Various elements go into a good book title, with alliteration one of them. It helps (alliteration alert) a novel’s name to flow nicely and can make a title much more memorable (additional alliteration).

Before continuing with today’s theme, I want to mention that the end of this post will feature details about a podcast focusing on my cat Misty! 🙂 There’s a link, too. 🙂

I thought of writing this alliteration article while reading The Plains of Passage, the fourth installment of Jean M. Auel’s compelling “Earth’s Children” series that began with The Clan of the Cave Bear. Not only is the title mellifluously alliterative, but it’s also informatively descriptive — Ayla and Jondalar take a long journey along Europe’s prehistoric plains as they attempt a passage to where Jondalar’s people live.

Of course, some alliterative titles are the names of the protagonists themselves — with notable examples including George Eliot’s dramatic Daniel Deronda, Sir Walter Scott’s rousing Rob Roy, Herman Melville’s brilliant Billy Budd, and Herman Wouk’s masterful Marjorie Morningstar.

Among ultra-famous examples of catchy title alliteration without full character names are Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, among others.

Somewhat less famous but still well known are Emile Zola’s The Drinking Den, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and Injured, Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point, Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen, Fannie Flagg’s The Whole Town’s Talking, Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk, etc.

More recent general fiction? A few titles that come to mind are Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Genre fiction (crime, sci-fi, and so on) is in the alliteration mix, too. Sue Grafton’s alphabet mysteries such as B Is for Burglar. Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer. Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax Pursued. Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Susan Moore Jordan’s Augusta McKee mysteries starting with The Case of the Slain Soprano. And more.

Any alliterative titles you’d like to name?

About that aforementioned podcast: The great Canadian interviewer/blogger Rebecca Budd, who often comments here under the name Clanmother, talked with me about my cat Misty. That wonderful feline has an interesting history of being walked on a leash every day, living with asthma, etc. The conversation runs about 16 minutes, and is accompanied by a really nice three-minute clip featuring some of the best photos and videos of Misty (outdoors and in) over the years. Put together by Rebecca and her production-wiz husband Don. The link is here.

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” local topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — about my town’s mayor overdoing the raising of campaign money — is here.

Trump supporters scaling the Capitol wall on January 6. (Photo by Jose Luis Magana, Associated Press.)

This summer’s congressional hearings on the Trump-incited Capitol Riot of January 6 remind us once again that most Republicans have tried to minimize how awful things were that day. The far-right white mob was violent and racist as they parroted Trump’s “Stop the Steal” lie that he won the 2020 presidential election, yet most Republicans have since made it seem like those January 6 actions were mostly benign. They know in their heart of hearts that there was no excuse for what was done in the Capitol building that day, but those spineless/unprincipled GOP politicians are more concerned about staying in office by not angering the vile Trump and his base.

Anyway, what would happen if Republicans tried to revise some famous novels as much as they’ve tried to revise the history of January 6 in an effort to make villainous characters and negative scenes seem more positive?

Let’s start with an early segment of Jane Eyre. The “pious” hypocrite Mr. Brocklehurst nearly starves Jane and the other hungry, freezing girls in his Lowood institution, even as he and his family live the wealthy high life. But in a 2021 Republican retelling of Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel, Mr. B would be a hero — keeping the orphan girls fashionably slim and creating jobs (for undertakers).

In The Grapes of Wrath, the Joads are evicted from their farm in drought-stricken Oklahoma by heartless bankers and then try for a better life in 1930s California — only to face one daunting ordeal after another. In a 2021 Republican retelling of John Steinbeck’s novel, the eviction-happy bankers would be lauded for maximizing profits, for further enriching real-estate interests by buying themselves more vacation homes, and for helping oil companies become even more profitable as ousted farm families buy lots of gas to drive their jalopies to the West Coast. There, California employers pay the Joads and other new arrivals such low wages for arduous work (if they find work) that those beleaguered employees can’t afford to see The Grapes of Wrath movie and get populist ideas.

The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a patriarchal society in which women are brutalized and discriminated against in all kinds of appalling ways. But the Republican spin on Margaret Atwood’s novel would be that women are still in the top two when it comes to how the two genders are treated. Better than the top three, no?

Speaking of dystopian novels, Republicans could also soften 1984 by saying the book’s evil totalitarian government makes a reader think of Total cereal — which has all kinds of vitamins and minerals. And they’d add that it’s only fair for the rat to get a star turn near the end of George Orwell’s novel after Winston Smith was featured so much in the book. Who said most Republicans oppose animal rights?

