classic movies and I loved it.  Johnny does not match the description in the book and it leaves much of the story of the book out, only focusing on the 1912 part of the story.  I’ve found a copy of it and I’m hoping to schedule a movie showing next month for the Back to the Classics Book Club.

Rogue Book Club thought the book was interesting, but was not sure why it is such a beloved classic.  Would the club have felt different if we read it when we were younger? I’m looking forward to talking about this book at Classics Book Club tomorrow night.

Favorite Quotes:

“She wept when they gave birth to daughters, knowing that to be born a woman meant a life of humble hardship.”

“Because the child must have a valuable thing called imagination.  The child must have a secret

world which live things that never were. . .. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.”

“A person who pulls themselves up from a low environment via the bootstrap route has two choices.  Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he left behind him in the cruel upclimb.”

“Forgiveness is a gift of high value.  Yet it costs nothing.”

Overall, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a great look into poverty in the early twentieth century and an inspiring story of how one girl’s determination and hard work could get her out of it. It is a beautifully written novel.

                                                                                                                               

Book Source:  I purchased a copy from Amazon.com last year.

The Martian by Andy Weir

Mark Watney is part of the Ares 3 crew on Mars when a dust storm causes havoc with their mission.  With the winds threatening to blow over their ride back, the crew evacuates the planet.  Unfortunately, Mark is blown away and injured in the attempt.  His crew leaves him thinking he is dead.  Mark awakens to discover himself injured and alone on Mars.  He doesn’t have enough food to last until the next manned mission to Mars and he has no way to communicate with NASA.  Can he survive?

 I loved this book.  It’s real science, science fiction.  I love that Mark had a great sense of humor and would work through all of his problems.  He may despair, but then he would do the math and work on how to solve the problem.  As things kept going wrong and Mark worked to survive, it made a great adventure story.  The story also showed NASA and the crew’s point of view as well.  Mark does like to swear a lot - you have been warned if you are not a fan of profanity.

 As an engineer and a fan of science fiction, I really really enjoyed this novel. I liked that Andy Weir had a section in the back to talk about how he put the novel together basically because of his obsession with space and going to mars.  He worked through what could go wrong and realized it could be a great novel.  I love that he actually put together a software program for the projection of the ship.   His details made the novel a step above pretty much all other sci fi I read.

I read The Martian as a “book set in space” for my summer library reading challenge, but I had it on my nightstand “to read” pile after The Martian placed last year’s PBS Great American Read.  I would love to read more novels like this one.  Does anyone have any suggestions?  I have read Artemis by Andy Weir.  It was good, but not excellent as The Martian is.   The version I read had a reader’s guide and book club questions in it.  I need to fit this into one of my book clubs!

I watched the movie this past weekend with my family.  The kids were warned there would be swearing and a scary part at the beginning (ages 8 to 13).  They were entranced by the movie and really into Mark Watney’s journey.  My 13-year old son Kile is obsessed with NASA and the new mission to Mars that is being worked on.  He really enjoyed the movie and I am going to pass the book on to him.

Favorite Quotes:

 “But there’s a difference between knowing it and really experiencing it.”

“I mostly ignore them.  I don’t want to come off as arrogant here, but I’m the best botanist on this planet.”  - This made me laugh out loud!

“Love of science is universal across all cultures.”

“But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out.  It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true.”

Overall, The Martian is an excellent adventure novel with a great sense of humor.  I loved how it is actual “science” science fiction and all of the geeky details. A fast-paced survival story, The Martian is the best true science fiction that I’ve read in years.  Are there any other books out there that truly go through the science the way that The Martian does?

Book Source:  I think I bought this book for my husband for a present years ago and I’ve finally gotten around to reading it.