Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

If Little Women were a comestible, it would be like milk and honey: wholesome, mild, and nourishing, to be sure; but sweet, so sweet, almost unbearably so; and moreover, replete with biblical connotations. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are the March girls, and Alcott, drawing on her childhood, chronicles a turbulent year in their lives. Their father is a Union soldier in the Civil War, and the family's finances are precarious, so the girls and their mother manage as best they can while maintaining their moral fortitude and love and commitment to each other.

The book is soaked with the flavor of the 1800s, evoking an era in which a girl could reach the age of sixteen without ever having looked at a boy as more than a friend, and then at seventeen become engaged. But though Marmee and Papa take the traditionally staid views of propriety in relationships, their position on women's rights is strikingly progressive. They accept the necessity of sending the older girls to work, and encourage useful endeavor. When Papa returns home, he commends Meg: "I remember a time when this hand was white and smooth...this hardened palm has earned something better than blisters."

Altogether the girls are excellent examples of solid Protestant work ethic. They assume their duties as cheerfully as they can, and though they err from time to time, they are quick to amend their follies. They entertain themselves well and get along most of the time, performing plays, hosting clubs, and assembling newspapers. Even their leisure is admirable. When asked about her plans for summer vacation, Jo replies, "'I've laid in a heap of books, and I'm going to improve my shining hours reading on my perch in the old apple-tree.'"

Alcott based Jo on herself, reflecting her penchant for literature. The novel is full of educated allusions, from Shakespeare to Dickens to Thackeray. But it is apparent that the author was rather young when she wrote the book. Many passages suffer from facile sentence constructions and a wordiness awkward even for the time in which they were written. Alcott seems to be afraid of "said;" one finds, in the first chapter alone, to wit: "grumbled," "sighed," "added," "cried," "began," "advised," "returned," "observed," "sang," "continued," "answered," "announced," and "exclaimed."

Much of Little Women reads like a primer. The tone tends toward didactic and the moral lessons are quite overt. The girls face adversity, but they are steadfast, and everything comes right in the end. Characters are developed admirably. The story is exceedingly instructive, suitably nutritious for the children it was obviously written for, but perhaps too treacly for the likes of me.

Silence by Shusaku Endo

Another recommendation by Will, the father of the boy I watch, this book was just as incongruous with what I'd think he'd like, though it was utterly removed from the former, The Bone People. A Portuguese priest travels to Japan in the 1600s to minister to the persecuted believers there. He is captured and forced to renounce his faith by stepping on a portrait of Christ. Throughout his Japanese sojourn he struggles with the seeming silence of God, but after he apostatizes he realizes that God had been with him all the time.

"It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful," says Rodrigues, the priest, "the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt." When Rodrigues meets the Japanese Christians, he is struck by the squalor of their lives and their desperate existence. But despite their poverty they manage to feed and harbor him until he is betrayed to the persecuting authorities, who are ardently striving to eradicate any traces of what they view as the religion of the West. The Japanese officials refuse to believe their people can comprehend Christianity in its Western context, insisting that any professing Christians there adhere only to their own corrupted understanding of their native Buddhism.

Rodrigues does not see them this way. Upon observing a Japanese believer's poignant rendition of a hymn as he is martyred, Rodrigues reflects, "Life in this world is too painful for these Japanese peasants. Only by relying on 'the temple of Paradise' have they been able to go on living." There are no noble savages here, no blissful ignorants. Christianity achieved something for these people that their indigenous teaching lacked.

Rodrigues publicly renounces his faith in a complex inner struggle that leads paradoxically to a rejuvenation of his devotion to his God. "He loved him now in a different way from before. Everything that had taken place until now had been necessary to bring him to this love." It is as if when stripped of his trappings of Catholicism - the priesthood, the sacred veneration of icons - Rodrigues discovers the heart of Christianity and depth of God's love and mercy for him.

The novel was translated from the Japanese, and the writing was as pure and unadorned as haiku. I don't know that I've ever read a work of Japanese literature, and I'm pleased my initial foray was a book so sympathetic toward my own beliefs. Endo was a Christian, after all, and he believed that if Christianity wasn't true in Japan, then it wasn't true anywhere.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

So one day Will, the father of the little boy I babysit, picked me up as per usual, and, upon his noticing the books that accompanied me, we began talking about what he had read in college. He told me he had loved his World Lit class, and when we got to his house he pulled this book off a shelf, saying, "I've read this three times. It's really great; it's about these people in New Zealand who go to this tower where this woman lives and they're all kind of troubled and they sort of help each other...well, you'll just have to read it." So I did.

