Tales from Q School by John Feinstein

Tales from Q School: Inside Golf's Fifth Major is typical John Feinstein fare. Mind you, that's not a slight, the guy always writes good books and they stick to a formula. Feinstein takes a sporting event(s), a season, a conference, a team, and follows the action. In following the action, he draws out the human interest stories in ways that not many other writers can do (Buzz Bissinger is the only other one that comes to mind).

In this case, Feinstein looks at the PGA Tour's Qualifying School (or Q School). It's where those pro golfers trying to break on to the tour compete or those who didn't earn enough try to get back. Unlike most sports, there are no contracts. Golfers are on the Tour on their own merits. A bad season, and you have to qualify again.

What's particularly striking about Q School is that one putt, one drive, one iron shot, can all put you out of contention. You have to be amazingly consistent in order to thrive (and have nerves of steel). Yes, it's just a game, but a game that can put you into really good money if you qualify for the big tour.

Feinstein follows the success and failures of new and old players from all different stages of their golf careers. As usual, amazing stuff.

JPod by Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland is one of my favorite authors. His wit and style are just terrific. JPod is another in the Coupland line of fine books, but I worry that he might need to start spreading his wings a bit before he becomes a genre unto himself.

Anyhow, JPod is about Ethan Jarlewski and his co-workers in JPod who work for a computer game company in Vancouver. The book starts by Ethan getting an call from his mom at work and asking him to come over to her house. It's then that we find out that she has a marijuana growing operation in her basement (which Ethan knew all about). What was unexpected to Ethan is that his mom killed a biker in the basement. And, if you can believe it, the story just gets weirder from there. In a over-the-top Vonnegut-esque way, Coupland actually writes himself into the story. It's hard to tell if the Coupland in the book is the villain or the savior (which is kind of the point).

The best part of JPod, as in most Coupland books, is the dialog. The discussions between Ethan and his podmates capture a good deal of the inanity of working life and life in general in the 21st Century. It also shows how intelligent and creative people behave when put in a stifling environment. Another interesting thing Coupland does is with the formatting of the book. Interspersed with the story are chunks of seemingly random text (which are actually things you see everyday, whether it's on the web, on a box of staples, on the nutritional panel of a bag of Doritos, about 21 pages of pi out to a hundred thousand digits, etc.). This is actually perhaps the most interesting point of the book because it's stream-of-consciousness in a much more intriguing manner. It shows how we're victims of information overload in so many ways that just media saturation. He even makes it so that these everyday intrusions even interfere with that most single-minded pursuit, reading a book.

In all, a very good book, even by Coupland's lofty standards. I'd put it right up there with my favorites, Hey, Nostradamus and Miss Wyoming. Much, much better than his previous book, Eleanor Rigby.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Where to begin? This book is epic in scale and tale. It takes place over 50ish years of Indian history, from the late colonial period, through the partition of Pakistan, Indian independence, Indo-Pakistani war, war between East and West Pakistan, and through the "Emergency" of Indira Gandhi in the 1970s. The story takes place all over the subcontinent, from Bombay to Karachi to Kashmir, and many, many other places. Further, the cast of characters is enormous. Just a few from memory: Saleem Sinai, Parvati-the-witch, Amina Sinai, Mary Pereira, Alice Pereira, Ahmed Sinai, Picture Singh, Mian Abdullah, Padma, William Methwold, Aadam Aziz, Naseem Aziz, Hanif Aziz, Jamila (Sinai) Singer (aka The Brass Monkey), General Zulfikar, Shiva, Wee Willie Winkie, Tai the boatman, Pia Aziz, Nussie-the-duck, Eyeslice, Hairoil, Cyrus-the-great, Evie Burns, Glandy Keith, Commander Sabarmarti...need I go on? There are many more and frankly, it's difficult to keep them straight. However, to Rushdie's credit, there seems to be a purpose to all of the characters.

Essentially, it is the story of Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the precise moment when India threw off the yoke of British colonial rule. But, as you can tell from the above, it's much more than that. Saleem's struggles are a microcosm of the struggles of the new nation. It's also a story of the role of the individual in history, in a family (and does nature or nurture make a family?), and in a nation. It's also a story of colonialism and post-colonialism. A story of a multicultural, multiethnic, and multilinguistic culture. So, you have all that, then throw in some magical realism: Saleem is a telepath with a preternatural sense of smell. So, in short, the book is extremely complicated, but also extremely rewarding.

Book One is the backstory of Saleem's family. Book Two is Saleem's and India's coming of age story. Book Three marks then end of the power of Midnight's Children and hands it off to a new generation. This is paralleled in India with the repressive measures of Indira Gandhi's Emergency. How to tell more without giving anything away? It's probably impossible, so I won't try to tell any more, other than that it's just a wonderful book.

Rushdie's writing is exceptional and his dropping of breadcrumbs to keep the reader interested in what's coming next is just amazing. He does this without patronizing the reader's intelligence, but certainly stokes the reader's curiosity to turn the pages to find the resolution to all these threads of the story. Rushdie is a master weaver of tales.

I learned so much about India and it's peoples (from the lowest to the highest) from this book. I realize it's historical fiction, but even having read Kim earlier in the year, I never realized what a vibrant multi-cultural jumble India is. It's certainly whetted my appetite to learn more.

Midnight's Children ranks in the top three of the books I read on my list this year. I would find it hard to rank it better or worse than Beloved or The Naked and the Dead, but that's lofty company to be in.

The Eight Books I Didn't Get To

Well, I knocked off 29 of the 37. Not bad. Not what I was hoping for, but not bad. I didn't get to the following books:

1. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
2. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
3. Don Quixote by Cervantes
4. The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
5. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
6. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
7. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
8. Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson

I'll probably get around to Bellow, Dumas, and McPherson eventually. It seems like I've been meaning to read Schlesinger for over a decade, so I think he's done for.

Other books I read when I should have been reading books on the list:

1. Quirkology by Richard Wiseman
2. I Am America (And So Can You) by Stephen Colbert
3. Kill Your Idols by Jim DeRogatis, ed.
4. I Have Fun Everywhere I Go by Mike Edison
5. The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth
6. Generation Kill by Evan Wright
7. When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
8. The Librarian by Larry Beinhart

So 37 books so far this year. Way behind last year's total of 53, but a good deal ahead of 2006's shameful 33 and right on par with 2005's 37.

Finished Midnight's Children Last Night

I finally finished Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie last night. I'm not sure when I'll have the review up, because it's a complicated book and I'd like to do it justice (though I'm sure I won't).

In other news, I believe I'm ending the 37 book project a little early. While I'm glad for the books I've read this year that I would have never read otherwise, it's obvious that I won't finish by the end of the year. Ok, also, I tried to start reading Robinson Crusoe yesterday and that early 18th century writing pissed me off. I've got a long list of things I want to read that have accumulated through the year and I want to have fun reading during the holidays.

Though don't despair, dear readers, as I've had a lot of fun doing this blog, so I'm going to keep it up for my other readings. (that is, of course, if any of you are still reading this blog).

So stay tuned for the review of Midnight's Children and a reflection on this project.

Getting There

Again, just let me say that Midnight's Children is a phenomenal book. But it's pretty dense and confusing at times with a large cast of characters. However, that isn't the problem...the problem is getting me to sit down and read these days. Arrrrggggh. Anywho, I'm getting close.

You would think...

You would think that you could get a lot of reading done whilst recovering from a minor surgery. Not true. Pain medicine makes me groggy and unable to concentrate.

You would think that you would be able to get a lot of reading done whilst sitting around the hospital for several days while a family member is recovering. Not true. Stress apparently damages my ability to recall anything I read. Stress apparently makes me really good at crossword puzzles though.

Reading Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

This book is pretty great, but I can't say why. The plot isn't really even developed yet, just backstory through 100 plus pages. I guess I just appreciate the writing. It's just so friggin' good. I know every writer works hard at his/her craft, but you can see the raw talent oozing out of these pages.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Frankly, the book isn't as good as I recalled. I'd say it was ok, but a little heavy-handed. But then again, it's probably good to remember that it set the stage for other "thin veneer of civilization" books.

On the face of it, Lord of the Flies is about a group of English schoolboys whose plane crashes (shot down during the war?) into a deserted island, killing all the adults. The story then moves to how the boys (early teens and younger) will survive (if at all) until they're rescued (if at all). Originally the boys all vote Ralph into a leadership position and he decides that keeping a signal fire is the most important thing. Ralph is advised by the fat and bespectacled Piggy (who is always for keeping the old order of civilization) Jack is never at ease with Ralph being the chief but accepts being the leader of the hunters. Then things start to fall apart. The hunters let the fire go out, then the hunters break off into their own group, and finally the hunters take over and descend into abject savagery.

