February TIWMT Book: The Fountainhead

My husband gave me a copy of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand in the first years of our marriage. He was going to architecture school, and I was sure he wanted me to read it for the story about this idealistic architect. Well, as he says, it is about much more than architecture. Every several years, I’ve picked it up to reread it. This month, it is time, again.  A new perspective and new time of life always changes what I get from a book, and I’m sure this will be the case, again.

Do you want to Read It With Me? Here’s how to participate:

First – Find a copy of the book.

Second – Read it by the last Monday of February, keeping track of lines you like with sticky notes or a running list of page numbers.

Third – Share your impressions in an online discussion here on the last Tuesday of February, the 24th. Here’s two ways to join the discussion:

1. Leave your thoughts in the comments.

2. Write a post on your own website.

If you do write a post, I want to publish your link so we can visit your website and see what you have to say. Please email your  permalink to tj (at) tjhirst (dot) com no later than the last Monday of the month by 12 a.m. (Central Time). Feel free to use the TIWMT image in your post.

If your want to write a post but don’t make the deadline, just leave the link in your comments on the Tuesday post.

As this book club grows beyond just a few people, I will add an automatic link up, but I want to maintain an environment that encourages readers of all varieties, whether they are blog authors or not.

And for March, my sister has chosen this selection, Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. She will host the discussion of this book on the last day of March.

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January’s Book Discussion: Angle of Repose

Have you read Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner? Today, as part of a lifetime pursuit of literature, I invite you to share your thoughts on the novel, which won the Pulitzer Prixe in 1972. Read my thoughts and share your own in the comments below or leave a link to your own post about the book.  Next Month’s Discussion is The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand on the last Tuesday of the month, February 24.

What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike parties clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until the angle of repose where I knew them. . . That’s where the meaning will be if I find any.

That’s the search that Lyman Ward, a retired historian, embarks on when he spends a summer living, researching and writing from his grandparent’s final home. I say final because they moved from place to place in the West in a day when packing up and moving wasn’t as easy as it is now. Hence, the term, angle of repose, is not only a fitting reminder of the engineering and mining adventures that Oliver pursued but also the metaphorical resting place where Susan longed to establish her home and family. Ironically, while it was Oliver’s job’s who took them over rugged country, Susan’s dissatisfaction with any circumstances that didn’t meet her expectations kept her forever looking for an unattainable ideal. It’s no wonder that their grandson asks, “What made that union of opposites hold them?”

Susan is an artist who writes and draws her life instead of living it. While I admire her sense of perspective, I can see how it keeps her from appreciating the ideal unfolding within the reality.  I, like her grandson, began to resent her blindness to her own husband’s strengths. In one scene, he leads them to safety in a harrowing climb in the mountains of Colorado, but instead of acknowledging his lead, she begrudges it. Throughout the book, she compares him to other men, embarrassed at the grace or tact or communication he lacks. Thus, the first example foreshadows an unfortunate truth—how Susan sees Oliver is how she treats him and who he will become in her artist’s eye.

Sometimes I have a difficult time training my eye to see my children and appreciate who they are now. When have you missed the strong qualities that already exist in a spouse, friend or child in an effort to “help them”  achieve a greater potential?

I don’t begrudge her the desire for a home, just her dissatisfaction in her husband in providing her ideal.  Her desires are expected; she longed for permanent roots and a large family of loved ones surrounding her. I love my own home and the refuge it provides, and we’ve expended a lot of energy to build such a place. Yet, I also see that Susan’s desire was even stronger than my own, given that she lived in a time when it was really uncommon for people to move around. I like the way Stegner compares her longing to ours:

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place, so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? . . . We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

Even with a great sense of my own home, I sometimes wish to move on. Do you believe we have a shallow sense of place?

Despite also living in this generation, Stegner writes as if he knows many places and many perspectives. As a would-be writer I envy his language, especially his ability to write the woman’s perspective with femininity:

She got up and went to the window. . . A girl with a wide flat basket of flowers on her head crossed the street, herself a flower, a nodding sunflower on a graceful stem, and stopped, swaying and top heavy, while a customer selected a blossom from her tray.

