Just shy of 500 pages, The Forest Laird by Jack Whyte is a tome. I did enjoy the story and all the details of life in the late 1200s, even though, having seen the movie Braveheart years ago, I knew how tragic William Wallace's life was. The vernacular and old-speak in the story was great, like using "ken" instead of the word "know", but I didn't glean any quotes from it.
I subbed for an English teacher today and one of my classes read Irving Washington's The Devil and Tom Walker (out of the Adventures in American Literature textbook.) Written in early the 1800's, this cautionary tale is set in 1727.
Vivid descriptions of the warring couple:
He had a wife as miserly as himself: they were so miserly that they even conspired to cheat each other.
This quote is less about a lovely turn of phrase and more about its interesting attitude toward slavery, given the era it was written in:
He [the devil] insisted that the money found through his means should be employed in his service. He proposed, therefore, that Tom should employ it in the black traffic; that is to say that he should fit out a slave ship. This, however, Tom resolutely refused: he was bad enough in all conscience; but the devil himself could not tempt him to turn slave trader.
And who hasn't met a self-righteous s.o.b. like this:
Tom was as rigid in religious as money matters; he was a stern supervisor and censurer of his neighbor, and seemed to think every sin entered up to their account became a credit on his own side of the page.
Ah, me. Fun in a high school English Lit class.
I started the book that another of my classes from today is reading. By page 18 I was hooked.
Here's a quote from the preface: We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out and combed out.
Can you guess what this novel is that I am reading now?
