Book update

Ok so books 13 and 14 are not "Siddhartha" and "The Tempest." I stopped midway on both of those because I was too excited about my findings at the Humane Society thrift store. Adult onset ADD? Much!

Book 13 was "Jailbird" by Kurt Vonnegut. I love me some Vonnegut. My friend John thinks he is so overrated, and that just kills me. The guy's got it. Period. (Vonnegut, not John. Although John's got it too. Just a different "it." Hi John!)

Favorite passage, about a little dog obsessed with a rubber ice cream cone toy: "I observe how profoundly serious Nature has made her about a rubber ice-cream cone - brown rubber cone, pink rubber ice cream. I have to wonder what equally ridiculous commitments to bits of trash I myself have made. Not that it matters at all. We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure. The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years." You would think this philosophy of his would make for extremely cynical and depressing books, but it doesn't. His characters are always happily resigned to their predestined fates, good or bad.

Book 14 was "Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf. One of the best opening lines of any book. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." The entire book is about one day in the life of Mrs. Dalloway. If you never knew a thing about Virginia Woolf, it would probably become pretty obvious to you after reading this that she was a deeply troubled soul, completely ill mentally. This book is a technical masterpiece. It is the "drip, drip of one impression after another." It will stay with you for days when you are done.

Book 15: "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim," by David Sedaris. Meh. Another collection of his family-based anecdotes. Second rate. Disappointing.

Next was "Laughable Loves" by Milan Kundera. A collection of short stories about male/female relationships. On the surface, some very problematic representations of women, and for the male characters, love seems to be almost exclusively about sexual conquests. But if you dig a little deeper, there is some great stuff in here.

I am starting to have serious doubts about making it to 100 books!!

Book update

Well this month has set me back. I have some catching up to do in March.

Book #9 of the year was "A Walk in the Woods" by Bill Bryson. I am a huge Bryson fan, and I couldn't be happier that there are still several of his books out there that I haven't read yet . He can be laugh-out-loud funny. While he did not elicit that reaction in me nearly as much with this book, I enjoyed it just as much. Here, he is reunited with his old college buddy Katz (who first appeared in "Neither Here Nor There," his book about his European travels with Katz, which had Adam and I doubled over as we were reading it in Spanish hostels). They make an attempt to hike the entire Appalachian trail together, and hilarity ensues. Bryson is quite a bit more serious and introspective here than I am used to, but that is not a bad thing.

Book #10 was "The Importance of Being Earnest," by Oscar Wilde. This play is as funny today was it was when it was written in 1895. It is so fast-paced and you will all of a sudden find the play finished as you are enjoying yet another witty exchange. No societal institution is left unattacked. Wilde was a devil!

Book #11 was "Of Mice and Men" by Steinbeck. Brilliantly depressing as ever.

Book #12 was "The Stranger" by Albert Camus. Absurdism at its best. Camus presents a world in which no meaning or truth exists. Only things that can be experienced physically are real. The attempts of the main character, Meursault, to find any meaning are ultimately a total failure. He is the most disaffected yet honest character you will ever encounter, unyieldingly honest. A very disturbing book. It's hard to imagine anyone actually liking the main character, but you will feel something for him. And that will trouble you most likely.

Books #13 and 14, in progress, "Siddhartha" by Herman Hesse and "The Tempest" by Shakespeare.

Book #8

Willa Cather. "My Antonia." Literary perfection. Had she added or omitted a single word, it would have been a shame.

I fell in love with this book in high school in 11th grade honors English (Ashley what was our teacher's name? I cannot remember for the life of me. Short little woman with short dark hair. Help!). I have always counted it a favorite. That preference has been totally reinforced. Any author who can make you WANT to live in Nebraska because of her incredible descriptions of the prairie is a damn good author. You can actually feel the pure prairie dirt sifting through your fingers with each turn of the page.

I have always been weak for nostalgia. It can be so painfully sweet to get tangled up in your own good memories, and sometimes I get myself so trapped in that labyrinthine mess of reminiscence that it is hard to find my way out and back to the here, the now. That is this book - the narrator looking back, yet moving forward. And all the time experiencing the pain and deliciousness that that entails.

The other HUGE bonus of re-reading this book was my discovery that the narrator's prairie grandmother, the strong farmer's wife who kills snakes without a blink and is the epitome of kindness to her neighbors, her name is Emmaline! This is the first time I have ever encountered my niece's name out in the world. I can't wait for Emmaline to read this book one day.

Some of my favorite passages:

After the narrator first moves to Nebraska from the east as a little boy to live with his grandparents after his parents' death:
"Between that earth and that sky, I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be."

Of the two rugged farmhands: "What good fellows they were, how much they knew, and how many things they had kept faith with!"

The narrator, reflecting on how long it had been since he last saw his childhood friend Antonia: "My business took me West several times every year, and it was always in the back of my mind that I would stop in Nebraska some day and go to see Antonia. But I kept putting it off until the next trip. I did not want to find her aged and broken; I really dreaded it. In the course of twenty crowded years, one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again."

