Where, you ask, is the Malvern Pudding...

weighted with its ancient stone? It has been set aside, as has my mother's cookery book. They will not be seen again in this story. While these are not the opening lines to The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields, they drip thick like honey through the rest of the story for me, containing almost the essence of the entire book.




The Stone Diaries was published in 1993 in Canada, Shields' second home, where it won the Governor General's Award. The book was later published in America in 1994, where it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995, giving her book the distinction of being the only one to receive both awards. Eight years later, Shields lost her battle with breast cancer at 68 years young.


Her novel, The Stone Diaries, is the fiction autobiography about a woman named Dairy Goodwill, beginning in much the same way that it ends: with death and loss. Daisy's mother dies during childbirth, a great surprise considering she thought she was merely struggling with a persistent bout of indigestion. Daisy struggles through her entire life to discover who she is only to get caught in the trap of daily minutia: lavishing hours of energy into maintaining a pristine home, reading the latest issue of Good Housekeeping in order to be the best wife and mother, preparing elaborate meals, and appearing perfectly polished and "fixed up" to announce dinner. She seemed to pass through life instead of living it.


From birth, Daisy was almost marked for loss or at least for a series of unfortunate events. Her mother dies, her father sends her away to live with a neighbor and her son. The neighbor dies, and at the age of eleven, Daisy finds herself moving to the United States and living with a father she doesn't know. After college (the only time in her life she seems to being fully living), she marries a man she doesn't truly love. But the marriage doesn't last long, as her drunk new husband falls out their hotel window on their honeymoon and dies instantly. Later, she fights cancer as well as other medical maladies that can come with old age, while her children are busy with their own lives. In the end, she dies as we all must.

For me, I had a hard time with this book. As you know already, I get attached to my characters, my friends, and knowing that she will die in the end made it hard for me to get attached. Sounds crazy I know. But I didn't really feel like I knew Daisy Stone Goodwill.



Perhaps it wasn't me.



Perhaps it was Daisy, unwilling or unable to show anyone who she really was. Hiding behind her Martha Stewart meals and her June Cleaver pearls. I can tell you a lot about what she does but not necessarily a lot about who she is. There is a lot of talk about stone. Daisy's maiden name is Stone, her father is a stone mason. They wear their emotions with stoic expression, never letting anyone close to the real self. Daisy is always the dutiful wife, the genteel woman, but it doesn't make her happy in the end. She feels like she is missing something.



I can see a little bit of Daisy in myself. Wanting to keep a clean home (despite the mess a one-year-old brings), to cook healthy meals for my family, to keep a garden. But lately, as my daughter gets older, I have found that my home can be clean and still be cluttered and healthy meals don't necessarily have to take an hour and a half to prepare.It is more important to make sure I spend time with my family. That my daughter sees my silly, carefree side as we play on the floor. That she know who I am.



The dishes can wait a little bit longer.



Up next, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. I've got my fingers crossed that it's going to be a good one.



Until then, happy reading.

"But man is not made for defeat..."

"Man can be destroyed but never defeated."

Ernest Hemingway won the Pulitzer for this work of fiction in 1953. The Old Man and the Sea was last novel to be published in his lifetime and the novel that brought him international acclaim. How disappointing...

Don't get me wrong. I loved the book, but I found it elementary in style and simple in plot. Not to mention there were no chapters (and we all know how I feel about that), and because of that fact, I finished it in the course of an afternoon. On the surface, there is nothing particularly special about the story line: an old fisherman (Santiago) goes out alone in a sailboat, struggles for over a day to catch a marlin, loses everything but the bones to a series of shark attacks, and ultimately has nothing to show for his struggles, except a broken boat and a broken body.

However, if I would look deeper, there would be more, right? ... Otherwise, high schools the world over would not still teach it to disinterested teenagers (at least it is only one hundred or so pages).

