19. The Princess Bride (30th Anniversary Edition)

By William Goldman

6. Alas, Babylon

By Pat Frank

There's a Montrealer who has a sidewalk sale about once or twice a year in the Plateau -- at 4096 Coloniale to be precise. I assumed he lives in that building, but Olman told me he just uses that space to store his finds.  It had just occurred to me to ask Olman about this mysterious collector/scavenger, but he didn't even know if he lives in the Plateau as he doesn't reveal much of his personal life in his blog and FB page.

I'm a professional scavenger making a living selling curbside garbage. This blog details my finds and sales. It also acts as an archive for things beautiful and historic that would otherwise have been destroyed.

Apparently, the yard sales are a way for him (I think his name is Martin) to move smaller stuff that he's amassed during the spring as he sells the larger or more valuable items privately via his site or DMs. From what I've perused from his blog, he finds quite a bit of silver. You'd think it's mostly old silverware that no one uses anymore, but sometimes he finds nice jewelry, even gold!  Once he found an 18k gold necklace weighing in at 28 grams. With the high price of gold these days, that'd be worth $2500-2800, which is a month's rent, and then some.

Anyway, I brought up Martin the Scavenger because it was at one of his sidewalk sales where I acquired this nearly pristine 1976 paperback of Alas, Babylon (1959) for just 2 bucks.  I also got a vintage glass ring holder for my daughter (also for $2).  They seem to go for $15-40 on sites like Etsy and ebay.

I've been aware that Alas, Babylon is a pioneering PA classic, though I'm late to the game in reading it.  Olman and Mt Benson had read it back when we were all active on the now defunct Ramblekraft and the 50-Book blogging club.  Enough time has passed since Olman had read it that he confused the premise of Alas, Babylon with another PA classic, Earth Abides.  Since Olman and Mt Benson had already summed up the novel nicely, I'll go on another tangent.

 

I think it's fitting I found my copy of Alas, Babylon at a scavenger sale.  I imagine if the Troubles came, Martin would still be scavenging away, but for survival as well as a livelihood. In the real world, I picture the kind of (lazy, thoughtless) people who would throw out valuable yet no-longer-wanted things instead of donating them as a mindful way of supporting a circular economy.  Martin the Scavenger would scope out homes for sale knowing that people in the midst of selling often need to get rid of things in a hurry (either their own possessions or those of their loved ones who had passed on), and often they don't have (or make) the time to drop off donation items at a thrift store or charity organization.  The old adage "One man's trash is another man's treasure" really applies here.

The value of things are not only relative, they are suddenly upended after a catastrophic event like The Day in Alas, Babylon.  The idea of a nuclear apocalypse was so inconceivable for the average person that it was impossible to properly prepare for such an event. The protagonist, Randolph "Randy" Bragg, was was privy to a coded message sent via telegram from his older brother, Colonel Mark Bragg, a U.S. intelligence officer.  The brothers had established that "Alas, Babylon" would signify that a Russian attack was imminent as the biblical phrase was often used by a local preacher for his fire and brimstone sermons.  

 

Even with the warning, Randy had less than 2 days warning to prepare, not only for himself but for Mark's wife and two kids, who were arriving from Omaha later that night.  Randy just had time to take out a large amount of cash from the bank to buy a shit load of food and supplies.  As a steak lover, he had purchased a lot of expensive meat to store in the freezer, not thinking that electricity would soon fail if bombs hit key targets. His sister-in-law Helen had to think fast and salt all the meat before they start to turn, but Mark had to go barter a bag of salt because they didn't have enough to preserve all that meat.  The Bragg's then invited their neighbours for a BBQ to use the remainder of the thawed meat.

Money immediately became worthless as people soon resorted to bartering as a way to acquire the things they need, and everyone needed something because you'd have needed weeks, if not months, to properly prepare for such a disaster.  Disaster wasn't even the right word, as it was more like the end of civilization as everyone knew it.  Once power was out permanently, appliances also became worthless. Some people, like Rita and her brother Pete, had hoarded fancy TVs and appliances, thinking that once things "returned to normal", they could sell them for a killing, not yet realizing they were stuck with a new abnormal.

