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Fiction.
Literature.
Historical Fiction.
HTML:NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER â?˘ A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK â?˘ The unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost: an â??epic tripâ??through Prohibition and World War II, from Montana to London to present-day Hollywoodâ??and youâ??ll relish every minuteâ?ť (People).
After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. Thereâ??after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanesâ??Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles. A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian's own story, as the two women's fatesâ??and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and timesâ??collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prod… (more)
This Booker Prize Shortlisted novel is a dual-timeline epic about a woman pilot in the 1920s-40s and the woman who will be playing her in a movie in 2014. Both women are essentially orphans, have to grow up fast, and face the challenges of working in fields where men wield power, often in nefarious ways. There's love, sex, self-questioning, facing fear, and dealing with tragedy. The 20th century parts get much more attention and address women's limited options, queer people's limited options, and the shrinking of the globe after WW2. Both portions highlight the limitations of any story to reveal truth or reality. There are a LOT of characters and I did use the wikipedia page to keep them straight. This is a very ambitious novel but I think the author was up for the challenge. It's a long journey but worthwhile. ( )
I wanted to like this fat Booker Longlist nominee better than I did. Well written prose and interesting tale of a lost aviator and her life in male-dominated world of flying, but the tandem story of a Hollywood star chosen to play her in the movie slowed me down. And I resented being slowed down. I am not a fan of historical novels so that explain some of my impatience. It was too big a book not to love spending time with it. ( )
The first quarter of this book was hard to get through since it seemed to rotate through all sorts of horrible abuse. That content let up as the story progressed and overall it was very good. ( )
Shipstead [...] writes with precision on both macro and micro levels, bringing a sure-footed fluency to descriptions of landscape, potted highlights of aviation history and close-up details of people and places [...]
The start of Shipstead’s book — her third, after “Seating Arrangements” in 2012 and “Astonish Me” in 2014 — is thrilling and complicated, with many different threads laid out and back stories carefully and richly wrought; for the next 500-odd pages, I felt the fear I feel when a student’s work starts strong, when other novels open high — knowing that, more often than not, lofty heights can’t be sustained. But “Great Circle” starts high and maintains altitude. One might say it soars.... This is a book explicitly invested in sweep....this far-ranging breadth is as much the project of this novel as any of these individual lives — including all the ways each life exists within the context of so many others, the way the natural world informs and forms us, all the ways we are still only and particularly ourselves.
“Great Circle” is a relentlessly exciting story about a woman maneuvering her way between tradition and prejudice to get what she wants. It’s also a culturally rich story that takes full advantage of its extended length to explore the changing landscape of the 20th century.... Shipstead is particularly interested in the way attitudes about gender shape women’s expectations, desires and careers. Marian utterly rejects the gallant respect for her femininity, which she knows is just a pretty way of keeping her tethered and hooded like a tame falcon.... Shipstead has boldly complicated this gripping historical novel by weaving in a modern-day story set in Hollywood.... The extraordinary realism of Marian’s chapters can make the broad strokes of Hadley’s sections feel light in comparison....Though separated by decades, the aviator and the actress are both powerful women, rising from devastating tragedies to forge their own way.
Though the plotlines come second to the character development, “Great Circle” delves into the gamut of human experience, from romance to war to grief. That being said, there are some parts of this book that drag, and it is a novel that will take time and energy to fully delve into. Especially towards the beginning, where the reader is introduced to so many perspectives, it can be difficult to fully invest in the narrative without a clear understanding as to why each mini-story is important quite yet. Combined with the fact that the novel has a complex non-linear timeline, this story is not instantaneously engrossing, but it builds until it is difficult to put down....“Great Circle” is a novel about lofty ideals of truth, purpose, and connection across time and space, brought down to earth by a dynamic and complex cast of characters. If a reader is willing to give this novel the time it requires, the story’s universal appeal shines through.
The intertwined journeys of an aviatrix born in 1914 and an actress cast to play her a century later.... Shipstead reveals breathtaking range and skill, expertly juggling a multigenerational historical epic and a scandal-soaked Hollywood satire, with scenes playing out on land, at sea, and in the air....Ingeniously structured and so damn entertaining; this novel is as ambitious as its heroines—but it never falls from the sky.
