In my quest to read these 100 “great” books, I knew I’d come across some I didn’t enjoy, and I have read a couple so far that, while they didn’t do it for me, I could still see why they were on the list. Until now. Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas is just awful. I don’t understand why it is included to be honest.

Stein was a writer and artist, American by birth, who lived and hobnobbed in Paris in the first part of the 20th Century. She wrote this book as a biography of Alice, her domestic partner, and it tells stories and tales of their life in Paris before and after World War I. Unfortunately, there is no overarching “story” to tie it all together. It reads like a diary, sort of like “today we did this” and “that summer we hung with this person.” Extremely boring to start with, but it is obvious from the beginning that Stein is so full of herself, she is as pretentious as it gets. The whole book is full of name-drops, how much they hung out with Matisse and Picasso and all the artists of the day. There are even times when Stein hints some of their careers would have not gone anywhere if not for her influence. When World War I hits, she continues her vacationing around Europe and sees the war as a big inconvenience to her social life, and becomes angry over things like her passport not being properly recognized at borders.

If the book were organized in any way, with some guidance or flow to keep it going in one direction, it at least could be readable, but as it sits, it is hardly that. Paragraphs stand alone from each other, and one idea often has little or nothing to do with the next. It is like Stein sat down and just starting writing with no idea where the book was going and no purpose behind it, except to tell everyone how fabulous her life and friends are. To my credit, I forced my way from beginning to end and didn’t give up, but it is an excruciating read and not recommended from any literary perspective.

I didn’t like The Diary of a Teenage Girl as much as the critics did. It is good, and well acted, but not ground-breaking or anything. It is a coming-of-age movie about Bel, a 15 or 16 year old girl living with her single mom in the 70’s. The movie starts with her having just lost her virginity, and we quickly find out it was to her mom’s boyfriend. It would be more creepy if it weren’t all her doing, as she made all the moves to make it happen. In teenage fashion she thinks she is now in love and all will be ok, but she has a lot of growing up to do before the end of the film. The movie holds nothing back, it shows Bel experimenting in sex and drugs and trying her hardest to grow up as fast as she can, as we all did at that age. A decent film, just not stellar for me.

Sleeping With Other People is also just OK. Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie are the leads, they lose their virginity to each other in college on a one-night-stand, and years later meet up again. Neither has had a healthy relationship in the intervening time, and set out to be just friends and support each other. Obviously know where this is going. If you like Sudeikis’s humor a la Horrible Bosses (and I do) then you will enjoy this film more, if not, you might almost hate it.

Monkey Kingdom is the latest from Disney Nature films. For animal lovers like myself, you will enjoy this one as you probably have the others. It follows a single community of monkeys in Asia, giving names to individual members and following them over the course of a year or so. It is narrated by Tina Fey, who injects some humor into the story/documentary as well. A short film at under 90 minutes I think, with plenty to like for families.

99 Homes started out great, but fizzled in the end, at least to my tastes. It takes place during the housing market crash in the mid-2000’s, and stars Andrew Garfield as Dennis Nash, who just lost his house to foreclosure, and Michael Shannon as Carver, the greedy real estate mogul gobbling up cheap homes. Nash is broke and trying to support his mom and son, and finds himself working now for Carver, evicting others. The movie is tense from the beginning, as Nash balances his morals with his need to help his family, and the moments when he confronts angry homeowners defending their house are edge-of-your-seat worthy. Unfortunately the ending wasn’t quite there for me, but still a good movie over all.

Freeheld is sort of the opposite of 99 Homes. Most of the film felt uninspired (even if it based on an inspiring true story), but the ending was great. It has Julianne Moore as Laurel Hester, a cop of 23 years dying of cancer, who is trying to leave her pension to her domestic partner Stacie (played by Ellen Page). Taking place in 2005, it brought a heightened awareness to same-sex marriage. I don’t know how much of the film was true and how much was made for the screen, but it was ok overall. Michael Shannon is in this one too as Laurel’s cop partner, and he is good here too, but Steve Carell’s character of a gay right’s activist is a little over-the-top, and I often couldn’t tell if he was trying to be serious or joking. The ending is a little heavy handed but acceptable.

At first I didn’t know what to make of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. This story is a “prequel” to Bronte’s Jane Eyre, telling the backstory of Mr Rochester’s first wife, the insane woman in the attic in that famous novel. The book shows that all things are perhaps not what they seem, and every story has two sides.

Sea is separated into three parts, each told in the first person. The first section is the female protagonist’s, Antoinette’s, childhood. Her mother’s first husband has died, leaving them a lot of land in Jamaica but no money to back it up. The locals resent the family as former slave owners, but they are “rescued” by Mr Mason, who comes and marries the mother and restores their estate. However, one night the house is set afire by an angry mob. Antoinette’s brother dies, and her mother, already mentally unstable, goes insane.

The second part is told from the first person of a new gentleman. Though it never says his name, we learn later that it is Mr Rochester. He has come to marry Antoinette for money, and their marriage quickly falls apart. Antoinette slips quickly towards insanity, but we as readers find her to a be a sympathetic figure. Her husband sleeps with the help, she has no true friends, as most still carry animosity towards her family from years ago, and it seems there is no help or hope coming. Her husband has grown to despise her and has started inexplicably calling her Bertha, a name she hates. One night after a drunken arguement, the man announces he is leaving Jamaica and bringing his wife to England. Antoinette has always wanted to see England, but now just wants to stay at her home.

