Classic Reads: Beowulf Teaches Us That Striving Doesn't Have to Be All About Success

It didn't take reality TV for people to want to be famous.

In college, as I studied English literature, I focused more on the significance of the mnemonic devices used by Northern Europeans to translate Beowulf over generations.

Taking a look back now, the morals of the story from a vicious time in the Sixth Century are perhaps equally as interesting. We learn that it is striving rather than success itself that "reveals and ennobles the true hero."

Beowulf is a warrior and principal advisor to the king of the land of Geats, located in what is today south Sweden and Denmark. He learns of a monster called Grendel that is devouring groups of humans. Beowulf travels to battle the monster. He fails to kill him but rips off his arm before the monster escapes.

Grendel's mother is furious and goes to find Beowulf. She almost succeeds in killing him, but he reaches for a sword nearby and plunges it through the monster's heart. He then beheads Grendel.

The story picks up many years later when Beowulf is an old man and king of the Geats. One day, he kills a dragon, but in the process, the dragon bites Beowulf in the neck, which kills him as well. 

Beowulf's ability to step up when needed and provide heroic acts is what endeared him to his people, and their love of him has powerfully been translated through all these years. At his funeral, his people said, "Of worldly kings, he was the mildest of men and the gentlest, most kind to his people, most eager for fame."

Find the other parts of this ongoing series of "Classic Reads" in the Books section.

Placing the Microscope on Our High-School Years with Curtis Sittenfeld

There are those moments during your high-school years when things seem so lucid, so crystal clear, so in-the-moment.

Your friends are five minutes late to pick you up to go to a party and each second seems to drip by in agony and longing. Your eyes constantly search for the girl you would move mountains for, even though she barely knows you exist or, at the very least, is too preoccupied with much older boys.

Curtis Sittenfeld, in her debut novel Prep, is a master at articulating, with such precision (and how difficult it must have been to remember so many details about adolescence?), the way we were growing up. Towards the end, a couple of lines sum up what the book is about:

"I've never paid as close attention to my life or anyone else's as I did then. I remember myself as often unhappy at Ault, and yet my unhappiness was so alert and expectant; really, it was, in its energy, not that different from happiness."

Those words are uttered by Prep's protagonist, Lee Fiora, who leaves home in South Bend, Indiana for the prestigious boarding school, Ault, near Boston, which is no doubt helped shaped by the author's years of teaching at Washington D.C.'s St. Alban's preparatory academy.

Lee mostly stands in the background during her four years at the school, observing others and mostly bouncing idea after idea and thought after thought around in her own very unsure, unformed mind. In that sense, it's a true coming-of-age story, reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye or Ethan Canin's novels, but with an even sharper microscope.

****1/2 out of ***** stars

Pop-Culture Catch Up: Rum Diary, Enough Said, and Frozen

I'm not going to lie. Having two kids is often more difficult than having one. By the end of so many days, I can barely keep my eyes open long enough to read one magazine article, let alone devour something of pop-culture value and then report its worth back to you, my fine and faithful readers.

That said, it's time to catch up with a few artifacts I've explored over the past weeks. And, I'll try to start blogging more regularly again after a pretty unimpressive summer collection of quantity and quality.

The Rum Diary is the first Hunter S. Thompson I've read since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas back in college. The "long lost novel" was apparently written in the 1960s and not published until 1998. It is basically the tale of Hunter himself (under the name Paul) going from New York to live and work at a newspaper in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

He carouses with the lowlifes who work at the paper and risks life daily drinking and fighting and romancing in a foreign land. It's the epitome of gonzo journalistic writing and serves as an underrated highlight of Thompson's prodigious career. Johnny Depp found the manuscript and had it published, then starred in the movie, which I should now go see for the first time.

**** out of ***** stars

Enough Said is a small rom-com that gains weight by the very fact that it was about the last thing James Gandolfini filmed before his death. Julia Louis-Dreyfus seems a little less great than usual in the film, despite very positive reviews.

The couple wins me over by the end as they suffer a series of setbacks while firing up an unlikely romance, but I still was a little disappointed and not that impressed with the overall story, general awkwardness, and pacing of this film.

*** out of ***** stars

Frozen is of course all the rage with the youngsters, but I was bored silly, wishing I could rematch The Lego Movie, The Jungle Book, Snow White, or any other kid movie.

Tip of the hat to Disney for making it about the importance of family instead of the usual fare of the importance of the prince. But if I have to hear someone else humming or singing "Let It Go" again, who knows what I'll do. Bad music in a hack of a story. It doesn't help that I don't particularly like any of the actors behind the voices.

Way overrated and hopefully will lose some of its runaway-hit momentum as soon as some better Disney films are released.

** out of ***** stars