I live my life in widening circles / that reach out across the world. / I may not complete this last one / but I give myself to it. I circle around God, around the primordial tower. / I've been circling for thousands of years / and I still don't know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song? -Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours
Dedication
For my brother
First words
If you were to put a blade through any sphere and divide it into two perfect halves, the circumference of the cut side of each half would be a great circle: that is, the largest circle than can be drawn on a sphere.
Quotations
Closure doesn’t really exist, though. That’s why we’re always looking for it. -Page 13
He could not make peace with the magnitude of suffering in the world. It registered in him as a wave of heat and tingling, an acceleration in his heart and a lightness in his head—a sensation both puny and unbearable. The only way to live was to shut it out, but even when he turned his thoughts away, he was still aware of it, as one who lives alongside a levee is aware of the deluge waiting on the other side. -Page 90
“You wouldn’t think it’d be so hard to stop throwing your money away.” “I think he’s after the thrill.” “What thrill? He never wins.” “And if he quits he never will, either. I think he likes to hope.” “Hope shouldn’t be so expensive.” -Page 134
It’s difficult to believe the gauges, that array of soulless little dashboard windows, over the insistence of the body, which is as sure as you live and breathe that you are funneling down into death. But you’re not. You’re dizzy inside a cloud. That’s all. -Page 174
"People’s wishes for their own lives tend to outweigh others’ ideas about how they should behave.” She paused. “We must bend in the wind sometimes, Jamie. So much is beyond our control.” -Page 241
I’d like to think I will remember this particular moon, seen from the particular angle of this balcony on this night, but if I forget, I will never know that I’ve forgotten, as is the nature of forgetting. I’ve forgotten so much—almost all I’ve seen. Experience washes over us in great waves. Memory is a drop caught in a flask, concentrated and briny, nothing like the fresh abundance from which it came. -Page 257
It’s wind chimes and helicopters, I said. And it’s muscle cars and leaf blowers and trash trucks picking up everyone’s bins and tossing them back like tequila shots. It’s coyotes yipping like delinquents who’ve just left lit firecrackers in a mailbox, and it’s mourning doves sitting on power lines practicing the same sad four-note riff. It’s the thrum of hummingbird wings and the silent gliding gyres of vultures and the long-legged stepping of white egrets through shallow green water in the concrete channel that’s the river. It’s dance music pounding in a dark room full of people pedaling bicycles going nowhere. It’s gongs and oms and whale songs soothing in the dim inner sancta of spas. It’s a Norteño song bouncing out of a passing El Camino and schoolkids singing o beautiful for spacious skies in a classroom with the windows open and the rasp of a beat from somebody’s earbuds you pass on the sidewalk. It’s pit bulls barking through chain-link and Chihuahuas yapping behind screen doors and poodles snoozing on terra-cotta tiles. It’s blenders and grinders and juicers and hissing steel espresso machines the size of submarines and waiters who talk too much—Any special plans for the weekend? Do anything special over the weekend?—and water, so precious, splashing into fountains and pools and hot tubs and tall glasses on shaded patios, burbling from hoses and geysering from broken pipes. And underneath, there’s the hum of traffic, always there, like the ocean that lives in seashells, like the cosmic whoosh of the expanding universe. At least that’s what I tried to tell him. I don’t know what I actually said. -Page 264
L.A. is dust and exhaust and the hot, dry wind that sets your nerves on edge and pushes fire up the hillsides in ragged lines like tears in the paper that separates us from hell, and it’s towering clouds of smoke, and it’s sunshine that won’t let up and cool ocean fog that gets unrolled at night over the whole basin like a clean white hospital sheet and peeled back again in the morning. It’s a crescent moon in a sky bruised green after the sunset has beaten the shit out of it. It’s a lazy hammock moon rising over power lines, over the skeletal silhouettes of pylons, over shaggy cypress trees and the spiky black lionfish shapes of palm-tree crowns on too-skinny trunks. It’s the Big One that’s coming to turn the city to rubble and set the rubble on fire but not today, hopefully not today. It’s the obviousness of pointing out that the freeway looks like a ruby bracelet stretched alongside a diamond one, looks like a river of lava flowing counter to a river of champagne bubbles. People talk about the sprawl, and, yeah, the city is a drunk, laughing bitch sprawled across the flats in a spangled dress, legs kicked up the canyons, skirt spread over the hills, and she’s shimmering, vibrating, ticklish with light. Don’t buy a star map. Don’t go driving around gawking because you’re already there, man. You’re in it. It’s all one big map of the stars. At least that’s what I heard him saying. -Page 265