The people who were most self-sufficient and practical were the Henrys, the African-American family living next door to the Bragg family home.  They have "poor folk" skills, ie. hunting, fishing, farming, etc. In short, the ability to live off the land, unlike the privileged white folk who can only use money to buy groceries and pay for the manual labour and domestic services that people like The Henrys provide.  Most importantly, the Henrys metaphorically have liquid gold underneath their property, an underground artesian well that provides an uncontaminated water supply, which they end up sharing with their neighbours. I find it interesting that the Henrys play such a crucial role in the survival of all the white characters yet they aren't even mentioned in the Wikipedia plot summary!

Coffee and gas also became super valuable commodities.  Gas was valued, not just for transport, but for recharging batteries needed to power Admiral Sam Hazzard's shortwave radio, which was the only source of news from the outside world. Months later, when reserves became low and people were sweating out salt from their pores, salt became the most prized item until a natural source was discovered.  

In his foreword, author Pat Frank wanted to realistically portray what life would be like if people survived a nuclear attack.  Even though the small town of Fort Repose was in a contaminated zone, the town was ideally situated in a way that did not receive much harmful fallout.  Thankfully, the novel didn't dwell too much on radiation poisoning, as I got enough of that from the 1984 British film, Threads. The few characters that suffered from radiation had stolen loot from a jewelry shop, unaware they've been hoarding radioactive bling in their own homes.

Author Pat Frank also embued many progressive values into his novel, particularly in the positive portrayal of African-American characters and the inclusion of strong female characters in leadership roles, despite being a product of the 1950s with some dated, traditional gender roles. This review takes a deeper look at how Alas, Babylon was ahead of its time yet also a product of its times.

3. 84, Charing Cross Road

By Helene Hanff

I do love second-hand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to “I hate to read new books,” and I hollered “Comrade!” to whoever owned it before me. 

I wanted to start off with this lovely review that perfectly captured my feelings of 84, Charing Cross Road (though I dispute the "aging" bit as Hanff was only 33 when she began her correspondence with Frank Doel in 1949!):

Epistolary fiction had always captured my fancies, but I never knew non-fiction of a similar kind could possess far more power to entwine the reader in its vast web of human intricacies ranging from the art of letter-writing, to the art of conversation and how human compassion can traverse miles and miles of oceans to make a mark on people one has never met, seen, or even heard about. The potency of words is such that seemingly polarized people are woven together in a relationship that transcends the barriers of friendship and love and all other abstract notions mankind has come to acknowledge and define.

 

Such is the relationship between an aging scriptwriter hailing from New York, the vivacious Helene Hanff and a certain Frank Doel of Marks & Co., booksellers located in London at the eponymous 84, Charing Cross Road. Ms. Hanff has an unquenchable thirst for English literature and in search for now obscure classics does she begin her acerbic albeit sidesplitting correspondence with the booksellers situated miles away from her shabby apartment. Ms. Hanff stumbles upon the book dealers through an ad placement made in the Saturday Review of Literature. From here onwards starts a warm and compassionate relationship between her and Mr. Doel on whom the responsibility of delivering her books falls on. This relationship is penned down in form of letters spanning almost twenty years.

 

I loved loved LOVED this book!  It was SUCH A DELIGHT.  Charming, witty, cozy and yet brimming with intelligence and affection.  And this unlikely friendship between a brazen NYC writer and reserved English bookseller, which spanned decades and the vast expanse of the Atlantic ocean, was real. I think I read it within 24 hours as the breezy, epistolary format made it very easy. And I didn't want it to end. It had to though, as Frank Doel unexpectedly passed away from illness in 1968.  This was not a surprise for me as I had already the watched the film adaptation back in May 2024. 

Apparently, 84, Charing Cross Road was one of Anne Bancroft's faves and her husband Mel Brooks bought the rights to the book for her birthday, which was how we ended up with the wonderful film starring Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins (with a young Dame Judi Dench as Mrs Noel). I was so fond of the adaptation that I put the book on my list. When I'm not in a rush to read something, I prefer ordering secondhand books from the USA as there is much more range and choice. Sure enough, I found this paperback Penguin edition for only $4.75 USD ($5.23 total with tax!) in great condition.

 

I had ordered the book to be delivered to my MIL's address when we were there during Xmas but I left it somewhat late and the book arrived shortly AFTER we had already returned home. It languished at my mother in law's for several months. I never told anyone to look for it until my SIL found it, still in its unopened envelope, during a summer visit after the Patch-Addario family had left. Hubs was finally able to bring it back in September!  By then I had lost my momentum. Some more months passed before I finally remembered I wanted to read 84 Charing Cross Road, and here we are.

