Updated list

Since it's an election year, I decided to add a classic journalistic history: The Making of the President, 1960. I find it shameful that I haven't read this book yet. So, below is the updated list, with only one spot left, unless I make some cuts.

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
8. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
9. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
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. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
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
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
    
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
    
37. (placeholder)

Finished Candide on Saturday

Candide is a wonderful little book. What it lacks in pages, it more than makes up for in scope. Voltaire skewers seemingly every sacred cow of the 18th Century. Whether it’s theater critics, the Jesuits, aristocracy, or other philosophers, none is spared the acid pen. The main point of the book is to thrash Spinoza’s optimistic philosophy. These tenets are explained to our eponymous hero by his tutor, Professor Pangloss. Pangloss tells us how all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The rest of the book is spent showing episode after episode of horrible events (all told in a quite humorous way) and how Candide tries to reconcile these events to Pangloss’s philosophy. Candide’s adventures take him on many stops along the route from Germany to the New World and all the way back to Constantinople. After following Candide around half the globe, one cannot accept that this is the best of all possible worlds, as nature and our fellow humans seemingly conspire to make mankind’s lot miserable. Voltaire doesn’t leave us without hope though. He leaves us with the thought that to live the good life, we need to “cultivate our own garden.” To me, he’s saying that you have to behave as best you can morally in the circumstances that you’re given. There are only so many things we can control, and the best we can do is to “cultivate” those that we are able to in order to work for the greater good of everyone.

As much as I like Candide, I can’t say that it should have made the list. It doesn’t seem “great” in the way the other three books did. Of course, being translated into many languages and still being read over 250 years later should confer some essence of greatness upon a piece of literature. I guess it just doesn’t seem “heavy” enough. It’s hard to say that when you’re talking about a book that catalogs a whole world’s worth of evil, from earthquakes, to war, murder, rape, and burning at the stake. But I guess I say this because the book is so damn funny. I imagine it’s even funnier in the original French. But of course, humor is the center point of satire, and the book is immensely successful there. Whether or not, it’s a “great” book, I’m glad to know that I still enjoyed the book as much, if not more, than I did as a teenager.

Next up is Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

Candide is under way

I started Voltaire's Candide the night before last. However, I didn't get any reading done last night. This book was one of my favorites from high school. It's a fast read and short, so if I don't finish it tonight, I can't imagine I wouldn't be done by Saturday.

All the King's Men

Last night I finished reading Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men (the restored edition, based on Penn Warren's manuscripts housed at Yale's Beinecke Library). I'm not sure of all the differences, other than a changed first chapter and more prominently, the name of the Boss was originally Willie Talos, but was changed to Willie Stark for the published edition. In an earlier post I noted that Joyce Carol Oates basically called these changes sacrilege. I'm not sure if that's the case. Stark is a better name because it seems more "real." Talos doesn't sound like a name for someone from the Louisiana back country. Talos, does however, lend a mythic air to the story by hearkening back to the ancient Greeks. Not only was Talos a name given to the sun (that which gives life and which everything else revolves around), but it was also the name of a powerful bronze giant, who, you guessed it, had only one small weakness and it proved to be his undoing. At any rate, on to the book itself.

I went into reading this book thinking that it was a simple, well-written fictionalized account of the rise and fall of Louisiana political giant Huey Long. Turns out that's only one aspect of the book. Rather than being a political story, it's a character study; a story of personal relationships; a story of the power the past has over the present; all of which is set in the context of a political story. The narrator, Jack Burden, is the right-hand man of the Boss (Willie). Jack was a newspaper man and failed law and Ph.D. student who covered the Boss when he was just a scrupulously ethical small town bureaucrat. He enlists Burden's help (after being used as a pawn by the state's political machine) to become a political titan who uses graft, blackmail, intimidation, and bribes to accomplish his goals. Throughout most of the book, Burden is a very detached narrator, participating in events, but not really being "involved." Burden tries to keep his personal attachments to a minimum and is, in many instances, a first-rate jerk. But when you're inside Burden's head, you realize that he has a classic case of anomie, an alienated man without a real purpose in his life. I don't quite get it at this point, but I think that Burden's attraction to the Boss was that the Boss believed in something pure at one time. Jack seemed to want to go along for the ride and see where that turned out. Even though he tells you the Boss was a first-rate S.O.B., there was, at least at one time, something noble in his character.

Burden is a very well-chosen name for our narrator. He carries many burdens with him, primarily the burdens of history, particularly family history. In many ways, one could interpret the theme of the book as being "the sins of the fathers are visited upon the generations." Not only with Jack, but with other characters as well. Moreover, the book is really about how everyone we know (and often those we never knew) affects our lives. If you think of the intersection of lives as a spider web, it doesn't take much to imagine how plucking on one thread disturbs the entire web. Penn Warren takes the metaphor a step further by imagining a third dimension to the web, one that stretches back in history. And so it happens that ripples in the web that occurred long ago still resonate to the current day.

Until I got to the final quarter of the book, I was going to say that the writing in the book was some of the best I ever read, but that the story was just OK. Don't get me wrong, the writing is wonderful. Take this example:

"Thus the fact of his death was absorbed effortlessly into the life of the community, like a single tiny drop of stain dropped into a glass of clear water. It would spread outward and outward from the point of vindictive concentration, ravelling and thinning away, drawing away the central fact of the stain until nothing at all was visible."

It seems like there's great stuff like that on every page. One can really tell that poetry was Penn Warren's true vocation. That being said, the final quarter of the novel wraps the threads of the story together so well, at such a rapid pace, and in such unexpected ways, it raises the narrative from just OK to truly outstanding.