Kerewin Holmes is a part-Maori self-sufficient financially independent painter-reader-writer living in a custom-built tower on the New Zealand coast. One day she comes home and discovers a thin, blond, mute boy in her living room. She finds that his name is Simon, and she contacts his father Joe and returns him to his home. Joe invites her over for dinner the next night, she reciprocates, and soon all their lives are intertwined. Kerewin learns that Joe adopted Simon after he washed up on shore one night, the lone survivor of a shipwreck, and that Joe's wife and son died shortly after, leaving the two alone. She also finds that, when drunk, Joe punishes Simon severely, though Simon feels he deserves it and so it just makes him love his father more. But one night Joe's blows send him to the hospital. Months of soul-searching, healing, and repentance find them all reconciled in the end.

The book is altogether strikingly individual. Literate allusions abound in the mind of Kerewin, who is well-read and familiar with French and Latin, as well as fluent in English and Maori. She has a keen ear for language and sound that becomes apparent as the sometimes stream-of-consciousness narrative follows her mental rabbit-paths of rhyme and word-play. She is clever, though at times a little too precious, like when she refers to herself as "Sherlock" - her last name is Holmes - and marvels that she never came up with that before. The distinct culture of New Zealand plays a major part in the individuality of the novel. Maori words are interspersed between the audibly accented English: "Berloody cheeky, mate."

An outré spirituality harbored by the characters pervades the book. They combine Maori spritualism with a brand of missionary Christianity and puerile superstitious mysticism in a confusing conglomeration of beliefs. Kerewin keeps a book of religious writings that includes Buddhist and Hindu texts among her own musings, as well as select books of the Bible. Simon sees auras around people, and Joe is visited by an ostensibly prophetic old Maori chief.

Though things eventually come right, Simon and Joe's relationship forms a terribly sick situation, and it makes the book an uncomfortable one. Kerewin's cold seclusion, too, is unnatural and undesirable, though also rectified by the denouement. The book is engrossing, but not necessarily something I'd want to read more than once. So why did Will - Cubs fan, mathematics major, Mac enthusiast, Guitar Hero champ - read it thrice?

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge may both have been as gloomy as the English moors, but Hardy contrived happy endings for at least some of the characters. In Tess, however, Hardy declines any pretense of nicety, submitting his hapless protagonists to increasingly tragic circumstances, culminating in a bitter denouement.

Tess, ill-advised ingenue of the English countryside, is raped by a licentious aristocrat, Alec D'Urberville, and the resulting infant dies shortly after its birth. Tess seeks employment as a dairymaid miles from her home, to escape the scorn of her neighbors and earn money for her impoverished family. A young well-to-do man, Angel Clare, falls in love with her and convinces her, despite her misgivings, to marry him. On their wedding night, Clare confesses to her a night of debauchery in the city, and so, assured, Tess reveals to him her similar past. But Clare is distraught by her revelation, and leaves her.

D'Urberville returns to pursue her in this vulnerable state, and she passively relinquishes herself to him in her hopelessness when he offers to provide for her impoverished family. Clare, repentant, finds them together. Tess kills her lover, rejoins her husband for a few weeks of pleasure, and is subsequently discovered and hanged.

Hardy's prescient pessimism anticipates, or perhaps ushers in, the effects of Darwinism on Western beliefs in the 20th century. Clare, son of an evangelical minister, professes an appreciation of Christianity but denies the verity of its supernatural elements. Tess readily assumes his "rational" views, having always harbored a faith tenuous at best. D'Urberville undergoes a radical conversion halfway through the novel, becoming a traveling preacher. But a brush with Tess, and her iteration of her husband's philosophies is enough to kill his emotional Christianity. Upon renouncing his beliefs, he renews his assault of Tess. "'O why didn't you keep your faith, if the loss of it has brought you to speak to me like this!'" she cries to him.

What Tess doesn't understand is that it just cannot be that way. One cannot have a standard without authority behind it; there is no moral code without God. Clare, full of ideals and clearly endowed with a sense of right and wrong, expects Tess to forgive him his pre-marital dalliance without any qualms, but finds himself unable to to the same for her. He later accepts her companionship, though she has added to her offenses murder. His self-fashioned ethics are startlingly inconsistent.

Hardy purports to write an indictment of ineffable Fate, but all he truly demonstrates is the futility of relativism.