The descent into savagery is brought on by fear of "the beast." The smaller children (littluns) believe early on that there is a beast on the island who is out to get them all. This fear begins to prey on the older boys when, in searching the island for the beast, they find, in the twilight, a dead pilot suspended in a tree by his parachute. In the darkness, he looks very much to them like a winged beast. From there the fear ramps up and Jack's hunters, after killing a sow, leave its head on a spear as an offering to the beast. Simon, an older boy aligned with Jack and Piggy, was hiding in the jungle near the clearing where the hunters spiked the pig head. While watching the flies surround the pig head, Simon slips into a hallucination where the sow's head speaks to him as the "Lord of the Flies" (Satan). The Lord of the Flies tells Simon that there is no beast, but rather the beast (the Lord of the Flies) is within each of the boys; that fear and savagery is the beast. Simon is unable to tell this to the boys, as Jack's tribe is in a ritualistic dancing frenzy when Simon arrives and they mistake him for the beast.

So in all, the book tells that man, left to himself, will fall back to primitivism. Order and government are fragile (symbolized by the conch shell used by Ralph to maintain order in meetings) and that the seeds of evil are within all of us.

The book reminded me, in some ways, of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian which I read earlier this year. However, McCarthy is a much better writer than Golding. Lord of the Flies does make some important points, but it seems that it is indeed a book better read by an adolescent.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

I really should have finished this novel a lot sooner than I did. I just didn't have much time to sit down and read over the last few weeks. Rabbit, Run by John Updike is a compelling read, a real page-turner, which is odd for a book that is largely a character study.

Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is a young man in his mid-20s with a pregnant wife and a 2 year-old child. Harry was a high school basketball star and he doesn't adjust well from moving from the spotlight of the basketball court to being an average guy leading an average life. Rabbit feels trapped in his life and decides, rather on the spur of the moment, to leave his rapidly-turning-alcoholic wife. He has a 3 month affair with a non-classic prostitute, then returns to his wife on the night she's giving birth to their daughter. In the interim, we learn of the difficulties of the families Rabbit has run away from. After a short time at home, Rabbit leaves again after his wife (fairly fresh from giving birth) won't have sex with him. This sends her into an amazingly written alcoholic fog the next day...and the worst happens. Rabbit rejoins the family, and yet runs again at the end of the novel...though we have no idea of to where.

I now understand why John Updike can be such a jerk when he's writing book reviews. He's got the chops to back it up. It ain't braggin' if you're this good. I wish James Joyce would have lived long enough to read this book. It shows that you can do stream of consciousness-esque writing for short periods without it reading like a gimmick. Janice Springer's alcohol-fueled day after Harry's second leaving...you're in her head. Updike does an amazing job of making you feel some sort of empathy for all of the characters in the book...and some distaste for many of them too. It's a foggy world and people are trying to get by. They may not be doing their best (many of them seem to be driven by lust), but you understand some of why they feel the way they do. Rabbit, Run is a heart-breaking and amazing book about the drudgery and ordinariness middle-class life and how one person's rash actions can have a ripple effect on many other lives.

Back on Track

Started Rabbit, Run by John Updike tonight.

Off Track Again

I'm sidetracked again. Not much time to read recently and what time I do have, I'm reading The Librarian by Larry Beifurt which is a really good political thriller (funny too) that's perfect reading for a librarian during an election year.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Ok, I had to take a short break from reading on the list because James Joyce was making me hate this project. But I'm back and avast, me hearties, I'm better than ever!

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson is a gem of a book. While probably considered children's literature, it still makes for a ripping good tale. Written in the later part of the 19th Century, it isn't as "modern" as most of the other books on the list, but it doesn't really suffer much for that. In fact, after reading Joyce, straightforward prose was an absolute blessing to my eyes.

Treasure Island is the story of a young lad, Jim Hawkins, who works at his family's inn. Due to bizarre circumstance, Jim comes across a map to buried pirate treasure. Sharing this information with the most trustworthy members of his community, Squire Trelawny and Dr. Livesay, the get together a crew to set sail for the tropical island where the treasure is buried. The man they hire as cook is a peg-legged seaman who goes by the name of Long John Silver. Silver, of course, is a pirate who eventually leads a mutiny. I won't say much more about the story itself, but of course, our lad Jim Hawkins is the hero and the mutiny eventually fails (but you all knew that, didn't you?).

Treasure Island is such a good book because its characters and locations are so exceptionally good. In fact, they're so good many have become archetypes. Long John Silver is the model pirate, equipped with a peg leg, a parrot on his shoulder, and a boatload of pirate phrases like "shiver me timbers." The desert island where there's buried treasure...another archetype. This is the very model for an adventure story.

I did have one problem with the narrative however. The book is told from Jim Hawkins's perspective through almost the entire book. Two chapters are told from the doctor's point of view in order to explain how some things came about while Jim was off gallivanting. I think Stevenson was clever enough that he could (and should) have found a better way to fill in that part of the story without having to resort to a rather jarring shift of perspective.

My final thought on the book is that while Jim Hawkins is the hero, Silver is far and away the most interesting character and really what makes the book more than just an adventure story. Long John is a bright, devious, and cunning man. He's always on the lookout for what serves his best advantage and make him either rich or away from the gallows. In some aspects he's heroic and in others he's the blackest villain you're likely to come across. The complexity of the character (and "bigness" of character) of Long John Silver are really what move Treasure Island into the category of classic literature.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

I finally finished this book last Wednesday. I've been thinking about what to write ever since then. It should be short and simple: don't waste your precious time reading this book. Yes, I understand that the book was important in changing the structure of the novel and being among the first to experiment with stream-of-consciousness narration. However that makes this book valuable in an historical sense, and thus of value to English Lit grad students, but to a general reader, I don't think there's much here to be concerned with.

Stephen Dedalus is the main character of the book (and a thinly veiled alter ego of James Joyce himself). Born into a decent family, his father spends the family into penury over the years. Stephen goes to a Catholic boarding school run by the Jesuits, but then the family can't afford to send him any longer. So then he goes a day school run by the Christian Brothers. During all this, Stephen's story is surrounded by the Irish national politics of the day (mainly independence from England). And while I'm very interested in the history of Irish nationalism, Joyce makes it unintelligible and uninteresting. Stephen is a very religious boy, but during his adolescence he's led to discover the temptations of the flesh and has his first sexual encounter with a prostitute. He also engages in other "sinful" activities and is shamed by them but he enjoys them too much to give them up. Then he goes on a church retreat and Joyce goes on a rampage. Twelve or so pages describing Hell and the punishments for sinners. At this Stephen reverts to his pious ways. So much so, one of the Jesuits asks him to consider joining the order. Stephen declines and goes off to college. There he learns that beauty is worth pursuing for its own sake. And thus he must leave the religious and political shackles of his homeland to make good in his study of beauty.

That's the story. Basically a coming of age story that could have been told in a hundred or so pages. Instead, expressing contempt for his readers the entire time, Joyce makes the book twice as long as it needs to be. Further, Stephen isn't even a particularly likeable character. He's a shy kid who turns into a stuffy zealot and then into an insufferable prat in college. Ok Stephen, you've read Aquinas and Aristotle, that doesn't mean that you have some tremendously developed philosophy of beauty and aesthetics.

The book could have been greatly improved if someone had introduced Joyce to the period. His sentences, even the ones that aren't stream of consciousness based, tend to run on and on. I'm not saying he needed to be Hemingway or that I don't enjoy a challenge. What I'm saying is, bunches of four and five line sentences are taxing on the reader and take away from plot and character development just so you can show off that you can construct a fancy sentence. Just for fun, I went back to the 9th grade tool of trying to diagram a complex sentence of Joyce's. I assure you that unless you're a 9th grade English teacher who's well versed in diagramming, it can't be done. It's possible it can't even be done then. It's a shame because there are flashes of descriptive brilliance in the novel.

Simply put, I detested this book because I believe the writer didn't care about his readers. He was more interested in gimmickry and showing off his skills with the language. It doesn't make for a good read.

Still Stuck

James Joyce makes me hate words.

Not Re-Joyce-ing

I'm going to come out and say it right now: James Joyce sucks. Highly over-rated, bombastic, beat-you-over-the-head crap. I powered through about 40 more pages last night in an effort of supreme will. About a dozen or more of those pages were given over to describing Hell. Ok, I get it. And I get that you're showing how Stephen became afraid of the sins of the flesh because he didn't want to go to hell. I think four pages would have more than sufficed. Sheesh.

James Joyce Is Tough to Read

I'm slogging through Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Not only is it difficult to read, I'm also not really interested in the character and the story. Ugh.