L.A. is mysterious crumbling old hilltop piles, and it’s haciendas wrapped in bougainvillea and Craftsman bungalows neat as a pin and little flat-roofed adobe things with bars on the windows, and it’s surf shacks and drug shacks and grumpy-old-man-no-solicitors shacks and patchouli shacks strung with prayer flags, windows glowing red through printed Indian cotton as though inside is the beating heart of everything. It’s the tents of the homeless crowded under an overpass; it’s the spherical mud nests of swallows high up under an overpass; it’s vines hanging from an overpass like a beaded curtain. It’s trash blowing around in the hot, dry wind, nesting in ice plant by the freeway. It’s the teasing, skipping, arcing fan dance of lawn sprinklers. It’s the snip snip of pruning shears and the plunk of lemons falling from laden branches to split open and rot on the sidewalk under hovering bees, and it's the placid blue gliding pool net maneuvered by a gardener in a broad straw hat, graceful as a gondolier. -Page 265
She hadn’t anticipated how much of her behavior after marriage would be motivated by a wish not to argue. -Page 280
One thing I learned is that you don’t just love a person, you love a vision of your life with them. And then you have to mourn both. -Page 280
Mother Macqueen had graduated with an esoteric set of beliefs, partly of her own concoction, that Barclay said had both enchanted and deranged his father: She perceived life as a continuous storm of divine wrath and celestial mercy, human beings blown one way and then the other by competing gusts on which angels and devils flew like bats. -Page 284
There should be an Antiques Roadshow for memories, and I would sit behind a desk and explain that while your memory might be lovely and have tremendous sentimental value, it was worth nothing to anyone but you. -Page 340
In his sixties, he dedicates himself to advocating for endangered species and indigenous people. He is obsessed with the threat of nuclear war. He’d helped to shrink the world but wishes it had not shrunk. -Page 357
I’ve always needed to feel I had a purpose, and now I have an undeniable one. Is this why people have wars? To give themselves something to do? To feel a part of something? -Page 477
The landscape was huge and beautiful in the way the concept of death is huge and beautiful—its beauty doesn’t really apply to you. -Page 493
You push on men and eventually you get to the bedrock of it all, which is that they think they’re better than us. And they’re the ones who made this war. I’ve been thinking about that. We get angry and nothing happens. Men get angry, and the whole world burns up. -Page 495
Distance equals speed multiplied by time. Time equals distance divided by speed. He feels the lines of latitude sliding underneath like the rungs of a ladder, watches the whitecaps through the drift meter, measuring the difference between where they are going and where they mean to go. That’s where life is, that wedge of discrepancy. -Page 525
I cried because Marian Graves hadn’t drowned and, to one person, hadn’t been lost. I cried because of Joey’s kindness, because I was jealous of Kalani having a childhood, because I was the kind of asshole who could be jealous of a little kid whose parents couldn’t take care of her. I cried for Mitch and for my parents. I cried because I’d gotten going and sometimes you just have to ride out the tears. -Page 576
Last words
She would want to rise from her body and have it be like when she'd first gone up with Trout, as though she were being held aloft by pure possibility, as though she were about to see everything.
Fiction.
Literature.
Historical Fiction.
HTML:NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER â?˘ A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK â?˘ The unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost: an â??epic tripâ??through Prohibition and World War II, from Montana to London to present-day Hollywoodâ??and youâ??ll relish every minuteâ?ť (People).
After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. Thereâ??after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanesâ??Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles. A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian's own story, as the two women's fatesâ??and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and timesâ??collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prod
This Booker Prize Shortlisted novel is a dual-timeline epic about a woman pilot in the 1920s-40s and the woman who will be playing her in a movie in 2014. Both women are essentially orphans, have to grow up fast, and face the challenges of working in fields where men wield power, often in nefarious ways. There's love, sex, self-questioning, facing fear, and dealing with tragedy. The 20th century parts get much more attention and address women's limited options, queer people's limited options, and the shrinking of the globe after WW2. Both portions highlight the limitations of any story to reveal truth or reality. There are a LOT of characters and I did use the wikipedia page to keep them straight. This is a very ambitious novel but I think the author was up for the challenge. It's a long journey but worthwhile. ( )