I may be like Susan in seeing how men are opposite of women, not the same. Stegner, in the voice of the main character identifies that this may be a mistake that  many women make of men. He says:

Like my grandfather, he was not a man of words, and it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers. Grandmother herself may have made that mistake. . . It was his capacity for feeling that she should have attended to: by failing to comprehend it, she probably contributed to his silence.

I’ve made that mistake, have you?

The lessons of this story reverberate through generations, for good and bad. Most tragically, I see how Susan never realized how the West painted a life for her that she could never have imagined herself. Her old friend and publisher, Thomas, saw it:

“How art thou remarkable? Let me count the ways. Hmm? She’s been out in the unhistoried vacuum of the West for nearly five years, as far from any cultivated center as possible. What does she do? She histories it, she arts it, she illuminates its rough society. With a house to keep and a child to rear, she does more and better work than most of us could do with all our time free. She has been over Mosquito Pass in a buckboard and across Mexico by stage coach and saddle horse, she has been down mines and among bandits, places where no lady ever was before, and been absolutely unspoiled by it. There isn’t a roughened hair on her head. . . Nobody made you but yourself. I also suspect the hand of God—no other hand could be quite that sure of itself.

Why is is so hard to see who we’ve become and not the missed opportunities?

I’ve relearned in this story, a lesson I’m learning every day: The shape of our life portrait is hardly ever drawn from the paints we think we’re choosing, but as we embrace those materials,  our picture of ourselves and others becomes more beautiful than the one we intended to create.

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January TIWMT: Angle of Repose

To all returning readers, those who made a resolution to read more in 2009 or those who just like to read and discuss good books, I’m beginning the year with a book I’ve started but not finished and I’m inviting you to read it with me—Angle of Repose by William Stegner.

Angle of Repose is a 1972 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Wallace Stegner about a wheelchair-bound historian, Lyman Ward, who has lost connection with his son and living family and decides to write about his frontier-era grandparents. The novel is directly based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote, later published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West.

see more at Wikipedia

I’m drawn to the grandmother, Susan,  an artist who steps away from opportunities available in the East to follow her new husband to the West. I can’t wait to read more this month and discuss it with you on Tuesday, January 27.

Do you want to Read It With Me? Here’s how to participate:

First – Find a copy of the book.

Second – Read it by the last Monday of the month, keeping track of lines you like with sticky notes or a running list of page numbers.

Third – Share your impressions in an online discussion here on the last Tuesday of each month. Here’s two ways to join the discussion:

1. Leave your thoughts in the comments.

2. Write a post on your own website.

If you do write a post, I want to publish your link so we can visit your website and see what you have to say. Please email your  permalink to tj (at) tjhirst (dot) com no later than the last Monday of the month by 12 a.m. (Central Time). Feel free to use the TIWMT image in your post.

If your want to write a post but don’t make the deadline, just leave the link in your comments on the Tuesday post.

As this book club grows beyond just a few people, I will add an automatic link up, but I want to maintain an environment that encourages readers of all varieties, whether they are blog authors or not.

For those who want to read ahead, NEXT MONTH”S BOOK is The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

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A Virtuous Woman

Try-It With-Me Tuesday, an interactive weekly time and place to foster connections that challenge and encourage the process to become a well-rounded person.

When I challenged my class to develop an attribute, I chose one, too—virtue.  I’d been reading Luke 1:26-56 with them and looking for Mary’s qualities that helped her prepare the way for the birth of Jesus Christ. I admired this woman who was “blessed . . . among women,” for her courage, her faith, and her virtue. Now, I don’t just mean virtue as the Virgin Mary, but the moral excellence, righteousness and goodness she must have carried in her heart and expressed in her actions before and after the Savior’s birth. For this Christmas and the coming year, my gift to myself is to seek virtue.

Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. . .
Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.
She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.
Proverbes 31:10, 25, 26

What attribute would you like to develop?

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Give Yourself A Gift: An Attribute for Christmas

Try-It With-Me Tuesday, an interactive weekly time and place to foster connections that challenge and encourage the process to become a well-rounded person.

Six weeks ago I challenged my early morning New Testament class to develop an attribute for Christmas. We studied the birth of Jesus Christ in Luke 2 and read about how he increased in “wisdom and stature.”

And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him.  Luke 2:40

“Often when we stop growing physically,” I told these high school students, “we think we stop growing, but we can always grow—emotionally, intellectually, spiritually.”

That set up my challenge to them:

First, as we study Luke, look for the attributes of Christ from his ministry and teachings.

Second, choose one attribute that you want to develop.

Third, define and describe your attribute.

Fourth, study and write about your attribute to learn more.

Fifth, set goals and make a plan to apply your attribute.

Finally, pray for help and evaluate your progress periodically.

I promised to choose an attribute with them and to give them a Christmas breakfast of homemade cinnamon rolls at the end of the six weeks. Last Friday I made good on those promises. We had a beautiful breakfast, not only in a temporal sense, but in a spiritual one. After we watched a five-minute video of Luke 2, each student gave a one- or two- minute presentation on his or her attribute.

These teenagers  had the courage and conviction to speak in front of their peers about the goals they set for themselves. The best part was that these were not performance goals for athletics or academics but plans to progress in obedience, patience, faith, charity and love.

Moments like that inspire me to be better. I’m continuing to work on my own attribute. Do you want to know what it is? I’ll share that next Tuesday. In the meantime . . . Do You Want To Try the Attribute Challenge With Me?

Choose an attribute you wish to have and begin working on the steps to develop it.

If you take the challenge, I’d love to hear from you in the comments next week, on Tuesday, December 23.  Or write your own post about what you want to develop.

If you do write a post, I’d love to publish your link. Just link to this post or my site and send your permalink to me by email tj (at) tjhirst (dot) com or in the comments here before next Tuesday.

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Two Books for Three Months

Try-It With-Me Tuesday, an interactive weekly time and place to foster connections that challenge and encourage the process to become a well-rounded person.

Feeling busy enough yet this month? I finished my Christmas shopping, though the countdown may still turn into chaos. I’d like to be curled up reading, but I’m carefully marking off my “To Do” list. So, I’m forgoing a new book in December for the TIWMT Book Club.

But wait . . . That doesn’t mean I’m not going to be reading. I’ve chosen two new books for January and February book club choices. I’m also reading Abby Takes a Stand for my daughter’s elementary school reading groups. My participation in her goal last year started my own reading challenges, which have evolved into the online Try-It-With-Me Tuesday monthly book club. We read books from our lifetime pursuit of literature lists.

For the new year ahead, I will choose one book per month, but I will announce it in the previous month. You can find the current and coming month’s book choices on the Try-It-With-Me Tuesday page at the top of my home page. And here there are . . .

January’s Book Choice:
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Discussion on January 27

February’s Book Choice:
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Discussion on February 24

Do you want to Try It With Me in 2009?

Here’s how to participate:

First – Find a copy of the book.

Second – Read it by the last Monday of the month, keeping track of lines you like with sticky notes or a running list of page numbers.

Third – Share your impressions in an online discussion here on the last Tuesday of each month. Here’s two ways to join the discussion:

1. Leave your thoughts in the comments.

2. Write a post on your own website.

If you do write a post, I want to publish your link so we can visit your website and see what you have to say. Please email your  permalink to tj (at) tjhirst (dot) com no later than the last Monday of the month by 12 a.m. (Central Time). Feel free to use the TIWMT image in your post.

If your want to write a post but don’t make the deadline, just leave the link in your comments on the Tuesday post.

As this book club grows beyond just a few people, I will add an automatic link up, but I want to maintain an environment that encourages readers of all varieties, whether they are blog authors or not.

Read More