What's Left on the List

1. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
2. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (currently reading)
3. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
4. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
5. Don Quixote by Cervantes
6. The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
7. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
8. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
9. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
10. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
11. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
12. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
13. A Book to be Named Later by an Author to Be Named Later

I'm pretty sure I'm going to eliminate the Neil Postman book. I'm also pretty sure that I'm going to add Barbara Tuchmans The Guns of August to the list. I tried to read it a few years ago and it didn't take, but as it's considered such a wonderful work and as I consider WWI to be fundamental to understanding the 20th C., I think I need to give it another shot.

I need to finish this list up. My "to be read" list of books in LibraryThing has cracked 100!

Night by Elie Wiesel

Night by Elie Wiesel is the Nobel Peace Prize-winning personal account of his time in the Nazi concentration camps as an adolescent. It is a very short book, but immensely powerful.

As with most talk of the Holocaust, no matter what I write here can begin to capture the horror of those terrible times. Every word seems to be an insufficient testament to man's basic inhumanity. Perhaps what I find more terrifying than "just" the killing, was the methodical and precise (though often arbitrary) way the genocide was carried out by the Nazis. This wasn't just knee-jerk killings in the streets due to anti-Semitism. This was well-thought out, planned, and executed government policy. It beggars the imagination.

What struck me most about Night was the spareness of its language (in English translation). No punches were pulled, no unnecessary prose was used. The story was as bare as the experience. Everything is stripped away. There is no time for extra words. Extra words are an unaffordable luxury. One must tell the story. One must bear witness. Perhaps the strongest contribution of Night was that it inspired other Holocaust survivors to tell their stories, so that we never forget what happened in those camps.

Wiesel lived in the Transylvania region of Hungary. Things went along fine for his town during the war until 1944. That's when the Nazis showed up in Budapest and the "evacuation" of those Jews began. First they were forced from their homes into ghettoes and then loaded into cattle cars and shipped like so much cargo to the concentration camps. Wiesel and his father were separated from his mother and sister at Birkenau. He and his father were then marched to Auschwitz. I have to stop here and say that the writing on the gate of Auschwitz (and the facsimile of the gate at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) is one of the things that angers me most in the world. Arbeit Macht Frei (work will make you free). The most cynical words ever set into form. There was no chance, no prayer, no way that work would make these inmates free. It was a lie on a colossal scale. I'm grinding my teeth now just typing this. I don't know how I could have dealt with seeing it as an inmate. Frankly, I probably couldn't have afforded the anger.

Wiesel goes on to describe how life in the camp became nothing but a quest for survival. He even, in his mind, abandoned his filial duties. His life revolved around how to avoid the blows of the guards, how to get food and water, how to get sleep, and how to avoid illness. The bleakest, sparest existence possible.

Finally, Wiesel was liberated from the Buchenwald camp. The Nazis fled after inmate resistance late in the war. American troops arrived the next day. Wiesel's father had alread died.

Night is a tremendously powerful book. Like many other Holocaust survivor stories, it should be required reading. We cannot forget what happened and we are bound to do our best to prevent anything like it from happening again.

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Down and Out in Paris and London is a barely fictionalized account of Orwell's experiences in poverty in both of those locations in the early 1930s. Sadly, it doesn't appear that conditions have improved much for the poor over the last 70 or 80 years.

Orwell starts the book by relating his life as a renter in a Parisian slum. It wasn't much of a room, but at least he had some privacy. His daily practice involved looking for work, trying to find money to get his daily tea and daily meal, and trying to fend off boredom. Chronicled here are the scams that the poor can fall victim to, such as promises of employment if one pays a subscription fee up front, or a start-up restauranteur telling you that you'll begin work tomorrow...and then the restaurant doesn't open for another month. Much of the time Orwell has to head to the pawn shop and take what he can get for anything he can sell...including his clothes. Hunger is constantly nipping at his heels. It's a joy when he can afford more than just bread.

Later, when Orwell does find work along with his friend Boris, he describes the subterranean 18 hour days of a plongeur, which is a position that is lowlier even that just dishwashing. This isn't to say that most of the restaurant workers are well off...but the plongeur is simply the worst of the lot. Finally, Orwell heads back home to England with the promise of work caring for a developmentally disabled person.

But of course, when he arrives in London, the child and the parents have gone abroad for a month, so Orwell is left penniless again. He is able to get a tiny loan from a friend, but two pounds doesn't stretch over a month. Now we're introduced to the life of a tramp in England. The situation here seems quite worse. The French seem to ignore their poor, where the English seem quite hostile to this same group. The daily routine here was to find shelter for the night. Common lodging houses were set up by the government and by charities. The cost of lodging was minimal, but often much more than a tramp could afford. What's worse, often the tramps were locked in for the night and their clothes were confiscated until the morning. On can only assume that this was to prevent them from going out and "terrorizing" the neighborhoods in the night. (Orwell notes extensively that tramps might be extremely petty theives, but they're also a broken-spirited lot who, due to poor nutrition among other things, don't have the energy or the inclination to go out raping and pillaging. They're happy just to have a roof over their heads). Another rule of the common houses is that you can't stay at the same one on consecutive nights (I think it might have even been a month between stays). This kept the tramps on the move.

Orwell concludes the book by enumerating the problems of the tramp: that he is a tramp by circumstance, not by inherent flaw; celibacy, because women generally don't fall to the level of tramp-dom; enforced idleness, which is a torture to a thinking being; and general physical discomfort (such as hunger, lack of sleep, and various maladies brought on by malnutrition). He closes by saying that the government should let them stay in one place and grow their own food. It would provide better for the men and it would save the government trouble.

Down and Out in Paris and London is quite a good book. No doubt this is because Orwell was one of the premier writers of the 20th century. But he also went out and lived this life. Educated, with connections, he probably could have made better at this early point in his life. But he lets his readers know about the lives of the indigent. I believe this is the book Barbara Ehrenreich was trying to re-write when she wrote Nickled and Dimed. However, she's not half the writer Orwell was and she's more than twice as preachy. But that's an aside. Orwell gives us pause to think about the poor...not to fear them or ignore them, but to actually consider their situations. It seems like it's well past time we do so.

Getting close to finishing another

I'm close to finishing George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. I'm planning on finishing it tonight after work while watching the first game of the new NFL season.

15 to go and not much time left in the year

22 books down and 15 to go on the list. I've still got a solid 4 months in the calendar year, but with football season arriving, who knows how that might chew into my reading time. No worse than Big Brother or Survivor, I assume. Some calculations:

59% of the list completed, 41% remaining to be read

126 days left in the calendar year

I'll finish at the end of the calendar year if I read a book every 8.4 days

I started reading for the project 220 days ago.

Given that I finished Beloved on day 218, I'm averaging one book every 9.9 days

If I keep reading at my pace thus far, I'll be finished with the project in 148.5 days which is mid-day on January 29th, 2009. Which actually wouldn't be too bad for having started on January 20, 2008.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Beloved is, simply put, one of the most powerful books I've ever read. Nominally the story of an ante-bellum woman's escape from slavery to supposed safety in free Ohio, Beloved is much more than that. In fact, while I was moved by the story, I was more taken by the world surrounding the story. I'm not sure I'm explaining this correctly, but to boil it down, Beloved brought home the horrors of slavery to me more than anything else I've ever read or seen. And frankly, I've read widely in the history of the era.

In this book, Toni Morrison hits the reader at a very visceral level with the physical trauma, psychological terror, and socio-political corruption of the slavery era. Not only is the physical damage of floggings and beatings (not to mention casual rapes) brought to your doorstep, but you, the reader, are forced to understand the psychological damage done to slaves. You realize what privations a runaway slave would endure to get to the "free" north. And then you understand at a very basic level what the Fugitive Slave Act was really all about and that the idea of "freedom" for blacks in the north was, at best, a very shaky proposition. You also come to learn what lengths a person would go to in order to preserve that freedom for one's family.

Morrison did several other interesting things in this book. Her take on love (man/woman, maternal, familial) in the context of these peoples lives is very intriguing. How much can one afford to love when one is a slave and your love might be torn from you at a master's whim? She also toyed with several classic notions of death, ghosts, and the spirit world in addition to a type of modified Christianity. Among the more obvious ones were death as a bridge to the afterworld and having to cross a river to get to (or back from) that afterworld.

Another aspect of the book I enjoyed was the occasional shift in point-of-view. It didn't happen too often, but when it did, it was very revealing of the characters, their inter-relations, and the wider world. It gave more weight to certain things than the exposition of the third person narrator would have.

Beloved is one of the most thought-provoking, horrifying, insightful, painful, and best books I've ever read. I shudder to think of the amount of research Morrison did in writing this book and I shudder even worse to think about how much it must have hurt to have written it which essentially meant having to have led the lives of her characters.