Crime and Punishment by Feodor Dostoevsky

I avoided this book for a long time because I have mixed feelings about Russian literature, and didn't want to commit myself to a long book I might not enjoy. Chekhov's profundity was entirely lost on me, and I only got two-thirds of the way through War and Peace before the people at the Jeopardy! tryouts told me to just stop and watch the movie instead. But I liked Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, and Tolstoy redeemed himself for me with The Death of Ivan Ilych. I'd heard Crime and Punishment had a redemptive ending, and so, after chastising myself for balking at a novel because of its length - "Since when am I one to pass on a book because it's too long?" - I checked it out.

It turns out I didn't want it to end. I felt nothing lost in translation here; the writing was forceful and immediate. Dostoevsky is a superb storyteller: he infuses the plot with action right from the beginning, honing in on the key players of his drama and sticking with them. Rodion Romanov Raskolnikov is an impoverished young man who, amidst the turmoil of mid-19th century Russia, puts his pet theory of moral relativism into practice by murdering and robbing an old moneylender and her sister. The novel follows Raskolnikov as he tries to make sense of what he has done, detailing his subsequent states of mind - hallucination, recklessness, rationalization, indifference, and finally remorse and repentance.

It is primarily a novel of the mind, and Raskolnikov's inner dialogue is fascinating. He, even at his most irrational, is eminently believable as he discovers just what a "miserable wretch" he truly is. The personalities of his friends, enemies, and family are just as engaging. Russia seems so remote, but the story is so universal. Raskolnikov realizes his depravity, and like Ivan Ilych, asks himself the essential questions: "What should he strive for? To live in order to exist?"

Raskolnikov's salvation is borne by Sofya Marmeladov, whose steadfast devotion to him brings about his final restoration. "There was a New Testament under his pillow...It was hers, the very one from which she had read to him the raising of Lazarus." Like Lazarus, Raskolnikov returns to light and life after being submerged in death and darkness.

Dostoevsky effectively denounces the atheism of 19th-century Russian intellectuals with his masterful, deft pen. His novel is a spellbinding account of a criminal's psychological plight, the striking image of a destitute man ensnared by his own misguided ideals. Raskolnikov mocks religion and the devout, ensconcing himself in jaded, indifferent disbelief. It is not until the very last page that Dostoevsky gives him his answer to the eternal question; the answer to the eternal question.

The Best Short Stories of O. Henry

I was making my way methodically through the fiction section of our little local library recently, and when I got to the "O" section, I paused. In between the O'Haras and the O'Neills, I found an O. Henry. I sincerely hope a librarian did not put it there. I returned the book to its proper place, where, coincidentally, I had just minutes before selected a volume by the same author.

I've run into Henry's stories periodically throughout school, in various anthologies, and I've yet to read a piece of his that isn't thoroughly enjoyable. He manages his medium deftly, suffusing his abbreviated narratives with easily grasped characters and adorning his denouements with perpetually unpredicatable irony. Irony is of course Henry's hallmark; he is the father of the unexpected twist. His stories are essentially all about the experience of reading them - the bulk of each serves mainly as the setting for the jewel of the concluding line.

Suspense propels most of the plots. But it is not solely the suspense over what is to happen next; often it involves discovering why the story is worth reading at all. Many of Henry's tales appear quite mundane at the outset; they proceed pleasantly but not extraordinarily, and so the payoff for the reader does not occur until that very last line. Much like a Hitchcock movie, the plot in its entirety comes full circle only at the end.

But that's not to say the beginnings and the middles of the stories don't offer up their own merits. Henry writes with a garish verbosity whose audacity would disgrace a lesser writer, but which in Henry's hands becomes exciting and ultimately endearing, as he expertly wields words like "eleemosynary" and "peripatetic." He assumes the dialects of Americans as varied as his surprise endings, from New Yorkers to Texans to Mississippians. He procures excellent metaphors: "They had the appearance of men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat - seamy on both sides."

Henry treats his characters tenderly, sympathizing with the plights of his hoboes and shopgirls, not too stingy to refuse them a few happy endings. Irony is invariably cruel to the ficitional pawn of fate, but Henry often strives to lessen the sting. In his classic "The Gift of the Magi," he lauds his innocent protagonists: "Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest."

Henry manages to be both sardonic and sweet in a delightful blend of irony and sentimentality. It's a pity that misguided library shelf stacker had apparently never heard of him.