So far, the list is three for three...all should be, in my book, considered classics.

Better than 2/3 of the way through ATKM

Just an update: better than 2/3 of the way through All the King's Men. A few things are slowing me down. First, I find myself re-reading passages just for the sheer fun of seeing (hearing?) how Penn Warren uses the language. You can really tell that his primary calling is poetry. Second, I've been playing too many computer games (especially Title Bout Championship Boxing 2.5 and Total College Basketball [which has since been succeeded by Draft Day Sports: College Basketball]). But back to work and back to reading.

More additions to the list

Newest additions:

• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
• Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward
• Rabbit, Run by John Updike
• Kim by Rudyard Kipling
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Only two spots left! There's a good chance they might both go to Willie Shakespeare (a history and a tragedy). Of course the whole damn thing is subject to change at my whim, so if any of you (I'm talking to you KSpoon) have gripes with these new selections, bring 'em on.

Small note on ATKM

I'm apparently reading the "restored" version of All The King's Men. Professor Noel Polk went back to the original manuscripts and restored the book to Penn Warren's original, rather than the edited version. In a NY Review of Books article, Joyce Carol Oates apparently took Polk to task for this by saying it was unethical to do this to the book. So now I feel that I'm going to have to compare the two versions. I never thought this would be such a difficult endeavor. Willie Stark or Willie Talos, the characterization should be the same, right?

A third of the way through All the King's Men

For those one of you that have to know what I'm reading right now, it's All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. I'm about a third of the way through this tale of a redneck farmer/lawyer who rises to the governorship of his state and then to the U.S. Senate (obviously the tale is based on Huey Long, the Kingfish of Louisiana). So far, I'm impressed. The story is good, but the great thing about Penn Warren is his power of description. He uses just enough adjectives to paint a pretty picture, but never goes over the edge (Dashiell Hammett, the same can't be said of you). Plus, the guy can really turn a phrase. One of my favorites thus far is his description of a drink a character had poured for himself (likely a whiskey and water)...going from memory here..."it was the color of winter sunlight, and probably just as weak." Damn that's good stuff. It seems like there are phrases like that on every page.

In other news, I'm trying to make a decision between reading Henry IV (1&2) or Henry V. I'm wondering if they can be read alone or need to go together. I'm leaning strongly toward Henry V because it has the "once more unto the breach" and "band of brothers" quotes. However, I've heard great things about the characterization of Prince Hal (who becomes Henry V) in the earlier plays. Advice?

Finally, I'm going to probably take a quick break from the list after I finish All the King's Men. I just got Tales from Q School, the new book by John Feinstein through the library. Feinstein isn't just one of the best sports writers out there right now, I think he's one of the best writers out there. I'll probably rip through his book in no time, so don't fear.

Finished Huckleberry Finn

Here we are on Super Bowl Sunday. And as I don't really care a rip for the Giants or the Patriots (but I would like to see the perfect season spoiled), I finished up Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Like Tom Sawyer, it was full of humor (especially poking fun at superstition) and excellent character development. The story was a lot different than Sawyer though. It seemed more like a series of unconnected stories. Admittedly, they were all pretty good stories, told from Huck's perspective. I daresay that the only boy craftier or more sly in all of history (real or fictional) than Huck Finn is Tom Sawyer. Though Huck is a far sight more self-reliant.

Most of the story involves Huck leaving the civilizing influences of the widow and Miss Watson and going back to his vagabond ways. That is, until his drunken ol' Pap shows up, looking to take advantage of Huck. Huck finally outwits the old man and goes on the run with Jim, an escaped slave of Miss Watson's. Now Huck was a boy of his time and certainly condescended to Jim (and his race) many times, but there was never any question that Huck considered Jim his friend and did what he could to help him get to freedom (though it takes some roundabout paths). The rest of the book captures their adventures with Mississippi River con men, feuding families reminiscent of the Hatfields and McCoys, and quite a few other folks on and along the river. I certainly hope I never come down with the "pluribus unum mumps." I'm happy to report, there is a Tom Sawyer sighting in the book. Dear Tom, never one to go with an easy, straightforward, fool-proof plan when he can think up a wonderfully complicated scheme with plenty of opportunity for failure.

In all, I think the book is considered great because it provides a snapshot of what life on the antebellum Mississippi was like. Raftsmen, traders, steamboats, plantation owners, slaves, drunks, preachers, layabouts, farmers, and good upstanding citizens are all represented. Also, as in Tom Sawyer, Twain works in the dialect of the time and area so well that you can just hear every word spoken.

Slavery, of course, plays a driving part in the story. It's obvious that Twain was no fan of slavery, but he demonstrated how a white person of the time could be conflicted about it. Moreover, Huck makes his decision to go against the rules of the time and help Jim, his friend, even though he was sure he'd go to Hell for it. The book also has one of the statements I've felt most conflicted about in all of my reading. After talking about how he'd squandered away 40 dollars, Jim says, "Yes-en I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn't want no mo'." Jim seems to realize that his freedom is worth quite a lot, but it damn near makes you cry that he places the value of that freedom in the context of the slave trade's economic system. Further, it's damn sad that he seems to be willing to sell himself into indentured servitude for that same pittance. But again, I think this is Twain showing how the slave system penetrated into all ranks of society, regardless of race.

Huck Finn is clearly a deeper novel than Tom Sawyer. However, I will say that it's just not as fun as Tom Sawyer either. Both novels though, I believe, have rightfully established spots in the canon of American literature.

Two more new entries

New additions (as opposed to New Edition):

Night by Elie Wiesel
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien