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And here the truth comes out. My bachelor's degree was in English. I read a lot. Lots of fiction, somewhat less poetry and criticism and biography, but more than most people, I suspect.
| What I've been read in the past - Literature |
| Date | Author | Title |
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[Finished 28 August 2010] English poetry before Shakespeare is dominated by the two poets of Tottel’s Miscellany, Wyatt and Surrrey. While I was an undergrad I managed to find a complete poems of Wyatt but only selected poems of Surrey, the latter of which I’ve only now gotten around to reading. I think I was interested in Surrey as a potential crypto-Catholic, although Dennis Keene who edited this selection finds that claim unlikely and provides significant evidence to the contrary.
The poems themselves vary from somewhat banal to quite nice, but what’s especially interesting is that this is Surrey working to, in effect, invent English poetry, experimenting with the sonnet form as well as writing the first narrative poetry in English using blank verse.
[Finished 19 August 2010] Martin Amis’s father famously threw this book across the room in disgust when he reached the point where the Martin Amis character appears in the book. I have to say that although I wasn’t aware of this anecdote when I reached that point in the story, I was tempted to join Kingsley Amis in a physical criticism of the novel.
Martin Amis manages to have a compelling narrative voice in John Self, a man who is defined by vulgarity, but he tells a story with to recommend it. A mystery introduced early in the novel has little if any meaning and the big con of the book appears as unexpectedly as the horse beneath the Old Spice guy. What’s more, there seems little justification for the character of Martin Amis being Martin Amis other than egoism. In all, a rather disappointing read. I read in an interview with Amis that he said if his father had pursued a different career, he would have pursued that same career. This book almost makes me wish that were the case.
The Complete Short Stories, Volume One by D. H. Lawrence
[Finished 18 August 2010] I remember really liking Sons and Lovers when I first read it (although it did nearly get me arrested by campus police because I happened to be reading it in a dorm lounge when a girl living in the dorm was worried about a stalker (not me) and they spent an inordinate amount of time paging through it while determining that I wasn’t a suspicious character).
But maybe it’s a change of tastes since I was twenty, but I found little of this collection of stories to interest me. Some of it is because these are early efforts by Lawrence (the back cover copy is a bit apologetic about the books), and in nearly 300 pages, only a single description of emotional pain stuck out as better than average writing.
[Finished 4 August 2010] McCarthy does some interesting stylistic things with his prose, eschewing quotation marks and most apostrophes, but the stream-of-consciousness style manages to keep this from being distracting.
The story itself is a meditation on human nature, really, the question of what it means to be one of the good guys versus one of the bad guys, in the context of a world gone horribly bad, where humanity has been reduced to scavaging from the remains of civilization or, when that fails, cannibalism and other savagery. The plight of the old man in the story as he leads his son on a destinationless journey down the titular road is especially compelling. Was he right not to join his wife in her suicide at the end of civilization? Is there meaning to the journey if it’s only about the survival of him and his son? I feel that there is a great deal of depth in the seemingly simple story that I have only half-plumbed.
[Finished 3 August 2010] When She Was Good: I’m guessing that Roth was weary of being described as a “Jewish” writer, so he wrote a book about WASPs. The whole thing felt a bit misogynistic to me and the ending seemed contrived.
Portnoy’s Complaint: An incredible narrative voice but somehow Roth manages to make a book about sex feel wearying and dull. At this point, I found myself wondering whether the ardor I felt for Roth’s writing after reading American Pastoral was misplaced.
Our Gang: And this slim story didn’t help. I imagine it was hilarious 30 years ago. Now, the whole thing feels painfully dated. Most likely one of those books which remains in print primarily for the benefit of completists.
The Breast: And then my faith in Roth is restored. I’m less inclined to be a Philip Roth completist after working through these early works. I can see why Howard Junker spoke of having grown bored with Roth in one interview. But suddenly here, we manage to see the mature Roth emerge. Or at least that’s what I hope it is. With deliberate reference to Kafka and Gogol, we get the story of a man transformed into an enormous breast and the writing once again feels deft and compelling. Am I seeing the emergence of the Roth who wrote American Pastoral? Or are these just sparks in the firmament? I’ll have to read on to know for sure.
[Finished 30 July 2010] A novel in verse about werewolves.
Is the “in verse” a gimmick? Yep. Barlow writes with a distinctive voice, but I don’t think that removing the line breaks would really impact the experience of the book (although it would cut down on the line count and the radio interviews).
There are a number of goofs that only someone writing about Los Angeles without having any significant direct experience with the city would make (the three that stand out were a pair of errors in Spanish and leaving out the article on “the 10”).
The story was pretty compelling although the central event of the story was a bit jumbled and confused, but I loved, absolutely loved the mythology of the story.
[Finished 28 July 2010] A brilliant novel of ideas. I listened to this as an audio book, something which I suspect made part III a bit more intelligible since each character’s voice was distinct. I knew that it was about a castaway on a lifeboat with a tiger from the beginning, and found myself a bit impatient through the first part waiting for Pi to be on the lifeboat already. And at times, during the long detailed narration of the time on the lifeboat, I grew impatient again, but looking back over the 100 chapters, I found that even those parts that I was impatient over were essential to the whole and the wonderful combination of comparative biology and theology make for a wonderful meditation into meaning, narration and the nature of grace.
[Finished 24 July 2010] Nominally a detective novel, but really a novel about remembering. Since much of my own writing, I’ve come to realize, is also about remembering, I paid especial attention to his style to see how he managed the task.
[Finished 16 July 2010] The second I saw this title, I knew that this was a book that would make for an interesting read. Or at least I hoped it would. Certainly, it’s a title I wish I had come up with. Fortunately, Clarke manages to take the concept dictated by the title and turn it into something a bit special, if a bit English-major-y (but in a good way). The nominal story exists to a large extent as a framework for considering the concept of story telling and truth, and what makes a story a good story? Should it be true? Should it lead to good things on the part of the reader? There is a bit of it which dates the novel since there’s a bit of a preoccupation with the current obsession with memoir and its ascendency over the novel as a preferred form of recreational reading (something I still don’t entirely understand myself, and I suspect Clarke would agree with me on this one).
But even with the heady intellectual aspects of the narrative, there remains a delightful humor and storytelling which keeps this from veering too deeply into literary novel which only an English major could love. Clarke’s choice to leave his contemporary authors unnamed makes for a fun game of guess the writer/book as an added bonus.
[Finished 14 July 2010] This book was on a list of the 100 best novels, an interesting thing since it’s not actually a novel or even a work of fiction (modulo a pair of curious interludes on lead and mercury in the middle of the book, plus the carbon chapter which closes the book), but a memoir. Levi elides his experiences in Auschwitz since he’s talked about it in great detail elsewhere and instead focuses on the time before and after that experience instead. A strange and wonderful book that makes me wish I had been more open to chemistry as an undergrad.
[Finished 7 July 2010] When I first heard about this book, I immediately added it to my reading list (slowly spiraling out of control, of course). A book about a book restorer struck me as something that would interest me a great deal.
It’s a bit deeper than that, using the book restoration story as a frame for a series of short, mostly disconnected narratives tracing the history of the book back in time. Each of these could stand on their own and provide some fascinating looks at historic narratives taking as their launching point a seemingly insignificant detail of something captured in the book.
The framing narrative is occasionally a bit disappointing, although a final bit of suspense and crime(!) does give it some justification for existing beyond as a linkage for the stories, although I’m not entirely certain that the non-book aspects of Hannah Heath’s life really amount to that much. In all, though, a wonderful introduction to the writing of Geraldine Brooks. I’d definitely read more by her.
[Finished 30 June 2010] One of these books that it’s difficult to make sense of. At first it seemed that it was going to be a story of a man making a hardscrabble living in 19th century New Zealand, but the book quickly transformed into being more about the women of the period, focusing initially on the wife and mother of the man I had originally assumed to be the protagonist and fanning out in a network to other women of the terrain including the former Maori nanny of the son of a wealthy couple who live near our putative protagonist’s home.
And every step of the novel suggests a path that the story might take, but then backs away from that possibility. What distinguishes the plot more than anything else is the paths that appear to be clear but then are blocked like the passage through the mountains from the east to west coast of New Zealand.
[Finished 10 June 2010] An interesting book. At first, I was a bit thrown by the stream-of-consciousness narrative, but as the story developed, I fell into Smith’s rhythm and found myself enchanted by the tale she was telling. The fragmentary style, told from multiple POVs is a stylistic triumph, even if things fall apart a bit in the final section of the book.
Rosalynde, or, Euphues' Golden Legacy by Thomas Lodge
[Finished 8 June 2010] A curious volume, something I picked up in college as part of my bibliomania surrounding my undergrad thesis (I would buy anything that had the name of a Catholic author on the spine at the time).
Rosalynde is a prose romance, written, as the alternate title suggests, in imitation of Lyly’s “Euphues,” and notable primarily as being the source for the plot of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”
Perhaps more interesting than the text is the fact that this is one of several editions of the work published during the first couple decades of the twentieth century (and as I recall, similar volumes were popular for other minor works which were source material for Shakespeare). If they exist in print today, it’s because they’re reprints of these earlier editions, remnants of an era when the new criticism hadn’t become the dominant mode of approaching texts.
The Locked Room by Paul Auster
[Finished 27 May 2010] The final volume of Auster’s New York Trilogy. A mention of the first two books of the trilogy in the penultimate chapter marks the first real intertextuality between the books (and perhaps identifies the anonymous narrator of the novel as Paul Auster, although not necessarily the Paul Auster(s) of the first novel in the trilogy. There are some wonderful narrative devices at play, the telling of the story of Fanshawe through the mystery of his disappearance, along with an assumption that the reader will be familiar with Fanshawe is a beautiful stylistic tic, something I wish I had come up with. While perhaps the most complete story of the trilogy, this one also left me feeling emptiest, although perhaps it was the fact that Fanshawe remained a bit of a cipher throughout the book, leaving us wondering whether he ever really existed (and the fact that he didn’t actually exist only takes things a bit further).
[Finished 20 May 2010] An interesting book. This is my first book I’ve read by Boyle and it seems that he is an author whose books are driven primarily by character rather than plot. The plot of this book, such as it is, is rather thin, with most of the conflicts fading away rather than being really resolved. But the characters that Boyle creates stay with the reader and kept me coming back to the book the whole way through.
[Finished 14 May 2010] When I read a collection of an author’s letters like this, I sometimes wonder what the 21st century equivalent will be. Selected e-mails perhaps? No matter, Richard Greene’s (no relation) collection gives an interesting perspective into Graham Greene’s life. We’re left with a sense of a man who strays less far from the church than the Greene of the Sherry biography, but at the same time this might be a bit of selection bias: R. Greene may have chosen his letters to support a view point, the recipients of Greene’s letters may have kept only those letters which supported their own preferred view of the man, or Greene himself may have done more to cultivate the appearance of a certain level of belief (although that level is far from full orthodoxy as well).
There’s a clear sense of Greene’s voice in these letters, and it’s easy to see just why I’ve enjoyed his writing so much over the years. There’s also a bit of support for some of my suppositions about writings by and about Greene. The origins of Ways of Escape are confirmed and the reticence of the second volume of the Sherry biography is also explained.
[Finished 7 May 2010] A first-class bit of propaganda. It’s hard not to want to go out onto the streets singing “The Internationale” after reading this book, Sinclair does such a good job of portraying the plight of labor against the backdrop of the seemingly invincible power of moneyed interests. Even more surprising, though is how relevant the book seems to my contemporary eyes: Sinclair’s description of the drilling process seems still applicable to how it’s done today (at least as it’s described in accounts of the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico). The hypocrisies of Eli Watkins and Vern Roscoe also have contemporary resonances.
The book opens with a bit of rather poetic description, something which I hadn’t expected (I think I may have paged through The Jungle in my younger days, but I doubt that I actually read it), although the poetic language faded pretty quickly on, so it’s hard to see that as central to Sinclair’s writing as his clear agenda in the writing.
[Finished 30 April 2010] I went into this book with two sets of expectations: The delight that I gained from reading Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo and vague memories of the story informed primarily by the animated series that was shown during the Banana Splits show, along with the film with Charlie Sheen and Oliver Platt.
So coming into this story, it starts out much as we all recall. A bit of adventure and intrigue, the hilarious triple-duel scene for d’Artagnan’s “meet cute” with the three musketeers, but then as the story proceeds, it becomes clear that the three musketeers are—well, not to put too fine point on it—dicks.
What’s more, their role in things seems a bit anti-patriotic. They seem to be helping the queen as she undermines her own country, while the “villainous” Cardinal Richelieu is actually acting in the best interests of France. The musketeers aren’t heroes, they’re anti-heroes! Imagine my surprise.
[Finished 24 April 2010] A wonderful book, or really books, there are a series of novels, nested together like matryoshka dolls. As we begin the unnesting process, Mitchell begins to expose the philosophical underpinnings, most particularly, the question of what the real story is here. Is it the innermost nest of the lot, or are the inner stories set in progressively distant futures, just imagined audiences of one of the outer stories. Meanwhile, the nested stories raise questions of freedom and slavery, free will and the relationship among layers of society. Overall a brilliant book.
Ghosts by Paul Auster
[Finished 16 April 2010] A slender volume without chapter or section breaks. Continuing on the first volume of the New York Trilogy’s theme of surveillance and identity, we have another story of surveillance, this time of a detective named Blue hired by a man named White to watch another man named Black. The color theme carries throughout the book but it seems like this is more connective tissue than a solid novel. The fact that it appears to be out of print outside of omnibus anthologies containing all three works only bolsters that point.
[Finished 7 April 2010] Whoa, this was brilliant. The story is ultimately a reflection on philosophy of identity. The protagonist, a writer of detective novels who identifies with his main character about whom we writes under a pseudonym, takes on the identity of Paul Auster, whom he believes to be a detective. He later discovers that Auster is a writer himself, one who is familiar with his non-pseudonymous early work. And we learn that the narrator who remains absent until near the end, is yet another unnamed character. And that’s not touching on the various Michael Phillipses, discursions on the tower of Babel and the original language, or what it really means to be alone. What a brilliant bit of writing, even more so in that the whole thing appears quite effortless.
[Finished 5 April 2010] Really the epitome of the MFA novel. Beautiful beautiful prose and no real plot to speak of. There were some great moments and some fascinating plays on words, including the title (“tinkers” could be interpreted as a verb or a noun), but in the end, I was left feeling empty.
A World of My Own: A Dream Diary by Graham Greene
[Finished 16 February 2010] Greene’s epitaph to his life’s work. The preface by his last mistress, Yvonne Cloetta makes it clear that this was the last work he assembled from a lifetime’s records of dreams and it was arranged to conclude with Greene’s dream of his own death and the poem he wrote as is own obituary.
The prose takes on a poetic quality that is generally absent from Greene’s fiction, allowing Greene to manage the difficult balance between the reified and immaterial that is essential in any good account of a dream. Not an essential work, certainly, but a wonderful conclusion to Greene’s ouevre.
[Finished 12 February 2010] There’s something interesting inherent in a book which begins with Book Three and has the prologue after the beginning and epilogue before the end. Sadly, the whole thing ends up being a bit of a hash. There are really two separate narratives here, the surrealistic Lanark story and the naturalistic Thawe story, each with its own merits, but with what seems only a tenuous connection (something acknowledged by the author in the epilogue). I feel like there were two good books here, but the postmodern narrative managed to sink them both into a bit of a morass.
[Finished 12 February 2010] The Stephenson that I’ve read previously has all been set in the same universe of 17th and 20th Century earth, focusing on questions of cryptography and the nature of money, so coming into Anathem which is set in a distant future and alien world was a bit of a shock. Add onto that the fact that Stephenson decided to create his own vocabulary for a number of things and I found the book off-putting at first. Creating a world is difficult enough, creating a language is much harder and tends to fall flat unless the writer is someone skilled in linguistics (like Tolkien) or who takes an existing language and modifies it for his ends (like Burgess did in A Clockwork Orange). Stephenson is certainly not a linguist and while he uses some latinate vocabulary to good end in the book, his deviations from that tend to way down the narrative, especially given that he doesn’t consistently distinguish between his “Fluccish” and “Orth” words.
The story itself is an interesting one with some nice discussions of mathematical concepts (Stephenson’s forte, by far is mathematical fiction), although the conclusion ends up devolving into a bit of nonsense (but then that could be said of the other Stephenson novels that I’ve read as well). But even with the flaws, I had a hard time putting it down and I found myself flying through its nearly 1000 pages in short order.
[Finished 11 February 2010] Part of my project to read recent first novels. St. John Mandel’s prose has a glowing dreamlike poetic quality that is hard to put a finger on and makes me really really wish that my writing were like that. She manages to do a great job of unravelling her story through non-chronological storytelling, although towards the end it feels like she doesn’t really have a good sense of what to do with her characters and falls into some cliches of storytelling, but I look forward to reading her next novel.
[Finished 9 February 2010] We’re slowly seeing the characters grow and mature and finally getting some clues as to the whole VFD/Eye mystery. It was neat to see Sunny really get a chance to shine this time around.
[Finished 2 February 2010] A hodgepodge of stories from across Greene’s career including those deleted when 19 Stories became 21 Stories. There are some delightful surprises in the mix, “The Man Who Stole the Eiffel Tower,” being chief in the mix, a wonderful bit of whimsy telling precisely the story the title promises. Some bits were tedious, most notably, “Work Not in Progress,” which is more a description of a story than a story in and of itself. It’s surprising, though, to note that the story comes from the 50s and not the 80s.
[Finished 1 February 2010] This book is really the definition of commercial fiction: Plot-driven, difficult to put down, but not necessarily of any great depth. One of the comments that many others of my acquaintance who’ve read the book is that there’s a lot of information on cathedral building in the book. Perhaps, although I don’t feel, joking to the contrary, like I can go out and build a medieval cathedral in my back yard now that I’ve read it.
The story, as I noted, is compelling and fast-paced. The 900+ pages of the book fly by with amazing celerity. But characterizations are not necessarily very deep. There doesn’t really seem to be more than one dimension for almost every character in the book. Aliena shows the greatest depth and even she doesn’t run especially deep.
But this is commercial fiction. We read it for the story, not for the characterizations and certainly not for the prose. We get a touch of an idea of what medieval life is like and a story that makes the reader want to just read a few pages more before bed. And in that, it succeeds quite well.
[Finished 26 January 2010] When this book first popped to the top of my reading list, I assumed that the title used the term “lambs” metaphorically, to talk about innocents in London, and while ostensibly, the Lambs of London are in fact, Charles and Mary Lamb (of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare), I think that there’s some merit to my original assumption, as Charles and Mary are, in a way, secondary characters in the novel, overshadowed by William Henry Ireland. I read this somewhat ignorant of the real Ireland’s history so the twist, that he was a forger and not a discoverer of lost texts, was one that caught me by surprise (it also helped that I hadn’t read the jacket flap copy). In all a delightful diversion.
Reflections by Graham Greene
[Finished 23 January 2010] I had some concerns going into this volume when I saw that it was a collection of essays from throughout Greene’s career including many which had been excluded from Collected Essays for a variety of reasons. But upon reading the collection, I found myself pleasantly surprised by the quality of the essays. A number of the early essays, speaking abstractly about film, form a sort of manifesto for what narrative arts in general (not just film) should seek to do and how it should approach the task. There are some curious bits of occasional verse included along with a concluding essay containing some notes on abandoned story and novel ideas.
[Finished 14 January 2010] This volume is apparently where the Hurricane Katrina fiction made it through the pipeline into the best of anthologies. Neither of the Katrina stories really called out to me that much, though. The stories which I enjoyed the most were Alice Fulton’s “A Shadow Table,” Karl Taro Greefield’s “NowTrends,” Greg Hrbek’s “Sagittarius,” Yiyun Li’s “A Man Like Him,” Rebecca Makkai’s “The Briefcase” (the best one in the book), Richard Powers’s “Modulation,” and Alex Rose’s “Ostracon” (an interesting bit of experimental writing).
[Finished 8 January 2010] A wonderful book, far better than the last Coetzee I read and a clear indication of why it was that he was named for the Nobel prize. While there is a fair amount of old man mourning his dying sexuality in the story, the stories of the stupidity of the imperial military caused a decrease in security took over. In a way there were two conflicting narratives going on: One was a bit of an allegory on the failures of empire (prescient of American overreach in Afghanistan and Iraq), the other the story of the magistrate. Oddly while I tend to find allegory tiresome, in this novel it was the more successful aspect of the novel. At times, the magistrate’s story descended into banality and boringness.
[Finished 3 January 2010] An enjoyable crime novel. Parker does a good job of sprinkling clues without giving things away, although it felt as if the story lost its momentum in its final pages. I think, though, that I might read more Parker in the future. He has a wonderful feel for Los Angeles.
Selected Poems by Alexander Pope
[Finished 3 January 2010] I’ve been reading these poems for the past couple weeks, reading a collection I’d only dipped into when I purchased it for my 18th Century English Literature class. The Penguin edition has the odd choice to omit line numbers on the poems making the usual citation format a bit difficult (I’m still a bit disturbed to look back on the papers I wrote on Pope and see the odd-looking citations), but the poems themselves stand on their own even if I do find myself slipping into a bit of a rap rhythm while reading them.
[Finished 30 December 2009] I have to admit I found this book to be rather dull. It’s been a long time since I’ve read any Henry James, but I think that about half the time I found myself in the same situation with James’s work so maybe it makes sense that I’d react the same way to a novel about Henry James.
[Finished 28 December 2009] Second novels are an interesting thing. After pouring out a life’s worth of experience on the first novel, a successful writer is often given a sizable sum of money and a deadline in which to produce a second novel, not always to the best effect. Niffenegger manages a creditable second novel with Her Fearful Symmetry, demonstrating a good handle on writing third-person omniscient (I think it might be coming back into fashion) in her take on a ghost story. At times the symmetry metaphor is handled a bit clumsily, but the writing is beautiful and the plotting is as surprising as she managed with her first novel.
[Finished 22 December 2009] How unpromising the title seems. A woman writer and a domestic title. And yet upon opening it, I was left feeling like this was some of the most purely beautiful prose that I’ve ever encountered, written with a hypnotic quality that leaves you feeling as if you’ve wondered into a waking dream. It’s not often that I find myself going back to the beginning of a chapter to re-read it for the pleasure of reading it one more time. I feel that my own writing has turned limp and inadequate in comparison.
Yours, Etc.: Letters to the Press 1945-1989 by Graham Greene
[Finished 19 December 2009] I picked up my copy new as a first edition out of my Greeneian completist instincts. Probably over half the text is actually explanatory prose from editor Christopher Hawtree, essential to an understanding of many of the issues which have since faded into obscurity (and even when they haven’t are often in need of clarification courtesy of the minimalist style of a letter to the editor). That said, it’s a frequently enjoyable read, especially given some of Greene’s habits as a practical joker. Having read the revelations of the later volumes of Norman Sherry’s biography of Greene since my first reading of this book, it’s interesting to wonder how much of the political writing was showmanship for Greene’s continuing espionage career.
[Finished 18 December 2009] I can understand the temptation to take an epic work of poetry in Latin and Greek and translate it in prose as Mary Innes has done with this edition, but the end result is seldom good and this is no exception. We’re left with a rather prosaic rendering of the text and the choice to turn the Metamorphoses into prose has ended up leaving the text feeling like a dense blob of words rather than something special.
[Finished 13 December 2009] There is something a bit obvious in writing a book called The Plot Against America in the days following 9/11 amidst the seemingly unstoppable upsurge of the Bush-Cheney regime. Roth’s alternate history even includes a president who likes to do his own flying (although Lindbergh, unlike Bush flew solo).
But all that said, somehow I found the novel falling a bit flat. Using the perspective of a 9-year old Philip Roth to tell the story, there is a great deal of promise, but it feels as if towards the end, Roth grew tired of his premise and decided to give up on the book rather than follow it where it was leading (which would have led to a much longer book, certainly, but, in the end, I think a much better book).
True, it’s a Philip Roth book, so even as flawed as it is, it’s still hard to put down, but in the end, I was left seeing more in the book that Roth hadn’t written than in the book that he had.
[Finished 7 December 2009] I know very little about the postcolonial period in Africa, but Naipaul manages to convey the atmosphere quite well in this novel. The country that Naipaul depicts is unnamed in the novel, but this, in a way, manages to make the themes more universal: that people more knowledgeable than I can make cases for different countries as the locale for the novel tells me that the conditions in various central African nations were similar.
Perhaps most interesting is that the story is told from the perspective of an outsider, an Indian trader working in rather cultural isolation. The commentaries on the international world of the fifties and sixties were especially fascinating.
[Finished 4 December 2009] Greene’s last novel. There are elements of Greene’s experiences in Panama in the narrative, with characters clearly reminiscent of Omar Torrijos and Chuchu from Greene’s Getting to Know the General. There are some possibly metaphorical elements in the story, including some hints that the Captain of the title is, in some ways, a stand-in for an ambiguously good God. This was the first Greene book I was able to purchse new and at publication, which in some ways is a bit of a pity since our lives had such little overlap chronologically.
[Finished 2 December 2009] I have no idea how this ended up in my reading list, but sometime between when I took it out of the library and when I started reading it, I came across a reference to it from a literary agent citing it as something he would like to see more of.
Bock does an interesting job of weaving together different characters and chronologies around the central mystery of the story, what happened to Newell Ewing. There’s a fascinating look into the worlds of the marginalized, whether it’s comic book fanatics, strippers, runaways or a father whose marriage is collapsing and has begun to seek solace from strippers and pornography. It really is a great debut novel and leaves me seeing a higher level of writing to aim for.
[Finished 30 November 2009] I first heard about this book from Barbara DeMarco-Barrett’s Writers on Writing show and upon reading it, I realized what it was that had attracted me to the book. The characters in the book are each, in their own way, touched by suicides whether it’s the cop who collects suicide notes, has a father who killed himself and spends most of the novel thinking that this will be the last day of his life before he himself commits suicide to the Beverly Hills housewife who volunteers for a suicide hotline. Wagman does a great job of managing the coincidences which tie her characters together with the exception of one character’s demise near the end of the novel which seemed just a bit too tidy for my tastes. For a novel whose unifying theme is suicide, this manages to be a rather uplifting read.