Olympic Slowdown

The Beijing Games are slowing down my reading. In fact, it's down to a glacial pace because I can't tear myself away from the TV or computer to get any reading done. It's a shame too, because I'm reading Beloved by Toni Morrison, which I totally expected to dislike and which is actually most excellent.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Let me start by acknowledging a few things. First, I love me some dystopian fiction. So going in, I'm obviously biased in favor of this book. Second, I'm still a bit shocked I didn't read this book earlier in my life. It's the kind of book I've always enjoyed. Enough with the disclaimers, on to the book.

Brave New World was published in 1932 and is an obvious reaction to the rise of fascism and totalitarian communism in Europe and Russia. Huxley shows us a "civilization" that exists solely for its own stability. Essential human constructs and behaviors, such as family and love, are completely subjugated for the greater good of the civilization's stability. The civilization of BNW is a one-world government run by a council of controllers. This government was formed in the aftermath of the Nine Years War which devastated humanity with mass killing and unrestrained use of horrible weapons such as anthrax bombs (clearly an allusion to the destruction wreaked by WWI). As a reaction, people sought a way to eliminate future wars and were willing to make the compromises necessary to bring about permanent stability. While most of the world is civilized, there are still areas (quite like Indian reservations) that are home to the "Savages."

A key compromise to ensuring stability of the civilization is to eliminate history. Other than referencing the horrors of the Nine Years War, all other history is swept clean, along with the art and literature of those time periods. This ensures that the populace doesn't aspire to anything that their ancestors had and provides no models for alternative ways of living.

One of the most important parts of the book (and most disturbing to many) involves the creation and rearing of children. Since Henry Ford is the godhead of the civilization, everything is modeled around mass production. So it is with the embryos. Eggs are harvested from women and then artificially inseminated and essentially grown in a bottle. This isn't done willy-nilly, however, because that wouldn't be good for stability. The embryos are carefully created to conform to one of five castes: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. Not only are the sperm and egg chosen for this purpose, but the nutrients (or lack thereof) and other chemicals that are put in the bottle with the embryo are all carefully calibrated to create an infant of the proper caste. After the infant is "decanted," it's then placed in a collective hatchery with others from its caste. The infants and children are then raised and conditioned to have the likes and dislikes of appropriate to their social group. No mothers, no fathers, no brothers or sisters...just your social group.

As with many pieces of dystopian literature, the characters are more cardboard cut-outs than in your "usual" fiction. The characters are there to explain the nature of the dystopia and its problems and to move the story along. In BNW, our main characters are Bernard Marx, Lenina Crowne, Helmholtz Watson, Mustapha Mond, and The Savage. Marx and Watson mark two of the discontents of the society, Lenina is a traditionalist of the civilization, Mond is a world controller, and The Savage shows us how a more "normal" human would behave in the milieu of BNW. Again, the arc of these characters isn't horribly important except as devices to illuminate various facets of the society.

For such a modestly-sized book there's a lot more that I could discuss. I could go on at length about the usee of casual sex and sedative hallucinogens to keep the masses from rising up, along with several other aspects of the book, but I figure I'll wrap up here. Brave New World is an excellent work that describes what could happen if follow blindly along one path. It also reminds us that we should question the choices that our leaders and our societies make. Further, we should question what sacrifices we're willing to make to keep our basic humanity. In many ways it's shocking that this book was written well before the outbreak of World War II, for so much was anticipated by Huxley (Hitler's eugenics program, easy transatlantic travel, several other things). Though it isn't quite up to par with the masterwork that is Orwell's 1984, Brave New World is an incredibly good book that is still quite relevant to today's reader.

A Reflection on My Reading Habits

I realized last night as I was reading a bit of Brave New World, that my reading habit or style is starting to annoy me. I now realize that I'll jump right in and knock out the first 60 to 100 pages of a book really quickly. And then I'll drop down to do like 15 pages or so at a sitting for a while until I'm done.

I don't think it's a symptom of a short attention span, but I think I get into a book and get a feel for the atmosphere, the characters, and the writing and then I get bored with it on an unconscious level.

Ah, who knows? I annoy myself on so many levels that this is really something minor. But it's related to the "Errand," so I figured I'd post this confession here.

On The Road by Jack Kerouac

Finished reading Jack Kerouac's On the Road on Saturday. I have to go in saying that I fully expected to hate this book. Given all the hype and adulation from the hippy-dippy crowd over the years, I expected something much more, um, how to put this nicely, "drugs-are-freakin'-awesome-dude!" And while there was some of that, it wasn't the whole point of the book, though it was important.

As many folks know, On the Road, is about Kerouac's adventures with several of his other "Beat Generation" friends. All are very scantily veiled under pseudonyms, and apparently it didn't take a genius to figure out which character was which person. William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg are among the luminaries represented in the book. Most prominent however is Neal Cassady in the guise of Dean Moriarty. The book is largely about how Cassady lived and thought in the late 1940s.

Kerouac's novel revolves around four road trips he took in 1947 to some indeterminate time before 1950. Through hitch-hiking, buses, shared cars, friends cars, and if I recall correctly, even a train, Kerouac (Sal Paradise in the book) made his way throughout the U.S.A. He recalls the rides he got, the rides he didn't get, and the blow-out parties he had with his friends in Denver, San Francisco, and elsewhere. Booze, marijuana (and other drugs), easy sex, all set to a jazz soundtrack made up most of the good times in the book. He lived a bohemian lifestyle and largely enjoyed it. He grooved on the free-thinking philosopy, poetry, and writing of his friends. But more than anything, he talks about his adulation for Dean Moriarty (as mentioned, the real-life Neal Cassady). Cassady was, it would appear, a totally free-spirit and Kerouac worshipped him for it. I, on the other hand, would characterize Moriarty-Cassady as a total, complete, and unredeemable douchebag. No other term could express how much of a jerk this guy was. He stole, connived, conned, used, abused, and generally mistreated everyone he ever met. All of this because the man was seemingly completely self-centered and self-absorbed and always in the pursuit of a good time (only under what I would call a phantom pursuit of experiencing the world in a philosophic way). I really and truly wished at times I could reach through the pages of the book and punch him repeatedly in the face. Did I mention repeatedly? Maybe a few good kickings after that.

What was good about the book? Kerouac's style. He supposedly wrote the book in just three weeks (but apparently put a lot of groundwork together beforehand), but the novel doesn't read like it needs editing. It's well-crafted and not at all choppy. It's not a difficult read and more importantly, the book flows like a good road trip should. Movement, ever forward, ever onward. The book did awaken a nostalgia for the good old days of college and my early 20s. Yeah, it sucked to be broke, but we could go and have a blast of a time and not really care what anyone else thought. Especially on a road trip. But, unlike Dean Moriarty, we all have to grow up sometime and catch our good times where we can.

On the Road inspired many other writers and artists. And since the travelogue is one of my favorite genres, I have to give him a lot of credit for this. Perhaps I wasn't inspired by it because I don't have the soul of a bohemian artist. I just wish he would have concentrated less on Moriarty and more on the people he met on the road, like Terry, the Mexican woman he fell in love with while they were riding on a bus together. More vignettes like that (and given the extent of his travels, I'm sure there were many more) and less of the insufferable Moriarty would have moved this book up into the "very good" category for me. As it is, I'd have to just call it OK. I don't even know that I can bring myself to call it good despite the quality of the writing. In closing, did I mention that I hate the character of Dean Moriarty?

The Naked and The Dead

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer is a massive book about the invasion of a Pacific island by American troops in World War II. Despite the size of the book, Mailer proves to be quite adept at moving the story along (even though it took me forever to finish the book...I actually finished a few days ago).

The book focuses on one particular platoon, which is nominally led by Sergeant Croft. At times the story broadens out to examine the commanding general, Cummings, and his staff of officers. But Croft's platoon, the grunts, are the main characters in the book. And boy are there a lot of characters. Too many perhaps. But the characters are one of the things that make this book great. Wilson, Roth, Goldstein, Martinez, Ridges, Red, Brown, Stanley, Gallagher, and more and more. These are men that you feel like you live with in the book. You live through the terror of landing on the beach, the boredom of camp life, the fear of the firefight, the fear of the jungle, and to a large degree, fear of failing your buddies and fear of their derision. Mailer uses flashbacks in sections titled "Time Machine" that give you the story of a soldier's life before the war. These men come from such disparate backgrounds that you'd think it impossible for them to work together as a unit. The Farmer, the Irish low level political machine operative, the redneck, the Mexican-American, two very different Jews, the stoic Texan...many different walks of life came together during the conscription draft for WWII. In the previous sentence I categorized these men in just a general word or two. This is really a failure on my part. I've often talked about character development in other reviews, but I wonder if Mailer can be topped. You understand each of these men as extremely complex individuals, each with their own many flaws and strengths. The only way I can really describe it is that these characters come as close to being real people as in any piece of fiction I've ever read. For that matter, they come off as more real that some actual people written about in non-fiction.

