hmmm... book one, The Genesis

So, usually when I read books and find something I haven't heard of before and don't know anything about, I google it. Often I get really excited when I find something that can relate to in one way or another
(e.g. in this book, when the author mentions Communism and Nikita Khrushchev (Ники́та Серге́евич Хрущёв) or Pearl (Pearl Harbor) etc. more about them later...)
The same with "The Poisonwood Bible". It is a fiction, but it also has references to history and what actually happened in the world at that time.

In the first book "The Genesis", what caught my interest was, well the name itself - Genesis. The title of the book gives a hint that there might be something to do with religion or Christianity in the story and the author has brought it out really well.
The Genesis, or Book of Genesis is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament.
Of course it is the first book in this novel, too. What is also great how she brings in the popular consumer good that people used back then or still use - Betty Crocker cake mixes, Anacin, Absorbine etc. She also bring out Piggly Wiggly (yeah, you probably grin over the name the name of it, I did, for sure, but stop! it's an actual place). It's  is a supermarket chain operating in the Midwestern and Southern regions of the United States (something people up in north of the U.S could relate to Stop and Shop). 

Throughout the storu, there are lots of references to the Bible, but there are also others, like The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde. I've heard of those names (Jekyll and Hyde) before, but I wasn't familiar with the story or what (more like who) the story was about. we learn something new every day... 
I read about the book from Adah's section, she also mentions Emily Dickinson (Dec 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Born in Amerhest, MA) 

Emily Dickinson

and Edgar Allan Poe (Jan. 19, 1809 – Oct 7, 1849, was an American author, poet) 

Edgar Allan Poe

 

who knew...

So, I was doing my homework for another class. It was about religion, the typical - read through the text and answer the questions. So I did and out of curiosity I googled about the different religions the texts was about and what caught my eye, was Judaism. Of course I opened the link to wikipedia and I scanned through the text and read through the important information on  the right side, and there was one part about important figures in Judaism and two names popped out - Rachel and Leah!
were these names given to the characters on purpose? perhaps... a coincidence? maybe...
who knew!? i most certainly didn't...

Significant sentences from Book Two THE REVELATION

• "Some of us are in the ground now and some are above it, but we're all women, made of the same scarred earth." Orleanna Price, pg 89.
• "God was testing him like Job, he declared, and the point of that particukar parable was the Job had done no wrong do begind with." Orleanna Price, pg 97.
• "He was hardly a father except in the vocational sense as a potter with clay to be molded." Orleanna Price, pg 98.
• "And poor Leah followed him like an underpaid waitress hoping for the tip." Orleanna Price, pg 98.
• "I copy down each new word in my school notebook and vow to remember it always when I am a grown-up American lady with a backyard garden of my own. I shall tell all the world the lessons i learned in Africa." Leah, pg 101.
• "While the little boys ran around pretending to shoot each other and fall dead on the road, it appeared that little girls were running the country." Leah, pg 113.
• "Father says a girl can't go to college because they'll pour water in your shoes." Ruth May, pg 117.
• "Hoo, boy! My father didn't like the doctor one bit after that. Saying anything is better than Jesus is a bad sin." Ruth May, pg 122.
• "Anatole, the schoolteacher, is twenty-four years of age, with all his fingers still on, both eyes and both feet, and that is the local idea of a top-throb dreamboat." Rachel, pg125.
• "In my life as Adah I must come to my own terms with the predator." Adah, pg 139.
• "I think Anatole helps our family because his an outsider here too, like us. He can sympathize with our predicament." Leah, pg144.
• "My father says a girl who fails to marry is veering from God's plan - that's what he's got against college for Adah and me, besides the wasted expense - and I'm sure what he says is true." Leah, pg 149-150.
• "Nelson says everybody's got their own little God here to protects them, special African ones that live in the little tiny thing they wear around their necks. A gree-gree is what you call it." Ruth May, pg 154.
• "Anatole said the Congo people don't like owls because an owl flies around at night and eats up the souls of dead people." Ruth May, pg 156.
• "No matter what happens on God's green earth, Father acts like it's a movie he's already seen and we're just dumb for not knowing how it comes out." Rachel, pg 162.
• "When I finally got up with sharp grains imbedded in my knees I found, to my surprise, that I no longer believed in God." Adah, pg 171.
• "I saw a kindness there, and believe he means to protects us, really. Protect us from angry gods, and our own stupidity, by sending us away." Adah, pg 174.
• "So Mr.Patrice will be the Prime Minister of the Congo now and it won't be the Belgian Congo anymore, it will be the Republic of Congo. And do you think anyone will notice? Oh, sure. They'll all have to go out and get their drivers' licenses changed. In the year two million that is, when they build a road to here and somebody gets a car." Rachel, pg 177.
• "Then I just crawled in the bed with her , and now that makes two of us that don't feel like getting up ever again." Ruth May, pg 180.
• "I narrowed my eyes to a hard focus on Patrice Lumumba and tried to understand his words. I was jealous of Adah who picked up anguages easier thatn she could tie her own shoes. I wish I'd studied harder."Leah, pg 183.
• "Leopoldville is a nice little town of dandy houses with porches and flowery yards on nicepaved streets for the whites, and surrounding it, for miles and miles, nothing but dusty run-down shacks for the Congolese." Leah, pg 183.
• "At last it is Independence Day, for Methuselah and the Congo." Adah, pg 185.

