Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell

When I was young, I spent all my summers at my grandparents' house. They had a bookshelf with glass sliding doors. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the doors were made of glass, but I always felt like maybe I wasn't supposed to be reading the books in there, and I'd always be careful to never leave the books lying around and to always put them back in their correct spots. There was a copy of Gone With the Wind on those shelves, but it was bound in a fraying blue cloth cover, and the pages were brittle and yellow with age. I didn't dare read that book, certain that it would crumble in my hands, and I'd never be able to slide it back into place undetected. And so the years passed, and I never saw the movie or went on to another copy of the novel. Until my friend Courtney, an avid reader whose has similar taste in books to me, told me that she was shocked to discover that it was simply fantastic. So, I borrowed it from the library - all 1000+ pages of it. And she was right - within 10 pages, I was sucked into the Southern soap opera featuring the self-absorbed Scarlett O'Hara, her many suitors, and their battle against the Yankee Northerners. But, of course, my favorite character was Rhett Butler - unsavory and cavorting with ladies of the night, he is the only one who truly speaks his mind and doesn't succumb to all the silly Southern traditions. I had been warned that racism is rampant throughout the novel, but this is something I would like to read more about. Obviously, Mitchell was from the South and writing this in the 1920s-1930s when race relations were a complicated manner. But, I still felt like the black charaters in the novel were written as often much more perceptive than the white people around them - and that while the white characters expressed racist positions, as would be common at the time I'm sure, it wasn't completely obvious to me that Mitchell herself bought into them. Twice, for example, when Scarlett's character is chastised for hiring cheap convict labor at her mill and taking advantage of these "poor" men, she reminds her criticizers that they once owned slaves. Of course, Scarlett herself probably saw nothing wrong with either slave labor or convict labor, as long as she turned a profit, but I felt that the interactions between the black and white characters were complex enough to warrant more than simply that Mitchell was a racist writing during racist times. Gone With the Wind is a truly amazing and wonderful novel filled with characters to love and despise - Scarlett did get on my nerves for her inability to understand basic human nature and her general ignorance about life events, but she is an impressive survivor and someone who always finds a way to get what she wants. The novel ends on an uncertain note - Scarlett is only 28 years old, but she has lifetimes of heartache behind her. Apparently, there is a sequel (titled Scarlett, I believe, written by someone other than Mitchell - but authorized by her), which I will read just to see what happens. This is definitely one of those books that while it went on forever, I still never wanted it to end.