[Finished 26 November 2009] A wonderfully readable post-modern novel. It’s really about reading and includes a delightfully byzantine story about foiled attempts at reading where just as the reader reaches the end of the first chapter, one of a number of problems leads to the reader being led to a new book, entirely different from the first. One of my favorite reads of the year.
The Red Queen by Margaret Drabble
[Finished 20 November 2009] I think I read Drabble’s The Waterfall in college, and if I did, my primary memory is of feeling rather disconnected from the narrative and that the story felt like I was seeing it through a gauze mask.
Coming back to Drabble to read this recent novel, I found her narrative style a bit more engaging. The story is told, for the most part, from the perspective of the deceased Korean Crown Princess Hyegyong of the title. We begin with a story of the princess told in a formal style, then move to a close third person narrative of a contemporary female academic who reads the life of the princess and finds it consuming her while simultaneously engaging in some parallel activities in her own life. We conclude with the academic meeting Margaret Drabble and Drabble writing the novel. Enjoyable, but not necessarily 5-star material to my mind.
Morte d'Urban by J. F. Powers
[Finished 15 November 2009] Powers is my people. Not merely a Catholic, but a pacifist and a writer whose first stories appeared in The Catholic Worker. This is a lightly comic tale of a worldly priest slowly coming to his own epiphany. The story is managed in such a way to avoid heavy handedness in its ultimate morality. Powers does a masterful job of letting us identify with and root for Father Urban so as he starts to feel the limitations of his world view, we do as well. I am eager to read more Powers in the future.
The Tenth Man by Graham Greene
[Finished 16 September 2009] A bit of an oddity in Greene’s oeuvre, a treatment for a film that was never made (until after the treatment was published). It was part of a trove of lost writings by Greene unearthed in the early eighties.
The story is easily the most commercial of Greene’s plots, written out of the same sort of financial desperation that brought about Stamboul Train, although perhaps tinged with additional worry of middle age. The conclusion is more than a little melodramatic and Greene’s use of coincidence overbearing, but underneath it all is the distinct sense of moral ambiguity that underlies so much of Greene’s writing.
The Sea by John Banville
[Finished 14 September 2009] I didn’t really get into this book as much as I had hoped I might. There is some beautiful writing and exquisite use of allusion and reference in the text, but the structure of the book with its frequent shifts in time left me feeling unmoored as I read.
The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge
[Finished 2 September 2009] A wonderfully strange book, it starts out as what seemed to be a bit of a domestic drama about two single young women sharing an apartment (and a bed, with a wall of pillows and books separating them). But as the central event of the book, an outing of workers at the bottle factory where both women work, comes to pass, the story takes a strange twist into a morbid comedy about dealing with the body of one of the women who dies on the outing (it’s revealed at the end that it was an accidental killing by one of the men on the outing). It’s the sort of twist that one sometimes imagines happening in a story but never actually encounters in reality (the only point of comparison I can come up with is the film From Dusk ‘til Dawn with its genre shift mid-story).
Nuns and Soldiers by Iris Murdoch
[Finished 22 August 2009] I’ve had this novel sitting on my shelves for at least a decade, probably longer. I went through a bit of an Iris Murdoch phase in college, and after reading this book, I’m thinking that I’d really like to revisit at least some of those books again now. In this instance, it’s an almost Victorian tale in some ways, complete with something approaching a Dickensian happy ending. And the language is exquisite. One thing I remember well from earlier reading of Murdoch was her skill at describing artworks, and here while there is an artist character, that skill ends up portraying the subjects of the art rather than the art itself.
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
[Finished 21 August 2009] A wonderful book, with touches of magical realism amidst the world of African Americans struggling to survive in mid-twentieth century America. I can see the influence of her on August Wilson and I really look forward to reading more Morrison.
My Name is Will: A Novel of Sex Drugs and Shakespeare by Jess Winfield
[Finished 14 August 2009] One of the central conceits of this novel, that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic, was one which I was familiar with from my undergraduate research on English recusancy and 16th century literature. For me, I found the analogy to be one of politics, trying to connect recusancy with the struggle of the poor in Latin America. In Winfield’s novel, he makes the connection (perhaps more successfully) between the actions of the pursuivants and the Reagan-era war on drugs. The story more fades away than comes to a conclusion and the attempt to bring the contemporary and Shakespearean narratives into contact was as fuzzy as the drug trip depicted, but it was still a fun read and it was nice to see some of my more esoteric interests represented in something approaching pop culture.
Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene
[Finished 12 August 2009] I first learned of this book from Dave Kostelancik. He was stopping by the high school where I was a freshman and he had just graduated and had a copy of the book with him. He described it as “Don Quixote is a priest and Sancho Panza is the communist ex-mayor of El Toboso.” I decided I had to read the book and rushed to the local public library to check out their copy.
Dave’s one-sentence summary does give a good sense of the plot and this is the most idea-centered of all Greene’s novels, even more so than A Burnt-Out Case, and represents, if Norman Sherry is to be believed, a bit of Greene’s rapprochement with Catholicism, the idea that belief and doubt were to be forever intertwined in his psyche. As I re-read this, I found myself reveling in the familiarity of the passages that I’ve read so many times and see the germination of many of my own beliefs, religious and political, in its pages.
My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
[Finished 8 August 2009] I read this primarily because my wife told me as we left the film that they had changed the ending (and I’ll be talking about that, so skip reading this if you’ve not read the book and/or seen the movie and care about spoilers), so I feel compelled to write about both the book and the film in this review.
The film was flawed in that, at least in the first act, and somewhat less later, it felt compelled to stick closely to the book, which meant trying to translate the multiple first-person narrations to the screen, which in turn came out as a series of gratuitous voice overs. In screenwriting, a voiceover is the cinematic equivalent of telling-not-showing in print. Very rarely is a voiceover a good thing in a film. And I’d also point out that multiple first person POVs are a deadly trap in narrative fiction. It seems like a good thing at the time, but it’s difficult to meet the challenge of writing more than two narrators, and even that is beyond most author’s skills. The fact that the book designer felt compelled to do the cutesy thing of changing the body typeface for each narrator (including some hideous choices of typeface).
As a storyteller, Picoult manages to transcend the limitations of her POV choice, though, and while I think that some of the streamlining of the story that took place in the film was worthwhile (although eliminating the Jesse-as-arsonist story turned his character into a bit of a cipher in the film), she made for a good story, the sort of thing that would spark some good book club discussions, even if she was a bit heavy-handed in bringing up the “are we responsible for others” theme.
And the ending? The film went for the Hollywood ending: Anna was filing the lawsuit because her sister wanted her to do so, because she was ready to die. And frankly, I think it was more effective than the self-conscious ending that Picoult chose for the novel, where Anna is killed in a car accident and her kidneys are transplanted to her sister, miraculously saving her life and allowing her to live well into the future. It just felt too contrived for my tastes. I suppose if Kate had died anyway, I would have felt better about it. Picoult had spent so much effort in letting us know that Kate was unlikely to survive that letting her live at the end cheapened the novel.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy by John Le Carré
[Finished 7 August 2009] I’ve not read much of the spy novel genre. Really only a couple of books by Graham Greene, and of those only The Human Factor really counts as a spy novel. So I don’t have a real point of comparison (other than watching films in the genre). That said, I found this a fun read, a great account of the psychology of deceit. What makes a good spy novel fascinating is less the spycraft side of things and more the whole psychological impact of a life style which is focused on deception.
A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby
[Finished 7 August 2009] Hornby is my favorite light writer. I can feel pretty confident when I pick up a Nick Hornby book that I’m going to encounter a strong voice, an entertaining tale and a weak ending. And A Long Way Down is a solid entry in that tradition. It does feel like Hornby is pushing himself a bit beyond his abilities in attempting to establish multiple narrators in his books, something he’s been doing for the last few novels, but as he increases the number of first-person voices, the strength of the narrators weakens. Here, only Jess has a strong voice, and while Maureen is the most interesting of the characters, she has the weakest voice. Still, Hornby resists the urge to moralize in the book, while acknowledging the pressure to do so. In all, a successful book.
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
[Finished 2 August 2009] Oh my. It’s hard to overstate how good this book is. Maybe it’s partly because the people in the book are very much my people. I was someone who did research on book arts related stuff at the Newberry Library (I’m not sure if it was Audrey Niffenegger herself or one of her Columbia colleagues who, seeing the document requests that I had made at the library came to see who was researching Beatrice Warde). The bookstores and record stores mentioned in the book are places that I’ve been, that I’ve blown my hard-earned pay on books and CDs that I probably couldn’t actually afford.
There’s not a sentence in this book which doesn’t seem perfect. Granted, the overall narrative runs out of steam in the final pages, but the first 500 pages more than make up for that. The time travel acts as a way of being able to provide a brilliantly crafted non-linear narrative. We don’t really follow Henry or Clare’s lives in sequence, but instead get both out of sequence, so not only is the reader learning things in a non-linear fashion, but so are the characters of the book. There’s a small list of books that I wish I had written and this, I think, takes the position at the top of the list.
Slow Man by J. M. Coetzee
[Finished 1 August 2009] My first (but not last, courtesy of the 1001 books list) Coetzee novel. The novel begins conventionally enough, seeming like it’s going to be yet another story of post-midlife lust. And in some ways it is, but the introduction of the character of a writer, Elizabeth Costello, who says that she didn’t come to the characters in the book, but that they came to her puts the book squarely into post-modern territory. The fact that Costello is not simply an imposition of Coetzee into the narrative, but a character in her own right gives her a narrative interest that might not otherwise be possible. At times, her presence is more a distraction, and Coetzee is inconsistent in his use of this authorial character, but even the attempt at such a difficult balance in narrative is a daring choice.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
[Finished 1 August 2009] A fascinating book about contemporary academic life and its overlapping with townie life. Smith is a bit clumsy at times with her use of the omniscient narrator. Her opening, “One may as well begin with Jerome’s e-mails to his father,” makes us aware of the presence of a narrator who disappears and reappears throughout the book. It seems as if we might have been better off if she were to let herself stay with a moving close third person narration. But as a storyteller, Smith is brilliant, using lacunae to move the story along, keeping us involved and giving us reason to read on, if only to learn what happened in the days weeks or months that passed in the blank space that separates the chapters.
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
[Finished 27 July 2009] A delightful novel about growing old and dying at a London hotel. We follow the titular Mrs Palfrey as she moves into the Claremont Hotel and becomes a part of the insular society of the permanent residents as well as befriending a young would-be writer. It’s a short breezy novel, an absolute delight to read.
Herzog by Saul Bellow
[Finished 24 July 2009] When I first read Bellow as a callow college student who had been pointed at Henderson the Rain King, I fell in love with the writing. Coming back to him at double the age, I found myself less enamored with him, although as I got deeper and deeper into the novel, I found it more appealing, although the letters scattered throughout varied from being distractions, to being illuminating, to being unnecessary, a view that Bellow himself may have agreed with as they almost completely disappeared from later portions of the book.
Ways of Escape by Graham Greene
[Finished 22 July 2009] I was looking to see if I had a review of this book in my archive, and it turns out that I did. AND, I had speculated that I had first read the book (almost) exactly ten years earlier. The date of that review: 23 July 1999. Apparently, for whatever reason, I come back to this book every ten years. And each time, I’m still in that hotel room outside Princeton.
I’ve read a number of biographies of Greene’s life now, so coming back into his autobiography now becomes an interesting commentary on those (or those on this). Greene’s tax troubles that led to his tax exile are elided in a few words, and he alternates from openly discussing his mistresses to discretely referring to staying in a hotel with “a friend.”
Greene’s attempts to tie his memories in with the title throughout are a bit weak and there’s one point where “athleticism” is used where “asceticism” is meant (I assume an editor is to blame--or perhaps Greene’s typist). The fact that a large portion of the book is re-purposed from introductions to the various books only makes things worse.
And yet, Greene’s life is compelling enough to let us get past these flaws and draw us in. It’s a pity that time has led to the book falling out of print.
Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope
[Finished 18 July 2009] Ah, the joys of returning to Trollope. The unconventionality of the characters made it not immediately clear whether John Grey or George Vavasor was meant to be the hero of the story, although, as in most things Victorian, this should not have been a difficult question to resolve with modest reflection. I had some doubts about whether I would want to read the Palliser novels when I first started reading this novel, but those doubts are resolved. I do.
Saturday by Ian McEwan
[Finished 11 July 2009] McEwan has set an interesting challenge for himself: Tell a story that takes place entirely in one day from the perspective of a single character. The events manage to largely fold together into a consistent story, and McEwan has sufficient skill as an author to keep the reader entranced even as we go into long internal monologues. I’m still not entirely sold on McEwan, but I enjoyed this a bit more than the contrived Atonement.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
[Finished 14 June 2009] A wonderfully anarchic novel. A lot of it is disconnected, but it seems to do an excellent job of capturing the pointlessness of war.
ESPete: Sixth Grade Sense by Arnold Rudnick
[Finished 11 May 2009] The main reason I picked up the book is that the author is my brother’s writing partner and on my brother’s last trip to town, Arnold gave me a copy of the book.
That said, this is a reasonably entertaining and well-written book, aimed at middle grades. There’s a tendency at times to write down a little to the audience, but overall it’s a fun and entertaining little book, the sort of thing that I can see really capturing a kid’s imagination. The book includes the opening chapter of the planned sequel, ESPete: Psychic Hoop Dreams.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
[Finished 9 May 2009] It’s rare that I get towards the end of a book and deliberately slow down my reading because I don’t want the book to end. But this time, I had been so captivated by Ishiguro’s narration that I couldn’t bring myself not to.
This is, I suppose, a work of literary science fiction, and from the beginning with the familiar yet unfamiliar vocabulary, I could tell that there was something a bit different about the world that Ishiguro was depicting (I knew nothing about the book when I began reading it), which is actually precisely the sort of science fiction-ish narrative that I really enjoy.
I think some of it is the almost emotionally flat narrative, something which didn’t work in the screen adaptation of Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (I’ve not read the novel, so I can’t comment on that), but in this context serves, ironically, to heighten the emotional content of the story.
Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party by Graham Greene
[Finished 8 May 2009] This, apparently, is considered a minor work in Greene’s canon, having fallen out of print and not meriting any mention at all on Norman Sherry’s biography of Greene.
But it seems like this is a somewhat misplaced view of things. Yes, there are some clumsy characterizations in the novel, but at the same time, the philosophy of the narrator rivals Querry’s in its pessimism, the concept of a God who exists primarily to humiliate his creation, does provide a fascinating view into Greene’s state of mind at this stage of his life. It’s interesting to note that Greene’s next novel would be Monsignor Quixote.
No Star is Lost by James T. Farrell
[Finished 7 May 2009] It’s been a while since I’ve read any Farrell. I remember being absolutely captivated by Studs Lonnigan, so I was more than happy to start the Danny O’Neill pentalogy a few years back before discovering that most of Farrell’s works had fallen out of print. Now they’ve come back into print so I’m able to easily obtain copies of the books on the pentalogy that I didn’t have and I’m back into it. What’s interesting is that despite the sometimes clumsy narration (when a character is first introduced, we get a description that seems more like what you’d find in stage directions than in a novel), there’s a compelling voice here, especially in the rendering of dialogue. The plot such as it is, is a bit wandering and undirected with no real protagonist for the action to be centered on (is Danny meant to be the central character? Or Margaret? Or Mother? Or is it the family in general?), but even so, the narrative voice is enough to keep the reader propelled through the story.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
[Finished 4 May 2009] This book reads like a first draft typed out on a benzedrine high, but oh my, what an amazing first draft it is. The incredible compelling voice here grabbed me and never let me go through the whole story. The madness and energy of Dean Moriarty are addictive and it’s easy to see our narrator drawn into the adventures that Moriarty instigates as well as setting off on some of his own. Could it be a more polished narrative? Sure, but it would at the same time lose some of the energy of the book. It makes me tempted to re-read the book in the scroll edition.
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
[Finished 30 April 2009] There are those occasional works of literature which are widely acclaimed as great, but which manage to leave some readers cold. For me, this is one of them. I can see some of the flashes of brilliance in this book, particularly, the account of the burning of the synagogue, and elements of the surrealist narration, but too much of it just seemed to drag and not be that interesting. That said, even in a book like this, I find some small inspiration for a bit of formation of future writing.
The Human Factor by Graham Greene
[Finished 17 April 2009] I remember being puzzled when I bought this book that it wasn’t a Penguin paperback like all my other Graham Greene novels. Only later did I learn that a conflict over the title of the book led Greene to change publishers with the publication of this book.
Re-reading it with a memory of the vague outline of the plot took away some of the suspense of the story, but allowed me to really enjoy how Greene unfolded character and mood. I did find the Catholic “furniture” in the story to be an odd diversion in the story, the metaphors and confession scene seemed to be completely out of place.
Caspian Rain by Gina B. Nahai
[Finished 16 April 2009] I’m not sure what attracted me to this book to put it in my library queue. Was it the first-person omniscient voice? The magical realism? The account of hearing loss? Perhaps some combination of them all. That said, it was a beautifully written book with a compelling voice.
The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perotta
[Finished 13 February 2009] I have to confess that I had high expectations for this book, and that I was left a bit underwhelmed by the result. It seemed like it took Perotta an awfully long time to begin to draw the character of Tim as a three-dimensional human being, and even moreso with Tim’s wife. Instead, the Christians of the story ended up as being rather cartoony and unsatisfying, especially the character of the pastor of the tabernacle. It’s a pity because when Perotta was in good shape, it was really good, but it just didn’t seem like he had any good idea of what to do with his characters (the plot more peters out than reaches any sort of conclusion). I’m likely to try another Perotta novel, in hopes of feeling more satisfied, perhaps if he stays more within his comfort zone, the writing will be more satisfying.
Best American Short Stories 2008 edited by Salman Rushdie
[Finished 28 December 2008] Another wonderful collection of stories. This time around, the editor Salman Rushdie focuses on the American part of the story with an interesting essay in what exactly constitutes an “American” short story, finally settling on an especially broad definition of the term.
There’s a fair amount of skewed reality in the stories (although surprisingly, not from George Saunders’s contribution), which I found pleasant. Allegra Goodman’s “Closely Held” managed to really grasp the reality of working in the tech industry.
Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
[Finished 1 November 2008] Looking back on this book, what I remember more than the book itself is how it inspired me to add a new chapter to my own work in progress.
A Series of Unfortunate Events 9: The Carnivorous Carnival by Lemony Snicket
[Finished 25 September 2008] I’m left with a stronger sense that we’re writing novels now instead of clever stories. Snicket has enough sense to pull back on some of the verbal games that could have grown tiresome this deep into the series.
The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett
[Finished 31 August 2008] Having read Ann Patchett’s most recent novels, I decided to start at the beginning and read all of her works. I was a bit surprised to discover that she wasn’t using her omniscient POV in this work, but rather uses a series of three first-person narrators.
If I had any doubts about whether Patchett was a Catholic before reading this, they were dispelled when I finished
Lord Rochester's Monkey by Graham Greene
[Finished 27 August 2008] A re-read. It’s still somewhat surprising that this was considered too scandalous to publish on its creation.
The Plague by Albert Camus
[Finished 21 August 2008] I always expect surrealism from Camus, for some reason, but never find it.
Novels and Stories 1959-1962: Goodbye, Columbus & Five Short Stories / Letting Go by Philip Roth
[Finished 19 August 2008] Roth’s early writing is not quite as engaging as I might have hoped, although some of it is attributable to the youth of the author. When I was in college, I made a point of reading lots of first novels. They were often quite delightful, containing the author’s lifetime of pent-up creativity in their pages. I don’t see that happening with the early Roth. Instead, there’s some indication of his nascent creativity beginning to show, and with his first novel, some hints of the narrative genius that he would become.
Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
[Finished 18 August 2008] A revisiting of the characters of Mitford’s first novel, and surprisingly, just as entertaining.
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
[Finished 11 August 2008] Oh, such delicious characterization.
The High Window by Raymond Chandler
[Finished 8 August 2008] By far my favorite of the three Chandler novels which I’ve read, although in this case, most of the plot twists which Chandler assumed drove the novel were abundantly clear. Maybe that’s why I liked it.
Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler
[Finished 3 August 2008] I’m getting a bit more accustomed to Chandler’s plotting and geography, although this is still a bit too convoluted a story for my tastes.
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
[Finished 28 July 2008] Maybe it’s just me, but I had a hard time getting into Chandler. Although being an Angeleno, I can at least envision his geography reasonably well.
The USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos
[Finished 15 July 2008] An amazing literary experiment. The “camera eye” segments seemed to be largely failures, although failures with grand aspirations. The mini-biographies of real-life figures, however, were fascinating as was the overall plan of the book in which the protagonist was not an individual but a nation and the arc of how capital and labor interacted over the first part of the twentieth century.
The Mad Scientists' Club by Bertrand R. Brinley
[Finished 21 June 2008] I hate to confess that it’s my fault that the Stickney-Forest View Library does not have a copy of this book. I checked it out over and over and managed at some point to lose it (costing an astronomical ten dollars of library fines as a consequence). And because the library’s copy was lost, I haven’t read these stories in some three decades. I’d forgotten the contents of almost all of them, so it was like reading them fresh when I got my own copy of the book.
Some of the plots are a bit simplistic, and there’s a fair amount of “magical” technology courtesy of small radios which can be effortlessly wired into doing any of a number of things, but it’s forgivable as children’s literature, especially given its ability to inspire a youthful imagination.
Journey to the End of Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
[Finished 13 June 2008] A book which is perhaps most amazing in its voice which manages to carry through even through the necessary mutilation of translation. There is a startling frankness and directness to Céline’s narration which sets the book apart.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
[Finished 27 May 2008] This is only the second Woolf I’ve ever read, the first being To the Lighthouse which I read but didn’t really get as an undergrad (that, of course, excludes countless readings of “A Room of One’s Own”). Coming back to Woolf now, I can appreciate the exquisite beauty of her prose, although I have to admit that I find that Ann Patchett is a better Woolf than Woolf herself is.
The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
[Finished 21 May 2008] Another one of these fun brisk novels. The story is pretty straightforward and there aren’t the sorts of extreme twists and turns which seem obligatory for a modern thriller, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. I’m thinking that I may definitely read more Buchan in the future
Collected Short Stories by Graham Greene
[Finished 8 May 2008] Coming back to these stories, I find many of them to be a bit lacking, feeling more like outlines for novels never undertaken rather than full-fledged examples of the short story art. In many of the stories, there is a lack of closeness that leaves the reader feeling a bit empty. Even the stories which feel more like stories, like “May We Borrow Your Husband,” come across more as a piece of a novel more than a story. I can’t help wondering whether that might have been the intent behind some of the stories.
But not every story is a failure. Greene is at the peak of his art in a story like “Under the Garden”, a story whose half-forgotten memory, mixed with the half-forgotten memories of the plot itself, have haunted me for decades since first reading it.
The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
[Finished 8 May 2008] It’s been a long time since I’ve last read D.H. Lawrence (I think not since just after the first time I dropped out of college). The reasons for this being banned seem somewhat trivial in modern society (a not terribly graphic lesbian romance), but more interesting are things like the attacks on her husband’s religion by Anna Brangwen.
A Sort of Life by Graham Greene
[Finished 26 April 2008] I stumbled across my first edition copy of this at a book fair in Chicago some twenty years ago. Coming back to the book again I find it remarkably readable. There are parts of the book which I realize that I’ve managed to forget in such a way that I’ve incorporated them into my psyche, a sign of just how dramatically reading Greene has impacted my own personality.
Some readers have found the detachment in this first volume of memoir offputting, but the younger me found it exhilarating, while the older me finds it comfortable, a reminder of what I liked as a young man. I’ve become old enough that I no longer read writers’ autobiographies as a recipe for how to lead my own life, but instead as an insight into another mind.
Time Regained by Marcel Proust
[Finished 23 April 2008] The final book in In Search of Lost Time. I’m finally really bound up in Proust’s prose. So much so, that my thought as I finish this last volume is that I would like to re-read the whole thing, although I think that when I do, I would like to do it outside my usual context of bus rides and stolen moments.
Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene
[Finished 8 April 2008] Coming back to this book after a couple decades, I’m left amazed with the pure richness of the narrative. Sometimes the international travels seem a bit gratuitous, as if Greene had wanted to be able to justify some vacation time as a tax deduction, but it still ends up being an entertaining yarn, definitely one on my short list of the best Graham Greene novels.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
[Finished 4 April 2008] Russell’s novel manages to start on an amazingly high note, worth quoting in its entirety:
After the first exquisite songs were intercepted by radio telescope, U.N. diplomats debated long and hard whether and why human resources should be expended in an attempt to reach the world that would become known as Rakhat. In the Rome offices of the Society of Jesus, the questions were not whether or why but how soon the mission could be attempted and whom to send.The characters that Russell creates are largely well-drawn although two members of the party end up being little more than names and occupations. And the situation that she sets up is an amazingly intriguing one. The problem is that she doesn’t quite succeed in pulling off the conclusion of the story, not too difficult though since she’s trying to tackle the Job problem, how God can allow suffering and bad things to happen. Nevertheless, I’m still eager to take a look at the sequel that she wrote to see how well it works.The Jesuit scientists went to Rakhat to learn, not to proselytize. They went so that they might come to know and love God’s other children. They went for the reason Jesuits have always gone to the farthest frontiers of human exploration. They went for the greater glory of God.
Anthology of Catholic Poets edited by Joyce Kilmer
[Finished 20 March 2008] A New Critic’s dream. The poems here are identified only by title and author, with the selection listed in alphabetical order by poet’s name. No dates, no background information, only the text.
The subjects of the poem are mostly religious, although there are a handful of poems with secular topics as well. It provides a pretty good sense of what was in vogue at the opening of the twentieth century (the first edition of this book was produced in 1917). A later edition added some additional poems to the collection including a fair number by Kilmer himself.
Ten Miracle Plays edited by R. G. Thomas
[Finished 10 March 2008] One of the ancient books in my collection. I picked this up at a time when I had the idea of writing a great comprehensive paper on reinterpretations of the gospel story (intending to write about everything from medieval miracle plays to Andrew Lloyd Weber). I never did.
