Reviews for The Longest Journey

The average rating for The Longest Journey based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-02-07 00:00:00 Allan Glass Hanging On, Hanging In, but not Hanging Out The above pretty well describes my life for the past year. Due to some underlying health conditions, I have followed the health guidelines to the best of my ability. I wear a mask when I am in public places; I practice social distancing; and I avoid groups and public places when I can. So I stay out of: 1) bars 2) barber shops 3) restaurants The first was no problem. I wasn't going to bars even before the pandemic. And to be truthful, I rarely go to barber shops. That leaves restaurants. And I confess that in the pre-pandemic era, when I would get tired of my own cooking and the mess that I always created, I would take the easy way out and go to a restaurant. But it has been a year since I resorted to that. For years I have had a vegetable garden, but this past year, with the help of my daughter and son-in-law, we expanded. The garden produce not only helped to keep me out of restaurants, but it also sharply curtailed my trips to grocery stores, which is also a good thing. We have hot summers where I live. Therefore, working in the yard and the garden during the summer is not only good exercise, it also allows me to shed some pounds that need to be shed. And eating even more out of the garden last year helped because my diet was much more nutritious than in prior years when I occasionally backslid and ate at a restaurant. Mostly, however, this past year I just didn't eat as much. The main reason for that is that I never go back for seconds when I cook. You wouldn't either, assuming you could even make it through the firsts. During the fall the garden was still producing and there were tons of leaves to be collected from the lawn and composted, but then came December. The leaves had been removed, the garden was no longer producing, and cold weather was making me more and more housebound. Of course, being a reader that isn't all bad either, but after a while the Puritan work ethic kicked in and I began to feel guilty that I was not doing some kind of "work," beyond routine household tasks. One day I went into my "library" looking for a book and after an hour of searching and not finding it I gave up in frustration and wrote it off as a lost cause. Unfortunately, this has happened on many occasions. Sometimes I did find the book, but only while I was looking for another book - that I didn't find - and after I no longer needed the book that I did find. Unorganized or Disorganized? I'm not sure that I even had a library. And since I don't think I had ever looked up the word in the dictionary, I did. According to Merriam-Webster it is: 1: a place in which literary, musical, artistic, or reference materials (such as books, manuscripts, recordings, or films) are kept for use but not for sale; 2: a collection resembling or suggesting a library; 3: a series of related books issued by a publisher; 4: a collection of cloned DNA fragments that are maintained in a suitable cellular environment and that usually represent the genetic material of a particular organism or tissue. I am glad I looked up the word because imagine not being aware of library no. 4. But to be honest, I don't think even no. 1 was a good description of my "library." It wasn't so much that my book collection was unorganized, but that it was disorganized. According to Merriam-Webster that means that it lacked coherence, or system, or a central guiding agency, which was a perfect description of my "library." I say was, because I decided that one way to satisfy that nagging work ethic was to do something about the disorganization. I had always attempted to catalogue my books on the basis of subject matter, which is a far from perfect method. Many books have overlapping subject matters and cataloguing fiction on that basis is particularly problematic. So I decided to alphabetize my books by the name of the authors. How hard could that be? Yes, I do have in excess of 3000 books, but I decided that it shouldn't take more than a week if I worked on the problem every day. I began the first week in December. It took me longer than a week; it took me seven of them. But now my book collection has coherence, it has a system, and it has a central guiding agency. It is a library. Main-Travelled Roads I know you couldn't tell, but this is supposed to be a review of Main-Travelled Roads by Hamlin Garland. However, if I had not reorganized my library, I would never have read the book. While sorting and rearranging books I ran across several that I had not read and even some that I had even forgotten that I owned. Main-Travelled Roads had even fallen behind a row of other books and was totally hidden. Although I had never read the book, I was aware of it and its author. What I knew about the book was that every American history textbook from high school through college always mentioned Garland and this book, as well as his A Son of the Middle Border, in their bibliographic references. But I never read the books. I still haven't read A Son of the Middle Border, but now I have read Main-Travelled Roads. Main-Travelled Roads was Garland's first major success. It is a collection of short stories that were originally published in 1891 that focused on farm life in the upper Middle West. Garland knew about that region because that is where he was born and raised and he knew about farm life because his father was a farmer, who, according to Garland, was barely able to support his family. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that the future greatness of the nation depended on the yeoman farmer for "those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people." Garland, having labored in the earth alongside his father, thought that was a bunch of bunk. In his stories he set out to demythologize the life of the yeoman farmer by documenting its dehumanizing, unromantic nature. The stories are for the most part somber tales about unrelenting struggles against nature and environment and economic forces, all of which were beyond the control of the farmer, leaving him with a feeling of helplessness. The stories are set in the late 1880s, but they seem to have a more modern sensibility. They read as though they could have been written about the problems of farmers during the Great Depression or even later. Garland's dedication of the book reads: To MY FATHER AND MOTHER whose half-century pilgrimage on the main-travelled road of life has brought them only toil and deprivation, this book of stories is dedicated by a son to whom every day brings a deepening sense of his parents' silent heroism

Review # 2 was written on 2019-07-24 00:00:00 Lorne Tippit Reading about American history and specifically about the settling of the West, I come In this excellent collection of short stories that portray the lives of those people who have chosen to live in this environment. The author, using his excellent writing, takes us to this unforgiving wild environment and realistically describes the lives of these people, with the enormous difficulties, the extremely poor living and the apparent lack of any prospect for the future, situations in which has lived them close. But this writer's perspective is not pessimistic, anything else, he is praising the determination of these people, their adaptivity, their strength, and their firm belief that these efforts will result in something positive. Of course they face many difficulties and things often go bad but in the end, they always go on and the writer takes care of rewarding them without going to the other end. So without expecting it, this collection moved me and was the perfect complement to my historical readings. Διαβάζοντας για την αμερικανική ιστορία και συγκεκριμένα για τον αποικισμό της Δύσης έφτασα σε αυτή την εξαιρετική συλλογή διηγημάτων που απεικονίζει τη ζωή αυτών των ανθρώπων που επέλεξαν να ζήσουν σε αυτό το περιβάλλον. Ο συγγραφέας χρησιμοποιώντας την εξαιρετική γραφή του μας μεταφέρει σε αυτό το άγριο περιβάλλον που δεν συγχωρεί και μας περιγράφει με ρεαλισμό τη ζωή αυτών των ανθρώπων, με τις τεράστιες δυσκολίες, την εξαιρετικά φτωχή διαβίωση και τη φαινομενική απουσία οποιασδήποτε προοπτικής για το μέλλον, καταστάσεις στις οποίες τις έχει ζήσει από κοντά. Δεν είναι, όμως, αυτή η οπτική γωνία του συγγραφέα απαισιόδοξη, κάθε άλλο, πάνω από όλα υμνεί την αποφασιστικότητα αυτών των ανθρώπων, την προσαρμοστικότητά τους, τη δύναμή τους και την ακλόνητη πίστη τους ότι από αυτές τους τις προσπάθειες θα προκύψει κάτι θετικό. Φυσικά αντιμετωπίζουν πολλές δυσκολίες και τα πράγματα πολλές φορές πάνε τρομερά στραβά αλλά στο τέλος πάντα συνεχίζουν και ο συγγραφέας φροντίζει να τους ανταμείψει, χωρίς, όμως, να πηγαίνει στο άλλο άκρο. Έτσι χωρίς να το περιμένω αυτή η συλλογή με συγκίνησε και αποτέλεσε το ιδανικό συμπλήρωμα των σχετικών ιστορικών μου αναγνωσμάτων.