Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives In North Korea by Barbara Demick ✔✔✔✔✔

Demick follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over fifteen years, bringing to life what it means to be living under the most repressive totalitarian regime today, where displays of affection are punished, informants are rewarded and an indiscreet comment can send a person to prison for life, and all his family suffer from generation to generation as a result. The book also follows the journeys of these six persons as they become disillusioned with the government and finally realize, only after they've been able to leave by way of China into South Korea, how their country has betrayed them.

Each chapter of this book begins with a small photo of life in North Korea. The first chapter shows a satellite image of North and South Korea taken at night, where South Korea is bathed in light, and North Korea is completely dark, except for one little dot at Pyongyang, the capital city.

I quote from the first chapter: "North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s.With the collapse of the Soviet Union,which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea's creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin. The lights went out......Even in parts of the showcase capital Pyongyang, you can stroll down the middle of a main street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side."

The citizens of North Korea are living life as if they were in a prison camp. The eternal, un-ending search for food, even to scooping up mud from the docks, spreading it over a roof till it dries, so any little speck of corn or rice can be extracted, the teacher who feels guilty because she knows as she eats a morsel or two for lunch that she will see several of her students die from starvation, and who feels guilty because it doesn't bother her anymore - this is a gut-wrenching book, made even more horrible by the fact that the reader knows the nightmare - and the majority of them don't even know it's a nightmare - continues.

Charlotte and Emily by Jude Morgan ✔✔✔✔

I purchased this book after looking at it on the shelf at Borders for some time. I've always been fascinated by the Bronte sisters' lives, and Wuthering Heights is one of my favorite classic novels. The book wasn't available at the local library, so I finally decided to buy it - a good decision, because I found it one of the best historical fiction novels I've read.

Before reading it, however, I did read Jane Eyre, and I'm glad I did, because I could see so many details in this book which appeared in Jane Eyre - the awful, awful experiences in a girls' school, the terrible deaths of Charlotte's two older sisters as a result of this same school's discipline, to mention just two. Class differences certainly show themselves too, particularly through the families whose children were educated by Charlotte and Anne.

Although the novel is entitled "Charlotte and Emily", the story is definitely Charlotte's, and I wondered why this novel was also published under the title "The Taste of Sorrow". In following some links, I found a novel devoted to Emily, which I'll try to locate - plus some others - I feel a pull towards stories on literary giants, and there are lots!

I had a hard time deciding what to write here about this novel, because there was so much that spoke to me,so I've left it to goodreads.com to summarise the novel for me:

From an obscure country parsonage came the most extraordinary family of the nineteenth century. The Bronte sisters created a world in which we still live - the intense, passionate world of JANE EYRE and WUTHERING HEIGHTS; and the phenomenon of this strange explosion of genius remains as baffling now as it was to their Victorian contemporaries. In this panoramic novel we see with new insight the members of a uniquely close-knit family whose tight bonds are the instruments of both triumph and tragedy. Emily, the solitary who turns from the world to the greater temptations of the imagination: Anne, gentle and loyal, under whose quietude lies the harshest perception of the stifling life forced upon her: Branwell, the mercurial and self-destructive brother, meant to be king, unable to be a prince: and the brilliant, uncompromising, tormented Charlotte, longing for both love and independence, who establishes the family's name and learns its price.

JANE EYRE by Charlotte Bronte ✔✔✔✔

I like to read at least one classic novel a year, and now that so many can be downloaded for free on Kindle, it was a matter of choosing which one. When I saw that a new film version of Jane Eyre will be released in March, I decided Jane Eyre would be the one.

Jane Eyre was first published in 1847, under the name Currer Bell, because Charlotte feared it would not be published if a woman's name appeared as the author.

Wikipedia has an excellent entry on this novel, exploring its many themes. While I was reading the novel, I was certainly aware of gender bias, class distinctions, the search for acceptance, plus passion and romance, the influence of religion, but the things that struck me as I read were first, the education of young women in those days amidst the most prejudicial males ( reminded me of our times, when the most strident voices for anti-abortion are male), and second, the often odd behaviour patterns of Rochester. Why did he lead her on so much to get closer to her - disguising himself as a gypsy, pretending to court Lady Ingram, misleading her into an almost bigamous marriage?

There's no question it's a highly literate novel, and a wonderful story, with many layers of meaning. Charlotte and her sisters lived a great life of full imagination even while being so secluded - it's amazing that she depicted life - especially romance - so accurately and so fully. I really can't recall whether I ever read the novel previously, but it was an engrossing, enlightening read. I love the sentence: "Reader, I married him" - I felt she was reaching out to communicate with all her readers down through the last 150 years, and it's almost as if she was talking directly to us all.