The book is a collection of different portions of multiple pageants, all presented in unmodernized middle English. The decision to simply provide a glossary at the back of the book rather than marginal annotations was not one that I would have made. It was interesting to see the medieval didacticism at work in the play.
The Collected Essays by Graham Greene
[Finished 1 February 2008] As an undergraduate I started reading this collection, but I don’t think that I ever finished it. I can guess how far I got into it by where the familiar turned alien. The review of Recusant Poets that turned me onto my undergraduate thesis topic was familiar. The account of Castro and 1960s Cuba, or Pope Pius XII were unfamiliar, but fascinating.
The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust
[Finished 31 January 2008] As I come into the home stretch of In Search of Lost Time, I find myself beginning to really get Proust. I have some sense of the sprawling landscape of the novel and the long stretches of uninterrupted prose are easier to get through, I’m almost ready to try re-reading the whole thing, although that will likely be a pleasure reserved for later in my life.
Best American Short Stories 2007 edited by Stephen King
[Finished 19 January 2008] It’s probable that it’s at least partly a consequence of King’s sensibilities, but I found this volume to be far more plot-oriented than last year’s edited by Ann Patchett. King notes in his introduction that he feels that the American short story is alive but not well, largely because writers have become too focused on writing for other writers as opposed to writing for readers, a trend which tends to reinforce and be reinforced by declining circulations of literary magazines.
In this volume, my favorites were John Barth’s “Toga Party,” Lauren Groff’s “L. Debard and Alietto: A Love Story,” and Richard Russo’s “Horseman,” although unlike the 2006 volume, there really weren’t any stories that left me cold.
The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells
[Finished 9 January 2008] In my little H. G. Wells marathon, this was the only story that I didn’t have any previous exposure to. The closest I came was the trailer for the 1996 film.
So maybe that’s why of the three Wells novels, this was the one that made the greatest impression on this reading. I found myself thinking that it was an especially creepy story, one which left me chilled as I finished reading it. Perhaps it was also aided by a relative lack of Wells’s usual sociological moralizing.
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
[Finished 8 January 2008] I don’t know if I ever read this as a child or if my memories are based primarily on the various adaptations of the story (the old black and white film, Orson Welles’s radio broadcast, even the Spielberg film).
It’s interesting to see how Wells adapted his preference for first person narration to a story which really needed multiple points of view (by recounting the experiences of the narrator’s brother and making references to pamphlets which had been published).
But the real crux of the novel seems to be the encounter between the narrator and the artilleryman near the end of the book when the artilleryman outlines his plan for surviving until the humans are able to finally defeat the Martians. It almost seems an echo of the Morlocks from The Time Machine.
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
[Finished 4 January 2008] I had read this book at some point in my childhood, so I had a vague recollection of the Eloi and the Morlocks, along with mental images which resurfaced as I read the book.
But what I didn’t remember, and what probably eluded me on that first reading, was the social commentary which is an essential part of this book. Wells was clearly concerned about a strict separation of the classes, and more than anything else, this book seems a parable designed to warn against the dangers of the idle rich depending too heavily on the working classes and being unable to function for themselves.
The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt
[Finished 2 January 2008] What a wonderful book. As a number theory math guy, the prospect of reading a novel about Ramanujan was already appealing, but Leavitt is a skilled writer and managed to handle the story remarkably well. The focus of the story is on G.H. Hardy, including a significant amount of his personal life that I was unaware of (I hadn’t known that he was gay). The mathematics is presented in a way that manages to not frighten off the non-mathematical (or so I assume) while still providing enough information for the mathematically inclined to get the sense of what’s in there. And perhaps most deliciously, The Anecdote is saved until almost the end of the book, something which keeps those of us who know little more than the bare outlines of Ramanujan’s life on our toes waiting for it to finally appear in the narrative.
I think one test of a historical novel is whether it inspires the reader to want to learn more about the subject of the story. By that test, Leavitt has more than passed the test.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
[Finished 30 December 2007] Hearing an interview with Díaz on NPR, I thought that this would be a book that I would enjoy a great deal, but I found that large stretches of the book left me feeling a bit bored. The character of Oscar was compelling, but much of the rest of the book was less interesting. I can see how some of the parallels that Díaz set up were meant to work, but I don’t think that it was that successfully managed.
The Comedians by Graham Greene
[Finished 30 December 2007] In one of my English classes, the professor asked us what would be the epigraph for our lives. I had recently read the Gospel of Matthew and had quoted it a fair amount in my papers and he thought perhaps I would take my epigraph from that book, but I told him that I thought I would take it instead from Greene’s novel, writing, “I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate.”
Coming back to this novel 19 years later, I realize that I only read it the one time, so I was able to have quickly forgotten the twists of the story, only the general outlines and a handful of memorable scenes. It’s a good read, and while it’s not up to the quality of Greene’s earlier work, I enjoyed it a fair amount.
Beware of God by Shalom Auslander
[Finished 23 December 2007] After reading Auslander’s memoir, I decided to take a look at his stories. Auslander is a writer of some skill, although he seems to have a rather limited range and many of the stories are riffs on the same joke, one which also is central to Auslander’s memoir as well. Some of the stories manage to take this riff and bring it to brilliant heights of comedy, but others fall flat or, in the worst case, descend to the depths of mediocrity. There is a fair amount of potential that is lost because of Auslander’s apparent fear of really facing the full depths of his topic.
Interestingly enough, the copyright page does not include any previous publication information on any of the stories. I’m not sure whether that’s an indication that this is a collection of stories never previously published.
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo
[Finished 20 December 2007] Wow.
One of the concerns I’ve found myself exploring in my own writing has been language, so when I heard about this novel, I immediately had to read it.
Wow.
The story is serviceable, a story of love found and lost. But the telling of it, in the context of learning a language (and the learning of the language was the context of writing the novel), is amazingly beautiful. Guo manages to make broken English readable for 300 pages. Absolutely brilliant. The language gradually transforms as the book advances, which, although it’s not done quite as perfectly as one might hope, is still effective at conveying the development of Z’s facility with the language.
Ron Carlson Writes a Story by Ron Carlson
[Finished 18 December 2007] I’ve tended to be someone who leans away from writing books written by writers. Far more interesting and useful is the advice proffered by editors and agents, people who have a view of many many manuscripts and have some sense of what the slush pile looks like.
But that said, there is some value for knowing something about how an individual writer approaches their writing. This is a somewhat interesting take in that it takes a line-by-line approach to how Carlson was inspired to write a single short story. It’s somewhat interesting, but I found myself wishing for more of the craft than the inspiration. There’s much more to be learned from how the story was crafted than where the ideas come from. And in this case, the structure of the book, creates the unfortunate illusion that there was a single draft through in the writing process.
Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett
[Finished 17 December 2007] I still have mixed feelings about Andrea Barrett’s writing. It seems that she misses the mark a fair amount, but partly because she’s so willing to push the fiction much farther than is safe. The short story which is clearly connected to The Air We Breathe is apparently her first effort at the first person plural narrative and it’s a bit clunkier in its first attempt.
The Linnaeus stories, though are superb and are worth the price of admission alone, as is the title novella.
Munster Village by Mary Hamilton
[Finished 16 December 2007] For some reason, I went through an eighteenth-century novel phase in my early twenties and this was one of the books that I bought that I never quite managed to pick up. Reading it now, I found it to be a somewhat tedious read.
Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander
[Finished 13 December 2007] After hearing Auslander interviewed on Fresh Air, I thought that this might be an interesting book to read. Auslander has an interesting relationship with God, one which is both complex and juvenile at the same time.
I don’t always find Auslander to be a sympathetic character although he is refreshingly honest in his depictions of his struggles with responding to his sexuality and the temptations to spend the day with porn and pot instead of writing.
In all, it’s an interesting memoir of struggles with belief and the consequences thereof, good enough to suggest that his collection of short stories about God would be worth reading.
Quarantine by Jim Crace
[Finished 6 December 2007] After this was mentioned on NPR, I decided to give the book a look. It’s a rather odd look at the historical Jesus, perhaps akin to Kazantakis’s Last Temptation of Christ. Not exactly a naturalistic understanding of the events, as there is at least one, if not two, putative miracles in the story. And yet, the understanding of the events—Crace is recounting the 40 days in the desert—is not exactly orthodox either.
By focusing on the other hermits in the desert and giving us some sense of what a desert quarantine would be like in first century Palestine, we get some more insight into just what Jesus’s task would have been. Familiar biblical phrases appear, but transposed and not necessarily with the same meaning that they have in the gospels.
In all, a well-written and thought-provoking work although not quite having the impact of Kazantzakis which stands apart as the best of the modern re-imaginings of the gospel story.
Run by Ann Patchett
[Finished 30 November 2007] I’m thinking that I have a new favorite author. This is another one of those brilliant works of literature which have so many depths to them to explore. Consider the title. One short word, but one which has so much meaning. You can run on a track, or run for office, or have the run of the laboratory, or run the household, or run away (figuratively or literally), or things can run in the family or be run over by a car. Somewhere there’s an English major who’s getting 5-10 double-spaced pages on this topic for their contemporary literature professor who will remember this paper when she writes a letter of recommendation for that student’s application to a PhD program.
This is only the second Patchett novel that I’ve read, but I’m hooked on her use of language, something so skilled that I need to switch over to classical music on my iPod when I’m reading so that I don’t get distracted from her words, something I normally only need to do for poetry, she’s that good.
Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'Neill
[Finished 27 November 2007] O’Neill has a compelling voice in this work and manages to capture the language and psychology of a child remarkably well in this book. Although there are occasional points where she lapses from her 12-year-old’s perspective to philosophize, these might be forgiven somewhat as a bit of reflection from a presumably older point of view.
A far bigger problem for me is the structure of the narrative. While it’s very well told, even given the rather ugly turn the narrative takes, it tends to be rather episodic, more like memoir than novel. That, plus a happy ending which felt tacked on and somewhat out of character with the rest of the narrative left me feeling like this wasn’t quite the great work of literature it could have become.
The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett
[Finished 25 November 2007] I caught an interview with Barrett on the Writers on Writing podcast and was intrigued by the concept of the first person plural narrative structure. It’s a fascinating conceit, and one which gives Barrett at least some of the freedoms of an omniscient narrator while retaining some of the intimacy which is characteristic of a first-person narrative. but at the same time, the conflict of the two left me feeling like the book was being narrated by some sort of disembodied consciousness: At no point were any names ascribed to the collective we, nor any actions directly connected to the narrative. There also seemed to be a fair number of cases where it didn’t make sense for the collected narrators to know some aspects of what had happened.
But even so, and with a plot which manages to be predictable and compelling at the same time, Barrett’s use of language gripped me and enabled me to ignore the POV issues (I’m beginning to think that we’re actually on the verge of breaking out of a neoclassical rigidity with respect to POV which would be quite welcome in some cases and a bit disastrous in others). I am intrigued enough that I think I may read Ship Fever to get a broader sense of Barrett’s style.
A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene
[Finished 24 November 2007] Given what I know about Greene’s life now, it’s hard to not read this book as a somewhat autobiographical statement (in fact, Greene admitted as much in a letter to Evelyn Waugh). There’s a bleakness to Greene’s psyche at this point which is stunning. And yet, despite the presence of annoyingly ernest Catholics like M. Rycker and Fr Thomas in the narrative, there is also some hope lurking in the margins of the book that perhaps God does exist. This is not the narrative of a committed atheist, but of someone who, like Querry, is a burnt-out case, who has lost hope and the ability to love.
I suspect that this was meant to be Greene’s swan-song, and only a rather bad choice of investment advisors forced Greene into having to continue writing over the remainder of his life.
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
[Finished 16 November 2007] I found this a bit more developed a story than Slaughter-House Five although the book ends with more of a whimper than a bang after building to a crescendo in which all the characters are brought together.
I note that the book was made into a film. This was doubtless a grave artistic misstep as the value of the book is much less in the story (which is the core of a good film) and more in the use of language in telling the story. One of the narrative conceits which is common to the two Vonnegut novels which I’ve read at this point is the explanation of the obvious throughout the story. Unlike with the insult-your-intelligence footnotes that I’ve complained about in some other books, these explanations carry with them the unspoken belief that the reader knows damn well about what’s being explained, and it’s the sly explanation, often in a satyric vein, which makes the story worth telling.
I have to admit that in general, while Vonnegut’s voice continues to impress me, I find his story-telling itself to be a bit disappointing. He falls back too much on giving 2-paragraph summaries of Killgore Trout novels as a means of commenting on the events in the story, a trope which leaves me a bit unimpressed.
Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
[Finished 15 November 2007] As I read this, I came to the realization that many of my favorite Greene novels aren’t beloved for their style, but for their plots and characterization. This is another light novel, although it does turn a bit darker as Wormold’s circle of “agents” begins to be targeted for elimination or intimidation. It’s telling that Captain Segura, the police officer with a cigarette case made from human skin, ends up being an at least partially sympathetic character after being introduced as an intimidating figure. Meanwhile, Braun and Carter end up seeming as much deus ex machina to move the plot as real character.
Sherry’s biography of Greene gives some insight into Greene’s writing practice at this stage of his life and it does provide some explanation of the weaknesses of Greene’s long-form fiction at this stage of his career.
Jake's Thing by Kingsley Amis
[Finished 14 November 2007] I was in Claremont and planning on heading back into L.A. but had no book. Add in that it was the final day of existence for Claremont Books and Prints (although much of the inventory and the selling thereof in the space is continuing--sans the presence of Chic Goldsmith--as Second Story Books), so I spent some time digging through the selection in the fiction room for something I could read on the train. My something turned out to be Amis’s book Jake’s Thing. While there were some funny bits, for the most part it struck me as a bitter book written by a bitter man with little to redeem it. Let me leave a letter for my future self: Don’t ever write a book about how awful the sex life of a middle-aged (or, for that matter, old) man is. It’s not that interesting. Also leave out the writing about lusting over younger women as well.
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
[Finished 9 November 2007] Among the authors whom I’ve never read, much to the surprise of others, is Kurt Vonnegut. Perhaps it was because in high school Dave Orland loved Vonnegut but his girlfriend Kim Bartosz found him vile (and if you found yourself at this page by googling either of them, drop me a line).
So now that I’ve read my first Vonnegut (prompted by the comic strip Frazz to read not just this one but also Breakfast of Champions), I can see a big part of the appeal of Vonnegut: he has a distinctive and infectious voice in his writing. In fact, I’m almost tempted to put aside any writing projects until I finish Breakfast of Champions just to make sure that none of this voice creeps into my own writing.
There is also a lot to say against Vonnegut as well, though. His style is the sort of thing that I would imagine many of the pretentious high school students who love him grow out of as they transform themselves from pretentious high school students into pretentious adults. And the marriage of the science fiction (or is it mental illness) and wart narratives doesn’t seem to quite work for me.
The Dynasts by Thomas Hardy
[Finished 8 November 2007] This book is an odd little backwater of Hardy’s output: A massive three-part verse drama which would not have been easily produced (if it were even possible) at the time that he wrote it. Certainly the fledgling film industry had begun to exist by this point, but it’s difficult to see Hardy anticipating the invention of the mini-series this early in the twentieth century.
As an account of the Napoleonic wars, it comes across as a bit slow and turgid. Apparently Hardy had wanted to face the subject of the Napoleonic wars for some time (The Trumpet Major which I read earlier this year being his previous work which touched on it), but was put off from writing it in novel form because of the immense shadow cast by Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Alas as a verse dramatist, I find Hardy to be a bit of a failure, and this work is justifiably consigned to the back corners of the literary world.
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
[Finished 7 November 2007] Since I became a member of my current writing group, I’ve become a lot more conscious of point of view in writing. I used to simply assume that third person was the same as omniscient (and as I read closely, this seems to be the rule in a lot of older writing). So when I heard in an interview with Patchett that Bel Canto is considered to be a masterwork of writing in third-person omniscient, I decided to take a look at it.
Wow.
This is one of the best-written books I’ve read in some time. I think part of it is that unlike a lot of literary fiction, it actually is about more than the language in which it is written. There’s a story worth stopping the wedding guests for here.
And the story is told not only with style and beauty but with humor (for example, the translator who learned Swedish by watching Ingmar Bergman films and thus is best equipped to discuss dark subjects). My previous experience with Patchett had been her work as an editor on Best American Short Stories 2006 and I had feared the worst coming into this book. Instead, I found the best.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
[Finished 30 October 2007] I guess it was all the buzz about Sebold’s new novel which provoked me to finally read this book. I can remember seeing it on the tables by the entrance to Borders and found the conceit of the novel intriguing: A story told by a murdered girl from the perspective of heaven. But it never really attracted me enough to actually read the book.
Coming to it now, I wish I had read it earlier. Sebold has managed to succeed phenomenally at capturing the psyche and language of a young girl denied the chance to move into adulthood and her narrative conceit gives her a logical way to be able to look into the thoughts of any character while retaining the distinctive voice of a first-person narration.
But writing this a week after finishing the novel, I find myself feeling a bit empty about the book. There was something--I can’t quite put my finger on exactly what--lacking from the book which left me feeling that what I read was good--very good, in fact--but fell short of being great.
A Series of Unfortunate Events 8: The Hostile Hospital by Lemony Snicket
[Finished 30 October 2007] The format of the books is completely broken at this point with the Baudelaires on the run at the beginning of the story. Putting aside some of the bizarre leaps of logic (although I do realize the oddity of being less concerned about a baby passing as a doctor than records about the fire which killed the Baudelaire’s parents being kept at a hospital), the story progresses although mostly in the way that seems typical of the middle movie of a trilogy. We’re being positioned for a continuation of the narrative more than telling a story worthy of standing alone.
Loser Takes All by Graham Greene
[Finished 29 October 2007] As I continue my Graham Greene re-reading project, I’m brought to the first of his “light” novels. This was, in a way, the first side of Greene that I was exposed to when I first discovered him in high school when I read Monsignor Quixote (which manages to merge the light Greene with the Catholic Greene).
As a purely entertaining book, this shows a new side of Greene, one which must have seemed alien to Greene (although if I remember correctly, he had published some mildly humorous short stories by this point as well). The change in tone must have been shocking to Greene’s readers at the time, especially coming in the wake of The End of the Affair and The Quiet American
Rasselas, Poems and Selected Prose by Samuel Johnson
[Finished 24 October 2007] Samuel Johnson, I’ve come to realize, is not an author that people read for pleasure. And yes, I realize the irony of that statement. This is one of two selections of Johnson’s writing that are left over from my undergrad days and the first that I’ve undertaken to read cover to cover.
I remember being assigned Johnson as an undergrad and wondering why, precisely, we were assigned to read him. As a poet he was a decidedly minor figure and his “novel,” Rasselas pales in comparison with other prose fiction of the period. Since the curricula of an English major tends to be overwhelmingly focused on poetry, fiction and drama, the concept of dealing with essays, particularly, the sort of essays which Johnson specialized in, which are now an extinct genre, seemed especially alien.
Coming at Johnson again with a couple decades’ reading to intervene, Johnson still seems not especially worthy of reading. He occupies an odd space between philosophy and literature. His life is more interesting than his works and I find myself thinking that I would rather re-read Boswell than this volume.
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
[Finished 22 October 2007] Greene’s use of the first person narration has greatly improved betwen his writing of The End of the Affair and this novel. Part of it, no doubt, was the consequence of spending more time on the novel: This was three years’ work. The narrator, again, is recognizably similar to Greene, but the plot is less close to his experiences and as a consequence he is able to put more art into what he writes.
A lot of the attention to this novel is based on the prescient account of American intervention in Vietnam, but really, that’s just decoration on the real story, the love triangle of Fowler, Pyle and Phuong. It’s interesting to note that while the first film of this novel, with Audie Murphy, grotesquely misportrayed the politics of the movie, it did a better job than the Caine-Fraser film of depicting the personal relationships which are the center of the novel.
I also find, re-reading this novel that Greene’s writing here is essentially cinematic. So much of the text is devoted to setting scenes and providing a sense of place. There’s a lot to be learned from this novel in that respect.
Brasyl by Ian McDonald
[Finished 17 October 2007] In 1986, Paul Simon released Graceland an amazing fusion of his own songwriting with the stylings of musicians from South Africa. Four years later he followed that up with The Rhythm of the Saints, an imminently forgettable attempt to redo that success by incorporating Brazilian musicians into his music.
Ian McDonald appears to be following in Simon’s footsteps by following up what I’ve heard is an outstanding science fiction novel set in future India with a science fiction novel set in future (and present and past) Brazil. Alas, like Simon’s 1990 album, I’m left with a sense of the effort being more tourism than real understanding.
That’s not to claim that my understanding of Brazil runs any deeper than a few Caetano Veloso CDs and a viewing of Cidade de Deus on DVD, but rather that my sense is that McDonald’s understanding of Brazil doesn’t run much deeper.
That said, there are some moments of brilliance, particularly the opening scene of a pilot of a reality show centered around filming car thieves stealing a car rigged with hidden cameras with the prize being the stolen car if they succeed at evading the police for the duration of the show. Had McDonald focused on this character and the social degeneracy around her television producing life, he could have had an outstanding work (or perhaps merely a poor knock-off of Series 7: The Contenders).
We’re taken through a plausible series of events centering around a quantum multiverse but the final pay off again leaves a fair amount to be desired. I think that I’ll read McDonald’s River of Gods to give him another chance, but I wasn’t particularly impressed with this book.
The Bill From My Father: A Memoir by Bernard Cooper
[Finished 12 October 2007] In a lot of ways, this book really is a shining example of how to write good literature: Write a beautiful sentence, and then write another. Cooper has a knack for being able to write beautiful sentences even when he doesn’t have that much to say. Fortunately, there’s a fair amount of interesting material here, although the titular bill doesn’t show up until fairly late in the book. I think that I might have used that as the hook to build the book from, although the bill was, in many ways, not as detailed as I might have imagined. There’s also a bit too much writing about writing the book, instead of writing the book itself, although I suppose that’s a hazard of being a memoirist: After a certain point, what you’re remembering is the act of writing itself.
But even with these weaknesses, the book is always a good read, and while I don’t feel that Cooper succeeded in revealing much about his father’s life before the events of the book took place, he does an excellent job of showing his father’s life declining into dementia and ultimately death.
Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
[Finished 10 October 2007] This was, I have little doubt, an absolutely hilarious book when it was first published. But changing tastes and social conditions leave it as more of a slow text of jokes that seem like they could almost be funny to the twenty-first century reader. I can see some roots of later satires, particularly Gulliver’s Travels but also The BFG in the book, but ultimately, I was more bored than entertained by the book.
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
[Finished 9 October 2007] I first read this eighteen years ago in the aftermath of a painful and inexplicable (to me, at least) break-up. I thought it was a work of genius, and I began writing my own story, about a character going through a break-up with a girl named Sarah that I realized on its completion was complete and utter dreck, although between the reading and writing (and perhaps also some subconscious remembrance of The French Lieutenant’s Woman), I had developed such a complete dedication to the name, that I still sometimes have a hard time convincing myself that I have, in fact, never actually dated a Sarah.
So to return to the book in a different state of mind and stage of life, I find my reaction to its pages quite different. I see further confirmation of my belief that break-up fiction makes for good therapy and lousy literature. I don’t think that I’m likely to continue citing this novel as the counterexample. There are huge problems of characterization, particularly with the narrator, Maurice Bendrix, who is meant to be an atheist, but who keeps making references to Catholic belief (so much so, that when Garrison Keillor described the book on Greene’s birthday on “The Writer’s Almanac,” he incorrectly stated that Bendrix was a devout Catholic). There are also clumsy repetitions that leave me feeling like I’m reading a barely-edited first draft, as if this were a book that Greene wanted to get out of his system as quickly as possible. I can’t help but feel that this is perhaps an almost-masterpiece, but falls far enough away from success that its status in the canon is undeserved.
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
[Finished 1 October 2007] What should I make of the fact that amazon doesn’t appear to have an in-print edition of this book? I thought that this was clearly part of The Canon and therefore immune from falling out of print.
This is yet another re-read for me as it occured to me that what I’m thinking of doing with draft three of the novel might be too close to what Fowles did here. It isn’t, although it could have come close and the re-read helped me delimit what I was going to do with the writing to avoid that problem.
I also found myself rediscovering a wonderful quote from chapter thirteen that I re-published in the Scripps College Press book, Livre des Livres (my copy of the book has the letter from Fowles granting permission to use his work with some small emendations to make the text stand better on its own).
The authorial intervention in the narrative is something that I intend to do, but it will be with some narrative purpose of its own, although I’m not quite certain just what that purpose will be. And the mock-Victorian narrative style is not something that I intend to attempt at all.
Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust
[Finished 30 September 2007] I stopped in a used bookshop in Santa Monica recently and noticed that in the edition of Proust they had on the shelves, this volume was entitled Cities of the Plain, an interesting bowdlerization of the title. I didn’t open it up to see if the text itself was similarly butchered.
I still find Proust to be a bit of a slog, I think partly because of the long uninterrupted stretches of prose (it’s especially difficult with paragraphs that run for two or more pages). But at the same time, I seem to have developed some affinity for Proust’s prose style as I didn’t feel as at sea while reading this volume as I have previously, even with the years that have passed since I’ve read the preceding volume. Only three more to go to complete the set.
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
[Finished 30 September 2007] This is one of the most religious of Greene’s works (if I recall correctly, this was the book which prompted one reviewer to wonder if Greene’s next book would even be understandable to a layperson). Certainly, the experiences of reading it before I became Catholic and reading it again as a Catholic were quite different.
The descriptions of Scobie’s loss of faith--if that’s even the right word for it--were especially haunting as he found himself cut off from the experience of God’s presence in his life. This is certainly in Greene’s top tier of works.
The Third Man / The Fallen Idol by Graham Greene
[Finished 21 September 2007] A novella and short story which are bound primarily by being transformed into films by Carol Reed and the need to hit a minimum page count in a published book.
The Third Man represents a first pass at the story and we’re faced with a curious situation: Most of the films of Graham Greene novels I’ve seen are pale shadows of the printed word. In this case, however, the film is a looming presence over the book. It’s difficult to read the book without imagining Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton in the central roles.
