Here's what we discussed:
Look Alive Twenty-Five - Jane Evanovich
Olive, Again - Elizabeth Strout
The One-in-a-Million Boy - Monica Wood
Overground Railroad - Lesa Cline-Ransome
Big Sky - Kate Atkinson
The Durrells in Corfu - Lawrence Durrell
The Black Book - Lawrence Durrell
Drive Your Bones over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk
The Secrets We Kept - Lara Prescott
The Two Towers - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Testaments - Margaret Atwood
Luna:New Moon - Ian McDonald
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
The Pioneers - David McCullough
Alexander Hamilton - Ron Chernow
Washington: A Life - Ron Chernow
The Mask of Sanity - Jacob Appel
Jacob, A film by John Stahl
Cemetery Road - Greg Iles
From Mary Lou:
Albert Camus, the plague (1947; trans. Stuart Gilbert, 1948). The COVID-19 isolation period is the perfect time to re-read this classic philosophical novel. It is set in the ugly French port of Oran, Algeria, in 194-. The plot is unremarkable. Rats begin to appear in the houses and streets, dying dramatically. People begin to fall ill and die. The story is in the response of the general populace and specific individuals to the epidemic and quarantine. The populace progresses from fear to suspicion to anger to lawless assaults on the closed gates of the town. The individuals reveal their distinct characters in the responses they choose to make to the crisis. (This is an existentialist novel; choice defines the self.)
Dr. Bernard Rieux is the main character. He is first to discover and diagnose the plague. His choice is automatic: he will do his duty as a doctor and fight the plague.
With elderly Dr. Castel, he pushes the authorities to take appropriate action. (They deny and resist all the way – “Officialdom can never cope with something really catastrophic.”) Dr. Castel choses to devote his energies to developing a serum.
Raymond Rambert, a Paris newspaper reporter, chooses to work with criminals to escape the quarantined town, but ultimately chooses to stay and fight the evil.
Jean Tarrou, a wealthy visitor and detached observer who keeps a chronicle of the plague, eventually chooses to form a “sanitation league” of volunteers to collect and bury the bodies.
Joseph Grand (an insignificant civil servant who is anything but) chooses to keep the daily plague statistics and the records for the sanitation league.
M. Cottard, a paranoid recluse, attempts suicide at the beginning of the novel. Once the town is quarantined and everyone is trapped and threatened, he becomes sociable and chooses life.
Father Paneloux, a Jesuit priest whose two lengthy sermons provide the most philosophical discussions of the novel, chooses to view the plague as the manifestation of God’s Will. First it is the justly deserved Wrath of God for the sins of the townsfolk. Later, after he witnesses the particularly horrible death of a child, he sermonizes that evil and suffering display the Mystery of God’s Will that the Christian must choose to embrace blindly and support vigorously, no matter how horrible. He decides that his Christian vocation requires him to refuse doctoring and he sickens and dies. Dr. Rieux wryly rules it a “doubtful case.”
It becomes clear that the atheism of Dr. Rieux and others is a matter of active philosophical choice, the opposite of the choice made by Father Paneloux. This analysis may suggest that the novel is formulaic. That is not how the reader experiences it. Rather, it is the meaning that evolves as the story progresses. John Milton wrote Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to man.” Camus finds them unjustifiable and as a result chooses atheism.
Dr. Bernard Rieux is the main character. He is first to discover and diagnose the plague. His choice is automatic: he will do his duty as a doctor and fight the plague.
With elderly Dr. Castel, he pushes the authorities to take appropriate action. (They deny and resist all the way – “Officialdom can never cope with something really catastrophic.”) Dr. Castel choses to devote his energies to developing a serum.
Raymond Rambert, a Paris newspaper reporter, chooses to work with criminals to escape the quarantined town, but ultimately chooses to stay and fight the evil.
Jean Tarrou, a wealthy visitor and detached observer who keeps a chronicle of the plague, eventually chooses to form a “sanitation league” of volunteers to collect and bury the bodies.
Joseph Grand (an insignificant civil servant who is anything but) chooses to keep the daily plague statistics and the records for the sanitation league.
M. Cottard, a paranoid recluse, attempts suicide at the beginning of the novel. Once the town is quarantined and everyone is trapped and threatened, he becomes sociable and chooses life.
Father Paneloux, a Jesuit priest whose two lengthy sermons provide the most philosophical discussions of the novel, chooses to view the plague as the manifestation of God’s Will. First it is the justly deserved Wrath of God for the sins of the townsfolk. Later, after he witnesses the particularly horrible death of a child, he sermonizes that evil and suffering display the Mystery of God’s Will that the Christian must choose to embrace blindly and support vigorously, no matter how horrible. He decides that his Christian vocation requires him to refuse doctoring and he sickens and dies. Dr. Rieux wryly rules it a “doubtful case.”
It becomes clear that the atheism of Dr. Rieux and others is a matter of active philosophical choice, the opposite of the choice made by Father Paneloux. This analysis may suggest that the novel is formulaic. That is not how the reader experiences it. Rather, it is the meaning that evolves as the story progresses. John Milton wrote Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to man.” Camus finds them unjustifiable and as a result chooses atheism.
