Probably because it was first published as a serial in a magazine, the book is episodic in nature though the stories are all bound together by the people and places in them, rather like in Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches Of A Little Town. I hope I enjoy this novel as much as I did Sunshine.
Here are my latest secondhand book purchases: The Country Of The Pointed Pines is the 1896 novel by Sarah Orne Jewett. In it the narrator- a woman author- moves from Boston to a small fishing village in Maine, takes lodgings with a local widow, and rents an old schoolhouse in which to write without interruptions and distractions. Despite this, many residents and their doings make their way into the narrative and much of the book can be seen as a meditation on the effects- good and bad- of living in such a remote place. Probably because it was first published as a serial in a magazine, the book is episodic in nature though the stories are all bound together by the people and places in them, rather like in Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches Of A Little Town. I hope I enjoy this novel as much as I did Sunshine. The Monuments Men is a nonfiction book about a very specialized U.S. army unit called the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section. Most of the members of it were volunteers originally from the art world, and with the mandate "respect and protect" they would advance with the Allied troops in war zones and rescue as many art and cultural treasures as possible from destruction and damage. A big part of their job was to track down and liberate the many caches of artworks which the Nazis had stolen from their victims and hidden in various places around Europe. Though I consider myself fairly well educated on World War II, this is a subject which I know very little about and look forward to reading up on. The book was made into a movie a while back which I haven't seen but is apparently a bit of a dud, which is unfortunate. I have higher hopes for the book. Pudd'nhead Wilson is one of Mark Twain's works which I haven't read before. It was published in 1894 and is set in pre-Civil War Missouri. In it, Roxy, who is a slave although she is only 1/16 black, has a baby son- Chambers- who is 1/32 black. She is also caring for her master's baby son Tom who is about the same age as Chambers. After some fellow slaves are sold, Roxy grows panicked about the fate of herself and her baby, so switches the two infants in their beds, hoping to give her son a better life. They look enough alike that no one else is the wiser. As a result, Tom- now Chambers- grows up as a slave, while Chambers- now Tom- becomes a wealthy and arrogant aristocrat. The book details the consequences of this when, two decades later, the truth comes out.
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