For the Fallen Idol, on the other hand, I have only a vague recollection of the film from a cable showing in the late ‘80s, so I’m able to look at the story as story. There’s an interesting thematic concern happening in the story, one which appears elsewhere in Greene’s writing, about the corruption of the child, the impinging of adult concerns and desires into the terrain which belongs rightfully to the innocence of childhood. As a story which is written for the page and not the screen, it seems to work better as a work of literature, even with the rather conventional plot that Greene uses to explore his themes.
Best American Short Stories 2006 edited by Ann Patchett
[Finished 19 September 2007] I’ve long seen this on the shelves in book stores (but with different years), and now that I’m back writing, especially writing short fiction, I figured that it was a good idea to read some of these stories. The general emphasis, in this volume, at least, seems to be on language and mood over character and plot. The one story which I absolutely loved was “The Casual Car Pool” by Katherine Bell which is a masterpiece of third person omniscient story-telling. She makes it look so easy. Others I enjoyed were “A New Gravestone for an Old Grave” by David Bezmogis, “The Conductor” by Aleksander Hemon, “Tattooizm” by Kevin Moffett, “So Much for Artemis” by Patrick Ryan and “Awaiting Orders” by Tobias Wolff. I did my best to avoid the usual writer’s reaction of “my stuff is so much better than this crap but keeps getting form rejections what’s wrong with the world,” although there were times it felt difficult. The Ann Beattie story largely confirmed what I had suspected before, that I’m not cool enough for McSweeney’s. I do want to read more of these volumes, as well as get the O’Henry Prize stories as well, so expect to see the new volumes on these pages when they appear and perhaps some working backwards through older volumes when I can turn them up.
The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene
[Finished 7 September 2007] Coming back to this book again, with the benefit of knowing the story, allows me to focus a bit more closely on Greene’s use of language and character. Wow. This is more than just an “entertainment” as Greene labels it. It explores the themes of sin and redemption that permeate Greene’s work in ways that sometimes seem at odds with the story being told, but ultimately, works well. This isn’t the best of Greene’s early works, but it’s an enjoyable read nonetheless.
Final Conclave by Malachi Martin
[Finished 3 September 2007] The problem with so much Pope Fiction is that there’s an overwhelming tendency to make the novel into a manifesto. This book is probably the most overwhelming example of this. The first 100+ pages of the book are Martin’s version of the history of the papacy of Paul VI (or as he, idiosyncratically writes, Paul 6). Then we get to the drawn out politicking of the selection of a successor.
There is little doubt throughout the book of where Martin’s sympathies lie although he decides to focus his attention on the actions of the liberal faction and leaves his proxies in the conclave as enigmatic sphinxes. He lays out a stark choice: Either return to a traditionalist church with liturgy in Latin or we’ll all be godless commies!
Being able to look back at the outcome of the geopolitics of the 70s with the advantage of 30 years of intervening history, Martin’s concern that Russia would come to dominate western Europe comes across as laughable.
As a piece of literature, the book is little better. The opening section has all the voice of an AP newswire, and through the use of an omniscient third person present-tense narrator, he manages to keep a journalistic tone throughout which only serves to make the book a dull slog, hardly worth the effort of opening, let alone reading.
Selected Poems by T. S. Eliot
[Finished 3 September 2007] Courtesy of Mr Caravello, my high school English teacher, I have the opening lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” permanently tattooed in my cerebral cortex. Curiously, throughout the entire coursework of a B.A. in English, I never revisited Eliot again.
I picked up this volume a decade and a half ago at Midnight Special Books, back when they were (a) still in existence and (2) on the Third Street Promenade (along with half a dozen other bookstores, none of which was Borders or Barnes and Noble). I only now got a chance to sit down with it and I continue to be in awe at Eliot’s abilities to make music from language. He makes it look easy, but from my own occasional efforts at poetry, I know that it’s far from easy to write a poem a fraction as good as what Eliot wrote.
At a younger age, it’s unlikely I would have fully appreciated the poems here, with the references to a mourning of lost youth and the religiosity which shows a man drawn towards Catholicism, but too timid to come any closer than high church Anglicanism. I may have to go ahead and spring for the complete poems.
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
[Finished 24 August 2007] Who’d’a thunk it? A Joseph Conrad novel which is not entirely in quotation marks.
Reading this, I can see that Conrad is somewhat less skilled at writing from an omniscient viewpoint and there are some scenes in particular which end up coming across rather poorly as he tries to tell us everything that we think that we should know, but the build up to the climax is quite gripping and it makes for an engaging read.
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
[Finished 24 August 2007] Like many (most?) people coming to this story in the twenty-first century, my primary previous exposure comes from Walt Disney. Or more specifically, the Mr Toad’s Wild Ride attraction in Fantasyland (best ride in the whole damn park). So I have to say that when I got to that part of the story, I was somewhat shocked to discover that Grahame disposed of the whole affair with a scene break. Mr Toad drives off and the next we see him, he is on trial.
The story, for the most part, focuses on the character of Mole, who, one spring day decides to explore the world outside of his hole. We’re introduced to his friends Ratty, Toad, Otter and Badger, as well as an odd world in which anthropomorphic animals somehow coexist with humans, as well as sit down to an occasional plate of meat (I can picture that scene leading a young reader into vegetarianism as they begin assembling the consequences of such a scenario). In all it is a fun and gentle story which deserves a more prominent place in the canon than it currently occupies.
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
[Finished 21 August 2007] This is, I think, Graham Greene’s best-known work, and one which I’ve only read once before. Coming back to it again, and reading it close on the heels of The Lawless Roads, I can see the influence of Greene’s journey on his writing, but even more so, I see the clear influence of Greene’s consciousness of his position in the world as a Catholic. The theology of The Power and the Glory is more fully-formed than that of Brighton Rock and Greene’s attention has turned, at least briefly, from a focus on sin to a focus on grace, albeit grace as seen through the veil of sin. It is a perspective that Greene would never really regain until Monsignor Quixote, I think.
The Complete Fables by Aesop
[Finished 16 August 2007] We all think that we know Aesop’s fables, but the reality is a bit different. Reading this translation by Robert Temple really forces the reader to re-evaluate everything that they think they know. Yes, the boy who cried wolf and the fox and the grapes are there, but the “morals” which are likely later additions are set off and italicized to emphasize this. Throw in the lack of bowdlerization and the fact that many of the fables were meant more as jokes than moral lessons becomes considerably clearer.
The notes scattered through the collection vary from pedestrian and useful, to more interesting than the text which they accompany. Some notes seem to exist primarily to show off Temple’s broad knowledge, although one simultaneously demonstrates his lack of interest in religious topics when he points out that a fable occurs in the Bible, but then makes a point of his choice to not consult the Septuagint text to see whether a particular Greek word is used in that telling.
Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait edited by Henry Anatole Grunwald
[Finished 15 August 2007] A fascinating collection of essays by authors including John Updike and Joan Didion (when she was less well-known than Arthur Mizener, Alfred Kazin, Granville Hicks and Maxwell Geismar).
The essays were written in late fifties and early sixties, most between the publication in book form of Franny and Zooey and “Seymour/Raise High the Roof Beam”. It was somewhat interesting to note an account at one point of a Harry Potter-esque frenzy around the release of Franny and Zooey. And yet half a century later, no one remembers the frenzy (the book, on the other hand, is still very much with us). As the second book of criticism that I’ve read in recent months, I continue to be surprised at my receptivity to reading criticism. Again, it may be a quality issue. It was especially interesting to think about what the critics were saying about Holden Caulfield (and Huck Finn) in the context of what I need to do in writing my own novel. I somewhat wish I’d gotten around to this collection earlier in my reading.
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
[Finished 14 August 2007] I had a bit of Conrad burn-out after being assigned Heart of Darkness in three consecutive classes across my high school and college career. I returned to The Secret Agent later in College and developed an appreciation for Conrad, but coming to this work, I found myself just drowning in his narrative, not particularly grabbed by story or language. Except the key part of the story in which Jim abandons the ship. I suspect the failing is my own, but this was just not a work to hold my affections.
Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway
[Finished 7 August 2007] I’ve always tended to shy away from Hemingway: The macho reputation was something rather off-putting to me. Then some years ago, I decided to read a collection of his short stories (not this one) and found, to my surprise, that I did enjoy them. And the linguistic detail in For Whom the Bell Tolls still impresses me ten years after I read it.
But then coming to this collection, I find myself face to face with all that I feared I wouldn’t like about Hemingway and discovering that my fears were, indeed, justified. I just had no interest in most of the stories of this book. They were well-written enough, I just wasn’t grabbed like the other Hemingway I’d read.
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
[Finished 5 August 2007] This is one of those books which I’ve known of for most of my life, and yet never read. Would I really want to read a book about a dog? Probably not, but it’s on the Observer list, so here I am.
The book takes us from Buck’s theft from his home in California to his life as a sled dog in the northern wilderness and eventually his taking a place as the lead of a wolf pack. I found the book to be rather slight and unimpressive. I suppose that’s a large part of why I never read it earlier in life.
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
[Finished 3 August 2007] An interesting view into a past time in India’s history. The state of racial relations between the English and the Indians at the time that this novel was set, in many ways, seems completely incomprehensible to me. And at the same time, it’s not too far from the racial relations that I grew up with in suburban Chicago in the ‘70s.
The story is skillfully drawn, although at times I lost track of some of the characters, perhaps as a consequence of reading the first half of the book on a weekend trip full of sleep deprivation. The delay of the major crisis of the book until nearly the halfway point makes for some slow pacing early on, but the second part moves at a pace more amenable to contemporary sensibilities.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowlings
[Finished 30 July 2007] I made a point on the evening of the release of Harry Potter to head over to the local Border’s. Not to buy a copy, but to see the excitement, celebration and chaos of it all. I’m pretty sure that there will never be this kind of excitement about a book again in my lifetime (although I would be more than happy to be proven wrong).
It’s also been interesting to note how common sightings of the book have been in the days since (I think there was at least one copy per row on the two flights I took the weekend before finishing the book).
But enough about the cultural phenomenon, what about the book itself?
Well, there were portions that just dragged. The action of the book doesn’t really start until nearly halfway through the book. That could have been safely condensed to half its length (although that would have denied Rowlings yet another Guiness Book of World Records entry). There was also her too-common tendency to introduce some previously unheard of aspect of the wizarding world to meet the needs of the plot. And with only two exceptions, most of the deaths came and went with too little notice for them to have any real emotional impact.
But at the same time, there was some wonderful writing here. The pensieve was used to decent effect to convey some additional back story and the scene before Harry’s face-off with Voldemort was perhaps the best bit of emotional writing that she has done in the whole series.
In all the Harry Potter series has been frequently flawed, and Rowlings has perhaps been somewhat hurt by getting such success at an early stage in her career, but she is still an excellent writer. I have little doubt that these will be books that are still read in decades to come.
Oyster by John Biguenet
[Finished 29 July 2007] I first discovered John Biguenet on the pages of Granta. I was sufficiently impressed by that first story, that I’ve kept my eyes open for his other work and have since read his collection of short stories and now this, his first novel.
I had some trepidation about starting this novel. It was the religious themes in Biguenet’s writing that first attracted me. Would a historical novel about New Orleans oystermen interest me much?
It turns out, yes, it would.
Biguenet manages to come up with a compelling narrative, although at times it does feel as if he’s stretching a bit to fill in his minimum page count. In all, though, it was the kind of read which was difficult to put down. I’ll have to remember to send him an e-mail to see what’s been published since The Torturer’s Apprentice.
The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene
[Finished 28 July 2007] As I continue on my re-reading of Graham Greene’s work, this is the first book besides the two withdrawn novels which appears to be no longer in print. I’d always assumed that Greene’s books would remain in print forever, so it was a bit of a shock digging through Amazon and not finding an in-print edition of this book. Sic transit gloria mundi, it appears. I suppose it was a good thing that I obsessively collected his work when I did.
The story is a bit thin, and as I recall, was written under the influence of Benzedrine and Joseph Conrad to fulfill a bit of financial need while Greene was also writing The Lawless Roads and preparing to begin The Power and the Glory. This stretching thin is apparent in the work. It’s an atypical bit of output, and falls short of greatness (although it isn’t difficult to imagine some small changes in the story making it a much more powerful work). I suppose there’s a reason why this particular work fell out of print.
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
[Finished 27 July 2007] A delightful satire of the insecurities of academic life. Even with the decades of change which have elapsed since this was written, the behaviors and insecurities of those in higher education remain highly recognizable. Amis succeeded here in accomplishing one of those rather difficult tasks: Writing a book very much of its time while still keeping it timeless.
Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins
[Finished 25 July 2007] I picked this up some time ago and only know have gotten around to reading it. I have to admit that I found Hopkins’ style to be a bit quaint for my tastes. There were a few nice images or turns of phrase, but for the most part I found Hopkins’ style to be affected and archaic. I remember a then-girlfriend seeing the book on my shelf some years ago and thinking that it would be good reading. Turns out she was wrong.
The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
[Finished 22 July 2007] The edition of this book that I read was labelled an illustrated children’s classic, which was an interesting take since the book was a bit of a challenging read for me, if only because of the large amount of unfamiliar naval vocabulary (among other things, I learned the phrase “coign of vantage” which my dictionary informs me I should have noticed while reading Macbeth).
The story was a bit convoluted and the inclusion of numerous maps throughout helped make some sense of the geography of the story.
The sands of the title refers to the sandbanks off the Frisian coast of Germany and Holland and the story is about how two British amateur spies managed to discover a German plot for using these sands as a launching point for a potential invasion of England via shallow-draft boats. Even from the vantage point of a century later, the story managed to effectively convey its time and place quite well to the reader.
Diary of a Nobody by George Grossmith with illustrations by Wheedon Grossmith
[Finished 21 July 2007] A charming bit of suburban satirical fiction. The illustrations do add quite a bit to the book, including page count, which the book is a bit shy of (it only runs a bit over 100 pages).
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome
[Finished 16 July 2007] My top 100 list claimed that this is one of the funniest books in the English language. I’d say that Wodehouse consistently outperforms Jerome on that front. But there are some delightfully funny parts of the book, even if the humor has been dulled by a century of exposure.
I also realized while checking this book off from my list that my list isn’t in order of excellence, but is chronological, which is why Philip Roth is so low on the list.
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
[Finished 15 July 2007] As I continue with my project of re-reading Graham Greene’s works, I come to my favorite of Greene’s novels, Brighton Rock. There is so much to learn from Greene’s pacing, plotting and characterization. At the same time as I read this, I’m realizing that this is not a novel which could be written today, at least not as a non-historical piece of fiction: The sense that Catholics once had, as a people set apart, is long gone. Perhaps this is why Greene, later in life, only addressed Catholic issues in Catholic countries.
A Series of Unfortunate Events 7: The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket
[Finished 13 July 2007] In preparation for the upcoming release of Harry Potter 7, I figured it was best to finish off the current Lemony Snicket book I’ve been reading in snatches at the bookstore. That I did this on Friday the thirteenth is merely a serendipitous coincidence.
The plot here remains suitably outlandish, and is, for the most part rather forgettable. I found it most interesting in what it sets up for book 8 in the series. We’ve had a bit more of an intrusion of Snicket into the plot, along with some surprising development of one of the Baudelaire children, but other then what resembles a bit more than usual of a cliffhanger ending, this one seems more like filler than anything else.
Deception by Philip Roth
[Finished 12 July 2007] This book was suggested when I was looking for books which told a story through dialogue. I was looking for more of a framing device, but in this instance I found something quite different. Roth tells his story through conversations stripped of context, even dialogue tags. It’s as much an experimental work as Begley’s Shipwreck, but in this case, I think that the experiment is more successful.
Both works treat much the same subject matter: Middle-aged lust and infidelity, writing, language. But I find that Roth is by far the more skilled writer (or at least the one whose writing fits in well with my tastes in reading). And Roth’s final chapters, rather than providing a comfortable conclusion to the story which wraps up everything in a relatively predictable fashion as did Begley’s tale, instead provides an internal justification for the format of the story, which Begley never managed to do. I didn’t love this book as much as American Pastoral, but it has confirmed me as a Philip Roth fan. He is not a writer to be checked out of the library, but one to be purchased from the bookstore, at full price, with money obtained by selling plasma to the university medical center.
Shipwreck by Louis Begley
[Finished 10 July 2007] I came across this title as a result of a request for contemporary stories told through dialogue and I had no ideas what the story might hold as I began reading it.
Begley makes an interesting choice in omitting quotation marks in the framing narrative, which forces the reader to slow down since we have a first person narrative inside a first person narrative, but in the end it seems more stylistic choice for the sake of style.
The bulk of the narrative ends up being a rather tedious account of middle-aged lust, leavened occasionally with some thoughts on self-doubt which mysteriously disappear as the novel progresses. The denouement of the novel, likewise ends up feeling cheap and not particularly satisfying. It seems as if Begley had a short story, perhaps a novella here, and did what he could to pad it out to 77,000 words.
Two Stories of Prague by Rainer Maria Rilke
[Finished 2 July 2007] This book is almost as much Angela Esterhammer’s as it is Rilke’s. Esterhammer serves as more than just a translator, but also as a bit of a tour guide, providing some insight into the various places throughout Prague which are so central to Rilke’s narratives. For my research purposes, this is an outstanding book, providing me with a great deal of the raw material I’ve been seeking to write my story of turn-of-the-century Prague.
As for the narratives, I was more than a little distracted by my research reading, so I can’t say too much about them. Rilke’s prose styling seems rather modern, especially compared to Jan Neruda’s stories from just a decade earlier. This is clearly something that I want to return to.
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
[Finished 26 June 2007] When I started this novel, I was overwhelmed with the sheer vitality of Alex’s narration. The language with its frequent malapropisms was the sort of thing that I wouldn’t even attempt to do in my own writing.
But reading on, I found that while this was a brilliant and promising novel (wow, what kind of first novel author gets blurbed by Joyce Carol Oates?), there were flaws that ultimately left me feeling unsatisfied. The novel is essentially three narrative streams. Alex’s account of the journey to the Ukraine by the hero (named, intriguingly enough, Jonathan Safran Foer), letters from Alex to Jonathan which are commentary on the novel and a magical realist take on Jonathan’s family history from the 18th century to World War II.
The magical realist thread, left me the most unsatisfied of the three. Foer has clearly been reading García Márquez, Fuentes, and Borges. And while he’s learned a lot from them, the style doesn’t fit him, sort of like a teenager wearing his dad’s sport coat (to borrow a simile from Jonathan Gold). There are some beautiful images there, and as he develops as a writer, he will doubtless grow into his ambitions unless success stunts his growth (as has been the case with J.K. Rowlings).
The letters from Alex to Jonathan are sparse and are an interesting conceit, commenting on the novel as it unfolds. Again, Foer’s reach exceeds his grasp here, and the letters fail as much as they succeed, although the successes are of exquisite beauty.
Alex’s narrative is, I think, where Foer is at his strongest but again, he manages to hit a fatal flaw, this time with the problem of telling a story which is clichéd and predictable in the end.
As a craftsman of language, Foer is in the top tier easily. In another age, he would be a poet rather than a novelist (in fact, while looking up his bio, curious as to whether he was a product of an MFA program--he’s not--I discovered that, based on his endeavors, he’s been exploring artistic endeavors beyond the novel). As a crafter of plot, however, he has some distance to go (which is why I was curious about whether he had done the MFA).
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
[Finished 26 June 2007] This is one of those stories which has lost its impact through its familiarity. Unlike, say, Frankenstein where the core of the novel is missed somewhat in the Universal monster movie version, there isn’t the same sort of depth to this story. It’s more the novelty of the story which makes the novel noteworthy. In fact, the structure of the story is such that most of the story consists of prologue, setting up a mystery about Jekyll and Hyde that perhaps would have been more compelling if a century or so of popular culture hadn’t spoiled the great twist that made the final two chapters so compelling to the novel’s original readers.
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
[Finished 20 June 2007] Let me begin by complaining about the Barnes and Noble edition of this book which I checked out of the library. The book is a perpetrator of “insult-your-intelligence footnotes.” Do we really need a footnote telling us that a row is a disruptive argument? Worse still are the missing-the-point footnotes. If someone doesn’t know what it means to be between Scylla and Charybdis, will telling them about Scylla and Charybdis without explaining the metaphor really help them? I’m sorry, but readers should be encouraged to pick up a dictionary from time to time. Lord help us if B&N ever decides to put out an edition of anything by Anthony Burgess.
This is a surprisingly political work for Trollope. Perhaps my view of Trollope is excessively colored by my reading of the Barsetshire Chronicles, but I found this to be something almost more like what I’d expect from Dickens than from Trollope. And while it’s a surprising choice to represent Trollope for the Guardian’s top 100 (it’s number 26), I’m glad for the unorthodox choice as I might not have read this book otherwise.
A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene
[Finished 16 June 2007] As part of my re-reading of Greene, there’s always the moments of re-evaluation. When I had first read A Gun for Sale I was happy to put it aside as a minor and forgettable work. Coming back to it again almost twenty years later, it’s remarkable how gripping the narrative is. Greene’s ability to conjure the paranoia of Raven’s world as the police close in on him while he closes in on Cholmondely/Davis makes the book compelling. There are still some parts of the narrative which don’t quite work for me, including the entirety of the last chapter which seems to be a fair amount of anti-climax, but I had previously marked the beginning of the mature Greene with Brighton Rock, but I think that I would move that up and claim that this was the first of Greene’s mature work.
Graham Greene: The Novelist by J. P. Kulshrestha
[Finished 30 May 2007] As an undergraduate, I had a major crisis of faith about what I was doing as an English major. It made sense to write literature. It made sense to do critical theory. But to do actual criticism seemed to me an empty and pointless act.
This is probably the most significant reason why I didn’t get a PhD in English.
Maybe it’s a consequence of a rejuvenation of my writing life over the last year, but I’m finding myself re-examining my English major years and thinking about them as something more than providing some solidarity with Garrison Keillor’s occasional jokes about being an English major.
Reading this book by Kulshrestha has actually made me come to appreciate the value of criticism. A big part of it, no doubt, is the clearly written text. As an Indian academic, he apparently feels no compunction to wrap his prose in a thick gauze of jargon. Or perhaps it’s a consequence of the clear writing style of his subject, but for the first time, I found myself really enjoying a work of criticism. And seeing how Kushrestha reads Greene, I felt more inspired in approaching my own writing. I suppose it would be possible to think of it derisively as “writing for critics,” but it’s really a case of writing for discerning readers. A good work of criticism, I think, is precisely that: A discerning act of reading set down on paper. It almost makes me want to teach a freshman rhetoric class.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
[Finished 27 May 2007] Interesting: While pulling up the ISBN for this book from Amazon, I discovered that this was an Oprah’s book club pick.
I haven’t read any other Tolstoy before I started this book, so I don’t have much point of comparison, but this translation (by Pevear and Volokhonsky) seems to have managed to convey the sheer poetry of Tolstoy’s writing (or is it that they’ve added it where it hadn’t previously been?).
There were some stretches of the book where I was a bit lost in the minutiae of nineteenth century Russian society and the footnotes provided didn’t always provide the kind of background that I wanted to have, but in all it was a wonderful read.
And as an added bonus, the book features one of the rare literary uses of my favorite word, “wertherian.”
England Made Me by Graham Greene
[Finished 23 May 2007] This is, to me, the first book in which we get a look at “Greeneland,” that seedy perspective on the world which is, to some readers, the distinctive mark of Greene’s writing.
The interplay between our central characters here is the essential aspect of the story made by Anthony Farrant with his habitual lies and string of casual failures in his past, none of which he attributes to his own shortcomings and his interactions with Minty, the shabby journalist living primarily on his remittances from home with dark secrets of his own in his past and a spider captured under his toothglass (that spider is perhaps one of the greatest images in the early Greene).
The characters of Kate and Krogh are less clearly drawn and some experiments in stream-of-consciousness in the early chapters show a novelist still feeling his way to his voice, but this is very much the beginning of the mature Greene.
How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights by Ariel Gore
[Finished 18 May 2007] OK, here’s an example of why a good title makes a difference. I wouldn’t have picked up this book if it weren’t for the title.
The actual advice is largely pedestrian and some of the interviews seem more like padding than anything else. What I was most interested in was seeing what she had to say about career-building moves and guerilla marketing tactics. Some of her advice sounds good (like her emphasis on doing things like readings to get your name out there), but I’m not really buying her enthusiasm for self-publishing. The analogy to indie music is made more than once, but it’s worth noting that even those major label artists who have made some moves back into the independent world (I’m thinking of Robert Fripp in particular) tend to still release their “big” stuff on the major labels.
The anthology whore advice, on the other hand, is something that I’d not heard previously and is by far the most striking single item that I hadn’t previously considered.
It's a Battlefield by Graham Greene
[Finished 2 May 2007] There’s a long period of mostly forgotten novels in Graham Greene’s output during the thirties. I’ve read all of these once back when I was in college and not returned to them at all since.
The opening chapter of this book, It’s a Battlefield, is awfully slow and poorly drawn, but as the book develops, we begin to see some signs of the mature Greene, with a few beautifully-drawn interior monologues in the middle of the book. In all, it’s a weak book, but it shows the promise of what’s to come.
Will Warburton by George Gissing
[Finished 28 April 2007] Gissing is one of those pleasures that seem to be unknown to all but a select few, like Argentine films or the taco truck at Olympic and La Brea.
It’s been a while since I read Gissing, and I found myself pleasantly surprised when I picked up this book. The energy in the opening page sucked me in to the book, until I had finished it a couple days later. It’s not the best of the Gissing that I’ve read, with the plot unfolding almost as predictably as a Trollope novel, with the twist that Gissing’s version of a happy ending is a far cry from what was typical for a Victorian writer.
Stamboul Train by Graham Greene
[Finished 26 April 2007] This book marks the beginning of Greene’s mature period. At this point, Greene has abandoned historical fiction for something set contemporaneously. There are still some signs of his early idiosyncrisies in the writing and we’re still a few novels away from Greene as he would later become familiar (his trip to Mexico raised the importance of Catholicism in his writing).
