Book Five-Six

Happy March!

I've finished The Minister's Wooing and I have mixed feelings. On one hand, the book was incredibly slow moving (it crawled), but on the other hand, the writing was stunning. And Stowe has such a deep understanding of the human condition, so much so that I was awed at how closely her characters' reactions/emotions reflected my own experiences.

I don't really feel like blogging much about the book. I'll probably write my paper on it, so I'll save all the deep stuff for those 8 pages. I have so many thoughts and they're not organized at all, so it would make for a pretty long, messy, (insert other negative adjective) blog. I'm just going to quote.

"Even persons of mere artistic sensibility are at times raised by music, painting, or poetry to a momentary trance of self-oblivion, in which they would offer their whole being before the shrine of an invisible loneliness." - This is getting at a feeling that I find indescribable, the feeling of losing oneself in the beauty of art.

"It was the sea - the deep, eternal sea - the treacherous, soft, dreadful, inexplicable sea; and he was perhaps at this moment being borne away on it - away, away - to what sorrows, to what temptations, to what dangers, she knew not." - Mary (the heroine) mourning the departure of her love on a three-year voyage. So beautiful.

"Yet there were within him yearnings and cravings, wants never felt before, the beginning of that trouble which must ever precede the soul's rise to a higher plane of being." - Stowe is describing conversion. Just... yes.

"Who has not loved a garret in the twilight days of childhood, with its endless stores of quaint, cast-off, suggestive antiquity - old, worm-eaten chests - rickety chairs - boxes and casks full of odd cominglings, out of which, with tiny, childish hands, we fished wonderful hoards of fairy treasure?" - Ahh. To be young again.

"How strange this external habit of living! One thinks how to stick in a pin, and how to tie a string - one busies one's self with folding robes, and putting away napkins, the day after some stroke that has cut the inner life in two, with the heart's blood dropping quietly at every step." - So poignant.

"I'm most afraid she has got wings somewhere that will fly away from me, or that I shall wake up and find it is a dream." - James after marrying Mary. Love.

There are a few more quotes I love, but I'm not posting them because they are quite revealing (for me, that is) because of how closely they mirror my life. So I will keep those hidden away within the 332 pages of The Minister's Wooing. Go find them yourselves.

Book Six: The Hidden Hand by E.D.E.N. Southworth
Start Date: March 1, 2011
End Date: March 13, 2011