Perhaps the next most impressive thing about the book is the description of the war on the island. Despite having read many books about war before, I don't recall ever reading such an un-sanitized depiction of war. The way Mailer describes mortar and artillery attacks can actually make you break out in a sweat. I was terrified and gratified to find soldiers in the book having reactions like I think I would have in that situation. While the artillery rounds come in, you have men cowering in their foxholes, ears ringing from the constant barrage, pounding the ground and screaming "stop it, stop it, stop it." In instances like this, it really put a human face on war for me. Other instances included a character defecating in his pants during an attack out of sheer terror. Something you never hear about, but something you know happened. And further on the excretory front, you normally don't hear about characters moving their bowels, let alone having diarrhea. If you do, it's normally in a comic context. In The Naked and the Dead, going off in the tall kunai grass when nature calls can get you killed. Speaking of the kunai grass, the book brings home the fact that the environment, as much as the Japanese, was the enemy. Jungle sores all over your skin, feet constantly soaked in water, brain baking in the direct sun, feet slipping in the mud, or mountain crevasses that are nearly impossible to pass. Unlike baseball, war isn't called off because of rain. And yet, despite all this, the characters in the book carried on and did their duty to the best of their ability. Mailer gets into the heads and explains their motivations, and you understand why they literally soldier on, but you're left wondering if you could have done half of what they did given the circumstances.

Even more frightening is the suddenness of death in the book (in some instances). A patrol would be going on just like normal. Nothing special would be happening, then bam...a character you've grown to know (over many pages) is dead. No rhyme, no reason...just dead. But that is how it happens in a war zone. For example: "Quite naturally, he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. Half an hour later, [X] was killed by a machine gun bullet which passed through his chest." That's it. About 100 or so pages spent getting to know the character, and then he's ripped from you in less than 20 words. Sudden, stupid, and cruel.

Finally, I want to touch on Mailer's use of the language. The man was a true virtuoso. If nowhere else, you can see this in the contrast between the language in the dialogue and the language of the narrator. The narrator uses complex sentences and draws amazing pictures with words. The characters use the vernacular of the day and Mailer makes only one concession for propriety's sake; the soldiers say "fug" instead of saying "fuck." And their speech is peppered with fug's. We don't like to think our grandfathers would have talked that way, but indeed they did. Further, Mailer seems to catch the dialect of each character just right. Again this is something that really helps make these characters fully recognized.

In closing, I suspect I've found my heavyweight champion for this reading project (and I'm not talking just about the weight of the physical book!). Even though it took me an awfully long time to read it, it's stunningly superb work. I know that we don't have the attention span these days, but I think every kid who's thinking about joining the service should read this book first, just so he has a broader perspective of what he/she might be getting into.

A Slow-Down

Well, I came down with the summer cold from hell, so I wasn't much up for reading. More in the mood for bad TV and NyQuil. I find it really hard to read when I'm hopped up on NyQuil.

In the meantime, I'm a little bit more than half-way through Norman Mailer's 700-plus page The Naked and the Dead. But I got distracted from that because I was able to get David Sedaris's new book When You Are Engulfed in Flames from the library and thus, had to put aside everything, including the NyQuil bottle, to read.

So anyway, that's why there hasn't been much in the way of posting recently. I'm hoping to have the Mailer book finished by early next week. It's really good, so I don't think it should be a problem (but it is long). Perhaps I should have set a page count goal rather than a monograph goal.

The Updated List

For you new readers, I decided to do a recap of the project (I'm just going to lift the text from an early post---nothing quite like self-plagiarism):

So I turned 37 in March. In honor of this usually unceremonious birthday, I've decided to try to tackle 37 "great" books in the calendar year of 2008. Why would I embark on such a task? I've no earthly idea, but it seems like something different to do.

It's definitely going to be a challenge, as I usually read around 35 books per year (last year I went into the 50s). So we'll see how that goes.

I'm including both fiction and non-fiction in the reading list (which will be developed on an ad hoc basis) and they'll all be in English (since I don't read any other language well at all) but this doesn't preclude reading translations. Since it's my project and likely nobody will read this blog but me, I'll be identifying books that are considered "great." I'll largely rely on other folks lists, such as the Modern Library Top 100 lists, but I want to get some 19th century stuff in there too (possibly some 18th as well). I've read quite a few of the books on the Modern Library list, so I know those are good recommendations. We'll see how it goes. If you have any suggestions, let me know. I'm still open to eliminating books and adding others.

Several of the books I've read before (mostly in high school) and I thought it might be a good idea to re-visit some of them as an adult. In looking at the list today (in July), it seems that I've chopped many of those off though a few remain.

Anyhoo, here's the current list:

1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (finished Jan. 22)
   
2. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (finished Feb. 3)
   
3. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
4. All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (finished Feb. 19)
   
5. Beloved by Toni Morrison (finished August 25)
   
6. Deliverance by James Dickey (finished April 1)
   
7. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (finished June 6)
   
8. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
9. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain (finished May 1)
   
10. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (finished March 6)
    
11. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
12. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
13. Candide by Voltaire (finished Feb. 23)
    
14. Don Quixote by Cervantes
15. White Noise by Don DeLillo (finished May 29)
    
16. The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
17. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (finished August 12)
    
18. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
19. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (finished September 5)
20. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
    
21. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (finished August 2)
    
22. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
23. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
24. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
    
25. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (finished June 15)
    
26. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (finished June 25)
    
27. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (finished June 16)
    
28. Night by Elie Wiesel (finished September 7)
    
29. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien (finished May 6)
    
30. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (finished July 26)
    
31. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (finished April 13)
    
32. The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward (finished March 27)
    
33. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
34. Kim by Rudyard Kipling (finished July 2)
    
35. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (finished April 28)
    
36. The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore White (finished May 22)
    
37. (placeholder)

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

On the face of it, Kim is a coming of age story of a boy in colonial India. But it is so much more than that. Kipling gives us a tapestry of life and lives in late 19th Century India under British rule. We learn about the collage of religions and cultures that co-existed in India (and modern day Pakistan) as well as much of the rest of Central Asia. This is all set in the context of "The Great Game" which is perhaps best defined as the colonial rivalry between Russia and Great Britain in Central Asia.

Kim O'Hara is a poor orphan boy who has lived on the streets after his native Indian mother died in childbirth and then his Irish-born father, a soldier in the British colonial army, passed away. Throughout the novel, Kim is pulled by both his love of India and its culture (from his early years and from his mother's blood) and his sense of duty to the British (through his father's heritage). Kim is a successful beggar boy on the streets of Lahore, where he seemingly knows and charms everyone and is known as "Friend to All the World." Early in the book, Kim meets an itinerant Buddhist monk who intrigues Kim and to whom Kim becomes a disciple. Kim and the lama then take to the road together in an effort to fulfill each one's prophecy. Kim's destiny comes to him first, as he meets up with and is taken in by his father's old regiment. They insist that Kim must be raised as a "Sahib" with all the attendant benefits of the racial system in place at the time. At the lama's insistence, Kim goes off to be schooled as an Englishman, but he still has his independent streak and insists on "going native" and rambling with his lama when he can. Kim comes to the attention of the British Secret Service and they realize what a useful person Kim would be to them, with his ability to speak the native language and naturally use the native customs. Kim enjoys the thrill of "the Great Game" but also feels he must be true to his lama. In the end, Kim proves himself worthy to both the British Secret Service and to his lama.

Kipling's novel, published in 1901, is still an outstanding work. In fact, I'll go so far as to say it was the best book I've read so far on my list. Because in addition to being a good story, I really feel I learned a lot by reading this novel. I never really thought much about the confluence of cultures in India, let alone much about British rule there (other than that it was extractive colonialism). It was really wonderful to learn about those cultures and the times from someone who lived in them. You have to put it in context of Kipling's traditional racism of the time (remembering that this is the man who gave us "The White Man's Burden"), but he isn't terribly heavy-handed about it. Moreover, he describes how the different cultures have an odd respect and disdain for one another at the same time. For instance, the lama, while Buddhist, is still given the respect due a holy man in Hindu towns and cities. However, certain individuals cast aspersions on his faith, while still trying to curry his favor. It makes for an interesting paradox.

Beyond that, Kipling creates some unforgettable characters. First and foremost, Kim and the Teshoo Lama are amazing character studies. Beyond them, Mahbub Ali, the Kulu woman, Hurree Babu, and Lurgan Sahib are incredibly well-drawn and compelling characters.

