Books in pictures

 

       I'm reading Stoner by John Williams, a most kind gift from Lynne, and although I'm only thirty or so pages into it, it has conjured a clear picture in my mind. The early part of the book describes William Stoner leaving the family farm to enter the University of Missouri; this is 1910, money is in short supply, and forty miles is a long way from home. When he graduates, taking his degree in English, not Agriculture for which he first enrolled, his parents come to visit:

"To attend the ceremony, his parents - in a borrowed buggy drawn by their old dun mare - had started the day before, driving overnight the forty-odd miles from the farm, so that they arrived at the Footes' shortly after dawn, stiff from their sleepless journey. Stoner went down to meet them. They stood side by side in the crisp morning light and awaited his approach.

....[he could not] bring himself to tell them of his change of plans, of his decision not to return to the farm. Once or twice he started to speak; then he looked at the brown faces that rose nakedly out of their new clothing, and thought of the long journey they had made and of the years they had awaited his return...."

    On reading that passage I thought straightaway of Grant Wood's American Gothic. It dates from 1930 and is of a farmer and his spinster daughter, but it depicts - for me - that scene.

    We had a lot of fun recently choosing pictures to sum up our reading taste (remember this post?), so why not let's all choose an image as I've done here which in some way represents a book, a character, an episode, say. It could be a painting or a photograph, any visual interpretation of something literary.

    If you have a go on your own blog, please link back to us here so that we can see what you've chosen, and if you are blogless then you may just want to mention book and picture in the comments on this post. I hope lots of people will join in with this as it will be very subjective and may cause us to 'see' familiar things differently.