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
[Finished 23 April 2007] This is, by far, one of the girliest books that I’ve ever read, and I have to admit that if it weren’t in my list of the top 100 novels of all time, I would never have picked it up.
The girliness of the book declines a bit from the opening chapter, but it pervades it still. Clearly, when Alcott set out to write a book for girls, she succeeded. In all, the book is well-written, if a bit sentimental for my tastes.
Rumour at Nightfall by Graham Greene
[Finished 23 February 2007] This is Greene’s third novel, withdrawn after the first edition went out of print. I stumbled across a copy in a bookshop in Victoria, British Columbia at a ridiculously low price (I suspect the bookseller had no idea what he had).
The novel is set in Spain in the ending days of the Carlist uprising and represents Greene’s last foray into historical fiction. Familiar themes of religion and betrayal are present here, but Greene’s sense of Catholicism is still somewhat immature, especially compared to later works, and he still writes of Catholicism from the perspective of an outsider. An interesting read for the sake of seeing the origins of Greene’s work, but not worth the price that copies generally sell for in the used market these days.
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
[Finished 16 February 2007] Another book in my project to read the top 100 novels of all time. It’s an interesting experiment in shifting narrators, although not as adventurous as that might seem at first glance (the shifts in narration are made too much a concern of the narration, I think). The story drags in places and certainly represents a Victorian sensibility which appealed to me much more when I was younger than it does now.
I have to admit some disappointment in the central mystery of the story. It ended up being somewhat inconsequential and was resolved in a completely unsatisfactory manner, with the narrative continuing on in a way that would seem unnecessary in modern fiction. All told, an interesting work, but one whose interest is as much for its position in literary history as for any intrinsic merits.
Time and Again by Jack Finney
[Finished 4 February 2007] During an interview with Audrey Niffenegger, she mentioned this book as one of her favorite time travel novels, so I decided to give it a read. I have to say that I’m not that impressed. The illustrated novel part of things is almost nice, but it seems that the use of found artwork is rather grating pretty quickly. The frequent insistence that the narrator was drawing things in the style of the time seemed more crutch than a benefit: Why not re-draw the illustrations for the book? It would make for a huge improvement over what’s there.
The writing itself was also a bit disappointing. There were some rather transparent devices in the writing (it’s not the author being melodramatic, it’s the characters, cause that’s the way people talked back then), and the pacing was a bit off, and the differences in social mores between the 1970s and the 1880s was poorly handled. There was also a strong sense of, “I did all this research for my novel and damnit, I’m going to put it all into the book.”
But there were some nice parts too: The means by which time travel was effected, for example, was brilliantly conceived: A bit of setting up props combined with self-hypnosis and boom, you’ve walked outside into the wrong year, and the ending was a nice one (although the ambiguity was spoiled by the postscript on the sources for illustrations).
Looking at the Amazon reviews, his sequel seems to emphasize all the things that I disliked about this book with little of what I liked.
A Series of Unfortunate Events 6: The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket
[Finished 1 February 2007] We’re starting to see a lot more continuity here in the books, we’ve moved from episodes to a story arc. A few more hints about Lemony Snicket and Beatrice are in the narrative, and our narrator becomes more of a character. It’s a difficult feat to pull off, but one that works well here. Count Olaf’s plot is a bit more finely drawn as well, leaving me the sense that there’s much less a sense of “it’s just a children’s book” in planning out the story. The connections that are drawn are also a bit more involved, leaving me to eagerly await my start on the next book in the series.
The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile by Noah Lukeman
[Finished 27 January 2007] This is another one of the blog-recommended writing books that I picked up at the library. The tone and style is very different from the first. Instead of writing in short bites (each “reason” in the Walsh book was 1-3 pages, here we’re treated to 19 in-depth chapters), and the perspective is much more geared towards what’s wrong with the stuff in the slush pile. What I read here fell a lot less into the “gee, I already knew that” category, and a lot more into “this is something that I think I’m good about, but I should look for it when I’m revising my work.”
Another nice feature is the inclusion of exercises at the end of each chapter, things to look at in your manuscript and find ways to improve the text.
Less useful, for me at least, are some of his examples of the faults at work. They felt far too contrived and it would have been nice to see actual slushpile examples rather than the obviously fake (and, I would hope, extreme) cases that show up in the book.
But all told, this is an excellent book. I read both writing books in library copies, but this one, I think I’m going to buy.
The Man Within by Graham Greene
[Finished 24 January 2007] After finishing the last volume of Norman Sherry’s bio of Graham Greene, I decided that it was time to go back and re-read all of Greene’s work (or in the case of the essays, read it for the first time). When the first volume of the Sherry biography came out, I started driving to every book store in Chicago until I had nearly all of Greene’s novels, and I read (or re-read) nearly everything Greene had written during the summer of 1989. Much of this, I haven’t looked at since.
So starting at the beginning, I’m faced with Greene’s first published novel (two earlier attempts were never published). I remember finding the work a bit opaque when I first read it, and coming back to it, I think some of that is due to the lack of any context of when the story is set. I know enough now to place it in the 19th century, marking it as historical fiction, a genre which Greene avoided in his later writing. In the preface to the Penguin edition which I read, Greene criticizes the book for its romanticism, and this is certainly a problem with the book. Re-reading it with a critical eye, I’m struck by the many failures of description which occur throughout the book, either with scenes being over-written, or Greene failing to give the reader a sense of place.
The characters of the protagonist Andrews and the father figure, Carlyon, who he portrays are well-drawn, although the relationship between Andrews and his father almost feels clichéd, and Elizabeth is little more than a cardboard cut-out of a character for Greene to hang plot points upon. Even the prostitute in Lewes is better-drawn than her.
In all, the book is primarily of historical interest in seeing the origins of one of the great writers of the twentieth century.
78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published & 14 Reasons Why It Might by Pat Walsh
[Finished 22 January 2007] On one of the literary agent blogs I’ve been reading, there was a list of recommended books on writing. Since I’ve never actually read a book on writing, not even what they passed out in junior high about grammar, I decided that maybe it’d be worth checking these out, since they did come with a personal recommendation.
This book is written by an editor at a small publisher, and covers a wide variety of sins committed by would-be authors. Only a small portion of these are about the writing itself, much of it being more a guide to etiquette and protocol in shopping one’s finished book around. I kind of feel proud of myself that there was little that I didn’t already know, courtesy of such luminaries as Miss Snark, and Jenny Rappaport, but the style is light and engaging and is a lot faster than reading agent blogs for a few months. It does encourage me to know that just by writing at a level of competence, I’m already in the 90th percentile of submissions (alas, it takes being in the 99th percentile of that group to actually get accepted).
The Algebraist by Iain Banks
[Finished 12 January 2007] I first spotted this book at Border’s in Santa Monica on one of the tables near the entrance. The title caught my attention since, at the time, I was an algebraist of sorts. Fast forward to the end of the year and I spotted the title in someone’s best of 2006 list, and I need to add something to an amazon order to get free shipping, but because I don’t know what might have been bought from my wishlist for Christmas, I can’t just pick something from there so I order this one.
The story starts out slow and a bit disjointed. While Banks does eventually tie everything together in the end, the first third of the book was still just not that gripping. The best parts, to me, were the descriptions of Dweller society, and I found myself wishing for 300 pages of that in preference to some of the other description which was presented. Add in a badly-written back cover blurb (which only really makes sense after you’ve read half the book) and it’s something that I might not have read otherwise. Banks does a good job of world-creating, but not so much a good job of storytelling. It’s not a bad book, but it wouldn’t make my best reads of 2006 list.
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
[Finished 31 December 2006] This is a classic case of changing tastes leading to a “great” work falling a bit flat. The intrusive narrator here is more annoying than entertaining, and the underlying social views (the headstrong Becky Sharp ends up being a mostly unsympathetic character while the docile Amelia Sedley is rewarded at the end). There are some great character creations, and I can see that Thackeray clearly influenced other authors (I can see elements of him in Trollope), but it hardly seems worth nearly 1000 pages of prose.
Tales of the Little Quarter by Jan Neruda
[Finished 30 December 2006] More research reading. The details of life in Prague, albeit a bit earlier than the period of which I’m writing about are invaluable, but the writing itself is wonderful as well. No wonder Pablo Neruda took his nom de plume from Jan. It’s a light touch, difficult to do well, but when it is done well, it is a beautiful thing. This is that style of writing, an intrusive narrator, done very well. Only a handful of the stories are a true first-person narrative, but “I” is present throughout.
The Life of Graham Greene, Volume III: 1955-1991 by Norman Sherry
[Finished 28 December 2006] At long last, I read the final volume of Norman Sherry’s biography of Graham Greene. I find myself a little disappointed to discover that it lacks the promised complete bibliography of Greene’s works (only the works actually mentioned in the book are included, and Sherry does not even mention two of Greene’s late novels, The Tenth Man and Doctor Fischer of Geneva.
After the depth of volume II, this volume seems a bit slight. Only the chapter on Greene’s religious beliefs near the end of his life seems to provide any insight. And even then, we’re given little insight into Greene’s opinion on the changes in the church after Vatican II (although there is some hint of his view in Monsignor Quixote. Otherwise, it seems that we are faced with an endless game of “on whom did Greene base this character?” as well as the intrusive presence of Sherry himself. My last complaint would be Sherry’s frequent abandonment of chronological narration throughout this volume. Some retrospective views are appropriate, but there are places where it appears that the pages of the manuscript had been shuffled and never returned to their original order before publication.
But reading this volume also leaves me eager to revisit Greene’s works, many of which I haven’t read since I was in college and reading the first volume of Sherry’s biography.
Cuentos de Eva Luna by Isabel Allende
[Finished 27 December 2006] Efforts to enhance my Spanish vocabulary. I still need a dictionary to get through any given story (and often any given page), but my ability to read Spanish, at least, is developing well. If only my ability to understand spoken Spanish were proceeding equally well.
Ask the Dust by John Fante
[Finished 21 December 2006] Palm tree. Palm tree. Palm tree. This is largely held up as the great Los Angeles novel. The plot, such as it is, is not especially good, and the characters of Arturo and Camilla are too annoying to hold much sympathy, but the writing--wow! There is a film of this book, but I have to wonder what the point is (I suppose I’ll find out when it pops up to the top of my netflix queue). This is a book in which the language of the narration is everything, and the characters and plot are more there to provide a raison d’etre for the writing. But even while the characters are not sympathetic, they manage to remain compelling. I still find myself thinking about Arturo telling Camilla to abandon her huaraches for proper shoes, then regretting his command after seeing her change for him.
A Series of Unfortunate Events 5: The Austere Academy by Lemony Snickett
[Finished 17 December 2006] The schtick which sustained the first four volumes of the Series of Unfortunate Events has largely run its course, so Snickett has been forced into changing the formula a bit here. Of course, the Baudelaires have learned, the adults are of no help in dealing with the dangers of Count Olaf, so they find themselves helped instead by a pair of triplets. Most of the other characters in the book continue to be two-dimensional, but some further insights into the narrator and his beloved Beatrice are hinted at, and the series begins to transition from loosely connected discrete tales to more of a genuine story arc.
Sybil, or The Two Nations by Benjamin Disraeli
[Finished 24 November 2006] This is a book which was on my to-read list since it was mentioned by one of my professors in college. I was expecting a typical victorian novel of manners, an accounting of life among the upper classes. So I wasn’t expecting the sudden appearance of working class Catholics in the narrative very close to the beginning of the story. The subtitle of the novel suddenly becomes much clearer. What particularly intrigued me after reading this was to look up Disraeli’s biography and find that he was a founding member of the Conservative party in England. Apparently “Conservative” had very different meanings then than it does now.
Czech and Slovak Short Stories edited by Jeanne Nemcova
[Finished 11 November 2006] Part of my research for my current novel, I continue to be frustrated at the difficulties in finding accounts of Prague life before World War I. Much of what I’d like to read has not been translated into English, so I read whatever I can find.
Perhaps it’s my goal-oriented reading, but I found the older stories in this collection to be the most satisfying. The only one of the post WWII stories that I loved was Josef Nesvadba’s “Mordair,” a wonderfully dark and surreal tale. On the other hand, I simply adored most of the early stories, whether it was Neruda, Herrmann, Rais, Hasek, Capek or any of countless others. I do think that I will definitely pick up some of the other Capek stuff which has been translated into English.
The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy
[Finished 5 November 2006] One of Thomas Hardy’s lesser works, but still a fun read. I continue to marvel at how long a shaadow Napoleon cast over nineteenth century literature (in fact, it seems that nearly every nineteenth century novel that I’ve read recently has made reference to Napoleon.
The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Svejk, Book One by Jaroslav Hasek
[Finished 30 October 2006] I first heard of this book (and this translation) from an article in the Chicago Reader. Shortly afterwards I bought it from amazon, but it took a few years (and the writing of a novel set in Prague a couple decades earlier) for me to actually read it. I can’t compare it to the earlier translations of Hasek’s work, but it is a fun read and the humor comes across quite well. I eagerly await the publication of the three remaining volumes. The translation of book two is apparently complete and books three and four are near completion so we may see them soon.
English Literature in the 16th Century by C. S. Lewis
[Finished 21 October 2006] The fact that this book is out of print and likely only available in libraries or select private collections (like mine) is, I think, connected to my flame out as an English major as an undergrad. This book represents the kind of comprehensive look at literature that was pushed out of fashion by the various post-modernist movements in critical thinking. Lewis is able to give us a serious critique of 16th century poetry and prose (drama was covered in a different volume in the series) because he is familiar not just with the texts which he treats, but the historical, philosophical and religious contexts. The result is a remarkably erudite look at the literature of the time, informing the reader of contemporary perspectives on magic, religion and the role of literature itself. I bought this book as part of my undergrad thesis research, but didn’t read it at the time. I wish I had because it would have given me precisely the focus that I struggled with in my own critical writing, in particular Lewis’ division (not always neatly) of the writing of the period into “drab” and “golden” stylings with occasional glimpses into the beginnings of metaphysical and augustan styles and the occasional authors who were very much sui generis.
The Black Sheep by Honore de Balzac
[Finished 18 October 2006] I first heard of Balzac when reading some advice for would-be novelists in Writers’ Marketplace while I was in college. It was something along the lines of don’t try to be like Dickens or Balzac. Dickens I knew, but Balzac was unknown to me, so I went to the bookstore, bought a second-hand Penguin paperback of The Black Sheep and put it on my bookcase where it remained for the next 17 years.
And now it comes back as number 12 on the list of the top 100 novels of all time.
The beginning of the novel is slow in the way that nineteenth century novels had the luxury of opening, but as it progresses, it becomes a fascinating story of Napoleon-haunted France at the beginning of the 19th century. I can clearly see how Balzac was held up as a model for writers alongside Dickens after reading this.
Vicar of Christ by Walter F. Murphy
[Finished 6 October 2006] Reading this book in “writer” mode, one of my first thoughts was that this was a novel written by someone who’s more an enthusiast than a writer. At over 600 pages, for one thing, the book is just too long and could have done with some serious pruning. And the narrative conceit, that each section of the book tells a non-overlapping part of the life of Declan Walsh, soldier-turned-chief-justice-turned-Pope, is more a distraction than a benefit to the narrative.
But as a page-turner, it does its job reasonably well, telling, as is typical with novels of fictional popes, a story more about the author than the papacy. I didn’t really need to look at the short bio on the back flap to see that Murphy was a soldier in Korea or a professor of constitutional law. And the novel tells me a lot more of Murphy’s tastes in women and politics than does the bio. There are some unique touches here, like a hint that Declan Walsh’s changes to the church meet with the approval of God, if not of the CIA or the curia, but also the usual cowardice in the conclusion (since this book, like all others of its genre, concludes with the untimely death of its pope) with its hints that, despite the promise that the gates of hell will not prevail, the gates of hell do indeed prevail in the end.
The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal
[Finished 29 September 2006] As I work through the top 100 novels (this is number thirteen), I sometimes find some that I don’t really relate to. This is probably the least exciting of the lot. Part of it is doubtless that this book is strongly in violation of one of the prime rules of contemporary fiction: “Show, don’t tell.” Much of the book is long sequences of just that. I am happy to have reached the end of the book.
The BFG by Roald Dahl
[Finished 27 August 2006] This is number 88 on the top 100 novels of all time. While I still would pick Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or James and the Giant Peach to represent Roald Dahl’s output, this gave me an opportunity to dig a bit deeper into Dahl’s writing. Since it’s been many many years since I’ve read any other of his children’s novels (I did read a collection of the “adult” short stories when I was a college student), I can’t really make a direct comparison, but it was a fun light read. The playfulness of language is especially beautiful and the playful tone doesn’t keep Dahl from the dark aspects of his story (viz, people are eaten).
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
[Finished 16 August 2006] My first exposure to The Count of Monte Cristo was through the passages in Huck Finn where Tom Sawyer refers to the book. Having read it, I can see how it could capture Tom’s imagination. This is a fun adventure story. There’s not a whole lot of depth to the story. For the most part, the bad guys are bad, the good guys are good and there is little shading in between, but the plot moves along in such a compelling way. This is the nineteenth century version of a great popcorn movie.
Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock
[Finished 26 July 2006] This has been one of the harder books to find in my project to read the top 100 books of all time: While the L.A. Public Library has several copies of the book, most are non-circulating, and the two circulating copies are not in the main stacks. I had to have a librarian fetch the book from the closed stacks.
And what did I get for the effort? A short, somewhat comic novella which seemed far from top 100 material to me.
The Trial by Franz Kafka
[Finished 21 July 2006] Kafka is one of those authors who suffers from being over-assigned by high school English teachers (although I managed to avoid having Kafka assigned to me for any class: The three Kafka novels I’ve read have been purely for my own enjoyment).
Unlike The Castle, The Trial manages to avoid easy allegorization. Instead it manages to be a fascinating story of disorientation and paranoia. The unfinished nature of the book, with a large appendix of deleted passages is a bit frustrating in that it forces the reader into being a bit of a textual critic on top of being a literary critic. My choice was to ignore the whole appendix as best as possible (the typographic indications of a deleted passage in the text, however, were a bit obtrusive).
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
[Finished 12 July 2006] A dangerous subject for a novel, and reading Nabokov’s afterword, it did have an impact on his attempts to find a publisher. But an incredible tour de force of novel-writing, at times reaching levels which can best be described as poetry, most notably the early description of nymphettes and later, the accounts of motels. The climax of the novel itself was somewhat less satisfying, but the whole was a masterpiece of prose.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
[Finished 7 July 2006] When Spark died earlier this year and I heard her obituary on NPR, I thought that she might be an author who would appeal greatly to me. After all, my favorite authors have been English Catholic writers (including Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh who apparently both mentored Spark). But I was left feeling a bit unsatisfied by this book: The narrative experiment is quite impressive, and, I think, successful, in creating a novel way to tell a story, but the story that she tells doesn’t seem that satisfying, nor are the characters ones that I felt much connection to. In the end, not a particularly satisfying read.
L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy
[Finished 30 June 2006] It’s not often that my reading material generates widespread commentary from strangers, but this book was one that did. Some of it was a consequence of the film that was made of the book, but Ellroy has a significant fan base in Los Angeles (not surprisngly).
While a long book, this was a rather quick read, with short chapters. The 50s slang made things a bit hard going at first, but I quickly adapted.
The plot is convoluted and I’m still not quite sure how everything fit together, and it makes me wish for the relative simplicity of the movie version of the story (which eliminates half the characters and sub-plots of the novel).
But even with the byzantine plotting, this is a great book and hard to put down.
Atonement by Ian McEwan
[Finished 27 June 2006] The first part of the book is brilliant, and the narrative device of the child/aspiring writer Brony Tallis is pure genius. But the second part of the book, focusing on the Battle of Dunkirk, and the latter sections of the book seem to lack the energy and vitality of the first part.
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
[Finished 21 June 2006] Part of my project to read the top 100 novels of all time (this one weighs in at #99).
One of the great lacunae in my reading is twentieth-century American authors, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I’d never read Philip Roth before. But after reading this book, I suspect that I very likely will return to Roth in the future. The narrative structure is amazing with its frequent shifts in time and non-linear sequencing. The narrator, who is a major character in the first section of the book has completely disappeared by the end of the book, which I suppose might be seen as a flaw although I find it an interesting choice on the part of the author.
Also interesting to me, more on a personal note than anything else, is that Roth is quite squarely in my parents’ generation, and parts of this book feel like they could have been written, if not by my dad, then by one of his high school classmates.
A Series of Unfortunate Events 4: The Miserable Mill by Lemony Snickett
[Finished 18 June 2006] I’ve now moved past the end of the material covered in the film, so I no longer have the cognitive interference from it to distract me from reading the book as book alone. I don’t think that this alone accounts for the rather dramatic change of pace in this book, The orphans’ new guardian has moved from cluelessness to nearly malicious viewpoints. And Klaus and Violet find themselves reversing their usual roles in the resolution of the story. In all, not a bad way to spend an hour or so.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
[Finished 27 May 2006] I’m sure I’ve said this somewhere else in the log, but it bears repeating: For someone as well-read as I am, I’m surprisinly poorly-read.
Case in point: Frankenstein. Wasn’t everyone assigned this book in high school English class? Or if not then, sometime in college?
Not me. Not sure how I missed it, but there it is.
What to say about the book itself? A gripping read, although I found myself periodically flipping back wondering if I’d missed something (Victor’s father’s death slipped past me). Doubtless my own failing, rather than Shelley’s.
Ulysses by James Joyce
[Finished 25 May 2006] When I was beginning my freshman year of college, a friend talked about having read Finnegan’s Wake on a family vacation and (I think) getting a T-shirt which read “I survived Finnegan’s Wake” I remember being not terribly impressed by this, but having (finally) finished reading Ulysses, I appreciate his accomplishment.
This is the third Joyce book that I’ve read (the others being Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), and I’m left thinking that reading Joyce isn’t really a terribly pleasurable experience for me, at least not in sustained readings. Early on, I found that one secret was to read the novel as if I was reading a poem. I was able to appreciate the language of Joyce’s writing, but as it continued, I just wasn’t able to sustain that kind of close careful reading. When I reached the famed 45 page run-on sentence (not really, more just a final section devoid of punctuation), it was more with a sense of relief than regret that I came to the end of the novel.
Against the Grain by Terry Eagleton
[Finished 21 May 2006] There was a time in my life that critical theory was something of great importance to me, and Terry Eagleton was very much the center of that universe. Now I come back and read some of the last unread Eagleton on my shelves and I find myself wondering how I’ve changed so much. There are bits of the essays which still strike me as containing some interesting ideas, but most of it comes across as dry and pretentious rather than appealing.
Six Comedies by W. Somerset Maugham
[Finished 19 May 2006] In his introduction, Maugham effectively dismisses the plays in this volume as being of little literary significance, meant only for entertainment, but most of these seem to fall short of even that aspiration. Perhaps its because of the sameness of most of plays’ themes, or the short shelf-life of humor, or even the loss of impact from reading a play rather than seeing it, but I was left disappointed by most of the plays. Only Home and Beauty and The Breadwinner left me happy to have read them. The former for its wonderfully silly plot, the latter for its hints at some of the themes that would recur in The Moon and Sixpence amd The Razor’s Edge. I’m thinking that it’s beginning to become time to re-read the short stories.
The System of the World by Neal Stephenson
[Finished 27 April 2006] It’s been a long road to get here: Nearly 3000 pages read in spurts spread out over 2 years, but I’ve reached the end of Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. I think that the time in some ways helped enhance my enjoyment of the book, in that I didn’t make connections between minor appearances of characters in volume one and their recurrence in later volumes.
Unlike The Cryptonomicon, Stephenson has managed to actually write a satisfying ending to his story (albeit one which is at times a bit Dickensian in its wrapping up of loose ends).
English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century by George Parfitt
[Finished 18 December 2005] A dry accounting of different strains in poetry during the 17th century.
A Series of Unfortunate Events 3: The Wide Window by Lemony Snickett
[Finished 17 December 2005] I’m at roughly the end of what was in the movie now and I’m a bit more into the rhythm of the books. The running jokes and dry humor are a hoot.
The Confusion by Neal Stephenson
[Finished 22 November 2005] It’s become my custom to employ my educator discount at Border’s to buy yet another thick Neal Stephenson novel. In this second volume of the Baroque cycle, we’re treated to some of what had come before made explicit (in particular, the curious longevity of Enoch Root, although the story of the mysterious eater of rotten fish is not handled in a satisfying way. The mathematical content here is a bit thinner than in previous Stephenson works, but the economics is a bit more fully fleshed out. I’m eagerly awaiting the next educator appreciation weekend when I’ll buy the final volume of the series.
The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope
[Finished 25 September 2005] For the first time since I started reading this series, I’ve read two Barsetshire Chronicles back-to-back. Mostly I was motivated to find out what happened to the saga of Johnny Eames and Lily Dale which had been left unresolved at the end of the previous volume, a hope which ended up being somewhat dashed in this one. I found that the passage of years had left neither character especially sympathetic. Johnny had turned into a bit of a boor while Lily had turned into a self-pitying parody of herself.
But the remainder of the story did provide some motivation to read the nearly 900 pages of Trollopian prose, and Johnny and Lily notwithstanding, the story was the typically comfortably predictable story which I usually expect from Trollope. But having finished this novel, I’m more than ready for a bit of a break from Trollope.
Red Hat by Ralph McInerny
[Finished 5 August 2005] What a depressing read. McInerny is a conservative in the “the world is going to hell in a handbasket” mode and I feel like the election of Bush and Benedict probably has him feeling awfully triumphant. There’s an amazing amount of wishful thinking here (e.g., the miraculous disappearance of AIDS from Africa while the disease ravages Gay America, close to the opposite of real life), and a needlessly complicated plot. It does provide further grist for my conception that papal novels are really all about wish fulfillment for the author.
The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope
[Finished 31 July 2005] I first started reading the Barsetshire novels while I was in college. Maybe one every three or four years. There’s always a comfort in reading Trollope but in this case things don’t completely turn out as expected. So for the first time in my reading of the series since I read the first two books back-to-back as an undergraduate, I’m diving immediately into the successor novel.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling
[Finished 20 July 2005] This, I think, is the best book in the series. The shock of the second chapter was only exceeded by the shock of the penultimate chapter.