In closing, I don't see how some consider Kim to be children's literature. I think those critics don't give the book a deep enough reading. Just because it's about a boy becoming a man, it doesn't mean that it's a boy's book. Kim is a fascinating and well-written book, that I'm putting at the top of the heap of books I've read this year.

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

I got a little behind because I got a good recommendation on reading Generation Kill by Evan Wright. Wright was embedded with the First Recon Marines during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Excellent book.

But back to the task at hand. Stephen Crane...now this guy could write. The Red Badge of Courage is a short book, but big on action and big on consideration of the mind of someone going to war. The main character, Henry Fleming, is a New York farm boy who joins up with the Union army with visions of glory dancing through his head. At first, he finds that there isn't much fighting to do; it's mostly sitting around camp, eating bad food, and practicing marching drills. But soon enough, his regiment is called into battle. In the first encounter with the enemy, Henry fires his rifle, but soon turns and runs. He's disgusted with himself, but he rationalizes his flight from battle. More than anything, he fears returning to his unit because he doesn't want to be known as a coward. He wanders around the rear of the lines and hooks up with injured soldiers heading back to hospital camps. He's envious of the wounded men, because their wounds serve as a "red badge of courage." After hassling one of the men, Fleming is struck by a rifle butt and cut on the head. When he gets back to camp, he then has a reason for why he left his unit, he says he was grazed by a bullet. And somehow, this wound does give Fleming courage. In the future battles, he's an absolute lion, leading the charge and carrying the flag. After these encounters, he feels that he has truly become a man.

To say that Stephen Crane was an excellent writer is an understatement. The story is gripping. From describing the boredom and rumor-mongering of camp life, to the confusion of battle, Crane puts you in the action. What's more, you feel compelled to continue reading the book...a literal page-turner. The best writing is the frenzy and chaos of battle. The soldiers weren't always sure of why they were attacking an area or why the couldn't retreat to a better position. In modern terms, they didn't have a wide situational awareness. We learn of this when Fleming is out looking for water and he overhears a general giving orders. The general has the wider view of the battle, but in Crane's words, he speaks of Fleming's unit as no more than a "broom." The regiment, to the general, is just a tool to be used to do a job. It's not a group of men who are fighting and dying. In another scene, the unit is trying to retreat, but in the confusion of battle, compounded by the smoke and noise of battle, they don't know which way is the actual way to retreat.

Harder to describe is how Crane puts you into Fleming's thought processes. He gives insight into Fleming's thoughts and emotions during all phases of the story. His boredom in camp; his thoughts on first being fired upon; his fear and flight from battle; his fear of cowardice; and his nearly insane rage and bravery in the later encounters with the enemy.

The Red Badge of Courage is truly a great American book.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

I actually finished this book back on Monday the 16th and I've been trying to come up with something to say ever since. I mean, it's Alice in Wonderland. What can really be said. Well, it's pretty trippy, that's for sure. Alice had to be high, dreaming, or madder than either the Mad Hatter or the March Hare.

I will say that the edition I read was The Annotated Alice with notes by Martin Gardner. This definitely made for a better reading experience for an adult. Gardner points out many of the finer points and subtleties of Carroll's work. Particularly of interest are the mathematical games and wordplay that Carroll intersperses throughout the text. Given the addition of the notes to the text and that I'm a sucker for puns, Alice is still pretty good.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Ok, so we're in England in the late 19th Century. Victorianism is at its height. And Oscar Wilde gives us The Picture of Dorian Gray. On the surface the story is about a beautiful young man of the upper classes who is having his portrait painted by a fawning artist. With a wish, Dorian Gray, the youth being painted, gains immortality in the painting. His aging and his experiences (mostly sins) will be reflected in the portrait but not in Dorian's flesh. So Dorian goes through his life living a "new Hedonism" and leaving a wake of corruption and sin. The portrait, which Dorian keeps locked away, continues to become uglier and more marred with each corruption. After many more terrible things happen due to Dorian's actions, keeping the secret of the portrait, and moreover, living with the visible corruption of his soul finally overtakes him.

So what we have is a morality tale that could have probably been told in 50 pages. Instead, the edition I have runs over 220. Why? Many, many excursions into what the upper class in England at the time cared about and how these were shallow preoccupations. Also, it gave Wilde many opportunities to impress the reader with clever epigrams and witticisms. It didn't impress me as much as it did make me wish he'd get on with the story.

Other than making oblique references to homosexuality at the height of the Victorian Era, I don't see what all the fuss is about. Not a bad novel, in my opinion, but I truly don't understand its enduring appeal.

Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe takes us into the world of mid-1980s New York City. The primary character is Sherman McCoy, millon-dollar income bond salesman on Wall Street. We learn about McCoy's patrician upbringing, going to all the right prep schools and then off to Yale all under the careful watch of his high-powered lawyer father who is an aristocrat's aristocrat. McCoy's life falls apart however, due to an affair with another married wealthy socialite. McCoy and his mistress get lost in the Bronx and come upon a makeshift roadblock. In an attempt to get away from two young black men, a scuffle ensues, the mistress takes the wheel and as they speed off, one of the young men, Harold Lamb, is hit by the back of the car. McCoy and his mistress decide not to talk to the police, but rather just to proceed as if nothing had happen.

And then we get to the real story. A Reverend Bacon (unmistakably Al Sharpton), intervenes with on behalf of Lamb's mother. Then Wolfe reveals to us how race, the media, trumped up public demonstrations, politicians, and other forces all work to pervert the truth and subvert the justice system. Undoubtedly McCoy was negligent at some level and it turns out that Henry Lamb was no mugger, but McCoy wasn't the villain. It's hard to feel bad for him...hell, it's hard to feel bad for nearly any character in the novel, but he doesn't deserve what happens to him. As to that, I'll leave it to you to read the book.

Wolfe's characterizations are, frankly, as deep and fleshed out as those developed by Charles Dickens and John Irving. It makes the novel longer, but it makes the novel oh-so-good. You feel you understand the motivations and all-too-human frailties of the characters. The plot ends with a rather contrived tool, but in all still an excellent book. As it is a snapshot of a period in time, I don't know that it will hold up over the years, but it's an excellent novel and one I should have read years ago.

As a quick aside, you can tell that Wolfe has no love of highbrow law firms. I loved it every time he mentioned McCoy's father's firm: Dunning, Sponget, & Leach. Really funny stuff. Just as good is another firm that had an unimportant role in the book: Curry, Goad, & Pesterall. Quality!

White Noise by Don DeLillo

I actually finished White Noise by Don DeLillo last Thursday, May 29th while I was on vacation in Memphis, Tennessee. So this post is a little late.

Published in 1985, White Noise is an indictment of how media saturation, information overload, quackery, fear of death, fractured families, and most of all, consumerism rule the day in late-20th Century America. I can only wonder if DeLillo imagined that it would get worse with the Internet, satellite radio, and the vast expansion of cable and satellite television. It's rather amazing that we can function at all in the modern environment.

Nominally, the novel is about Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler studies at a university. Yep, Hitler studies. Gladney invented it. The book follows Gladney, his third (fourth?) wife Babette, their children together and from previous marriages. Largely, the book demonstrates how we are overwhelmed by the information saturation of daily life and that we are only jarred out of it through true crisis. It takes a significant, perhaps catastrophic event to cut through the incessant white noise. In this instance it was a "toxic airborne event." (actually other events too, but they were more personal to the characters.) A chemical spill caused the toxic airborne event. This served to show that people really only care about the horrors of TV whenever they're actually involved in them. But in the great post-modernist tradition, the people seemed to hate it when their tragic event wasn't given enough air time. One of the high points of the writing for me was DeLillo's interjection of fragments of dialogue from the TV into the text. These interjections were apropos of nothing. Often they were product names. All of which made it seem almost too real. I couldn't count the number of times I've been talking to someone in the room or on the phone and you get distracted by something said or viewed on the television (or someone else in the room involved in another conversation).

From there the book truly damns the "better living through chemistry" pharmacological society. A pill is created that may or may not eliminate the fear of death. DeLillo poses the question from there as to whether life is worth living without the fear of death. Do things still have value when you don't know that you're going to lose them someday with Death?

Of all the books I've written about so far, I'm really not giving this one the best treatment. It's very difficult to summarize the book without giving anything important away. So I figure it's better to leave it brief and incomplete rather than to possibly spoil anything.

In relation to all the other books so far, this novel made me think harder than any of the others. It really speaks to some of the fundamental questions of living in today's society. I imagine that I should read the book again in a year or two to see if anything new pops out at me. As it was, I found this to be a magnificent book that definitely should be part of the canon of great literature. I'm very surprised that I haven't heard more about this book. While I still think All the King's Men is probably still the top of the heap for me, White Noise is a close second.