A major character in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is Professor Woland, who also happens to be Satan. Republicans usually hate profs — they’re liberal academics, after all — but Woland is THE DEVIL. So, to the GOP, he’s more beloved than Anne Shirley, Jo March, Dorothy Gale, Madeline, and Bilbo Baggins combined. And why read six books (including those with all the aforementioned characters) when one book will do? Leaves more time to destroy democracy.

Moving on to Kurt Vonnegut’s most-famous novel, Republicans would simply change the name of Slaughterhouse-Five to Slaughter House Six to reference the House of Representatives and January 6. And they’d say the book was mostly a comedy, a la The House of Mirth. (Of course, Edith Wharton’s novel was far from funny.)

Most readers know that the abusive Bob Ewell is a virulent racist who ruins the life of Black man Tom Robinson in Harper Lee’s 1930s-set To Kill a Mockingbird. But to Republicans, Ewell is “good people” and “our base.” Sure, they’re disappointed that he didn’t participate in the January 6 riot, but, then again, Ewell would be over 130 years old if he lived until 2021. Not an ideal age for scaling a Capitol wall.

Any other novels with heartbreaking moments you’d like to mention that Republicans could cynically make more benign?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” local topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — about an election controversy, required COVID vaccinations, and more — is here.

The beach where I did NOT read Mother Goose last week. (Photo by my wife, Laurel Cummins.)

Vacation reading! If you’re not constantly sightseeing, you might have more time to read than when you’re home. There might be long hours to fill on plane rides, too.

So, what’s the strategy? Tackle a challenging novel or two? Go for the “comfort food” of escapist reading? A combination of the two?

I vividly remember a Cape Cod vacation four years ago sitting on a pond beach wading through Henry James’ The Ambassadors, day after day. Ultimately a subtly interesting novel in many ways, but difficult and at times boring. Some of the convoluted sentences were longer than the vacation. 🙂

The next year, I switched reading approaches by enjoying two escapist Gorky Park sequels on the plane rides to and from France and during non-sightseeing moments amid two weeks in La Rochelle and Paris. “We’ll always have…Martin Cruz Smith.”

I also “did” escapist during a family-vacation return to Cape Cod this past week, July 17-24. I finished Colleen McCullough’s stellar historical novel Morgan’s Run (which I wrote about last week) and then read much of The Mammoth Hunters — the lengthy third installment of Jean M. Auel’s always-compelling “Earth’s Children” series. (I had recently read the first two novels: The Clan of the Cave Bear and The Valley of Horses.) There’s something very soothing about continuing a book series on vacation; one already has a comfort level with a particular author’s storytelling and characters, even as there’s the excitement of new plot developments.

Of course, few escapist novels are totally escapist. Auel’s series and Morgan’s Run and Martin Cruz Smith’s books have quite a few distressing moments. But they’re escapist in the sense of being very readable and very absorbing, with little mental strain involved in following the plot (even as the novels can also have a good amount of literary value). After all, vacations are for relaxing — at least in part.

Then there’s the comfort of rereading. I haven’t done that on vacation for a while, but remember rereading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix while on a train from Paris to Venice in 2004. That rail ride sure seemed to go fast, but a drawback was concentrating more on J.K. Rowling’s riveting fifth Potter book than on the amazing scenery outside the train window. 🙂 But I did look up from the pages fairly often.

What are your vacation-reading preferences? Challenging, “comfort food,” or both?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” local topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — about children’s book characters coming to life in the reopened children’s section of my local library 🙂 — is here.

Colleen McCullough

When I read another novel, it often sparks an idea for a thematic blog post that includes elements from that book mixed with similar elements from novels I’ve read in the past. It’s not always a “Eureka!” moment, but sometimes it is.

As was the case this past week. I’m currently reading Colleen McCullough for the first time — her riveting novel Morgan’s Run — and, about a quarter of the way through the 600-page book, I came across this line about 18th-century protagonist Richard Morgan: “He is six-and-thirty, and God is trying him as He tried Job.”

Eureka! That gave me the idea for a blog post about beleaguered characters who are hit with one gut-punch after another — whether it be deaths of loved ones, ill health, loss of jobs, unjust imprisonment, etc.

How do these characters deal with all that? Do they cope to some extent, or succumb to despair? Are the gut-punches partly their fault, or mainly instances of bad luck? Do things get better eventually — or never?

Basically, novels with this type of scenario can be heartbreaking or inspiring or some combination of the two. And we of course usually feel a great deal of sympathy for the beleaguered protagonists, unless they’re villainous.