There’s a lot to be said for the argument that there’s still a lot of filler here, but it seems to me that Rowling has, at last, gotten some of the editing that she so desparately needed.
It’s hard to say much about the book without spoilers though. I will say that I didn’t really expect any of the last couple chapters at all, but perhaps I’m just a bit dense. At the least, I’m not quite so obsessive as to compile spreadsheets of information from the book in order to connect the dots. I’m looking forward to book 7 to see how it all ends up.
A Series of Unfortunate Events 2: The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket
[Finished 13 July 2005] In the second book, I’m getting a bit more into the flow of the writing and able to put aside my memories of the movie a bit more easily now. The various asides about the meanings of words and phrases are one of the highlights of this series and at this point we have occasional characters explaining what words mean as the story progresses for a bit of entertainment value.
There might be some who would object to a homicide in the book, but given that the first volume opened with the deaths of both Baudelaire parents, we’re actually at a lower body count than has previously been the case.
The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum
[Finished 11 July 2005] A bit of light reading as a break. This is the first of Baum’s sequels in the Oz series. It’s been a long time since I’ve read the Wizard of Oz, and I suspect that my perspective has been colored a bit more by the movie than the book, but it seems to me that Baum has played fast and loose with his characterizations in this follow-up. That plus some seemingly arbitrary plot points which don’t appear to have any purpose other than to pad out the length of the book. But it has its enjoyable moments and there are some amazingly funny scenes, like the translation difficulties sequence when the pumpkin head meets the scarecrow.
There is also a fair amount to be said about the role of gender in this book, but there’s a part of me that feels that a proper treatment of the subject requires a more thorough understanding of Baum himself and his relation to the political movements of his time. A new critical approach to the topic would be a disservice to the text.
The Erotic Poems by Ovid
[Finished 1 July 2005] The introduction to this volume, by translator Peter Green, is a fascinating overview of Ovid’s life and the context of his poems. This was almost worth the price of admission alone.
However, the translation of the poems left me feeling that it was somewhat suspect. Green frequently uses anachronistic colloquialisms in his translation. I can understand the motivation: A literal translation of a first century colloquialism might not convey the informal nature of the text, but his choices leave me feeling like I’m reading a paraphrase rather than a translation.
Thankfully, Green didn’t feel the need to shoehorn Ovid’s poems into an English verse form, further deforming them.
A Series of Unfortunate Events 1: The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket
[Finished 25 June 2005] Is it bad form to begin a book review by mentioning the film, let alone comparing to the film? Then so be it. It was the film which inspired me to pick up the book.
The Series of Unfortunate Events books, unlike the other contemporary children’s best-seller series consists of much shorter, more manageable books. I was able to read this one at a single sitting while waiting for my wife at the mall. Having seen the film previously, I found myself waiting for some of the better jokes from the book to make their appearance and was somewhat disappointed when they didn’t. But the spirit of the writing is still quite entertaining and the didactic elements of the book are quite entertaining with the occasional interposed vocabulary lessons. I suppose I’ll keep at the series until I catch up. And one hopes that once I get past the source material for the film, I’ll be able to more directly appreciate the storytelling.
The Very Persistent Gappers of Fripp by George Saunders
[Finished 3 May 2005] Saunders is best known as a writer of surrealistic short stories for adults. In this instance, he tackles instead a surrealistic short story for children.
It’s wonderful.
This is a book that I will read to my children in hopes that they too will grow up to be somewhat strange and offbeat.
The Prodigal Project Book 3: Numbers by Ken Abrahams and Daniel Hart
[Finished 10 April 2005] Hmm, let’s see what’s happening now: We’re introduced to a wacky angel (his name is Stan! he likes Jell-O! He drives a Cadillac!), we learn that Azul Dante is the Anti-Christ, all those night people are probably not the same as Izbek Noir but are apparently demons or devils or whatever they would be in the cosmology of this series, and that some how Izbek Noir (who, presumably, is Satan), is perhaps at odds with Azul Dante or perhaps subtly linked with him. It’s all quite a mess really.
One reviewer on Amazon has called this series, “Left Behind for mature adults.” I hate to imagine how bad Left Behind would be.
And am I the only one who’s reading this and thinking that the theology is pretty problematic? Not just the whole idea of the rapture, but the way God acts in this book is a bit off.
At Risk by Stella Rimington
[Finished 27 February 2005] A decent first novel by the former head of MI5. There’s some personal story from the protagonist which mysteriously vanishes in the second half of the book, leaving the reader wondering why it was in the book in the first place, and Rimington has some difficulty making her characters distinct (which left me a bit confused at times who the various people in the book were), but as it proceeds to the climax, the narrative narrows its focus and Rimington’s potential becomes much more evident.
The novel gets a lot of press for being a novel about a female spy, but far more interesting (and evident), I think is the interplay between the two British spy agencies, MI5 and MI6 which is, by far, the most fascinating part of the book.
The Prodigal Project Book Two: Exodus by Ken Abrahams and Daniel Hart
[Finished 12 January 2005] Well the mystery of Daniel Hart is revealed. As near as I can tell, he’s the person who’s come up with the broad outline of the story while Abrahams does the actual writing. I’m guessing that this is Abrahams’ modus operandi: He gets some collaborator who wants to write a novel without actually doing the writing.
As for the book itself, it’s more of the same and then some: Of course we throw in some mild anti-Semitism to go with the anti-Islamic slant (it’s interesting to note that other than a brief passage in the first book, the Catholic Church is completely absent from the book). There’s some sort of goofy mystery about “seven” which is left unresolved (or maybe it is, I didn’t count the number of people who are asked about “seven” but the obvious Satan stand-in. Still worse, we get interior monologue from the assorted characters that I assume are Satan, all of which comes across as rather ham-handed and poorly managed.
And then there’s the lost opportunity. The first book, with its subtitle Genesis provides a framework of sort for the book: It’s about the beginnings of the whole thing. The second, presumably should be something about travelling, perhaps with the characters gathered in a central location, but alas, the possibility of symbolism is lost.
And there are still too damn many characters. I’m really hoping that the shooting in chapter ten will result in a death in the beginning of the next book since that way there will at least be one less character in the narration.
Return to Eden by Harry Harrison
[Finished 11 January 2005] The story of the Yilane in South America, introduced in the second volume reaches its fulfillment here, albeit not entirely satisfyingly. Perhaps less satisfying is the resolution (or really, lack thereof) of the conflict between the humans and dinosaurs. But I’ve also come to realize that it’s really not the story which is the most interesting part of this as the descriptions of societies in change. Here, the South America subplot really shines as the dinosaurs find a way to structure a society around their new philosophy. Similarly, the human society, on the verge of a change in its way of living, also creates some interesting elements, although at times the whole thing seems a bit rushed. I wouldn’t mind seeing a fourth book in the trilogy.
My Name is Aram by William Saroyan
[Finished 5 January 2005] I wanted a bit of light reading to start out the year so looking over my libri legendi shelves, I spotted this volume of short stories by William Saroyan. I had previously read Saroyan’s The Human Comedy and had enjoyed the gentle humor of the book, so I figured that this would be similar. It was. Nothing dark or challenging here at all, just recollections of a childhood in the San Joaquin valley filled with wonder and poetry and love.
Winter In Eden by Harry Harrison
[Finished 17 December 2004] Clearly a middle book. The narrative gets fragmented as we follow an assortment of characters introduced in the first book of the trilogy. The issues of suspension of disbelief are lessened in this volume, I suppose because I made it through one volume already with Harrison’s bizarre concepts. But this is clearly a set-up for the final volume of the trilogy and a bit unsatisfying still. But I’ll doubtless continue on.
The Prodigal Project: Book One-Genesis by Ken Abraham and Daniel Hart
[Finished 9 December 2004] I started reading this book when my wife and I stopped at Vroman’s in Pasadena to rest a bit after a strenuous hike in the mountains. I’d been toying with reading the Left Behind series in bookstores (no real interest in actually owning these books), and figured this looked, at the least, to be shorter.
Except, “Book One-Genesis”? Does that mean 65 more books to come? (Apparently not: Book Four brings things up to Kings).
Anyway, I read the first three chapters that day and still hadn’t finished with character introductions (or had an introduced character return, for that matter). I finished it off at Borders today and I’m left thinking that this is pretty much a me-too book. Let’s see, only Christians are good, Muslims come out as largely off-screen and unmitigatedly evil (curiously, although the book was first published in 2003, the events of September 11th seem not to be referenced in any way, despite an obvious opening). Less suspense (and more predictability) than even a Dan Brown novel.
The most fascinating thing to me was the fact that the brief author bio didn’t mention Abraham’s co-author. I’m not sure that I’ll bother with the other three books. Or maybe I will. They are, at least, fast reads. Next time I’ll bring a CD player with me so that I can listen to something other than piped-in Christmas Carols while I read.
Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
[Finished 20 October 2004] I came at this with some trepidation as some reviews I read had been a bit less than positive. But I’ve found it to be a very interesting read indeed. My knowledge of European history has assorted lacunae, one of which is the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which is precisely the time period covered in Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, so I’ve been learning quite a bit in the process of reading this (although sorting out the historical from the fictional is occasionally a bit of a challenge). But like the best historical fiction, this book leaves me inspired to delve deeper into the period.
I’m looking forward to the paperback releases of volumes 2 and 3 of the Baroque Cycle.
Deus lo Volt! Chronicle of the Crusades by Evan S. Connell
[Finished 14 October 2004] A very odd book. The bulk of it is a history of the crusades written from the perspective of a medieval noble, which provides an interesting perspective on the topic, and forces the reader to be aware of the narrator’s credulity (although bits of modern sensibility creep in at times). This part was interesting although at times a bit tedious (I felt like it would have been helpful to have a timeline perhaps, and maybe a dramatis personae to keep track of all that was going on).
Towards the end of the book, the tone suddenly changes as our narrator participates in one of the final crusades lead by the French. Oddly, while this is the closest to a traditional novel that the story gets, it’s also the least successful part of the novel. In the end, I was left wondering why I read the book at all, although I do confess to having more understanding of the crusades than previously. I just think that a straight history would have been a more productive way to have learned what I learned.
Understand This by Jervey Tervalon
[Finished 17 September 2004] When I was researching Locke High School when I was offered a job there (which I ultimately did not accept), I encountered references to this book which fictionalizes the school as Bolt, and I decided to pick it up as part of my decision-making process. I ultimately ended up teaching at a different school, but I did find the novel to be a very compelling read. The day-to-day lives of the students at the school are chronicled in honest detail (Tervalon had been both a student and teacher at Locke). At times his change of narrator with each chapter seemed a bit gimmicky, but it ultimately served the tale quite well.
To Kill the Pope: An Ecclesiastical Thriller by Tad Szulc
[Finished 12 August 2004] One of the better Pope novels I’ve read in the past few years, Szulc’s book reads a lot more like biography than a novel, which makes sense if only because Szulc is primarily known as a biographer.
In this novel, his Gregory XVII stands in for John Paul II, with the plot centering around the unconfirmable story that Szulc found when he investigated John Paul’s attempted assassination. The fictional characters behind the plot can be easily connected to the real characters, allowing Szulc to get his version of the story out while at the same time providing a rather entertaining history of the Catholic Church in France and the church’s relationship with Islam since the Crusades.
I recommend this one without hesitation, regardless of the veracity of Szulc’s story (on which I have no firm opinion, although I’m willing to believe Szulc)
In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien
[Finished 9 August 2004] I came across this novel mentioned on a writing professor’s website as key reading for the students in his writing class, so I decided to take a look at it.
Having read it, I have to agree that it’s a beautifully crafted story, with an amazing repertoire of technical tricks used to advance the ideas of the novel. Definitely worth reading. I won’t say anything about the plot details for I think that it pays to read this novel, “blind” knowing nothing about what the novel is about.
Robert Browning's Poetry: Authoritative Texts, Criticism (Norton Critical Edition) by Robert Browning
[Finished 5 August 2004] I guess it’s been too long since I’ve read poetry, especially difficult poetry. It took me most of the book to finally begin to get Browning, and then it was too late. And given the heft of this volume, going back just seemed to be too much.
Of the critical essays which conclude the book, the historical essays seemed to be an alternating series of vituperation and reverence while the modern ones were a bit more compelling. The interpretative essays in particular were well worth the read, particularly the essay, “Blougram’s Apologetics” which provided a novel, but persuasive interpretation of “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”.
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
[Finished 25 July 2004] It’s been a while since I’ve read any Dickens and this was rather slow going at first, but as I read further, my mind began reacquainting itself with Victorian diction and it became a much easier read.
It’s a bit interesting in that there seems to be a lot in common with 18th century novels in this book, particularly the periodic digressions into implanted short stories which is something that I tend to associate more with Fielding than Dickens, but perhaps given that this is Dickens’ first novel and bears many of the marks of his influences (especially Fielding), that shouldn’t be a big surprise.
Supertoys Last All Summer Long and Other Stories of Future Time by Brian Aldiss
[Finished 2 July 2004] I picked this up in the wake of seeing the brilliant, if flawed, film, AI. Having now read the stories that inspired the film, I’m left a bit disappointed: I think that the film realization of the concept was far superior to the original.
The other stories in the collection were also largely empty. I don’t particularly think that Aldiss met his goals as stated in the introduction very well, or, in many cases, at all. There were a handful of good stories and a lot of what felt like filler.
West of Eden by Harry Harrison
[Finished 16 April 2004] An engaging fantasy. I had a hard time suspending disbelief for the dinosaur civilization and the subplot about the daughters of death ended up having no real consequence, but I still had a hard time putting the book down. I’ll definitely pick up the sequels.
5 Novels by Daniel Pinkwater
[Finished 14 April 2004] I picked up this omnibus out of a desire to re-read one of my favorte novels from my childhood, Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars. The book was still as entertaining as it was when I first read it over 20 years ago. The others in the collection were a bit of a mixed bag. Slaves of Spiegel didn’t particularly do much for me other than remind me of Pinkwater’s weight problem and become more conscious of the omnipresence of food in Pinkwater’s writing. The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death had a good start but seemed to rush to its conclusion. On the other hand, The Last Guru and Young Adult Novel were both works of genius. All of the books reveled in the joys of nonconformity and creativity, and for that alone, I think that all young people should read these books.
Pastoralia by George Saunders
[Finished 1 April 2004] I really enjoy Saunders’ writing voice. This collection was a bit more conventional in setting for many of the stories than was Bad Decline in CivilWarLand, but it still had the compelling voice. One thing that I’ve found that I really enjoy with reading Saunders’ work is the gradual sense of becoming oriented to the universe of the story. You’re never certain what “normal” is until the story has been read most of the way through. It’s a great example of what the deconstructionists meant about the transformation of meaning as the text progresses. And even if you’re not into literary theory, they’re still fun stories to read.
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
[Finished 11 March 2004] A fascinating tale. Historical reconstructions like this are always a bit of a challenge to make interesting, but Winchester is up to the task in this book. He manages to convey an interesting mix of information about the creation of the greatest English dictionary, Victorian England, the treatment of mental illness in the 19th century and more. A great companion to Chasing the Sun which approaches the question of dictionary-making from a more global perspective
The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis
[Finished 24 January 2004] Well that’s the end of the Chronicles of Narnia. Again, I found this a more compelling read than some of the earlier volumes. The portrayals of religious hypocrisy and false prophets struck me as particularly interesting. The conclusion of the book also had me caught quite by surprise.
I would say, at this point also that perhaps publication order is the best order to read the books rather than chronological. I really think that The Magician’s Nephew would work much better after The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
I think also that some of my reservations about the series are largely a result of my general distaste for allegory. Once I can get past that, the books become more enjoyable (and interestingly, the books that are least allegorical are the ones that I enjoyed the most.
The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis
[Finished 20 January 2004] Is it that the books are getting better in the series or am I getting more accustomed to Lewis’ writing? My personal favorite passage from the book:
After that the Head’s friends saw to it that she was no longer a Head, so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other Heads. And when they found out she wasn’t much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis
[Finished 18 January 2004] The most satisfying, in literary terms, of the Narnia series thusfar. Aslan is largely offstage which helps a fair amount. This feels much closer to a classical picaresque than to a Christian allegory which also seems to help, although this is the first book in which Lewis directly hints that Aslan=Jesus.
Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis
[Finished 15 January 2004] Continuing with the Chronicles ol Narnia. I’m realizing the two things that bother me about this series: The first is how problems are almost always solved through violence. This wouldn’t seem to really jibe with Christianity in many ways. The other is that Aslan as a character just doesn’t work, but then God has never made a good literary character. I’m reminded of how in Paradise Lost, despite Milton’s best efforts, Satan ended up seeming the hero of the piece.
The Horse and His Boy by C. S. Lewis
[Finished 13 January 2004] I continue to be bothered by the extent to which Aslan is a deus ex machina in this series. This could have easily been a much longer book than it was. I’m not sure that I really like the Chronicles of Narnia series. There are some good moments in the books, some brilliant imagery, but Lewis’s plots seem to leave a lot to be desired.
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
[Finished 12 January 2004] This book felt a bit less juvenile to me than did The Magician’s Nephew. The character of Edmund in particular struck me as being a rather interesting choice for a children’s novel, although Lewis tended to shy away from too much complexity in the characterization and to make Aslan a bit too much of a Deus ex machina for the plot.
The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis
[Finished 5 January 2004] The first (in chronological order) of the Chronicles of Narnia. I managed to somehow never read these books when I was younger, so having received the full set as a Christmas gift this year, I’ve decided to take the plunge. The narrative tone is at times a bit grating, but the story moves along nicely and makes for a good read. Certainly, I had a hard time putting the book down.
2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke
[Finished 23 December 2003] An entertaining enough read. There were plenty of unresolved threads and pointless diversions (like the celebrities on the flight to Halley’s comet), but since I don’t read that much genre fiction, it was easy to overlook the shortcomings while I read through the book.
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson,
[Finished 6 November 2003] It turns out that the title story was the least interesting of the lot. I was most intrigued by the glimpses of a much simpler life lead by the main characters. Minimal possessions, simple abodes... and the heart-rending relationships. The recurring character of James Harris left me especially intrigued and I wonder if he appears in othe Jackson writing.
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
[Finished October 2003] An enjoyable read, with some significant mathematical content. This was one of the best explanations of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem that I’ve encountered.
In general I enjoyed the Lawrence Waterhouse passages the most. Stephenson has a knack for creating good “genius” characters. Other sections fell a bit flatter, and Stephenson’s tendency to wait a hundred pages to fill in a lacuna was a bit disconcerting at times.
The conclusion of the book was rather disappointing. It felt like Stephenson decided that he’d written 900 pages so he’d better end the book sooner ratherthan later.
The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown
[Finished October 2003] A painfully predictable read. I figured out the identity of the Teacher fairly quickly, solved all the riddles almost immediately (except in cases where key information was withheld), I knew the 10 digit account number well before the characters found it, realized immediately where the grail was, who sophia was, etc.
Then there’s the “history” which is full of so many absurd fabrications and instances of anti-Catholic bigotry that I found the whole thing more annoying than entertaining
Lilith by George MacDonald
[Finished 19 August 2003] An intriguing proto-fantasy novel. At times the allegory and metaphysics become a bit too victorian for my tastes, but it was a worthwhile endeavor.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling
[Finished 5 August 2003] I found this entry in the Harry Potter series a bit disappointing. The all-is-well ending was rather unsatisfying. It’s a series of books, not a sitcom. It’s really not that important that each book end with the characters in similar places as the previous books.
That said, the book does reflect a more mature Harry Potter and an interview with Rowling which I read earlier this year in which I read that she had intended the books to be read one a year while the reader was the same age as Harry and his pals actually made the books make a bit more sense in some ways.
Players by Don DeLillo
[Finished 5 August 2003] Despite good reviews elsewhere, I found this novel to be a bit empty. Perhaps I missed something
Millenium Pope: A Novel of Spiritual Journey by Frederick J. Luhmann
[Finished 1 August 2003] My annual “Pope” novel. This one is another American liberal Catholic fantasy following the usual pattern. It confirms my belief that Pope novels tend to be more about the author than religion.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of the Fire by J. K. Rowling
[Finished 23 July 2003] The high point of the series. Rowling has hit a high point in her writing and pushed the plot to an interesting breaking point.
The Talented Mr Ripley; Ripley Underground; Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith
[Finished 25 May 2003] An omnibus collection of the first three Ripley novels. I decided to read this after seeing the film with Jude Law and Matt Damon (which, by the way, was quite excellent). The books left me a bit disappointed. The clever plotting in the film was in many ways a creation of the screenwriter with the novel being a bit less carefully conceived. I don’t think that I’ll read the last two Ripley novels. Or at least not buy them.
Selected Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant
[Finished 19 May 2003] I first picked this up after I had discovered W. Somerset Maugham and read that he considered Maupassant to be one of his key influences. A couple early starts at reading the stories left me having a hard time getting going, but this time around they flowed like good wine. I’m thinking I should learn French so that I can read the originals.
The Gospel According to Peanuts by Robert L. Short
[Finished 18 May 2003] An amusing and interesting little book, taking the religious themes in Peanuts (which is a remarkably religious comic strip, but not obsequiously so) and using them as a starting point for a discussion about theology.
Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966 by Martin Stannard
[Finished 15 May 2003] Most peoples’ lives are less interesting in the second half of their lives, and Waugh is largely no exception.
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
[Finished 5 May 2003] Dickens in heavy-duty social commentary mode.
The Torturer's Apprentice by John Biguenet
[Finished 20 January 2003] Ever since I first discovered John Biguenet in the pages of Granta, I’ve been waiting for this. He’s got a great voice and is potentially the successor to Graham Greene as a great Catholic writer. Not all of the stories are winners, but enough are that this is a must-read collection.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling
[Finished 27 December 2002] The first really good book in the series. Rowling still needs an editor, but she’s got a better idea of how to construct a plot now. I imagine part of it comes down to her conceiving of the series as books which should be read at the same age as Harry is. Certainly the subject matter is becoming a fair bit more mature.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling
[Finished 22 December 2002] An improvement on the first book, but still somewhat inferior to the film, which manages to tighten up the plotting quite a bit. Somebody get this woman an editor. At least the ending is a bit better conceived than in the first book.
Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone by J. K. Rowling
[Finished 21 December 2002] Being a bit sick while visiting my cousin’s family, I decided to read this book while in bed. I had hoped that the conclusion was somewhat better than that of the film, but was disturbed to see how faithful the film was to the book. In general, I think the film was actually superior to the book because it caused some forced editing to take place. Overall, the writing is pretty good, though, and I ended up getting hooked on the series.
Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident by Eoin Colfer
[Finished 28 November 2002] Read on Thanksgiving break afternoon while my cousin was visiting (it’s his book). Breezy and fun. I really should read the first book in the series, but this seems very much the sort of thing that I would have enjoyed as a child and I do enjoy it as an adult.
The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
[Finished 25 August 2002] My edition (not the one linked) was apparently abridged, but given that it was a $.99 Dover edition I don’t feel too cheated. It was just the right length to read straight through, which would have been unpleasant for a longer version.
Ayres and Observations by Thomas Campion
[Finished 16 August 2002] 16th century lyric poetry. The introduction includes a bit of music with lute tabulature.
Thank You For Smoking by Christopher Buckley
[Finished 15 August 2002] Buckley (the son of William F.) Has a fun light touch in his satiric writing which makes his writing always a pleasure to read. In this case, we’re told the story of a P.R. man who ends up being used. The Nick Naylor short I read was similar in character and Buckley has a gift for writing entertaining fiction.
The Reckoning by Thomas Monteleone
[Finished 13 August 2002] My annual “Pope” novel and a really awful one at that. It reads like a Jack Chick tract re-written by Jerry Bruckheimer. But I always try to finish the books that I start and I slogged through it, all the time wondering, “why? why would anyone write this? or more to the point, why would anyone publish it?”
King Richard the Second by William Shakespeare
[Finished 2 August 2002] A slender, sparsely-commented volume (not the edition linked to at amazon!), this is the first of Shakespeare’s 8-play history cycle, a sequence of plays well worth returning to.
Man and Superman by Bernard Shaw
[Finished 31 July 2002] I remember reading or hearing somewhere that the theatre was about Ideas with a capital I, and certainly, Shaw’s theatre is very much so. I don’t know why I don’t read more Shaw more often. I always enjoy it.
The Captives, or The Lost Recovered by Thomas Heywood
[Finished 19 July 2002] I’m trying to remember this book nearly three years later as I fill in the gaps in the book list, but I’m stumped. Pretend there’s something profound here.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
[Finished 15 July 2002] A classic gothic tale, complete with mysterious goings on, rooms that are not to be entered and a handsome yet tragic love interest for the heroine. A fun fast read.
Exemplary Novels by Miguel de Cervantes
[Finished 3 July 2002] More a collection of stories than novels, my copy is a limited edition (although long enough print run to make that description a bit odd). Nothing to quite measure up to Don Quijote.
Graham Greene on Film by Graham Greene
[Finished 20 June 2002] The sort of book that one buys and reads because of completist tendencies, which as a Greene afficianado, I freely admit to. I’ve seen only a handful of the films reviewed in the book, and many of them have disappeared into the collective amnesia.
Many Dimensions by Charles W. Williams
[Finished 16 June 2002] Continuing my explorations of the inklings, I decided to try this kind of science-fictiony adventure yarn. Similar in spirit to War in Heaven, although a bit more enjoyable and better conceived. Certainly a world away from Tolkien.
Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
[Finished 9 June 2002] I don’t remember how I first encountered this book (perhaps amazon recommendations), but it was a breezy and fun read, especially in the wake of having recently read Stephen J, Gould’s Dinosaur in a Haystack. I would definitely seek out more Sawyer in the future.
Four Plays by Eugene Ionesco
[Finished 4 June 2002] I first encountered Ionesco when I saw the film of Rhinocerous on PBS while a child home with chicken pox. I loved it enough that when I saw the play in the Marshall Field’s bookstore nearly ten years later, I grabbed it. Wanting to read a bit more Ionesco, I found this at a used book sale. I guess he had more to say to fourth grade me than adult me.