 

I learned later that Hanff was an Anglophile and autodidact. Unable to afford a college education during the Great Depression, she undertook a comprehensive, self-taught English literature course that lasted over a decade. She was then in her early thirties, scraping a living as a freelance scriptwriter and magazine journalist. Her unconventional education was structured around the writings of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Q"), specifically his lectures at Cambridge University. Hanff discovered On the Art of Writing by "Q" in a library and used his recommendations as her syllabus, covering authors and texts he admired.  Under ‘Q’s gentle, ghostly tutelage’, the self-study process took approximately 11 years because she would stop her study to investigate unfamiliar references and texts, as the scholar had assumed the reader would be already familiar with these books.  

So I started reading Q. Who assumes I’ve read The Fairie Queene and Paradise Lost. So I read Paradise Lost and find I need to have read the New Testament. So I read the New Testament and find I need to read the Latin Vulgate. And my Latin reader says the rules governing the ablative are the same as in English. A-ha. Thanks a LOT!

Hanff didn't want to bother with the library because she wanted to have her reference books within easy grasp.  When she inquired at local booksellers, she discovered that the American editions of the English books she wanted were of lesser quality and/or over-priced. When Hanff spotted the Marks & Co ad, she wrote to them and the rest was history.  

Gentlemen: Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. The phrase ‘antiquarian book-sellers’ scares me somewhat, as I equate ‘antique’ with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books . . .

It's a niche genre, I guess, but I love reading about under the radar autodidacts, like The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

Another fact I learned was that Gene, Hanff's editor, was mentioned in her letters as being Chinese.  It was well-known that editor Genevieve Young was instrumental in getting 84, Charing Cross Road published. Young also had a fascinating legacy and bio of her own, entering the publishing business in the early 1950s, when there were few female editors and even fewer Asians.

It was bittersweet how Hanff finally made the journey to London well after Frank Doel had passed on and Marks & Co had long been shuttered. Even though Hanff made enough money to support herself relatively comfortably and was setting aside money for her trip, minor emergencies kept eating away at her savings. I think air travel was still prohibitively expensive for the average person during the 50s and 60s and ocean travel took longer.  Ironically, it wasn't until after 84, Charing Cross Road was published in 1970 that Hanff would afford to finally travel to London!  She wrote about her experience in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, which is now on my list.

 

There are so many wonderful online reviews of 84, Charing Cross Road.

From A Literary Love Affair:

By the time she wrote to Marks & Co., Hanff ’s pursuits had become, frankly, arcane. Her first few letters include requests for a very particular edition of Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers, de Tocqueville’s Journey to America and Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Four Socratic Dialogues.

But Helene Hanff is no dry old blue-stocking. She reads with the seasons, ordering ‘Dear goofy JH’s’ (John Henry Newman’s) The Idea of a University for Lent, and Pepys’s Diary for long winter evenings. On 25 March 1950, she writes to say that, with spring coming, she requires a book of love poems:

 No Keats or Shelley, send me poets who can make love without slobbering . . . Just a nice book preferably small enough to stick in a slacks pocket and take to Central Park.

Had she ever been in love? Rumours after her death suggested that her heart had been broken by some high-ranking American whose identity she kept under wraps for the sake of his wife and family. Was she lonely? We cannot tell. All that is clear from her letters is that for this single woman in her ‘moth-eaten sweaters and slacks’ books are friends and companions, and antiquarian books especially so. She loves ‘inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins’; she rejoices in the way that the books sent by Marks & Co. ‘open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to “hate to read new books”, and I hollered “Comrade!”’

In response to these wild, wise-cracking, passionate outpourings, ‘FPD’ of 84, Charing Cross Road is, at first, stiff: ‘Dear Madam’, his letters begin, and they are cautious almost to the point of curtness. Undaunted, Helene Hanff works at puncturing his reserve. ‘I hope “madam” doesn’t mean over there what it does here’, she writes, and on the rare occasions that she does not like the books he sends her, she makes no bones about it...

And that is how providence seems to operate, blocking the paths we think we want to take and then introducing unexpected openings in the form of opportunities and delights more wonderful than anything we could have dreamed up for ourselves. This was Helene Hanff ’s experience and, since meeting her through the pages of this book, it has been mine too. Nowadays if I find myself on Charing Cross Road it is with a sense of gratitude and wonder; and the knowledge that the best things come unbidden.