The Making of the President 1960

The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore White, a senior journalist for Time magazine, was a runaway bestseller and winner of the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction. In the book, White covers the presidential campaigns from their genesis in small rooms through the primary campaigns through the general election and to the vast public stage of election night.

In reading the book, one is struck by how much has changed in American politics over the last 48 years. First, there weren't nearly as many primaries as there are today. Much of the manuevering to gain the candidacy was still controlled by the state political machines and their financial backers. Second, this was the election that determined that a Catholic could win in a national election in an overwhelmingly Protestant United States. Third, civil rights was an enormous issue and Northern black voters became a tremendously important voting bloc. Fourth, the "New South" was continuing to fracture away from the Democratic party, largely because of the civil rights issue. This was to culminate in Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in 1968 which, arguably, won him the presidency in that election. In the 1960 election it appeared that one could appeal to the northern, urban black vote or the Southern vote, but not both. The Kennedy-Johnson ticket was able to successfully do both, where not having a southerner on the ticket, Nixon-Lodge could probably not have. Fifth, the amount of money spent by the campaigns, even adjusting for inflation, was miniscule compared to the fortunes poured into the current political campaigns. Sixth, and not least, this was the election where television came into its own as an integral piece of the American electoral process.

Looking at the electoral map of the few most recent presidential elections and comparing them to the 1960 map, the differences are stunning. Instead of the South being a Republican stronghold, it was a Democratic stronghold. California went Republican. Texas went Democratic. New York was actually in play (despite eventually going Democratic).

White does an excellent job of analyzing the racial, ethnic, and religious divides in the American body politic during the 1960 campaign. Further, his examination of the sectional differences (farm belt, New England, industrial midwest, et al.), is outstanding.

In the end, Kennedy won a substantial electoral vote victory while managing only a miniscule win in the popular vote. Obviously, all the factors above played into this. Ultimately though, White argues, that it was Kennedy's strategy to play for the big states and have Johnson marshal the south that won him the presidency. He also believes that Nixon's lack of strategy and strategic failures (not deciding early enough whether to go for the northern black vote or the southern vote, not bringing Eisenhower into the campaign enought, etc.) may have been decisive as well.

In all, The Making of the President 1960 is a top-notch book that is well-deserving of its laurels. The only fault I found with the book is that it does tend to be a bit of a Kennedy hagiography. It's very clear that White had great respect and admiration for Kennedy and I think that colors the reporting in the book. However, don't misunderstand me, White brings the campaign of both camps to life and does highlight the things that Nixon did well. In sum, this is a great book to read, especially in an election year.

Reading The Making of the President, 1960

I'm currently reading, The Making of the President, 1960. It's excellent so far, but I haven't been devoting enough time to reading this week.

The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is a fictionalized series of stories about his experiences in the Vietnam war. And yet, it's a lot more than that. It's a reflection on life, dreams, death, and above all, storytelling. O'Brien takes care to note that much of "story-truth" which is objectively untrue, is often more reflective of actual events than "happening-truth" which is to say, the perspective of an omniscient narrator. "Story-truth" is a much more human way to approach things because it's how we actually experience the world. For example, when talking about a fellow soldier getting blown up by a booby trapped artillery shell, O'Brien talks about how the actual experience is looking at the soldier, looking away from the blast, looking back at what remains, looking away again, and then coming back to the actual horror of what happened. You get a much more personal feel and experience with "story-truth" than with "happening-truth." "Story truth" isn't some objective truth, but it's true as far as the character in the story, or a person's memory remembers it as truth.

O'Brien's writing is absolutely gripping. The stories are all tied together through his Vietnam experience but range from his current (as of the writing) middle-aged self, to Timmy as a 4th grader. Every story is compelling in it's own way, but what's most impressive is the immediacy of each story. You are there. You are watching Curt Lemon get blown up. You are retrieving his yellow slimy guts from the banyan tree. Moreover, you're stunned by how everything can go from tranquility to horror in just the space of a few words. And a very few words at that.

I've read many books on the Vietnam war: journalistic accounts, oral histories, memoirs, military histories, political histories, you name it. The Things They Carried is exceptional among all these books because O'Brien's facility with the language envelops you into the text. Whether or not you want to be, you're in Vietnam with him. You're at the Canadian border considering dodging the draft. The war, O'Brien's war, becomes your war even if you weren't born yet. The Things They Carried isn't just a book about the Vietnam war; it's a book about what it means to have human emotion and a human psyche. Simply put, this is one of the best books I've read in years, maybe ever. Don't wait. Go read this book right now.

Change to the List

After much consideration, I'm dropping Catch-22 from my reading list. It's one of my favorite books and I've already read it in the neighborhood of 4-5 times. I don't think that there's much to be gained by a re-read at this point in the context of this project. There are plenty of other books out there. In it's place, I'm adding White Noise by Don DeLillo. I've heard plenty of excellent things about DeLillo over the years and yet I've never read any of his work. This novel made Time magazine's list of top novels since 1923 (what Time refers to as all-time). So it's the new addition.

So, the current list"

1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (finished Jan. 22)
   
2. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (finished Feb. 3)
   
3. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
4. All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (finished Feb. 19)
   
5. Beloved by Toni Morrison
6. Deliverance by James Dickey (finished April 1)
   
7. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (finished June 6)
   
8. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
9. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain (finished May 1)
   
10. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (finished March 6)
    
11. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
12. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
13. Candide by Voltaire (finished Feb. 23)
    
14. Don Quixote by Cervantes
15. White Noise by Don DeLillo (finished May 29)
    
16. The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
17. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
18. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
19. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
20. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
    
21. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
22. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
23. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
24. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
    
25. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (finished June 15)
    
26. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
27. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
28. Night by Elie Wiesel
    
29. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien (finished May 6)
    
30. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
31. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (finished April 13)
    
32. The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward (finished March 27)
    
33. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
34. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
35. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (finished April 28)
    
36. The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore White (finished May 22)
    
37. (placeholder)

The Postman Always Rings Twice

James M. Cain...father to generations of hack noir writers. Perhaps I just hate the genre, the "hardboiled" style (yes, I really dislike Hammett too), but I really didn't like this book at all. I finished it yesterday morning before work and then took some time to try to figure out why The Postman Always Rings Twice book rang in toward the end of Modern Library's list of the top 100 20th C. novels. Apparently it made the list because this 1934 novel gave birth to the noir genre of the "hardboiled" style. Which is to say, it's a gritty, earthy, drama where the protagonist isn't a private eye, but rather a victim, perpetrator, or accomplice to a crime. Why this is a good thing, I'm still not sure.

Anyhoo, TPART is the story of a cagey drifter (yup, a new cardboard archetype), a "dame," and her decently well-off husband who she was never really in love with. Guess what? Surprise, surprise...the drifter and the dame fall in a bizarre kind of "love" and try to off the husband to get his money and collect on the insurance. Sound familiar? Yeah, because billions of hacks have been writing this crap ever since and it never gets any better in the re-telling. The drifter, Frank Chambers, can best be described as a cunning (but not smart), brutal thug with no redeeming qualities. Really...none. He's the main character and I kept hoping that bad things would happen to him. Crowbar to the crotch maybe. Something like that. If it's possible, Cora, the "dame," is even worse because she's brick-wall stupid to boot. Her husband, the Greek, is just boring. You don't like him, you don't dislike him, you just feel bad for him that these to yay-hoos are trying to kill him. So this short book has it all: murder, blackmail, domestic violence, car crashes, possible rape, lawyers, plot twists...everything except characters that you can remotely give two shits about. And that to me, along with giving future hacks 2 dimensional characters to work with, makes TPART a monument to suckitude.

I will say this for Cain, blessedly, the book was slim. He didn't waste words and the plot was fast-paced. Thank heaven for that, because I don't thing I could have spent 10 more minutes with that book. Easily the worst book on this list that I've read so far.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

On Monday, the 28th, I finished Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. "Bell" is, on the surface, a book about three days in the life of a band of anti-fascist guerrillas during the Spanish Civil War. More than that though, the book is an exploration of what complex creatures human beings are. Even good people are capable of doing ghastly things, given certain circumstances. Moreover, the book examines the motivations of many characters and you get a real feeling for why they're fighting in the civil war, even though they were never trained soldiers.

The main character is Robert Jordan, an American university instructor who has come to Spain to fight against the fascists. Even if one wanted to forget Robert Jordan's name, it would be impossible, since Hemingway writes out Robert Jordan's name in full on nearly every page of the book. It's my biggest criticism of the book, but realize that this is minor. But I digress. Jordan's experience in the civil war is as a dynamiter. As such, he's sent by the communist (anti-fascist) General Staff behind the fascist lines to meet up with a guerrilla band led by a man named Pablo. Jordan's orders though, essentially send the band on a suicide mission to blow up a bridge at the start of a Republic offensive. From here, we learn how Jordan reconciles placing himself and these other people (who, for the most part, he likes very much) in mortal danger for a "greater cause." We also learn how many of the band found themselves in this situation and why they fight. Jordan does have a romantic interest, which at first I thought was trite, but then I realized that it was important for Jordan to have more at stake than just himself and his life. For the story to have greater weight, he had to be willing to sacrifice the life of someone he loved.

