THURSDAY SPARKS: THEMES & BOOKING — MARCH 29

Good morning!  Welcome to another Thursday event, in which we spark some creativity and dig into the books we’re reading for our Thursday Themes, hosted by Reading Between Pages ; or explore our thoughts and feelings about bookish topics in Booking Through Thursday.

Our themes give us a wonderful opportunity to explore and understand different writing styles and descriptive approaches adopted by authors.

 

Theme Thursdays:

 

March is going to be all about making life easy. This month we will do ‘Pick what you see first‘ themes.

Pick the last sentence from the last page of the book. Yes, the very last sentence. I am assuming it would be mostly ‘Happily ever after’ but lets see how books end.

ENDING – Last sentence from the last page of the book.

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Today I’ve grabbed a book from next week’s stack.  This one has been on my TBRs for QUITE awhile.  American Pastoral, by Philip Roth, is a Pulitzer Prize winner.

As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century’s promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth’s protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father’s glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede’s beautiful American luck deserts him.

For Swede’s adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longer-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth’s masterpiece.

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The Last Sentence:  And what is wrong with their life?  What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?

Interesting…what do you think?

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Booking Through Thursday:

I haven’t participated in this one for a couple of weeks.  So here’s today’s prompt:

Ted and Sarah both asked similar questions about relating to characters:

Ted asks:

Are there any fictional characters whom you have emulated (or tried to)? Who and why?

Bookish Sarah asks an interesting assortment of questions:

What literary character do you feel is most like you personality-wise (explain)?

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Let me start by mentioning a favorite book in childhood and how I loved it so much I read it over and over.  After awhile, the characters seemingly informed my life.  Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, was that book.

I wanted to be Jo, of course; the writer.  But I wanted to look like Meg…lol

 

Nowadays, I’m more likely to enjoy characters who are grown-ups…and writers.  Yes, that wish lingers.

I actually am a writer, but don’t we always feel as though the writers whose books we love are on a higher plane?  Or at least I do.

I love the character in The Tapestry of Love (click for review), in which the MC lives in a beautiful house in France; it’s about finding a new life in beautiful places.

So…to sum up, I would like to be a writer who travels to beautiful places!  lol

What about the rest of you?  Come on by and share….