The third short section again switches to Antoinette’s view. She is totally insane now, and her narrative falls in and out of coherency. Her husband has locked her in an attic, and she refuses to believe this cell is the idyllic England she had envisioned. She doesn’t recognize Mr Mason or other visitors, and is convinced she has only been there for days, when in reality years have gone by. She escapes out of her room one day, and during a vision she sets fire to the building (obviously the same from Jane Eyre).

This book paints her as a tragic figure indeed. She obviously has mental disease in her family, but many factors outside of her control put her in that attic by Mr Rochester. The book is a little hard to get sometimes, much of it is told like a stereotypical creole story, with truth and present sometimes muddled with spirit and effervescence, to the point that you aren’t exactly sure what is actually happening. A good book though for sure, reminding you that the bad guy may not always be who you think.

White Noise by Don DeLillo is an interesting book. It is written in a playful, wry style. For instance, the main character Jack, is a Hitler studies expert and professor in a small, prestigious university (famous for Jack’s studies, since he was the first in the country to promote this course), yet he doesn’t speak German. The book follows Jack in his everyday life, and his dealings with quirky family members and work associates. As a modern family, the tv is always on in one room or another, so you think the title refers to the constant stream of commercials and background sound (the author does intersperse a line regularly into the novel from the tv), but really it is about the death all around us.  The backdrop of the novel is Jack’s obsessive fear of death. He thinks about it often, such as when he will die, how he will die, etc.

Jack’s fear grows exponentially when there is a waste spill just outside of town, and the residents must evacuate for a time for safety. Jack is exposed, and the response team (again humorously, a “fake” response team that is meant to practice for calamities is instead having to do the real thing first, and practice later in the novel) tells Jack that his life has almost definitely been shortened. When Jack finally tells his wife Babette about his real fear, she says she has the same fear, but while it is a nagging obsession with Jack, it is a paralyzing fear for Babette. She has gone so far as to find a black market pill that is supposed to subdue the fear of death, and she has been having an affair with the drug-maker to keep a steady supply coming. Jack takes this news in stride; with his own increasing dread he realizes he would do just about anything to rid himself of the fear as well.

In the end, something snaps in Jack, and he wants to get the medicine his wife has been taking, to see if it will help. He goes to the sleazy motel where she has been meeting the drug maker, and confronts him with the intent to rob and kill him. It goes astray though, and both end up at a local religious hospital, being cared for by nuns. Jack turns to a nun, looking for some faith to ease his troubled mind, and she admits she isn’t even religious and doesn’t believe in God or an after-life.

Funny little stories about death fill the book, such as Jack’s son’s friend who wants to sit in a pit with 70 deadly vipers to get in the Guinness book of records, or youngest son Wilder, who Babette is always checking on, but manages to find himself in the middle of a busy interstate at the end of the novel (he doesn’t get hurt). There are many more. Even the local grocery store where Jack and his friend Murray shop can be a metaphor for death. This book was much different than most of the other classics I’ve been reading lately, and a good, if somewhat unsettling, change of pace.

O Pioneers! is the second novel of Willa Cather’s I’ve read in this list of 100. Written many years before Death Comes for the Archbishop, it is a softer story but is still very moving. It tells the story of Alexandra Bergson, an independent strong-willed woman struggling to build a farm in rural Nebraska in the early part of the 20th century.

It starts when Alexandra is a young adult. Her father brought their family to the USA from Sweden to start a new life, and after struggling for years to get something to grow in the strange Nebraskan soil, he is dying. Alexandra is the eldest child and must now look after the farm and her three younger brothers. Brothers Lou and Oscar are similar in that they lack the foresight for grander schemes, and want to sell the land and settle on a smaller farm by the river where farming may be easier. Alexandra wants to further her father’s goal of the kids having a better life, so resists their efforts, while grooming youngest brother Emil to go to university one day and move on to bigger and better things. She puts her personal life on hold, keeping her only male friend Carl at a distance.

From these beginnings, the novel shoots forward from chapter to chapter. Sometimes a week or month will go by, sometimes years. Over time, Alexandra is able to turn her small farm into a sprawling plantation. Lou and Oscar still pine away for an easier life, Emil has gone to school and come back for a short time, deciding what to do next, and Carl is having is own adventures around the country, but always returning from time to time hoping Alexandra is ready to settle down with him. Emil ends up falling in love with Marie, a neighbor who is all ready married to a burly farmer named Frank. Emil struggles with his feelings, finally deciding to leave before anything comes of it, but when he goes to say good-bye, the two give in to their feelings. Frank finds them and shoots them both in a crime of passion. Alexandra’s hopes of Emil being the one sibling to go off to a new life are shattered, and she realizes that has been the big goal of her life, more than the farm or prosperity she has brought to the area. Now in her 40’s, she finally allows herself some personal comfort and agrees to marry Carl. She knows that no matter how hard she tries to hold on to something, whether it is Emil or the land, all things fade and time keeps moving on.

This is a quiet, unassuming, “little house on the prairie” kind of book, but a good one. In fact one of the more moving books I’ve read in a little while. Much of the book is told in dialogue, and the descriptive background writing is sometimes sparse, leaving much to the imagination. Cather does a fantastic job of writing just enough to give you a sense of the open land they live on and the life it holds there, and lets your mind fill in the rest. Alexandra is a different kind of feminist. She doesn’t stand on a soapbox shouting for equality, but she does her work quietly, as well as any man could, and doesn’t even listen when her brothers try to move her to do something she doesn’t think is right. An enjoyable, quick read.