- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (finished Jan. 22)
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (finished Feb. 3)
- The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
- All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (finished Feb. 19)
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Deliverance by James Dickey (finished April 1)
- Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
- Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
- The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
- Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (finished March 6)
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Candide by Voltaire (finished Feb. 23)
- Don Quixote by Cervantes
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
- Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
- The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
- Night by Elie Wiesel
- The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
- The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
- Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (finished April 13)
- The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward (finished March 27)
- Rabbit, Run by John Updike
- Kim by Rudyard Kipling
- For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (finished April 28)
- The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore White
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Wednesday, February 27, 2008
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.
Monday, February 25, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
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.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
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.
Friday, February 8, 2008
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
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?
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