READING: The Forsyte Saga (still...)
I was stuck at page 327 for about a week. I was afraid that if I turned the page, Old Jolyon would die and then I would start crying. A lot.
After Irene, Old Jolyon may be my favorite character so far in the Saga. He starts out a wounded father whose son, Young Jolyon (who has a son also named Jolyon because why not?), has disgraced the family by leaving his first wife and daughter to live with another woman. One of the side plots of the first novel in The Forsyte Saga (The Man of Property) is Old Jolyon's reconciliation with his son. By the end of the novel, and in the novella Indian Summer of a Forsyte, Old Jolyon is the only Forsyte to extend any kind of olive branch to Irene.
Things, they did not go so well for my girlfriend Irene.
This happens to me a lot in books, my over-involvement. When I was reading The Count of Monte Cristo, I yelped out loud at a particularly gruesome and gripping scene (there's a guy, hiding under the stairs, who ends up covered in someone else's blood by the end of the scene). I was on the Metro when I discovered that someone who wasn't Marian had signed her secret journal in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. I gasped, alarming the man sitting next to me. "Fosco!" I hissed under my breath, once I had regained my composure. The gentleman decided he'd rather stand. And most recently, I yelped when a character in George Gissing's The Netherworld had acid thrown on her face, ruining her acting career. The bus driver slowed the bus down and asked if I was all right.
I'm also a vocal reader. When Zach and I first started dating, I was reading The Unconsoled, and every two or three pages I would mutter, "This book is so weird." Other times I would say, "But why is he giving a eulogy in his pajamas?" At first, Zach would think these were actual questions that I expected an answer to. By the time I got to East of Eden, Zach would turn a deaf ear to my constant outbursts of, "Ooh, that Cathy!"
"I don't know how you can sit there, so calm, when Cathy is pregnant with kids she doesn't want and a set of knitting needles!"
"Huh?"
"KNITTING NEEDLES!"
"..."
Back to The Forsyte Saga, I finally gave in and kept reading. Old Jolyon dies at the end of Indian Summer of a Forsyte, sitting in the shade of large tree and waiting for the beautiful Irene to arrive for luncheon. "Shhhh," Zach said. "It's gonna be fine. All you have to do is flip back a couple of pages and he'll be fine."
After Irene, Old Jolyon may be my favorite character so far in the Saga. He starts out a wounded father whose son, Young Jolyon (who has a son also named Jolyon because why not?), has disgraced the family by leaving his first wife and daughter to live with another woman. One of the side plots of the first novel in The Forsyte Saga (The Man of Property) is Old Jolyon's reconciliation with his son. By the end of the novel, and in the novella Indian Summer of a Forsyte, Old Jolyon is the only Forsyte to extend any kind of olive branch to Irene.
Things, they did not go so well for my girlfriend Irene.
This happens to me a lot in books, my over-involvement. When I was reading The Count of Monte Cristo, I yelped out loud at a particularly gruesome and gripping scene (there's a guy, hiding under the stairs, who ends up covered in someone else's blood by the end of the scene). I was on the Metro when I discovered that someone who wasn't Marian had signed her secret journal in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. I gasped, alarming the man sitting next to me. "Fosco!" I hissed under my breath, once I had regained my composure. The gentleman decided he'd rather stand. And most recently, I yelped when a character in George Gissing's The Netherworld had acid thrown on her face, ruining her acting career. The bus driver slowed the bus down and asked if I was all right.
I'm also a vocal reader. When Zach and I first started dating, I was reading The Unconsoled, and every two or three pages I would mutter, "This book is so weird." Other times I would say, "But why is he giving a eulogy in his pajamas?" At first, Zach would think these were actual questions that I expected an answer to. By the time I got to East of Eden, Zach would turn a deaf ear to my constant outbursts of, "Ooh, that Cathy!"
"I don't know how you can sit there, so calm, when Cathy is pregnant with kids she doesn't want and a set of knitting needles!"
"Huh?"
"KNITTING NEEDLES!"
"..."
Back to The Forsyte Saga, I finally gave in and kept reading. Old Jolyon dies at the end of Indian Summer of a Forsyte, sitting in the shade of large tree and waiting for the beautiful Irene to arrive for luncheon. "Shhhh," Zach said. "It's gonna be fine. All you have to do is flip back a couple of pages and he'll be fine."
posted by Mike at 10:40 AM
2 Comments:
I'm going to have to stop reading your blog until I read the book to avoid spoilers. ;-)
I read aloud to my dog.
I tend to bark out stacatto giggles, and curse a lot. Sometimes I cry, but i think that's a different thing, somehow.
The Forsythe Saga sounds almost good enough to tear me away from the two noir-y maybe mysteries I'm reading now. Of course I should be reading my work books, but I am pretending March is 60 or 70 days long...
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