I am sure that Hemingway did not intend to make the old Cuban a pathetic character. I am sure he wanted the reader to focus on his tenacity, his cheerful and undefeated spirit. Nevertheless, he made me sad. Santiago is having a dry spell, hasn't caught a fish in over 84 days. His only friend and companion, a young boy, is no longer able to fish with him, his parents said Santiago was suffering from bad luck. And the other fishermen laugh at his foolishness when his back is turned. With only a hope and a prayer, he braves the deeper waters of the unforgiving sea to find larger fish for greater profits. Well, we all know how that worked out for him (sorry if I spoiled the ending for you).

He was tenacious, fighting for any part of his prize he could keep. But, his loneliness overshadowed his determination for me. Repeatedly, he would state "If only the boy were here... but he is not here." However, Santiago cowboys up and is not defeated, not by the fish anyway. The fish did not defeat him. Due to his large (however unfulfilling) catch, the fishermen once again respected the old Cuban, and the boy, the boy who never left him, was there to mend the broken bits. While the skeleton (the only thing to show for his backbreaking labor) may float along the shoreline like garbage, there is still hope in the end:

"You must get well fast for there is much that I can learn and you can teach

me everything. How much did you suffer?"

"Plenty," the old man said.

"I'll bring the food and the papers," the boy said. "Rest well, old man."

... Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still

sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old

man was dreaming about lions.

Perhaps you could claim Santiago as a Christ-like character, ridiculed by his peers, suffering alone in a wilderness of blue vastness. Perhaps you could say that Santiago is simply a reflection of Hemingway, an old man struggling to fight the good fight only to be knocked down and hindered at every turn. Perhaps...

But for right now, all I see is an old man, a fish, and the sea. Perhaps, I am tired.

Up next, something slightly more recent: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields, winning the Pulitzer in 1995.

Until then, happy reading.

Up here...dey is only heroes.

Who says best sellers never receive the Pulitzer? Like The Color Purple, Tales of the South Pacific has its own musical ( Rodger and Hammerstein no less). It was a great book, although I find it hard to imagine military men randomly bursting into song and dance, but I guess there isn't much to occupy your time while you fight a war of waiting.

Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener (1948) is a novel of short stories with interlocking characters and one narrator. According to Wickipedia, the stories are based on observations and anecdotes he collected while serving as lieutenant commander for the Navy on the island of Espiritu Santo. While the stories are fiction, they are based in truth, focusing mainly on the characters and not on the war itself.

My favorite line in the book comes from an African American ensign working in an American Cemetery on the island of Konora. "Up here... dey is only heroes." The men fighting World War II in the south pacific did a great deal of waiting. Waiting to fight, waiting to go crazy, waiting for a war that seems so immanent and yet so far away. They occupied their time investigating the islands and the natives that live there, swapping war stories that belong to someone else, or writing letters back home to girls they may or may not love. The chronological stories cover the building of an airstrip before the Battle of the Coral Sea and ultimately ending in the invasion of the fictional island Kuralei through a planned attack code-named Alligator, covering the time span of 1942 to 1944 roughly.

While reading this novel, I happened to be in North Carolina visiting family. Especially two members who fought bravely in various battles of World War II, my grandfather and my Great Uncle Howard. My grandfather, a member of the Navy, was wounded at the age of 18 by a kamikaze pilot who crashed into his ship. About 10 years ago he had a piece of the plane removed from his arm, a bolt measured in metric. Uncle Howard was an Army Ranger and has only recently starting talking about some of the things that he experienced, the things he was asked to do. I hold them in the highest regard for what they did for our country and others. Members of my grandparent's generation are known as "The Greatest Generation," and perhaps they are. But there is still a residue of hatred that remains. I heard my uncle refer to Japanese people using what I would consider a racial slur in conversation. My heart cringed. There I sat, someone who works with International Students on a daily basis, and I didn't say a thing. Should I have?