From A Life in Books:
 

The funny thing about Helene as an author is that she could not write fiction. She never made it as a playwright, though Lord knows she tried, and studied her art. She wrote scripts for TV shows, and reviewed books for film companies to advise on how well they might be adapted as films. The Lord of the Rings was one of her great ordeals, because she absolutely hated it, and charged her employers ten times her usual fee as recompense for the mental torture of trying to summarise the plot. (This explains clearly to me why she was not able to write fiction.)

I realized that there were many, many authors, and books, in the long history of English as a literature, that she just had to read. But the New York libraries couldn’t supply what she needed (she had a passion for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century essayists), and she began to order books from Marks & Co, who had advertised their services as an antiquarian book-finding service in the New York Times Saturday Review of Books.

If you like the sound of 84 Charing Cross Road, but want to find out more about her, try Underfoot in Show Business, and Q’s Legacy. There is also a what-I-did-in-London book, called The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, about when Helene finally gets to visit London, to see the BBC filming her book, and there’s also a book of New York reminiscences, Apple of My Eye. I’ve also found, to my great delight, that there’s a biography of Helene’s life, by Stephen Pastore, which I now have to read after a lifetime of vague guesses. 

Update (April): Olman got me this lovely Plain Foxed Edition for my birthday!

2. The King in Yellow

By Robert W. Chambers

Saw this hardcover edition while browsing Walden Pond Books in   Oakland.  We (the Purves-Brebner clan) were in the area to pick up a Christmas tree at Brent's near the Grand Lake Theatre and had also consumed some delicious Asian-inspired pastries at Bake Sum.

So yes, I saw The King in Yellow and got Olman to pick it up for me as a Xmas present.  I also found a used copy of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, which happened to be on Olman's list.  Too bad for him though, finders keepers!
I first heard about The King in Yellow as a literary influence on True Detective S1, and it's been on my list ever since.  

Recently, I acquired a HP Lovecraft box set under purely consumeristic circumstances. I was taking advantage of Black Friday sales to do some early Xmas shopping and Indigo had a sale on Kpop albums, which is what my daughter is into collecting now.  Albums qualify for shipping, but I needed another $12 to reach the minimum amount for free shipping.  I saw that certain paperback box sets were half price so I got a HP Lovecraft box set for only $12.50 and as a minor horror buff, I've always been curious about his work.  Anyway, I was aware that author Robert Chambers was an early influence on Lovecraft, so I thought it was a nice coincidence when I saw this nice Pushkin Press edition from 2017 at Walden Books.

The King in Yellow was my first completed book in 2026 (not counting The Antifa Comic Book) and I was able to finish it within a few days.  It's really a collection of four short stories.  The original 1895 publication contained more stories but apparently it's just the first four that are thematically connected by a cursed play called 'The King in Yellow' which somehow ends up in the hands of various characters. When someone reads the second act, terrible things befall them, ie. they start losing touch with reality and become haunted by a ruined, mythical city called Carcosa, unwittingly serving a cult-like deity known only as Hastur, the Yellow King.  Apparently, the world of Carcosa was inspired by Ambrose Pierce. 

The first and probably best story was "The Repairer of Reputations".  The setting is a dystopic 1920s America that has become quite militaristic and Randian (before Ayn Rand and the military-industrial complex came about).  People of Jewish descent and other undesirable foreigners have been deported and a state has been established for African-Americans. The narrator, Hildred Castaigne, observes the official opening of a "Lethal Chambers" at a public park in Manhattan, for anyone who wants to painlessly end their life so as not be a burden on society.  We soon learn that our dear Hildred is not quite right in the head.  Not only had he suffered a head injury from a fall, he had also been committed for a period of time inside an asylum.  At some point he had also read "The King in Yellow" and often visits the creepy Repairer himself, a Yellow King devotee who happens to live above the store that's run by the father of his brother's fiancée.  I like the part when Hildred thought he was alone inside his shabby apartment admiring himself in mirror as he wore his golden crown but when his brother came upon him, he was really just wearing a cheap, dime-store trinket. The reader is basically plunged inside the unraveling mind of a man who's becoming more and more paranoid and deranged until he commits a terrible act.

As a Goodreads reviewer wrote: it is a bracing and imaginative bit of darkness on the page and, to me at least, quite wonderful. the style is so breezy, the pacing so brisk, the imagination so fertile and so oddly modern, the experience was pure pleasure. it is hard to believe that this story was written over a 100 years ago.