We also learn how bureaucracy, petty politics, and general incompetence put all of the guerrilla band in danger (in some cases more than danger). Fighting for ideology, fighting for your home, fighting for your government, fighting for murdered friends and family, fighting for the Spanish people...all seem to be legitimate reasons to be engaged in the civil war, but they all come with a terrible cost.

As an aside, I found it interesting that Hemingway devoted several pages to the story of how Robert Jordan's father killed himself with a pistol. Considering that Hemingway was later a gunshot suicide, I wonder if he thought about suicide for much of his life.

Hemingway's main characters seem extremely "real." Perhaps it's because his dialogue was so good. He interspersed Spanish into the English text and it really seemed to bring the characters to life. Also, his descriptions of the forested mountain territory of Spain really placed you, the reader, in the action. The occasional change of point-of-view from a Jordan to an omniscient narrator to another character and then back to Jordan was sometimes jarring, but in all it gave a more complete picture of the situation the characters found themselves, and thus benefited the story. In sum, it's abundantly clear to me why For Whom the Bell Tolls is considered an American classic.

Confederacy of Dunces

So I finished Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole last night. Frankly, I'm disappointed. I was expecting big things and all I got was an ok book. Pulitzer Prize, Shmulitzer Prize, says I.

Dunces chronicles a few turbulent weeks in the life of Ignatius J. Reilly, jobless medieval scholar who lives in his tiny room in his mother's tiny house. It should be mentioned that Ignatius' great intelligence is only matched by his enormous physical bulk, complete disdain for others, enhanced self-opinion, and unmatched hypochondria. Due to a series of odd circumstances, Ignatius finds himself having to look for a job in his home town of New Orleans. Toole takes us from job to job, introducing us to fabulously weird characters whose lives all seem to be intertwined at the end, mainly because of Ignatius' fabulous failures.

Ignatius, while the main character, is not a sympathetic character. Funny to laugh at, yes, but not funny. I don't think he can even be properly termed an anti-hero. The other characters are spectacularly unique, especially Burma Jones. The character studies of Ignatius and Jones are the real strengths of this book. Sure it's got some funny moments, but I didn't find it riotously funny like many of the critics did. The dialogue is also a strong point of the book. The characters really do "sound" like "real people." I find that this is often very difficult for writers to master and Toole does an excellent job of it.

Despite the strengths mentioned above, I didn't find the story all that funny or compelling. Certainly there were funny scenes, but the book wasn't all that funny. I didn't want anything good or bad to happen to Ignatius, I just wanted him to go away. Less Ignatius and more Burma Jones would have made for a better book. The multiple characters all crossing paths at one time or another is always a fun trope, but I've seen it done a lot better in other works.

Of course part of the book's cachet is the tragic circumstances of its publishing. Toole had been deceased, a suicide, long before the novel was ever published. His mother found the manuscript and sent it to the Dean of Southern Literature, Walker Percy. Percy loved the book and got it published. Indeed, it's sad that Toole couldn't have lived to see his work gain accolades. Dunces is certainly a good read, but in no way would I consider it a classic.

Deliverance by James Dickey

Let me start off by saying that I've seen the movie Deliverance a few times, and it certainly burns in one's memory. I don't know how one can ever forget the scene of Ned Beatty being raped by vicious hillbillies. Rough stuff. On to the book.

Deliverance details the canoeing trip of 4 upper middle-class Atlanta men. Seemingly a dull idea for a book (the anomie of the middle class, yadda, yadda, yadda), James Dickey turns it into a magnificent story. The men of the book, Ed Gentry (our narrator), Lewis, Bobby, and Drew, are all fairly well off friends who at Lewis's urging, decide to go on a canoe trip on a wild river in rural north Georgia. At least from Ed's perspective, he needs to find something different and break away for a while from the mundane office life and do something different. One can assume that the others feel the same way. So our intrepid canoeists head to the river...and everything goes wrong.

They start by meeting rough and tumble hayseed-types who they're make fun of and talk down to, yet at the same time are afraid of. And it's clear that the country folk don't like these city slickers very much at all. Once they get the canoes in the river, it's clear that most of the main characters don't know what they're doing and have no business being on such a difficult river. Other problems erupt when they come across a couple of armed hillbillies. Suffice it to say that things go very poorly for at least one of the members of the group. To say much more about the plot would be to give away what makes this book great: the story.

Dickey gives us a story of man versus nature and man versus his primal self. He makes us examine what getting back to nature really means. Should one even want to go back to nature? While she's beautiful, Mother Nature is heartless as well. On the other hand, Dickey explains the exhilaration of living life so on the edge and so in the moment. The story is so incredibly compelling that it's very hard to put the book down. No doubt this is an American Classic.

The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward

I actually finished this book on March 25 or 26.

In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Woodward traces the history of Jim Crow laws, segregation, and the Civil Rights movement from Reconstruction through (in this edition) the early 1970s. It's an ambitious undertaking for a slim volume. However, rightfully so, the book is considered a classic. Woodward's writing is clear and direct. He addresses the subtleties of the historical themes and situations without drifting off into nebulous academic tangents. This is, indeed, one of the best examples of historical writing that I've ever read (and given my several years in grad school for U.S. history, I've read a lot of them).

Woodward, starts, rather naturally, with the Reconstruction Era. He demonstrates that while freedmen didn't have it great, things were certainly better than they had been in slavery and better than they would become in the Jim Crow era. African-Americans were participating in government, working alongside whites, and yes, even riding in the same train cars. This, was, unfortunately, to change. The future of the South was determined by a disputed presidential contest between a New Yorker, Samuel Tilden, and an Ohioan, Rutherford Hayes. Tilden, the Democrat, led in the popular vote and apparently the electoral college. However there were disputes about the electoral votes of several Southern states. In what was often called "the Corrupt Bargain," Hayes was awarded all of the contested electoral votes and the presidency in exchange for declaring an end to Reconstruction and withdrawing all Union troops from the south. The negative consequences of this Corrupt Bargain for African-Americans were enormous.

Woodward then takes us through the history of how the segregationist Jim Crow laws evolved from the white supremacist thoughts of the power structures in the south. Further, and perhaps more importantly, Woodward elaborates on viable alternatives to Jim Crow that while not ideal, were certainly superior. He explains how these other options gained prominence but were ultimately co-opted or outright defeated by the Jim Crow supporters. For me, this was probably the best section of the book. I think we all need to be reminded that nothing in history was inevitable. The Union didn't have to win the Civil war, the Allies didn't have to win WWII, and on and on. There are always political, military, social, and other forces at work that influence events. There is no "march of history." Oftentimes, things could have been very different. In this instance, if it hadn't been for political deal making in Washington, a real Reconstruction of the South might have happened, almost surely improving race relations and certainly would have been a better situation for African-Americans. Also, the other alternatives to the Jim Crow system may well have been better for America. We'll never know, but we should know that people had the ability to prevent this horrible system from coming into law.

The next section deals with Jim Crow laws at length. I don't see any reason to expound upon them here, but suffice it to say that these segregationist and racist laws were an abomination, especially in what is supposed to be a democratic and freedom-loving nation. Woodward also details the "great migration" of African-Americans out of the south and into northern urban centers. He demonstrates here that while segregation and racism weren't codified in the north, they certainly existed. Woodward makes a very cogent point in this section by linking Jim Crow to U.S. imperialism. Jim Crow laws at home expanded and took root as the U.S. gained in empire overseas. Woodward draws a clear connection in the attitudes that informed Jim Crow also informed the U.S. taking up the "white man's burden."

Next is the Civil Rights Movement that came about as a result of African-Americans being denied these basic rights due to Jim Crow laws and general societal racism. Woodward details the major players and events, from Brown v. the Board of Education, to MLK, SNCC, CORE, the NAACP, and seemingly all of the big actors and events. For Woodward, the success of the Civil Rights Movement culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Of course, there was still more work to do, but the Voting Rights Act was certainly landmark legislation that ended Jim Crow in law, if not in "real life."

Finally, the book concludes by talking about the race riots that occurred later in the 1960s. He writes about how despite the end of Jim Crow, America was, in the words of the President's Commission on Racial Disorders in 1968, "moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal." So despite the successes of the Civil Rights Movement and the end of Jim Crow, race problems still abounded and these American wounds have still not healed.