I just finished “Women in Love” by D.H. Lawrence. It was written in 1920 and is set in the early 1910’s, before the first World War, and concerns the lives of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen who live in a small coal mining town in England. Gudren, who is an artist,  falls in love with Robert Crich, a businessman. Ursula falls in love with Robert Birkin, an intellectual. A good summary of the book is here. The book is about relationships, between men and women, and between men.

The book has a racy reputation but it is very tame by modern standards. It was banned in Britain for 11 years after its publication.

My impression of the book is that it is a torrent of words, a regular Niagara Falls. Lawrence sets up the various scenes completely including the emotional state of the parties involved and then puts the scene in motion. I thought he was great at picking out the nuances of a relationship, from deep attraction, to mild irritation and of describing how people in a group interact. He set up some scenes that seemed fairly innocuous and then suddenly something happens, a punch is thrown, a horse kicks up, somebody drowns. To do all this requires the deluge of words, words of all types. I read the book on my Kindle because it is free and that was handy because of the built in dictionary.

I enjoyed the book but it is not light reading. The information density in the prose is thick and if you don’t pay attention to it then the subsequents scenes don’t make much sense. Anyways, I’m glad that I read it and can now tick it off my life TBR list and I don’t think that I’ll be reading much more of his stuff. I am not smart enough.

I just finished this book. It is awesome. It is about a young registered sex offender in Florida who due to the Florida residency laws can live in only one place in his county, underneath a causeway. He wears a gps ankle bracelet that lets his parole officer know instantly if he strays into a forbidden zone.

Also, thanks to an internet based sex offender registry, given his name anybody can get on the internet and find out his histroy. So for 10 years he is doomed to homelessness and despair and he never actually assaulted anyone. He was lured into what he thought was a liaison with a 14 year old but the girl’s father met him at the door. Lucky for the daughter.

The whole thing about sex offenders’ residency laws has intrigued me. Sex offenders don’t have any advocates so they are free game for any politician looking for a few cheap votes to make it harder to find a place to live. It has gotten to the point where some of the offenders have stopped registering their addresses and go underground which makes it harder to authorities to monitor them.

This book about more than sex offenders though. It is about the difference between shame and guilt, and the nature of belief and reality which is fancy way of asking how do we really know the truth about things. It is also about community and how we deal with outcasts.

The book is also about growing up without parents who care. Take my advice, care about what your kids and grand-kids are looking at online. It matters.

The book is extremely well written and kept me going to the end. I rate it four stars out of five.

More Information – Infographic on Sexual Predators

Via: MedicalBillingAndCoding.org