To avoid spoilers, I won’t get specific about the travails of Robert Morgan as his life morphs from England to the early settling of white people in Australia, but that decent/moral/capable man is absolutely pummeled by life in a good chunk of the book by McCullough, who’s best known for The Thorn Birds.

Among the many other compelling novels in which the main characters don’t catch a break — until sometimes they do — are George Eliot’s Silas Marner, Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Emile Zola’s The Drinking Den, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle, Lisa Genova’s Still Alice, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Stephen King’s Rose Madder, and Martin Cruz’s Smith’s first Gorky Park sequel Polar Star, to name just a few.

Any novel you’d like to mention with beleaguered protagonists?

Note: I’ll be slower with my replies at times this week, but will reply eventually! 🙂

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” local topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — about everything from a proposed nature trail to an overpriced new apartment building — is here.

From the 1984 film version of A Passage to India.

Have you ever read a novel you contemplated not finishing but then things picked up? Such was the case last week with me and A Passage to India.

The first part of E.M. Forster’s 1924 novel was actually pretty good: beautifully/subtly written — with mostly non-stereotypical depictions of India’s citizens and interesting cross-cultural interactions between those citizens and characters from Great Britain, the colonial ruler over India back then. But there was endless talking and little happening in the way of plot, and I found my attention straying. Then — pow! — an unfair arrest happened and things got really compelling.

Of course, a plot development that dramatic is not always needed to make a book more interesting.

It also took me a while to warm to A Game of Thrones, the first installment of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. It wasn’t that the writing wasn’t good — it was — but I was rather bewildered by the array of characters being introduced, the connections between those characters, and the fictional world being depicted. Then it came together, and I was hooked.

In short, the buffet had to be laid out and studied before the eating was enjoyed.

With Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the structure of the novel made me consider throwing in the towel. Early on, the book was in the form of a long, at-times tedious poem. Then, Nabokov started using prose to offer clues about what was going on as he unraveled some of the puzzle he had set up. A novel almost totally devoid of warmth, but immensely clever.

Sometimes novels start with pages and pages of over-long descriptions of landscapes and buildings before characters are introduced and the plot begins to unfold. This is especially the case in older novels written during a pre-air-travel/pre-Internet time when most readers hadn’t actually or virtually seen most places, so authors had to fill in the blanks.

I’ll conclude by saying I HAVE abandoned some novels before finishing them — with few regrets. So many other fictional works to read instead. 🙂

Any novels you’d like to mention that started slow but picked up?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” local topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — about some interesting early-summer events — is here.

The Secret Life of Bees movie‘s main cast.

I have two daughters and my wife has four sisters, so I’ve heard plenty of conversations among women. But I’ve obviously never heard them speak when a male isn’t around, which is one of many reasons why women-centered novels written by female authors appeal to me. A person can learn a lot while “eavesdropping” on female characters interacting with each other, whether those fictional women are mostly feeling camaraderie or things are more fraught. 

Female-only interactions can of course be between friends, sisters, mothers and daughters, grandmothers and grandchildren, cousins, couples in same-gender relationships, co-workers, sports teammates, etc.

Not surprisingly, this post was partly inspired by novels I’ve recently read. One was Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees and the other was Joy Fielding’s Grand Avenue. Both very compelling books that are well worth the time.

Bees is narrated by 14-year-old Lily — a white girl who, with her household’s Black maid Rosaleen, leaves home in 1960s South Carolina to escape her abusive father and search for information about her late mother. They end up in the household of three Black sisters: wise/friendly beekeeper August, not-so-friendly teacher June, and emotionally sensitive May. The conversations of these five characters are something to behold — reflecting the bonds between females, racial dynamics, and more. Meanwhile, there’s the threat of Lily’s (bigoted) father looking for her…

It almost goes without saying that most women-centered novels feature men in some scenes, but they are scarce in many other scenes.

The Ohio-set Grand Avenue, which spans the late 1970s through the early 2000s, starts with an irresistible premise: four mothers who live on the street of the book’s title hit it off immediately while watching their young daughters play in a local park. The mutual loyalty of high-powered attorney Vicki, magazine editor Susan, former beauty queen Barbara, and homemaker Chris is a delight until the quartet’s many differences — as well as the vicissitudes of life (an abusive husband, a shocking murder, etc.) — put major stress on their four-way friendship.

Other women-written, women-centered novels that offer memorable, believable characters and meaningful female conversations and relationships include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies, Kate Quinn’s The Alice Network, Jennifer Ryan’s The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir, and Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, to name just a few of many.