The next story, "The Mask", was ok and probably my least favourite as it was more melo-dramatic than creepy or chilling.  It takes place in Paris and involves a love triangle between young painter named Alec, a sculptor and would-be alchemist named Boris, and their love interest, Genevieve.  Boris has discovered or created a magical solution that can transform any organic object or living thing into lightly veined white marble.  It's unclear how the golden liquid came about, but it's strongly implied that it came from the same world that brought about "The King in Yellow".  Tragedy soon befalls the hapless trio. 

Next was "In the Court of the Dragon", also set in Paris, about a man pursued by a sinister church organist who is after his soul.  That pretty much sums up what is probably the shortest of the four stories and the least developed.

Last was "The Yellow Sign" and we're back in Manhattan (Greenwich Village) in "contemporary" times, ie. the 1890s. This time, an artist and his model are troubled by a sinister churchyard watchman who resembles a "plump white grave-worm".  Tessie keeps having the same recurring dream where she sees Scott lying inside a funeral casket being taken away by a horse-drawn carriage.  As their relationship develops, Tessie gives Scott "a clasp of black onyx, on which was inlaid a curious symbol or a letter in gold", which she happened to find one day near Battery Park.  Then soon after, Scott finds The King in Yellow in his collection, "a book bound in serpent skin, standing in a corner of the top shelf of the last bookcase." It is, inexplicably, "The King in Yellow", a book he has studiously avoided: "If I ever had had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages."

So we have come full circle, and our two young lovers are doomed towards a sad demise. This wiki site has a good plot summary.

The King in Yellow collection was an enjoyable read.  I did not expect it to be so readable.  TBH, I expected it to be less accessible and weirder, because after all, The King in Yellow is supposedly a classic example of weird fiction.  The stories were macabre in tone, full of creeping dread and gothic romanticism, with characters who are often artists or decadents, inhabitants of the demi-monde.  But the supernatural or occult references were very subtle and minimal.  This was not a bad thing, just not what I expected.  Still, very glad I read this.
 

12. Little Women

By Louisa May Alcott

Oh boy, lemme tell you about Little Women.

 

I innocently picked it up at Chainon based solely on my limited knowledge that it’s an enduring and beloved American classic.  I’ve watched both Gillian Armstrong + Greta Gerwig’s respective film adaptations and was completely ignorant of the fact that they had been totally secularized, as befitting liberal-minded Hollywood. Both films had stripped away any Christian moralizing that was prevalent in Alcott’s novel. 

 

I was also very much expecting Little Women to be a warm, fuzzy, feel-good read, but was wholly unprepared for how earnestly wholesome it would be.  Gee whiz, I now get why Americans regard Little Women as a beloved classic – it’s a novel that reflected how great America once was!

 

Despite the wholesomeness, I was enjoying Little Women for the most part, at least until Chapter 11 when I caught on that the storylines of the March sisters were merely delivery mechanisms for preachy morality tales.  At this point, my interest began to wane and my progress slowed way down.

 

It was during this time that I came across I’ll Be Gone in the Dark at Chainon. I would’ve dropped whatever I was reading to embark on this lucky discovery anyway, but immersing myself in Michelle McNamara’s dogged search for the Golden State Killer was a welcome break from the gushy, goody-goody-godliness I was being subjected to with Alcott’s writing.  I didn’t realize how much I longed for “the darker side of life” until I cracked open McNamara’s book, may she RIP.

 

Once I finished I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, I made a concerted effort to plow through the rest of LW.  It wasn’t all bad.  I realized the film adaptations did a great job including all the important plot points, ie. how Laurie became part of the March family, the trials and tribulations of each March sibling.  Like Austen, Alcott was a keen observer of societal class differences in 19th c. Massachusetts, especially through the eyes of the sheltered and naive March sisters. Take Meg, for example. She was so excited to be invited to a fancy party hosted by an upper-class family, but was ill-prepared for handling all the gossip directed at her:

Those foolish, yet well-meant words, had opened a new world to Meg, and much disturbed the peace of the old one in which till now she had lived as happily as a child.  Her innocent friendship with Laurie was spoiled by the silly speeches she had overheard. Her faith in her mother was a little shaken by the worldly plans attributed to her by Mrs. Moffat, who judged others by herself, and the sensible resolution to be contented with the simple wardrobe which suited a poor man’s daughter was weakened by the unnecessary pity of girls who thought a shabby dress one of the greatest calamities under heaven.