Part 2
Significant Sentences from Book One - the Genesis

• "So Noah cursed all Ham's children to be slaves for ever and ever. That's how come them to turn out black." Ruth May, page 20.
• "Leah and Adah are in between and they're twins, so maybe they are one person but I think two, because Leah runs everywhere and climbs trees, but Adah can't, she is bad on one whole side and doesn't talk because she is brain-damaged and also hates us all." Ruth May, pg 21.
• "He is reliable in the following way: if they say he is coming on Monday, it will be Tuesday Friday or not at all." Adah, pg 33.
• "It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell." Adah, pg 34. 
• "He must have lacked faith in mankind's follow through capabilities, on the day He created flowers."  Leah, pg 38.
• "... days and months do not matter one way or another to people in this village. They don't know Sunday from Tuesday or Friday or the twelfth of Never! They just count to five, have their market day and start over." Rachel, pg 45.
• "In some ways they are as strict you might as well have a Communist for your parents, but when it comes to something you really wish they'd notice, oh, well! Then parental laxity is the rule of the day." Rachel, pg 48.
• "Why, Nathan, here they have to use their bodies like we use things at home - like your clothes or your garden tools or something. Where you'd be wearing out the knees of your trousers, sir, they just have to go ahead and wear out their knees!" said Mama. Ruth May, pg 53.
• "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes" he (Father) still loves to say that. Adah, pg 56.
• "My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's foot soldier, while our mother is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit." Leah, pg 68.
• "Our village was blessed for weeks with the smell of putrefaction. Instead of abundance it was a holiday of waste." Adah, pg 70.
• "She (Rachel) is the most dramatic member of the family, and the worst actress, which in out family is a crucial skill." Adah, pg 75.
• "If God had amused himself inventing the lilies of the field, he surely knocked His own socks off with he African parasites." Adah, pg 76.
• "That he just proposed to sit up there and consign us to hardships one right after another? Certainly it wasn't my place to scrutinize God's great plan, but what about the balancing scales of justice?" Leah, pg 78.

the Poisonwood Bible

Part 1

So, as I mentioned in my previous blog, we started to read a novel "The Poisonwood Bible". I still haven't made much progress with it (shame on me), but I did manage to read about the main characters   - the Price sisters and their mother Orleanna Price. Out of those characters I fell for two of them, Adah Price and Ruth May Price.

Adah Price -  Leah's twin sister Adah is born with a condition called "hemiplegia," which prevents her from using the left side of her body. Rather than view herself with pity, Adah places herself in voluntary exile from the world, looking on as a wry and brilliant observer, rather than an active participant. She too is changed by the Congo; she is pulled into life and forced to admit that she cares enough to participate. She devotes her life to science, becoming a celebrated epidemiologist. (http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/poisonwood/characters.html)


Ruth May Price  -  Five-year-old Ruth May enters the Congo fierce and adventurous. Without speaking the language she manages to befriend all of the children in the village. After a bad bout with malaria, however, she becomes quiet and spiritless. Obsessively frightened by green mamba snakes, she is ultimately killed by one.