Any women-centered novels you’d like to discuss?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” local topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — in which both George Washington and Yogi Berra get comedic mentions — is here.

From the cover of the Eugene Onegin edition I read.

When we look at literature from the first half of the 19th century, the 1810s and the 1840s first come to mind.

The 1810s of course saw the publication of all six classic Jane Austen novels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and well-known Sir Walter Scott works such as Rob Roy and Ivanhoe (the latter released in very late 1819), to name nine memorable books. The 1840s offered a bonanza of famous novels such as those by the Bronte sisters (including Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights), Charles Dickens (including David Copperfield and A Christmas Carol), Alexandre Dumas (including The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers), Nikolai Gogol (Dead Souls), William Thackeray (Vanity Fair), and Herman Melville (Typee, etc.).

The in-between 1820s and 1830s stand out less in the fiction realm, but it was still an important literary time — partly a transition period, perhaps, as novels became a more and more prominent genre.

Among the great books of those two decades were Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward (1823), Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (also 1826), Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), George Sand’s Lelia (1833), Honore de Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet (also 1833) and Old Goriot (1835), Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby (spanning 1836 to 1839), and Edgar Allan Poe’s only finished novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838).

But today I want to focus the most on Eugene Onegin, which I read last week. Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse was serialized from 1825 to 1832 and released as a book in 1833. The story is compelling — the rich/bored/cynical title character, a fateful duel, and two people enamored with each other but not at the same time. Still, what impressed me even more was the writing itself: absolutely magnificent poetry that ranges from witty to dead serious, with narration from a very interesting perspective. It’s no surprise that Eugene Onegin and Pushkin had quite an influence on subsequent 19th-century Russian literature — and we all know how amazing THAT turned out to be…with works by Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, etc.

One last note: While I’m no expert on translation, I was super-impressed with the job James E. Falen did turning Eugene Onegin‘s wonderful writing from Russian to English in the edition I read. Falen managed to maintain Pushkin’s vivid, clever, wonderful rhymes in a way I can only describe as…wow!

Your favorite 1820s or 1830s novels? Anything else you’d like to discuss relating to this week’s theme?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” local topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — about everything from teacher layoffs to the planned reopening of a movie theater — is here.

Journey. I’m talking about a long trip, not the rock band, and specifically talking about long trips in novels.

Those trips, sometimes described as quests, can be in fantasy fiction or more realistic fiction. Journey novels of course have the potential to be quite exciting and compelling — with the characters fleeing something and/or searching for something, seeing new places, encountering great danger, testing their courage, testing their stamina, and successfully completing the journey, or not.

If the journey IS completed, is the result triumphant or at least satisfying? Often. But sometimes there is tragedy, mixed feelings, and/or results that are unexpected.

The last point is one of the interesting things about a book I just read: Tailchaser’s Song, the compelling Tad Williams fantasy novel featuring cats. (Yes, journey fiction can star animals.) Tailchaser the kitty character takes a long, arduous, harrowing trip for a very specific reason, and then…

Another novel about animals on a lengthy trek is Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey. In it, two dogs and a cat travel 300 miles through the Canadian wilderness to try to find their beloved humans.

Getting back to fantasy fiction, perhaps the journey novels that most come to mind are J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The stakes could not be higher in the latter trilogy; the characters leave their homes to literally try to save their world. (Tailchaser’s Song obviously takes some inspiration from The Lord of the Rings in that and several other ways.) There’s also L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its story we all know so well.

Science-fiction writers of course also offer journey motifs, whether the setting is Earth or outer space. Among the many examples are Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days, and H.G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon and The Time Machine (time travel is obviously an epic journey of sorts, even if many miles are not traversed).

Epic sea voyages that can last for many months or years? Edgar Allan Poe’s only finished novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket; Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, White-Jacket, and Redburn; and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi — to name just a few.

Lengthy trips via motor vehicle? John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance are three of many examples.

Other novels that are quite different from each other but share long journeys: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Voltaire’s Candide, Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, (Ms.) Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles, H. Rider Haggard’s She, H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, to name just a few.

I’ve only mentioned books I’ve read, so I missed plenty of trek-heavy novels. Any you’d like to mention and/or discuss?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” local topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — which looks at fictitious graduation ceremonies of the past 🙂 — is here.

Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway. (Photo by Julieta Cervantes.)

We purchased Broadway tickets a few days ago to see a December performance of To Kill a Mockingbird, which led me to think about novels that have become plays or musicals.