Alcott loved using Meg as an example for various “little lessons” throughout the novel.  As the eldest, she was the first to leave the March household when she married Laurie’s tutor, John. 

    Like most other young matrons, Meg began her married life with the determination to be a model housekeeper. John should find home a paradise, he should always see a smiling face, should fare sumptuously every day, and never know the loss of a button. She brought so much love, energy, and cheerfulness to the work that she could not but succeed, in spite of some obstacles. Her paradise was not a tranquil one, for the little woman fussed, was over-anxious to please, and bustled about like a true Martha, cumbered with many cares….

    They were very happy, even after they discovered that they couldn’t live on love alone. John did not find Meg’s beauty diminished, though she beamed at him from behind the familiar coffee pot.

Having married a tutor, Meg was doomed to a penny-pinching life, yet she had a weakness for finery.  When practically cajoled by her wealthy friend, Meg caved and bought herself an expensive bolt of fabric.  Alcott couldn’t help but use Old Testament metaphors to drive home her point.

Till now she had done well, been prudent and exact, kept her little account books neatly, and showed them to him monthly without fear. But that autumn the serpent got into Meg’s paradise, and tempted her like many a modern Eve, not with apples, but with dress. Meg didn’t like to be pitied and made to feel poor. It irritated her, but she was ashamed to confess it, and now and then she tried to console herself by buying something pretty, so that Sallie needn’t think she had to economize.

Because of Meg's greediness, her husband John had to give up on getting a new coat. Meg felt so guilty and realized the error of her ways, etc.  Even before Meg was married, Alcott used Mama March as the primary lesson doler:

    So I thought, as a little lesson, I would show you what happens when everyone thinks only of herself. Don’t you feel that it is pleasanter to help one another, to have daily duties which make leisure sweet when it comes, and to bear and forbear, that home may be comfortable and lovely to us all?’

    ‘We do, Mother we do!’ cried the girls.

Good Lord, even Austen didn’t write with such earnestness!

 

I think most everyone’s favourite character was Jo.  As the tomboy of the family, Jo was the one with a promising future as a spinster (Beth being doomed to a life of illness and death).  She didn’t even have any romantic feelings for Laurie, which was refreshing.  When Laurie’s obsession with Jo was getting too intense, she moved to the city to work as a governess.  She lived in a rooming house ran by a respectable family friend, and it was there that she befriended the older Mr Bhaer, who used to be a professor in Germany and was now making a living as a tutor.  What was cool about Jo was that unlike her sisters, she had a talent and passion - she loved writing and became a “sensational writer” to supplement her income.

 

Unfortunately, Alcott had plans for Jo and her adventures as a genre writer would soon come to an end. 

Following Mr. Dashwood’s directions… Jo rashly took a plunge into the frothy sea of sensational literature… Like most young scribblers, she went abroad for her characters and scenery, and banditti, counts, gypsies, nuns, and duchesses appeared upon her stage, and played their parts with as much accuracy and spirit as could be expected. Her readers were not particular about such trifles as grammar, punctuation, and probability, and Mr. Dashwood graciously permitted her to fill his columns at the lowest prices, not thinking it necessary to tell her that the real cause of his hospitality was the fact that one of his hacks, on being offered higher wages, had basely left him in the lurch.

 

    She soon became interested in her work, for her emaciated purse grew stout, and the little hoard she was making to take Beth to the mountains next summer grew slowly but surely as the weeks passed. One thing disturbed her satisfaction, and that was that she did not tell them at home. She had a feeling that Father and Mother would not approve, and preferred to have her own way first, and beg pardon afterward. It was easy to keep her secret, for no name appeared with her stories…

 

    She thought it would do her no harm, for she sincerely meant to write nothing of which she would be ashamed, and quieted all pricks of conscience by anticipations of the happy minute when she should show her earnings and laugh over her well-kept secret.

    But Mr. Dashwood rejected any but thrilling tales, and as thrills could not be produced except by harrowing up the souls of the readers, history and romance, land and sea, science and art, police records and lunatic asylums, had to be ransacked for the purpose.