Complete Tales and Poems by Edgar Allen Poe
[Finished 2 June 2002] I figure being the sort of geek that I am, that I really should read the bits of Poe that I hadn’t or knew primarily by reputation (thank you Ray Bradbury). Nice haunting stuff, which holds up pretty well after nearly 200 years.I especially enjoy his detective fiction.
The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
[Finished 24 May 2002] Maybe it’s the long stretches without so much as a blank line between paragraphs, but Proust really more tires than entertains me. Every so often I’ll spot a vignette which appeared on stage in a Proust production I saw a few years back and I’ll enjoy the spot of recognition, but most of the time, I’m kind of bored if I might admit it.
How to be Good by Nick Hornby
[Finished 16 May 2002] Nick Hornby tries writing a novel with a female narrator and largely succeeds. As usual, he doesn’t really have a good idea of how to end his novel, but that’s not really why I read Nick Hornby anyway. I’m curious to see the inevitible film of the book (which will doubtless be in theatres when the paperback of his next novel is published).
The Third Woman: The Secret Passion Which Inspired the End of the Affair by William Cash
[Finished 6 May 2002] An intriguing story of Graham Greene’s affair with Catherine Walston. It provides a compelling supplement to Norman Sherry’s biography of Greene, going into greater detail and giving a rather fascinating mix of sexuality, religious fervor and artistic genius which motivated Greene at this point in his life
Introduction to Literature: Poems by Lynn Altenbernd and Leslie Lewis
[Finished 7 April 2002] A New Critic’s dream anthology. Minimal commentary and the editorial intervention is largely constrained to a roughly chronological ordering with some excerpting of larger works.
Night by Elie Wiesel
[Finished 5 April 2002] The current One Book One Chicago selection. I’d actually meant to read some Wiesel for a while after hearing an interview with him on NPR. It’s a haunting read based on Wiesel’s own experiences during the holocaust.
Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937 by Joan DeJean
[Finished 9 February 2002] When I was in college, rather under the influence of J. D. Salinger, I had a bit of a whirlwind love affair with Sappho. This is one of the loose ends that remained as time passed on.
As someone whose biogrpahy is known only in fragments, Sappho tends to have a great deal projected upon her and this book is an attempt at untangling some of these threads to see not so much who Sappho was, but rather how perspectives on her reflected the times and culture from which they originate. An interesting, albeit sometimes dry book.
The Paradise of Dainty Devices edited by H. E. Rollins
[Finished 17 January 2002] An early anthology of flowers, in this instance dating back to the sixteenth century. This edition is a lightly edited version of the original edition, with poems from later editions added to the end of the book.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir by Margaret Salinger
[Finished 15 January 2002] One of these books that I’ve read largely because of the dearth of biography of J.D. Salinger. It’s an interesting inside view of Salinger’s life written by his daughter and not surprisingly, when her life veers from her father’s, the story becomes less interesting, but it’s still a vital read for the Salingerphile.
War in Heaven by Charles Williams
[Finished 29 December 2001] After re-reading The Lord of the Rings I decided to explore some of the other inklings. Wright’s tale transpants the grail story to 20th century England. It’s occasionally comic and doesn’t really have much of a conclusion but does make for an interesting read. I really should find some more of his novels.
Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle
[Finished 26 December 2001] Quite a lot different from either of the films of the same name, we have a frame which helps provide some new twists on the theme with the cautionary tale taken in a different direction (closer to the second film than the first). There’s quite a bit of minutiae in the narrative which makes for a better novel than film
The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien
[Finished 8 December 2001] And the saga comes to a close. There were a few more parts here that seemed familiar than in The Two Towers but a fair amount which seemed out of reach. I hope that I haven’t ruined my enjoyment of the films by going back to the books right before the movies begin.
The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien
[Finished 25 November 2001] Unlike The Fellowship of the Ring there was quite a lot of this volume that didn’t come back to my memory which makes me wonder whether I actually finished reading the book or, perhaps, if I had just skimmed over the last two volumes looking for fodder for my expanding universe of Dungeons and Dragons characters and adventures (sadly never played because of a lack of fellow hardcore nerds).
The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien
[Finished 18 November 2001] It’s been almost 20 years since I read this. Parts are still familiar, others had escaped my memory entirely. I have to admit that I don’t see the Catholic allegory that everyone claims is there (I suppose one could make a case for a Christian allegory, but specifically Catholic? I think not). It’s a bit startling how slowly the story starts off and how abruptly it comes to a conclusion at the end of the volume, something that I remember deeply upset me when I first read this book as a high school freshman
Civilwarland in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella by George Saunders
[Finished 10 November 2001] What makes these stories work is the voice. There is a clear authorial voice here, one which remains familiar without becoming grating. Occasionally the stories miss the mark (“The Wavemaker Falters”) but mostly they’re dead on. Saunders manages to convey a sense of melancholy and decay that’s just perfect.
If you came to buy this collection after hearing “Offloading for Mrs Schwartz” on This American Life, hesitate no longer. Buy the book.
The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
[Finished 30 October 2001] A re-read in honor of the upcoming films of The Lord of the Rings. I’m a bit startled to see how childish the tone is in this volume. I’d quite forgotten that. But it does also make it a much easier read than I recall the later books being.
Poetry and Life edited by F. J. Sheed
[Finished 24 October 2001] Despite the innocuous title, this is actually a rather specialized anthology, focusing exclusively on Catholic poets. Not much beyond that to really recommend it. I bought this when I was on a bibliomanic buying rampage for all things relating to Catholic poetry.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
[Finished 14 October 2001] A re-read, and one that’s well earned these days. It’s been a long time since I’ve read this, and with it being a One Book One Chicago selection, it seemed about right to pull it out again. How delicious are the details and how wonderful is Atticus Finch. This is what I aspire to be as far short of the mark as I often fall.
I can see why Harper Lee never published another book. How could you meet the expectations that this book set.
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
[Finished 7 October 2001] An amusing enough yarn, although I seem to recall having enjoyed Swiss Family Robinson a bit more. It’s a bit startling to realize how blithely Defoe has his protagonist spending decades stranded on his island.
Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust
[Finished 30 September 2001] The second volume of Remembrance of Things Past is a bit easier going than the first, but still left me feeling a bit lost at sea. I think a big part of this is the bulk not only of the whole book, but of the individual parts of the book as well.
Complete Poetry and Prose by William Blake
[Finished 9 September 2001] There’s something about reading poems written by a man with such a psychotic imagination which can’t help but capture the fancy of the reader. There are the familiar lines (“tiger tiger burning bright”) and the unfamiliar, all of which provide a strange and unusual trip into pure fantasy.
America's First by Charles Edwards
[Finished 13 August 2001] A missed opportunity. Edwards, setting out to write a novel about the first black president of the United States, ends up with a mishmahs of mafia themes, behind the scenes manouvres of his central character’s party, and even Saddam Hussein. All of which adds up to little of consequence. Not worth bothering with in the end.
Interpretation in Teaching by I. A. Richardson
[Finished 8 August 2001] An intriguing book, discussing how questions of interpretation shape the teaching of English, although in the end, I don’t feel that the book really provided what I hoped it would. Had I read this when I bought it, it might well have only exacerbated my existential crisis about the role of criticism.
The Accidental Pope by Raymond Flynn and Robin Moore
[Finished 4 August 2001] This year’s Pope novel. Hmm, why is the American ambassador to the Vatican such a central character? It turns out Flynn was the ambassador to the Vatican during the Clinton years. Well, that explains a lot. Yet another formulaic Pope novel with little to recommend it.
A Flowering Tree: And Other Oral Tales from India by A. K. Ramanujan
[Finished 6 July 2001] A fascinating collection of orally-transmitted folk tales from India. It is made a bit perplexing by the incorporation of some scholastic apparatus including a nomenclature for classifying tales according to some sort of rather mechanical system. I felt at times like I’d missed most of a semester of class. But the tales are great.
Walter Benjamin and the Bible by Brian Britt
[Finished 2 July 2001] Not entirely sure why I bought this. I guess it’s because of the Terry Eagleton-Walter Benjamin connection, but having not actually read any Benjamin, this came across as amazingly opaque.
Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-Makers and the Dictionaries They Made by Jonathon Green
[Finished 1 July 2001] This is one of those subjects that seems to fascinate me but few others. I knew a very small amount about dictionary making before I read this book, largely courtesy of reading about Samuel Johnson. This provided a rather interesting history of the genre (which is relatively young). It’s interesting to note, for example, that the idea of arranging words alphabetically was not self-evident (after all, if you know a word and want to know what it means, it works well, but if you want to know what the word is for, say, the knee of a horse, a standard dictionary is little help at all). In all a fascinating work.
The Quest for Graham Greene by W. J. West
[Finished 21 June 2001] One of the weaknesses of Sherry’s biography of Graham Greene is the additional information which has come to light since he began writing. This, in part, explains the fact that between the publication of the first and second volumes, the size of the work had expanded to three volumes with the second volume being far more detailed than the first.
In writing this work, West has come at it with the view that his readers would likely be familiar with the other biographies and makes frequent reference to them (including scathing rebuttals to claims made in Shelden’s travesty of a biography). This ends up creating a work which helps fill in the gaps that were unavoidable in Sherry volume 1 and makes this an essential companion to Sherry’s work for the serious Graham Greene scholar (or fan).
Say I Am You: Poetry Interspersed With Stories of Rumi and Shams by Jalal Al-Din Rumi
[Finished 15 June 2001] I stumbled upon the Sufi mystic and poet looking over the shoulder of a girl I sat next to on the bus one morning heading in to work. We both got off at the same stop, she went right to art school, I went left to my computer job. Something significant there.
The poems come from the Sufic mystic tradition of Islam, although I find that mysticism tends to be fairly uniform regardless of the underlying theology. A great read and one that I’ll doubtless return to.
On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism by Jonathan Culler
[Finished 29 May 2001] Some leftover reading from college. I kind of wish I’d actually read it when I took the class. This was a highly readable and quite interesting introduction to post-structuralist criticism. Certainly a lot easier to follow than some of the other work that I did read all those years ago.
The Stranger by Albert Camus
[Finished 28 May 2001] One of those books that most of my peers read in high school but I managed to miss (that’s what I get for writing a novel in place of senior English, I guess). The sense of alienation throughout the novel is something which will haunt me for years to come, I suppose.
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
[Finished 14 May 2001] A pleasant read, in a series of vignettes. This was a One Book One Chicago selection when I read it.
Typee by Herman Melville
[Finished 14 April 2001] I spotted this at a book sale and picked it up having enjoyed other Melville that I’d read. Divorced from any context it was a bit perplexing: Was I to take at face value the manuscript’s claim to be true. Obviously not. On the other hand, I also missed out on the ways in which this was a truly shocking story: From the perspective of a 21st Century American, the sexuality, cannibalism etc. aren’t that outrageous.
A Catholic Reader edited by Charles A. Brady
[Finished 12 March 2001] A delightful compendium of Catholic writings from throughout English history. Some of the short stories are particularly delightful
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
[Finished 16 February 2001] I had my doubts about this book as I started reading it. How interesting can a novel about a pre-adolescent be? As it turned out, it was actually quite good, perhaps better, even, then the Barrytown trilogy.
Decadence and Catholicism by Ellis Hanson
[Finished 26 January 2001] When I saw the title, I was intrigued enough to want to read it so I picked it up at Border’s (using my discount card). By “decadence” Hanson is referring particularly to a late 19th-century literary and artistic movement which was fascinated by decay. And what better source for decay than the Catholic church in England, finally coming out from under the weight of severe penal laws prohibiting Catholicism and divested of much of its historical wealth? Yet the reading remained relatively dry, even with Oscar Wilde as a central figure in the book. I suppose it would have been far more interesting to me as a college student.
About a Boy by Nick Hornby
[Finished 21 January 2001] A great premise with fun and interesting characters. But of course, as seems to be perpetually the problem with Nick Hornby, he is unable to provide an ending to his story. The film of the book helped a bit on that front, but here the book just sort of peters out. On the other hand, the path there is sufficiently fun that really it’s hard to begrudge Hornby his inability to end a novel.
Samuel Johnson by W. Jackson Bate
[Finished 18 January 2001] A captivating biography of Johnson, surprising in its detail. This is the second Johnson bio that I’ve read (the first being, of course, Boswell), and I’ve found that it gave me a remarkably good perspective on Johnson the man, and his accomplishments in his life.
Granta 70: Australia, the New New World
[Finished 4 January 2001] Once again, Granta manages to put together a stunning collection, although it felt like some of the fiction could have used some footnotes for those of us unfamiliar with the finer points of Australian life.
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
[Finished October 2000] A re-read. I first read this as an undergrad, and after lending my copy to a friend who never returned it, I decided to buy a new copy (this edition which includes the Postscript). This is clearly a book which rewards rereading, with its layered meaning in the detective story. I’m thinking that I’d like to read it one more time paying a bit more attention to the historical background in the book as well for still more meaning waiting to be unwrapped
Eminence by Morris West
[Finished August 2000] Another annual “Pope” novel. I’m back to Morris West who’s probably the king of the genre. Once again, West manages to do a good job of using fiction to reveal the state of the church
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
[Finished July 2000] Inspired by the “Summarizing Proust” skit on Monty Python, I’ve long meant to read Rememberence of Things Past, so I finally decided to begin. It’s a long, often difficult journey, with chapters which run for unbelievably long stretches, which is largely incompatible with my somewhat addled reading habits.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
[Finished June 2000] Great fun. Yes, parts of it seem to be gratuitous filler, but it’s still an awful lot of fun to read. Even bits of the filler have stuck with me as a source of amusement some years after reading it.
And if you’ve ever played Illuminati, this is almost a must-read.
Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood
[Finished May 2000] A mixed variety of short stories set in Germany between the world wars. It’s been a while since I read these, but I remember enjoying many of them.
In the Heart of the Seas by S. Y. Agnon
[Finished March 2000] A very curious narrative. It’s written in an eighteenth century style,
but seems to be a contemporary piece. I believe I got this from a list
of top 100 spiritual books of the twentieth century.
The Cardinal Sins by Andrew Greeley
[Finished 20 February 2000] Better than White Smoke although Greeley still doesn’t do
too much for me as a novelist. If you’re looking for a compelling
Catholic novelist, try Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh or Morris West.
Granta 69: The Assassin
[Finished February 2000] Another fascinating collection from Granta.
Graham Greene: On the Frontier by Maria Coutos
[Finished February 2000] Not terribly insightful, I thought.
The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham
[Finished 21 January 2000] Not one of Maugham’s best novels, but still an interesting (and short)
read.
Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939 by Martin Stannard
[Finished 18 January 2000] An outstanding and intriguing examination of Waugh’s life and
opinions.
Granta 68: Love Stories
[Finished 16 January 2000] The Cheever left me cold, but as usual, some nice stories and
articles.
Birdy by William Wharton
[Finished 4 November 1999] A re-read. I first read this in college when I borrowed the copy my
roommate had for one of his classes and later bought a copy for
myself. I still love the intertwining narratives and timeframes.
Poems for the People by Carl Sandburg
[Finished 11 October 1999] Mostly lesser poems, there’s one really nice one describing a gypsy
girl sitting across from Sandburg on the L which was the whole reason
I bought this.
Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
[Finished 22 September 1999] Not as funny as some reviewers have led me to believe, but certainly
the lightest Russian literature I’ve ever encountered.
Granta 67: Women and Children First
[Finished 15 September 1999] An interesting look at the places where social niceties seem to break
down or stand up.
Life and Poems of Nicholas Grimald by L. R. Merrill
[Finished 2 September 1999] The archipropheta is especially interesting as are the many
contradictions of Grimald’s life. This is part of my collection on
Catholics in Elizabethan England.
Papabile: The Man Who Would Be Pope by Michael J. Farrell
[Finished 3 August 1999] Not quite the book it could have been.
Ways of Escape by Graham Greene
[Finished 23 July 1999] A re-read. Interestingly as I was reading this, I found myself
transported to the hotel room in New Jersey and its environs where I
read this book initially in 1989 (in fact it’s entirely possible that
I read this exactly one decade earlier).
The Golden Book of Catholic Poetry edited by Alfred Noyes
[Finished 15 July 1999] A fair anthology of poems which stretches beyond the breaking point
the definition of “Catholic Poetry.”
A Sentimental Journey with The Journal to Eliza and a Political Romance by Laurence Stern
[Finished 25 June 1999] Not quite as great of a read as Tristram Shandy was.
Granta 66: Truth and Lies
[Finished 24 May 1999] As usual, a great outing from Granta
The Satyricon by Petronius
[Finished 19 May 1999] Frustrating with its frequent lacunae, an amusing and bawdy work.
Granta 65: London--The Lives of the City
[Finished 7 April 1999] Another outstanding collection of fiction and essays.
The Oberagammau Passion Play 1970 by J. A. Daisenberger
[Finished 3 March 1999] Rather pedestrian. The dialog added to flesh out the story is
incredibly banal. The portrayal of Judas was somewhat sympathetic,
which seems to be characteristic of just about any dramatic treatment
of this material.
Viper's Tangle by François Mauriac
[Finished 15 February 1999] An intriguing and provocative novel. A nice treatment of spiritual
matters without descending into becoming maudlin.
The Short Stories of James T. Farrell by James T. Farrell
[Finished 12 February 1999] When I first read Farrell’s Studs Lonigan I ended up
losing a lot of sleep reading my way through the book. The other
Farrell I’ve read has often failed to measure up to that masterpiece,
although some of the stories here come close. It’s a shame that nearly
everything Farrell has written has fallen out of print.
Granta 64: Russia
[Finished 6 December 1998] Possibly the best Granta yet. The first one with multiple
authors that I’ll be seeking out more of their writing.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
[Finished 30 November 1998] Stuffy Victorians? Posh and nonsense. They were heavy drug users
apparently.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott
[Finished 28 November 1998] Classic nerd fiction. Some of the allegory is a bit forced and frankly
it gets a bit dull at times. Back when I thought four-dimensional
geometry was the coolest thing on earth though, this would have been
my favorite book.
Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse
[Finished 20 September 1998] I liked it; an interesting exploration of the meaning of life from a
Jungian perspective.
Granta 63: Beasts
[Finished 17 September 1998] This is why I love this publication. Usually there’s a clunker or two
in any given Granta, but this one is perfect. Wow.
Anthony Trollope by James Pope Hennesy
[Finished 28 August 1998] Fortunately Trollope’s life is fairly fascinating because this book is
a bit of a mess.
I am Mary Dunne by Brian Moore
[Finished 24 August 1998] Not one of Moore’s best. I found Mary Dunne a fairly unconvincing
creation, but the exploration of memory and identity was promising. I
wonder if Moore ever attempted to return to that theme.
Trout Fishing in America; The Pill vs The Springhill Mine Disaster; and In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan
[Finished 17 August 1998] Three books in one. I had a feeling of being on a really bizarre acid
trip with Trout Fishing in America, felt the poems were
largely disposable and the lyric beauty of In Watermelon
Sugar absolutely captivated me. I may have to dig up some more
Brautigans.
The Aquitaine Progression by Robert Ludlum
[Finished 15 August 1998] A bit of brain candy. Too much of this book made no sense and seemed
like it was there just to incorporate another death in another
country. But I still couldn’t put it down. I hate that.
White Smoke: A Novel About the Next Papal Conclave by Andrew M. Greeley
[Finished 10 August 1998] My first Greeley novel. Quite a disappointment. It seems that Greeley
is incapable of creating characters who aren’t Andrew M. Greeley
himself. The central characters in the novel are all
interchangeable. There is barely a thing that one says that couldn’t
come out of the mouth of another. And the characters who aren’t Andrew
M. Greeley are so 2-dimensional as to be laughable. I’ve got a few
others on my list that were mentioned in other books that I’ve read,
and I’ll still read those, but it’s unlikely that I’ll add more to my
list if this is par for the course.
Granta 62: What Young Men Do
[Finished 3 July 1998] Delightful. One of the best Grantas yet. I especially liked the long
article on Indonesian headhunters.
The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath
[Finished 29 June 1998] What I didn’t know when I started reading this: Ted Hughes, who edited
this volume, was Sylvia Plath’s husband. A friend who is a big Sylvia
Plath fan told me this. What was interesting is that I, unfamiliar
with much more than the most basic biographical facts (poems, oven,
dead) was able to come up with a description of Hughes that matched
his view based on reading every scrap about Plath that’s ever been
published: In short Hughes is a bit of an egomaniacal bastard. He
talks about the meticulous care that Plath put into arranging her
poems for publication than proceeds to disregard this in this
collection and instead publish everything in chronological order.
Fortunately, the strength of the poems comes through. Great stuff, although I personally didn’t find it as depressing as my friend did. There’s a sort of quiet sadness that pervades many of the poems, but also a great beauty in that sadness.
Naked Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello
[Finished 30 May 1998] Some leftovers from college (the only assigned play in the book was
Six Characters in Search of an Author). In cases
Pirandello seems a bit too facile in his philosophical explorations,
although I think It is so! (if you think it is) is rather
successful indeed.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[Finished 22 May 1998] As a pretentious high school student, I read this book and completely
missed out on what it’s about. Coming back to it again, I find myself
shocked by how kind Raskolnikov is at times. The treacley
ending is a bit hard to swallow, but it’s truly a brilliant novel.
Last and First Men and Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
[Finished 15 May 1998] Histories of the future form an interesting genre. As prediction they
generally fail miserably, but as a philosophical exercise they are
quite interesting indeed. Stapledon was a philosopher and his two
novels (the first is a history of the future, the second an
exploration of other worlds) betray his philosophical concerns: He saw
humanity in the twentieth century as being in crisis, and on the verge
of self-destruction. He saw the solution as finding a balance between
individualism and communitarianism. Writing in the thirties, he is
clearly influenced by his times and the racism, sexism and
anti-Semitism (this latter, I think, only possible in persons like
Stapledon in the years before Hitler’s atrocities were revealed)
sometimes make the text hard to digest. Only when he gets some
distance away from contemporary humanity do these views manage to evaporate.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare with the Famous Temple Notes by William Shakespeare
[Finished 15 May 1998] Frankly, the Temple notes aren’t all that impressive. Also, it’s much
easier to watch Shakespeare than to read him. The more obscure plays
are leaving me quite in the dust (the typography of this edition is
also quite awful, which doesn’t help much). My big surprise was how
much I enjoyed the history plays. [Note the amazon.com link is to a
different edition. I can’t vouch for its typography or editorial
content.]
Granta 61: The Sea
[Finished 23 March 1998] A few gems and a bit of dreck, but as usual a good collection of
writing.
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges
[Finished 10 March 1998] Delightful. I’d never read any Borges before this, but I will
definitely read Borges again. I think that I’ll keep my eyes open for
the fiction in Spanish.
Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic by Terry Jones
[Finished 26 December 1997] If like me you’re puzzling over what “Douglas Adams’s Starship
Titanic A Novel by Terry Jones” could possibly mean, the answer
is revealed in the introduction. The Starship Titanic was a passing
reference in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy which
was recently made into a CD-ROM game under the direction of
Adams. Adams then asked Jones to write the novelization, and this book
does read an awful lot like a novelization of a CD-ROM game: An awful
lot of looking for lost artifacts and solving puzzles. At least Jones
doesn’t fall into some the facile linguistic games that Adams is so
fond of.
Granta 60: Unbelievable
[Finished 20 December 1997] A bit of a mixed bag, really. I could have lived without the Princess
Diana thing, although at least it was the “minority” view. The article
on Emma, though was spellbinding.
Nice Work by David Lodge
[Finished 27 November 1997] Lodge created a delightful satire of the world of academia, especially
the literature departments. Add in a near-perfect portrait of 80s
society and the fundamental philosophical question of meaning in life
and literature and we’re left with a fine book indeed. I haven’t
decided if the Dickensian ending spoils the book or is the only
possible postmodernist conclusion to the story.
The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy
[Finished 15 November 1997] Although it predates the drug and the book, this is in many ways a
good companion to Kramer’s Listening to Prozac
(below). As a work of fiction---I don’t know it struck me as being a
bit Crying of Lot 49 at times. Perhaps I’ll read some
other Percy and see if this is typical of his work.
The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck
[Finished 28 October 1997] After a rather slow start, the book picked up themes that were really
much better developed in the Winter of Our
Discontents. Some of the descriptions struck me as being a bit
clumsy as well.
The Castle by Franz Kafka
[Finished 23 October 1997] I first discovered Kafka through the comic strip “Kudzu” which had a
sequence in which Mr T was guest-hosting a Masterpiece Theatre
production of Metamorphosis. That was (yikes) fourteen
years ago. I haven’t been back to Kafka since that first reading of
Metamorphosis and really only have some general memories
of plot to work from for reference. The Castle is an
unfinished work and certainly that colors my perception of the
work. The underlying religious metaphor is a bit clumsy since it’s
difficult to conceive of the book as being anything but a religious
metaphor. It does seem, though, from the notes on omissions and
surviving fragments that the finished product would have been quite a
bit better indeed.
Granta 59: France--The Outsider
[Finished 16 October 1997] Not one of the better Grantas, I’m afraid. The “France”
content made up only about half of the book and it was a bit confusing
to find oneself out of France at that point. What’s more, the
non-French bits were some of the better ones.
I understand the French think that Jerry Lewis is a cinematic genius.
The Van by Roddy Doyle
[Finished 14 July 1997] The last of the Barrytown trilogy. Doyle is clearly a playwriter in
his prose styling, but the end result is quite excellent.
Harlequin by Morris West
[Finished 10 July 1997] West is probably the best of the Catholic novelists writing
today. This was the first of the non-overtly religious novels which
I’ve read and was pleasantly surprised to see the intelligent
discussion of religious questions carried into a secular narrative (as
it should be).
The Snapper by Roddy Doyle
[Finished 8 July 1997] My favorite of the Barrytown trilogy and the only one for which I have
not seen the film. I wonder if that’s just coincidence?
The Commitments by Roddy Doyle
[Finished 24 June 1997] A much better accounting of the interpersonal dynamics than was
present in the movie (but the movie sounded much better).
The Gospel According to the Son by Norman Mailer
[Finished 17 June 1997] Mailer manages to recast the gospels in a first-person psychological
novel form and avoid providing any new insights into the Gospel. He
doesn’t even come up with any facile blasphemies. This is
Norman Mailer? I’d never read any of his books before, but I’d
expected something a little more solid.