At one point the narrator questions who will replace the Commander Hoags? It is difficult to fill the shoes of great leaders. And the past always seems better, easier than the present. But is that generation much different than this one? A different "enemy" perhaps, but war is war. However, how many people take the time to support the troops that are fighting overseas? How many people take the time to pray for the souls that are lost... on both sides of the war? I don't. My heart breaks when I hear about lives lost on the news. I cry when I watch new reports of brave men and women leaving their families to serve our country. But then I turn off the TV, take my daughter to school, and I go about the daily act of living... with little thought to what it cost.

Perhaps I digress... but it is amazing to me that the more of these Pulitzer Prize winning books I read, the more I find their relevance today. I guess to plan for the future we must learn from the past; however, isn't history doomed to repeat itself.

Up next, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1953).

Happy reading, everyone.

Lamb in His Bosom

Alice Walker and Margaret Mitchell were not the only Georgians to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. They were not even one of the first. The first Georgian to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature was Caroline Miller in the year 1934 for her first novel, Lamb in His Bosom. And only posthumously was she entered into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2007. I must take a moment and express my irritation that she was inducted after Jimmy Carter (2006). Nothing personal against Jimmy Carter and his works of fiction, but you would think that as the Pulitzer Prize the is greatest Literary award in existence, it would warrant induction first. Almost like a Speedy Pass at Six Flags. Miller was even the reason that Mitchell was indirectly responsible for Mitchell winning the award, and you would think, as a charter member, she would show her appreciation and admiration to a fellow writer from Georgia. But what do I know. Only upon beginning this journey did I even know that Caroline Miller was a writer from Georgia and winner of such a prestigious award.

I digress...

I must say out of all of the works I have read so far, this one has impacted me the most. Perhaps it is the fact that it takes place in a familiar region of Georgia. Perhaps it is because I come from a long line of farmers. Perhaps it is because I am a new mom and now know from where the main characters are coming. Whatever the reason, I feel especially connected to the characters. My heart rejoiced for them, my heart broke for them. I have always had the tendency to become too attached to the characters in the books that I read, even the bad ones with hardly a notable character within its pages.Growing up in the country, I had few friends to play with, so I found them wherever I could, usually within the dogeared pages of books.

But again, I digress...

The book jacket declares this as "The saga of a courageous young woman in the Old South," but it was so much more than that. Yes, Cean was the main character, but I found it to be more about the saga of a courageous family living in the Old South. When we talk about the Old South, most of us think of Plantation Farmers, cotton and slaves. We forget that not everyone lived with such "luxury" in the Old South. There were the poor country folk that worked the land with the strength of their backs and the sweat of their brows. That is the family we follow through a lifetime of joys and, more often than not, sorrows.

I have always had the misconception that I was a strong woman. I will haul limbs, clear away brush, and brandish a screwdriver just as good as the man I married. I will can vegetables and make jams and jellies ( a dying art, so I am told). But this book, Lamb in His Bosom, showed me how weak I really am. In one night, Cean gives birth to her third child by herself and then finds need to shoot a panther that has invaded her home, aiming to kill her two children and newborn asleep in the bed. After the birth of my one and only, I could barely walk across the room by myself; I don't think I would fair well if asked to kill an unwelcome predator.

Cean birthed around 15 children in her lifetime and lost several of them including her husband to accidents, sickness, childbirth or war. Lonzo, her husband, couldn't understand the want to go to war for slavery. Why should he fight a war for something he was too poor to have? His son, however, was ready to fight when the call came, only to have somewhere important to go.

I think the most difficult concept for me was outliving your children. That is not the natural order of things, but with the lack of antibiotics, hospitals, and antiseptics, it was a common occurrence. Even today, people can't afford the medicines that would easily mend their sick loved ones, or must choose between food and shelter. I take that for granted. How fortunate I am. It's something I think we all need to be reminded of from time to time.

"Seen would throw that promise back into God's eternal face in the weak song of her lips. He had promised, and repromised to bear her like a lamb in His bosom, never, no, never, no, never to forsake her."

Up next, Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener, winner in 1948.

Happy reading...