 

    Jo soon found that her innocent experience had given her but few glimpses of the tragic world which underlies society, so regarding it in a business light, she set about supplying her deficiencies with characteristic energy. Eager to find material for stories, and bent on making them original in plot, if not masterly in execution, she searched newspapers for accidents, incidents, and crimes. She excited the suspicions of public librarians by asking for works on poisons. She studied faces in the street, and characters, good, bad, and indifferent, all about her. She delved in the dust of ancient times for facts or fictions so old that they were as good as new, and introduced herself to folly, sin, and misery, as well as her limited opportunities allowed. She thought she was prospering finely, but unconsciously she was beginning to desecrate some of the womanliest attributes of a woman’s character. She was living in bad society, and imaginary though it was, its influence affected her, for she was feeding heart and fancy on dangerous and unsubstantial food, and was fast brushing the innocent bloom from her nature by a premature acquaintance with the darker side of life, which comes soon enough to all of us.

 

    She was beginning to feel rather than see this, for much describing of other people’s passions and feelings set her to studying and speculating about her own, --a morbid amusement in which healthy young minds do not voluntarily indulge. Wrongdoing always brings its own punishment, and when Jo most needed hers, she got it.

 

    I don’t know whether the study of Shakespeare helped her to read character, or the natural instinct of a woman for what was honest, brave, and strong, but while endowing her imaginary heroes with every perfection under the sun, Jo was discovering a live hero, who interested her in spite of many human imperfections. Mr. Bhaer, in one of their conversations, had advised her to study simple, true, and lovely characters, wherever she found them, as good training for a writer. Jo took him at his word, for she coolly turned round and studied him—a proceeding which would have much surprised him, had he know it, for the worthy Professor was very humble in his own conceit.

YAWN.  So much for Jo's brilliant career.  According to this article,

Alcott originally intended for her story to end with Jo as a “literary spinster,” much like Alcott herself. But Alcott’s publishers insisted that Jo had to marry someone, that the book would be unsaleable otherwise. And so, although “much afflicted” by their demands, Alcott wrote to her friend, she had concocted a solution “out of perversity.” She invented dour and dictatorial Friedrich Bhaer as a “funny match” for Jo. Laurie she disposed of by marrying him off to Amy.

“Girls write to ask who the little women will marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life,” she wrote in a letter to a friend in 1869. But: “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.”

Alcott was intentionally being perverse in her invention of Bhaer, but it’s unlikely that any ending she wrote that involved marrying off Jo would ever be truly satisfying.

Ok, that's very interesting. So Jo was meant to be a spinster. Even so, if Alcott was pressured by her publishers to marry off Jo, Alcott still had some very conservative ideology she was perpetuating via Jo.  Jo willingly gave up a lucrative writing career and whatever intellectual potential she had was quashed by her Christian values.   

Once when I was a naïve youth, I went to church and studied the bible.  I eventually became an atheist after reading Carl Sagan and allowing my mind to open up to new ideas, even uncomfortable ones that can result in existential angst.  It wasn’t something that happened overnight, but over time, I came to realize how much I was using Christianity as a crutch.  Reading Little Women really cemented these feelings for me.  The following section was PRECISELY the reason why I became an atheist.  Religion is a barrier to true knowledge, and prevents us from learning about our true selves and the world around us.

    Before the evening was half over, Jo felt so completely disillusioned, that she sat down in a corner to recover herself. Mr. Bhaer soon joined her, looking rather out of his element, and presently several of the philosophers, each mounted on his hobby, came ambling up to hold an intellectual tournament in the recess. The conversations were miles beyond Jo’s comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms, and the only thing ‘evolved from her inner consciousness’ was a bad headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually that the world was being picked to pieces, and put together on new and, according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before, that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and intellect was to be the only God. Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon out on a holiday.

 

    She looked round to see how the Professor liked it, and found him looking at her with the grimmest expression she had ever seen him wear. He shook his head and beckoned her to come away, but she was fascinated just then by the freedom of Speculative Philosophy, and kept her seat, trying to find out what the wise gentlemen intended to rely upon after they had annihilated all the old beliefs.

 

    Now, Mr. Bhaer was a diffident man and slow to offer his own opinions, not because they were unsettled, but too sincere and earnest to be lightly spoken. As he glanced from Jo to several other young people, attracted by the brilliancy of the philosophic pyrotechnics, he knit his brows and longed to speak, fearing that some inflammable young soul would be led astray by the rockets, to find when the display was over that they had only an empty stick or a scorched hand.

 

    He bore it as long as he could, but when he was appealed to for an opinion, he blazed up with honest indignation and defended religion with all the eloquence of truth—an eloquence which made his broken English musical and his plain face beautiful. He had a hard fight, for the wise men argued well, but he didn’t know when he was beaten and stood to his colors like a man.

 

    Somehow, as he talked, the world got right again to Jo. The old beliefs, that had lasted so long, seemed better than the new. God was not a blind force, and immortality was not a pretty fable, but a blessed fact. She felt as if she had solid ground under her feet again, and when Mr. Bhaer paused, outtalked but not one whit convinced, Jo wanted to clap her hands and thank him.

 

    She did neither, but she remembered the scene, and gave the Professor her heartiest respect, for she knew it cost him an effort to speak out then and there, because his conscience would not let him be silent. She began to see that character is a better possession than money, rank, intellect, or beauty, and to feel that if greatness is what a wise man has defined it to be, ‘truth, reverence, and good will’, then her friend Friedrich Bhaer was not only good, but great.

Excuse me while I barf in my mouth. 

 

So Alcott was basically saying that whenever a good Christian’s comfort zone gets shaken by new ideas, or if they’re forced to think so much that it hurts their head, then one must cling to our comforting beliefs even more!  Any flicker of intellectual curiosity Jo had (and was admired for) was quickly extinguished by Bhaer’s heroic speech to adhere to the old ways.  Friedrich Bhaer may be a solid and kindly old coot, but he was certainly no thinker.  For Jo to revere such a conservative traditionalist was really quite stomach churning (and I love horror fiction).  Even if Alcott was being perverse in pairing Jo with Friedrich, it was such an odd way to go about it.  Anyone who was already God-fearing certainly wouldn’t read it that way and would take their relationship at face value.  Alcott may have been perverse, but she was by no means subversive.

 

At this point, I still had another 150 pages to go in this almost 500-page tome. I wanted so much to get Little Women out of the way, but not before being subjected to one final lesson involving Meg, this time in her role as a young mother.  Turned out Meg had been spoiling her toddler by giving him a sweet as a kind of bribe so that he’d fall asleep in bed instead of coming down and demanding treats. So her husband had to step in and intervene with some tough, fatherly love. 

It was not all Paradise by any means, but everyone was better for the division of labor system. The children throve under the paternal rule, for accurate, steadfast John brought order and obedience into Babydom, while Meg recovered her spirits and composed her nerves by plenty of wholesome exercise, a little pleasure, and much confidential conversation with her sensible husband…

 

 This household happiness did not come all at once, but John and Meg had found the key to it, and each year of Married life taught them how to use it, unlocking the treasuries of real home love and mutual helpfulness, which the poorest may possess, and the richest cannot buy.

Once again, silly Meg.  Sensible John.  Good God.  There were indeed some great lessons there – if one was struggling to live as a white woman in patriarchal Christian society. 

 

When I finally finished LW, I was curious what conservative fans of Alcott’s classic thought about Gerwig’s adaptation.  To my surprise, I found fairly measured reviews from a couple of conservative rags:

Ms. Gerwig’s retelling of Little Women maintains the major aspects of Alcott’s beloved novel, but rearranges them to serve as a commentary on the very real lack of economic opportunities available to middle- and upper-class women (really, the genteel poor) in nineteenth-century America.

Gerwig’s rendition of Little Women intimates that women were, by and large, unhappy in their roles as wives and mothers, and that women were domestic because people at that time thought that homemaking was simply “all a woman (was) fit for.”  

Alcott’s own words, however, suggest that women took on the work of rearing a family by consent, and that they chose to do so out of conviction, not oppression. Though she herself never married, Alcott called being a wife and mother a woman’s “highest honor” and the home a woman’s “happiest kingdom.” 

Alcott’s characters exemplify this positive view of marriage and sacrifice again and again, not because they are oppressed, but as an expression of love. In the novel, Amy’s love for Laurie motivates her to give up vain habits and pursuits. In Alcott’s words, “she didn’t care to be a queen of society now half as much as she did to be a lovable woman.” 

 

Even though I didn’t exactly enjoy Little Women as much as I thought I would due to my prior misconceptions, I did learn some things.  However, had I known what I was really getting myself into, I would’ve avoided Little Women altogether.  For the time it took me to read it, I could’ve read two thought-provoking books instead.  This is why I’m noting all my thoughts down, to make the most of all that time spent reading such offensive material!  Right now, I just want to watch the most graphically depraved horror movie I can find to cleanse myself of all this wretched wholesomeness!!