Plenty of novels inspire movie adaptations, but fewer such books are turned into plays — with one reason being that there are of course more major films made than major plays staged. Also, certain elements are needed for a novel-to-play transition to have a chance to work: It helps if the novels are well-known, well-written, filled with great dialogue, dramatic, plot-oriented, and graced with memorable protagonists; and it also helps if theatrical productions feature high-profile actresses and actors. Some luck doesn’t hurt, either.

The acclaimed To Kill a Mockingbird production, which will reopen this fall along with various other Broadway plays after the long COVID shutdown, first featured movie notable Jeff Daniels as attorney Atticus Finch. Daniels will return to that role when the play resumes October 5, and is scheduled to stay until January 2. Harper Lee’s iconic novel had previously been performed as a play for several decades in Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama — an example of how a number of fiction books have inspired local or regional theater productions.

A sampling of other novels turned into successful plays performed in large venues? Alice Walker’s The Color Purple inspired a popular Broadway production and then a popular Broadway revival during our 21st century. In the 1980s, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables became a hit musical, Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby was turned into a massive play of more than eight hours, and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn spawned Big River. Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote was major source material for The Man of La Mancha musical that opened on Broadway in 1965. Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding was adapted for Broadway in the 1950s. James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific inspired the famous South Pacific musical that premiered in 1949. Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road was on stage for eight years starting in 1933. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are among the many other novels that have been adapted for live theater.

There have also been theatrical duds, such as the 1988 Carrie production based on the novel by Stephen King, who of course has fared better with various movie and TV adaptations of his works.

Any novel-to-play transitions you’d like to mention and/or talk about?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” local topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — which offers a fake graduation speech 🙂 — is here.

The sisters from We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Seven years ago, I wrote a blog post about some of literature’s memorable sibling relationships — including those in The Mill on the Floss, Crime and Punishment, Little Women, The Grapes of Wrath, Go Tell It On the Mountain, The Poisonwood Bible, and The Blind Assassin, among other novels.

I thought I would update that today by discussing siblings in several books I’ve read since 2014, starting with two recently finished novels: Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Mary Renault’s The Praise Singer.

Why are literature’s sibling relationships potentially compelling? We like when fictional sisters and/or brothers get along, lament when they don’t, feel uneasy when they’re super-competitive with each other, see the unfairness if one sibling is much more intelligent/popular/successful/better-looking, hate if the parents blatantly favor one child over another, etc. Those of us with siblings can certainly relate to some or all of the above.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a quirky, disturbing novel (no surprise with Ms. Jackson) that often centers on the interactions between main character Mary Katherine and her decade-older sister Constance — who’s almost like a mother to “Merricat.” They live an isolated life, and…is one of those two young women guilty of having mass-murdered several of their family members?

The Praise Singer is a well-crafted historical novel focusing on ancient Greek poet Simonides. One interesting aspect of the book is the relationship between the protagonist and his older brother Theas when they’re both living at home as boys. Their father blatantly favors Theas — who’s more handsome, charismatic, and confident than Simonides. But Theas treats Simonides affectionately, encourages him, and defends him. Theas goes on to become a successful adult, even as his poet brother becomes widely famous.

Another historical novel is Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies — in which three of the four Mirabel sisters become revolutionaries opposing the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo dictatorship at great risk to their lives. The trio (Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa) have quite different personalities, and don’t always get along, but share a hatred of the brutal regime. The fourth sister (Dede) is less revolutionary, and takes a somewhat divergent path in life.

As in The Praise Singer, there is unfortunate parental favoritism in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brookyn. Katie Nolan prefers her son Neeley over her daughter Francie, yet Francie (the novel’s protagonist) and her younger brother get along well for the most part — taking some psychological comfort in their companionship as they deal with a charming but often-irresponsible alcoholic father.

Also getting along well are Jemmy and Mandy — the young son and younger daughter of Brianna and Roger, who bounce around in time more than once in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels. The two kids (the grandchildren of Brianna’s 20th-century-born mother Claire and 18th-century-born father Jamie) are a familar touchstone for each other during their unorthodox lives.

An example of a dysfunctional sibling relationship is the one between Hank and Leland in Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. Hank is more confident and physically stronger than his more intellectual half-brother Leland, and the oil-and-water mix between the two helps fuel a lot of the drama in the novel.

Any novels you’d like to mention with memorable sibling characters?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” local topical-humor column for Baristanet.com. The latest weekly piece — about my town’s bus service resuming, LGBTQ news, and COVID’s effect on two parades — is here.