If you want to read a good novel about Jesus, pick up Kazantakis’ Last Temptation of Christ instead.
Granta 58: Ambition
[Finished 16 June 1997] When I renew my subscription, I’m buying two years. John Biguenet is
an American Catholic writer to watch for. I’m also going to keep my
eyes open for Paul Auster’s memoirs.
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[Finished 13 June 1997] One of four or five Dostoyevsky novels I picked up with the last of my
store credits at Huntley Bookstore before leaving Los Angeles. I
continue to be intrigued by the philosophical-intellectual situation
in late 19th c. Russia, but I have to admit to being somewhat baffled
by it still. It’s quite an alien culture, I think. And I’d like to
have a reference guide to help keep the characters straight in
Dostoyevsky.
Interviews with Spanish Writers by Marie-Lise Gazarian Gautier
[Finished 29 May 1997] You’d think maybe Gazarian Gautier’s interviewing skills would have
improved for the second volume in the series. You’d think wrong.
Interviews with Latin American Writers by Marie-Lise Gazarian Gautier
[Finished 28 May 1997] A present from a friend who was aware of my interest in Mexican
literature. The book is saved by the writers interviewed by Gazarian
Gautier. She herself is not really much of an interview and misses the
obvious follow-up questions.
Granta 17: While Waiting for a War
[Finished 23 May 1997] I bought this back issue expecting a bit more Graham Greene content
than I found. The remainder of the volume was a bit less coherent than
the first Granta that I read. I especially enjoyed the
pieces by Alice Munro and Marianne Wiggins. The “name” pieces were
uniformly weak.
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg
[Finished 29 April 1997] An incredibly jargon-laden work. Sadly, many of the contributors
really have nothing to say and spend a long time not saying it. On a
few occasions, however, some of the contributions really shine and
remind one that not all of academia is populated by mediocrity.
Notes from Underground; White Nights; The Dream of a Ridiculous Man; and Selections from the House of the Dead by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[Finished 18 April 1997] I’ve been reading a fair amount of Dostoyevsky (favorite of pretentious high
school students everywhere) lately and this particular collection is
especially nice as it shows quite clearly a progression in Dostoyevsky’s
thought. To what extent the progression has been manipulated by the editor, I
don’t know, but it is certainly quite revelatory.
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
[Finished 11 April 1997] There’s nothing to make one feel settled like a nice long Victorian
novel. And Eliot can be counted on to not only provide the novel, but
to include some subtle subversions in it as well. Daniel Deronda
doesn’t fail to satisfy on this front and is largely an interesting novel,
although some of the “Jewish bits” do seem forced.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[Finished 27 March 1997] My admiration for twentieth-century Latin American fiction continues
unabated. Garcia Marquez creates an interesting work on the
circularity of narrative with the theme reasserting itself in all
manner of subtle and fascinating ways.
Granta 57: India
[Finished 24 March 1997] I’m hooked. Granta will be filling the void left in my
reading material after Tina Brown ruined I mean took over The
New Yorker. (Damn it, I liked the four part articles
on zinc!)
My only complaint would be that there was too much short material in the magazine. I would rather have had fewer longer pieces.
English Morality Plays and Moral Interludes edited by Edgar T. Schell and J. D. Schuchter
[Finished 13 March 1997] Morality plays which were the dominant form of drama until the
Elizabethan era are an under-studied area of English literature. I
became fascinated with the whole concept when I read Bangert’s history
of the Jesuits which gave some considerable attention to the
continental forms of this type of drama and only now am I getting
around to this anthology which I managed to find (along with another
collection of Mediaeval religious dramas) shortly after reading
Bangert some five years ago. Unfortunately, I found the plays
themselves to be generally rather dull and uninteresting.
The Red and the Green by Iris Murdoch
[Finished 13 February 1997] This is the second historical novel in recent history that covered a
period of European history with which I have an inadequate
acquaintance. As a device for getting me interested in the period
leading up to Irish independence, it succeeded. As a novel, not so
much.
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[Finished 10 February 1997] I knew I had picked the right book to read at the beginning of my
(now-ended) stay in the community of the Catholic Worker when I
discovered that every other member of the community had read the book.
This is quite possibly Dostoyevsky’s best novel, an interesting
examination of the role of religion in society.
Antología de Cuentos Mexicanos I edited by Carmen Millan
[Finished 9 February 1997] Frequent visitors to this page (if such persons exist)
will know that I read volume 2 in 1995. Again, I find myself very
impressed with contemporary Mexican literature and interested in
pursuing it even further than I have in the past. I’ll definitely
re-read this.
Murther and Walking Spirits by Robertson Davies
[Finished 4 February 1997] Very much a failed narrative experiment. Davies was trying to do
something interesting here, I think, but he didn’t succeed.
The Lyre of Orpheus by Robertson Davies
[Finished 3 February 1997] I find myself wondering when I read a book like this, how much of it
the author is just making up, working on the assumption that his
readers will not know enough about the subject matter to realize that
it’s all bullshit.
What's Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies
[Finished 1 February 1997] Actually the best of the Cornish trilogy, I think, although that’s not
saying too much. The closing of the novel seemed a bit rushed, as if
Davies had realized that he already had his usual page count totalled
and he should wrap things up quickly. It’s a pity, because the novel
could have been much much more.
Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies
[Finished 28 January 1997] Very much what I would expect from Robertson Davies after reading the
Deptford Trilogy. The dual narrators, however, are poorly managed and
only a few too-rare moments reveal the full potential of the device.
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
[Finished 26 January 1997] This is, I think, the best of all Greene’s novels. It’s been a long
time since I’d read the book and my attempts to view the film in a
revival house in London failed because I was too jet-lagged to remain
awake in a dark room for the requisite 99 minutes. So I return to the
book. Rereading a book is a very different experience from reading a
book. It’s much like revisiting one’s home town as compared to being a
tourist, the terrain is familiar and one can focus on the details of
the landscape and discover the delightful things that were missed in
the broad view.
A Liar's Autobiography, Volume VI by Graham Chapman
[Finished 24 January 1997] I look back and I’m not entirely certain why I bought this book
originally. I guess I was looking for something funny and Chapman’s
book is sometimes funny (after all it was written by Graham Chapman
with assistance from Doug Adams, among others). And sometimes it’s
absolutely unreadable. At other times it’s a rather fascinating view
into Chapman’s character. The mix is not always good and I can see why
it was on the shelves of a used bookshop priced cheaply, but I suppose
the fun and interesting parts were worth slogging through the
unreadable bits and paying whatever I paid for this book.
Graham Greene: The Enemy Within by Michael Shelden
[Finished 20 January 1997] One of my authors asked me recently about whether I wanted footnotes
in a piece that he was writing. I told him that if he was making any
claims that people might dispute, he should footnote the hell out of
it. Michael Shelden doesn’t do this. His biography is full of
controversial claims but his critical apparatus is very weak. In fact,
one of his claims, that a gardener at an uncle’s home was a central
figure in his life, doesn’t seem to have any documented source at all.
If the claims were restricted to gardeners, this would not be an important detail, but Shelden makes an assortment of claims, identifying Greene as a homosexual, an antisemite, a closet fascist, and even insinuates that Greene was a murderer as well. Of all of these claims, only the antisemitism claim seems to have any merit and what merit there exists is for a weaker antisemitism than Shelden claims. The claim of homosexuality doesn’t jibe with Shelden’s own account of Greene’s life.
Perhaps most amusing is that while Shelden is eager to point out Greene’s fondness for deception, he doesn’t seem to acknowledge the possibility that he himself was being deceived.
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
[Finished 14 January 1997] People tend to get hung up on the macho aspects of Hemingway. The
hunting, the bullfights, the sex, the dynamite, the war, etc. But what
they miss with this approach to Hemingway is the exquisite use he
makes of language. I think he is perhaps somewhat superior to Anthony
Burgess, even, in that his experiments with language are much more
subtle than Burgess’. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, we get
the feel in the dialogue that we’re listening to the dialogue of
people whose language we’re not entirely comfortable with. Not just in
the qué va’s and thee’s and thou’s but in the idioms
(“How are thou called?”) that the characters use. And Hemingway does
an almost perfect job of dropping in and out of this as appropriate to
the context of the language. Wow.
Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope
[Finished 7 January 1997] So I’m reading this book and then, on page 481, disaster. It’s not
there! The binder screwed up and inserted the wrong signature at this
point. Fortunately, they had a replacement copy at the local B&N
(and didn’t even ask me if I had bought it there--I hadn’t) so I was
able to finish it without too much discomfort.
Graham Greene wrote in his introduction to The Lawless Roads about the pleasures of reading Trollope. I have to agree, it’s a comfortable world where things always work out well in the end and the journey along the way is pleasant enough.
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
[Finished 10 October 1996] Hardy can always be counted on to tell a good story. The Mayor
of Casterbridge is no exception on this front, but there are
some problems with the structure of the novel. There’s almost a
Job-like plague upon Michael Henchard where once things seem like they
might finally be settling down, something else pops up.
Lazarus by Morris West
[Finished 29 September 1996] The last of the books in West’s Papal “Trilogy.” I think that trying
to make a trilogy out of The Shoes of the Fisherman,
The Clowns of God and this book was a mistake. The
Clowns of God was really not written as a sequel to The
Shoes of the Fisherman and certainly doesn’t lend itself well
to a sequel such as this one. I think it might have been better to
have eliminated the gratuitous references to the two earlier novels
and to just let this novel stand on its own. That said, each of the
three novels is a remarkable portrait of the papacy in the times of
the writing of each novel (The Shoes of the Fisherman was
written ca 1960, The Clowns of God ca 1980 and
Lazarus ca 1990).
The Clowns of God by Morris West
[Finished 24 September 1996] A dull evening lead me to Borders and thence to a night spent reading.
This was the book that I bought and read. I’ve enjoyed West’s writing
and this was a fairly entertaining and moving book, although I think
that West was a bit out of his element with the apocalyptic dimension.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
[Finished 21 August 1996] I think that part of the reason why many people are disappointed in
this work is that their expectations are raised much too high by the
preface. The book itself is really quite well crafted and really quite
funny although from much of the comments lavished upon it, I suspect
readers go into it expecting Douglas Adams, which of course, they
won’t get.
I wonder if Karol Wojtla has ever read this book.
The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
[Finished 19 August 1996] Wow. This is a really amazing work. Not perfect, but awfully close.
I’ve long been interested in telling a story from multiple
perspectives and in the trilogy Davies does a very good job of
accomplishing this task. This is the first Davies I’ve read and I’m
looking forward to reading more.
A World I Never Made by James T. Farrell
[Finished 13 August 1996] When I read Studs Lonnigan back in 1991, I remember being
so impressed with Farrell that I ran out and bought every one of his
books that I could find. Reading this book, I’m still impressed with
his ability to manage the technicalities of literature, but I find
that his story is less compelling.
The Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris West
[Finished 8 August 1996] It seems that every year about this time I read another “Pope” novel.
In this case, West was remarkably prescient about coming changes to
the Catholic church and the papacy. In these days of the continuously
travelling John Paul II, it’s difficult to see the dramatic
impact of a single papal visit to France or of proposing that African
clergy might be exempted from learning Latin, yet even still, West
manages to convey the mood quite well.
From a Burning House: Writing from the AIDS Project Los Angeles Writers Workshop edited by Irene Borger
[Finished 3 August 1996] This book puts the lie to the first sentence of the next commentary.
(Fun part about reverse chronological order, eh?) I picked up this
book, also from a radio interview, in this case a local NPR interview
with Irene Borger who is the editor of the collection as well as the
leader of the APLA workshop. My interest in the book was twofold: First
to see what the individuals who were in the work shop would write and
second, I find works-in-progress (of which much of the work in this
collection could be classed) to be fascinating. On both counts the
book was successful. The contributions by Christopher Gorman and Ezra
Litwak were easily among my favorites and the beginning of the
unfinished novel, The Headless Boy on its own
demonstrates the great tragedy of AIDS---I would love to have had the
opportunity to read the rest of this work. Perhaps when I die...
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
[Finished 2 August 1996] It’s not often that I’m persuaded to read a book from a radio
interview but Hornsby’s interview with Terri Gross on Fresh
Air had me intrigued and I decided that I’d pick this up next
time I was in a bookstore. (That I was buying a new book was also an
unusual event).
The book itself was frequently laugh-out-loud funny and also insightful. It gets a bit soppy and juvenile (in a bad way) towards the end which is a pity, but it was well worth the time it took to read.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
[Finished 28 July 1996] Like most Americans I read The Great Gatsby. Correction:
I was assigned to read The Great Gatsby. After
reading this over the course of a weekend, I am certain that I never
actually read it when it was assigned.
Reading assigned to kids too immature to understand the works assigned is doubtless responsible for how little reading happens these days. The fact of the matter is that The Great Gatsby is a great book with wonderful characterization and some passages whose language is, well, perfectly crafted. I found myself wishing, on more than one occasion, that I had written some of this.
Love Among the Ruins by Evelyn Waugh
[Finished 18 June 1996] There are two contemporary English authors who I’ve read and collected
extensively: Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. My views of the world are
probably closest to Greene, but my own story is closer to Waugh’s.
What that means, if anything, I wouldn’t care to guess.
This book is perhaps the most explicitly political of Waugh’s fiction. He comes across, really, as nearly Newt Gingrich. He posits a world in the new future in which the State has been elevated to Godhood (in fact, his characters use interjections of clichés with the word “God” substituted with “State”, e.g., “State be with you.” It’s not really a surprise that this is not one of the novels available in a Little Brown paperback edition. Politics aside, it’s not a very good novel (although in reality it’s not much more than a long short story).
A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
[Finished 16 June 1996] For some reason, I had found myself wanting to get this book many
years ago when I use to buy books with the fervor of a hypomanic, but
I was never certain why. In all, I have to admit that I found the book
to be entertaining, but slight. Not quite up to the level of some of
my favorite Murdoch work (I’d have to say that I liked Henry and
Cato the best).
Fergus by Brian Moore
[Finished 13 June 1996] I had tired of the “hard” reading I’ve been tied up with of late, so I
took a quick novel break, reading this brief work by Brian Moore
nearly straight through. In a way, it’s a work similar to John Fowles’
Mantissa (see the archive), although in many ways it’s a
more successful book. It does lack an ending, but the process of
discovery in the novel is still quite pleasant.
A Sor Juana Anthology edited by Alexander S. Trueblood
[Finished 29 April 1996]
Sor Juana was a seventeenth century Mexican nun who was also a notable
poet. Unfortunately, this particular translation (by Trueblood) is
quite execrable. Translating poetry is dicey business at best and is
perhaps best handled with a literal translation and occasional
footnotes. Trueblood imposed rhymes where there were none in the
original and a rather jangling rhythm more appropriate for
twentieth-century Madison Avenue than seventeenth-century Mexico City.
His introduction also seems to distort some of Sor Juana’s attitudes
to meet his own ideology. Thankfully, the book also includes the poems in the original Spanish.
Words, Things and Celebrations by Wendell Stacey Johnson
[Finished 25 April 1996] A rather basic book on ideas about language. It was on my shelves, I
read it. The target audience is probably junior high or high school
students, so it’s a bit basic, but it also presents a rather novel
approach to the subject, giving “games” rather than exercises at the
end of each lesson.
Cecilia by Fanny Burney
[Finished 18 February 1996] It’s been a long time since I read Evelina and all I
remember was not much caring for that novel. Cecilia has
me thinking about picking it up again and giving it another spin.
Burney has hit upon the same vein as Chekhov did with Uncle
Vanya and it certainly is one to appeal to this reader.
Postscript to the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
[Finished 5 February 1996] An amazing little book. Eco chooses not to explain what he wrote
(consistent with his views on literary theory) but rather why he
wrote, an all too rare occurence. Occasional author’s autobiographies
move into this territory, but too infrequently, I think. Eco is one of
the more accessible of the contemporary theoreticians, and this is
certainly one of the more accessible of his works, not a bad introitus
to literary theory. I would, however recommend that students not use
this as Cliff’s notes when writing papers on The Name of the
Rose your professor will almost certainly know who you’re
cribbing from and judge you accordingly.
Aventuras de don Quijote by Miguel Cervantes
[Finished 4 February 1996] In Spanish, but in a condensed & heavily illustrated (one picture per
sentence, roughly) form. Not bad for someone like me whose Spanish is
good enough to read, but not good enough to read the original
(yet--it is on the libri legendi shelves). At times the editing is a
bit choppy---it seems that the intent of the editor had been to simply
condense the book, but to avoid any rewriting, but it’s still not a
bad effort. I may do a similar job on Tom Sawyer which I
feel is the American Don Quixote.
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
[Finished 24 January 1996] I first encountered this novel in the office of John Peavoy, a
literature prof at Scripps College. It was the largest Penguin
paperback I’d ever seen, roughly the size of the Chicago Metro Yellow
Pages. A few years later, I saw it in a Cambridge bookshop and bought
it for later reading. It’s finally come to the top of the stack,
nearly five years after I bought it and seven or eight after I first
saw it. I have a vague notion that this might be the longest novel in
the English language.
Samuel Johnson once said that anyone who read Clarissa for the plot would hang himself. This is true. It’s a remarkably slow-moving book, although it does have its rewards. After the first five- or six-hundred pages things pick up a bit and in the last five-hundred pages it’s hard to put down. The unfolding of plot is predictable, but still compelling. I’ll probably have to pick up Terry Eagleton’s The Rape of Clarissa now and read that.
Little Wilson and Big God by Anthony Burgess
[Finished 2 January 1996] It’s rare that I encounter a book in English that I need to read with
a dictionary handy. Anthony Burgess’ autobiography is the first book
which has forced this in quite a while. The life itself was rather
fascinating, covering primarily that portion of Burgess’ life before
he became a writer. This is the point in a writer’s life which is
interesting. After they settle into the task of actually writing,
their lives tend to become dull as dirt.
Mantissa by John Fowles
[Finished 25 December 1995] A novel about writing, nominally, although Fowles has perhaps gotten
to wrapped up in the eroticism of his nominal tale so while it has
it’s moments, this is largely a rather unsatisfying book on all
counts.
Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope
[Finished December 1995] The third book in the Barsetshire series, it, like most Trollope, is a
fun, light read. The ending is evident about one fifth of the way
through the book (Trollope tells us), but that’s not the fun of
Trollope anyway.
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
[Finished 18 November 1995] The first chapter of this book, was clearly written separately from
the remainder. The characterizations, especially of Owen Meany, the
narrator and the narrator’s grandmother all don’t really seem to be
the same characters as those persons by the same names we encounter in
the remainder of the book. As a humorist, Irving is outstanding and
this certainly is a funny book. The conclusion helps compensate for
some of the deficiencies of the text, but in all it’s a rather
imperfect novel, certainly not up to the level of Garp.
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
[Finished 10 November 1995] With a cover in Penguin’s own brand of Pantone 804 (although not a
Penguin), this book grabbed my eye at the library book sale. This
edition concludes with an embarrassingly shallow essay, which one
assumes was only included because of its provision of a Nadsat
glossary. I’m told that Burgess opposed this (most likely both for the
glossary and for the poor essay which is its companion).
Reading A Clockwork Orange was an experience much like reading the Mexican short stories of Antología de cuentos Mexicanos (see below), in that one is somewhat distanced from the text by not knowing what all the words mean, and occasionally misunderstanding the text itself. Should you, O my brother, find yourself reading this book for the first time, I urge you to eschew the glossary and just experience the text itself.
Getting past the superficialities of language itself, the novel, like the other Burgess that I’ve read (The Wanting Seed) is effectively an examination of a dilemma of Christian philosophy, in this one the matter of free will. In that, I think Burgess succeeded quite well where he had been somewhat clumsy in execution in The Wanting Seed.
This Side of Paris by F. Scott Fitzgerald
[Finished 6 November 1995] First novels have a certain quality that can never be regained no
matter how hard the author tries. The first novel encompasses a
lifetime’s experience in a way that can never be repeated, much as
one’s innocence can never be restored. This Side of
Paradise has all the autobiographical qualities one expects in
a first novel and it’s easy to see the promise of the young Fitzgerald
in its pages. The book concludes a bit too weakly and Amory Blaine’s
impromptu speech on socialism in the last chapter leaves much to be
desired, but in all, this was quite a satisfying read.
The Inheritors by William Golding
[Finished 4 November 1995] An intriguing experiment in expressing perspectives, I found. Golding
does an effective job of putting one in the head of neanderthal man,
and presenting the known (canoes, bow and arrow, etc.) as unknown. As
a story, I must admit that I preferred Lord of the Flies
and Darkness Visible.
Antología de Cuentos Mexicanos II edited by Carmen Millan
[Finished 1 November 1995] Yes, in Spanish. I must say
that I find twentieth century Mexican literature fascinating. I bought
this book in the spring of ‘92 while I was in the D.F. Unfortunately,
I’ve never managed to track down volume I. But then my library is
filled with many incomplete sets like this.
Reading an anthology of this sort when one is developing one’s language skills is incredible. One never quite becomes conscious of individual vocabularies until one reads an anthology of multiple authors whilst on the boundaries of literacy.
Of the authors I’ve read, I’ve enjoyed Sergio Galindo’s “Querido Jim” and I hope to be able to find some of his other works. Carlos Fuentes has been a big challenge and easily the densest of the writers. I may stick to reading Fuentes in translation (there’s no way in hell I’d’ve been able to read Christopher Unborn in Spanish). José Emilio Pacheco was another favorite. What looked like it might be difficult going turned out to be really rather compelling and an interesting read.
I’m putting this book back on the libri legendi shelves guaranteeing that I’ll reread it. Certainly my Spanish is much stronger now and I hope that after reading other works in Spanish, I’ll be in excellant shape to return to these stories.
The Winter of our Discontent by John Steinbeck
[Finished November 1995] Steinbeck is at his best when he avoids his tendency to allegorize
(e.g., Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men.
Alas, too many unimaginative high school English teachers have turned
off too many better-than-that high school students by sticking to the
allegory and skipping the good stuff. This is a particularly
fascinating novel with some of Steinbeck’s most inventive experiments
with narrative structures.
The Devil's Advocate by Morris West
[Finished November 1995] An interesting story about a priest’s journey into rural Italy to
investigate a reputed saint. Having read Woodward’s The Making
of Saints helped a bit in supplying background details, but it
wasn’t essential. West is easily one of the better writers dealing
with Catholic issues.
The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
[Finished November 1995] It’s interesting when one gets a sort of synchronicity of themes in
one’s reading, especially if one, like myself, has a somewhat
arbitrary method for selecting the next book to be read. In this
instance, I find myself hitting the same theme, approached in
radically different ways, in three consecutive books. In the end it
all comes down to Thoreau’s challenge: Simplify! Simplify! Which of
course is really just Jesus’ a man cannot serve two masters put in a
forceful American way. Materialism. It’s killing us all. I’m not much
better than most. I just have different household gods. Books, mostly.
The American Senator by Anthony Trollope
[Finished 19 October 1995] Trollope is one of the great underrated writers of the nineteenth
century. This particular novel, which from its title sounds as if it
might be a satire of American manners (a la the American scenes from
Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit), is in fact very little about
the title character and instead turns around two intertwined marriage
plots. The story reminds me the most, perhaps, of Trollope’s
Kept in the Dark. In any event, The American
Senator is pure Victorian potboiler and a good read.
Graham Greene: An Intimate Portrait by His Closest Friend and Confidant by Leopoldo Durán
[Finished 6 October 1995] Are there no editors anymore? After I’d sat down with the book for less than half an hour I found numerous items that any competent editor would have found, errors that are reminiscent of what happens if I write something at three in the morning and don’t check it again after getting a good nights’ sleep. I found similar problems in the Sherry bio. There is an interesting book here, but the final product lacks the touch that a good editor could have lent the work.
The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets edited by J. C. Squire
[Finished 3 October 1995] A friend majoring in English attempted to slip a course plan past her advisor which did not include any course in Shakespeare (her plan was rejected). Perhaps this anthology would appeal to her. The basic plan is to begin by excluding the best known poets of the English language along with anyone still living (then again, perhaps she wouldn’t like the anthology) and collect what’s left.
The Life of Graham Greene, Volume II: 1939-1955 by Norman Sherry
[Finished 24 September 1995] I’ve spotted on bookstore shelves recently three Graham Greene bios
(and of course have purchased each). The Sherry biography is perhaps
the most “respectable” of the three, being the authorized biography.
Despite the authorized label, however, it’s far from a whitewash,
particularly in this second volume. One wonders to what extent the
death of Greene in the interim between the publication of volumes I
and II is part of this. It was a fascinating read, taking me just
about a week to finish. There are a few places where it feels like
Sherry’s editor was lax and the organization is sometimes confusing in
the jumping about in the chronology.
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling
[Finished September 1995] Most prose on the internet is, quite frankly, crap. Anything
book-length tends to fall into one of two categories: Poorly HTMLized
texts in the public domain and works too bad to find a “real”
publisher.
The discovery of this book on the internet (and it’s available on paper as well), then was quite delightful and sucked several hours of my precious time while I read it. Since most of my non-fiction reading tends to not be of the mainstream variety, I often forget how captivating it can be (and ought to remind myself to bring some of this energy into my own writing). Definitely a gripping yarn, and while it will appeal to the computer geek, is not mired in technobabble. A definitely recommended read.
Hadrian VII by Frederick Rolfe (aka Baron Corvo)
[Finished August 1995] I first encountered this story in a radio drama on KCRW and decided to
start tracking down books by the author, a rather difficult process to
say the least. As the radio drama made more clear by calling the main
character Rolfe rather than Rose, this is a bit of self-fantasy about
the author’s being “rightfully” given his ordination as a priest and
later being named pope. If one can get past the rather dull
turn-of-the-century geopolitical diatribes, there’s an amazingly
prescient view of where the church did end up going half a century
later.
Graham Greene by John Spurling
[Finished August 1995] A rather cursory treatment of Greene’s work I find. I’ve not found
any Greene criticism which I particularly enjoyed. Whether the problem
is with Greene, contemporary criticism or myself, I don’t know.