Closing paragraph, after Jim has finally visited Antonia and met her husband and 8 children on their farm: "This was the road over which Antonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is. For Antonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

This is just a delicious read. I devoured this in pdf form, downloaded from Project Gutenberg (a wonderful wonderful thing). I had to get another book in quickly on this last day of the month to stay on track, and this was a good way to do that without feeling like I was cheating. My mission in life now is to find an old sturdy copy of this book with the original illustrations (one of which is posted here) so I can read this to my own children some day.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

I figured now is the best time to read this play, having just finished Hamlet. It has been sitting on my shelf for years untouched. It's a quick read, which is good because I'm going to have to read it again immediately to get a better understanding. It's hard to digest if you aren't very familiar with the Theater of the Absurd, which I am not. I think the point is to be utterly confused at first. Stoppard has created a world without any logic or anything reliable. The world R & G find themselves in is totally featureless. They cannot make any sense of it. Their attempts at dealing with their "reality" are equally absurd. The protagonists are essentially called into existence at the beginning of the play, with no memory, no idea of why they are there or what their task is. This makes for some very bleakly funny passages, in which their repeated attempts to discover significance fall short.

This is pretty much as far as my thoughts go after the first reading. Maybe I'll have more to say after I read it again.

Hamlet Schmamlet

This play SUCKS!! Why all the hype for 500 years? Save yourself some time and energy and just go rent the movie with Mel Gibson, it's way better!!

Kidding! This was book #5 of the year for me. I know I have read this before but I can't recall whether it was high school AP Engligh or college. We all know the basics of the story, but the telling of it is worth experiencing over and over again. I'm sure I will read this play several more times yet in my life. As an English lit major, my knowledge of Shakespeare's work is actually pretty abysmal. Looking back, I'm shocked I wasn't required to read more of him in college. As part of my "100 books this year" campaign, I'm going to try to read one play a month. Get my Shakespeare on! Jigga what!That's right, you heard me. Booyah! (said while clenching my fist and thrusting it downard vertically, as I should according to urbandictionary.com when I say this word)

Uh, anyway, back to Hamlet. I need to get a better edition with more footnotes. The one I have is pretty basic, which is fine. But I'm sure there are so many nuances I am missing out on without more solid and complete reference material. The paperback I've had for years belonged to a Gwen Martin at some point, which I know because thise Gwen person thought it necessary to write her name all over the freakin' place, so I associate Hamlet with her, sadly. She also drew a lot of stick figures on the bottoms of pages. She was clearly not very riveted by this tragedy.

4th book of '08

My intention to read 100 books this year is not going according to plan. I really need to pick up the pace. Or else I'm gonna have to start picking up a lot of really puny books!!

Finished "1984" by George Orwell a few days ago. Yep, it's still amazing and it still resonates! This is my 3rd time - once in high school, in college, and now in my late 20's. Each time, my reaction has been the same: horror at the thought that civilization could ever become this totally dystopic. I think Winston Smith has to be one of the most tragic figures in modern literature. You owe it to yourself to read this important and relevant book. If you read it in high school, read it again now. Terrifying. There is nothing I could possibly say about this book (or, let's face it, any book) that hasn't been said before a hundred times over. Just read it for cryin' out loud!

3rd book of 08

I finished the last half of "Villa Incognito" at 4 AM last night while on suicide watch for a patient at the hospital. Maybe that affected my mind's digestion of what appears to be this half-assed attempt by Tom Robbins to satisfy his followers. I don't count myself a follower because I haven't read everything the guy has written, but I appreciate him for who he is in contemporary American literature. Even though I think I appreciated him considerably more several years ago.

Anyway, when you are sitting in the dark with a handheld booklight in the corner of a tiny hospital room next to a stranger whose life you can't even begin to comprehend, sweating through the bed with delirium tremens, mumbling incoherently in his sleep, his desensitized GABA receptor complexes totally indifferent and sympathetic nervous system working harder than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, your reading experience is bound to be affected.

A few times while reading this book, I actually thought about all the other better books I could be reading instead. Obviously a bad sign. This just fell totally flat for me. My sole motivation for finishing it was so that I could move on. The story had so many potentially mesmerizing elements, but never once was I captivated. Sure Robbins is funny and some of his ramblings cause the lightbulb to go off in your head, and sure he can put a smile on my face at times with some genius similes, but this was just a trainwreck and pointless. Definitely not recommended for someone's first Robbins book.

2nd book of '08

"Middlesex" was one of those books I was sad to say goodbye to. A fascinating peek into the life of a Greek immigrant family, one member of which (the omniscient narrator) faces total upheaval in his early teens after discovering he is a hermaphrodite. He has been raised as a female his whole life, but not without some agonizing moments of uncertainty, fear, and despair that he tells us about in hindsight. He decides at age 14 against the surgery that will finalize the femaleness that everyone has always assumed and opts instead to live in a genderless state. It's the story of his journey through a sexually ambiguous and frightening childhood/puberty, and also the story of his family and their immigration to the U.S. Oh and also their inbreeding, which caused his condition! Let's not forget about the inbreeding!

A very good read. Captivating, energetic writing style. The book has a very large scope, but I was never not interested in what was going on. And a great deal of the book is not directly about the main character. His story doesn't really grow legs til after the book is halfway done. My only gripe is that I got annoyed when the narrator speaks directly to the reader, which he does a fair amount. Not one of my favorite narrative frameworks. But it didn't sully the experience of reading this book. Highly recommended, although I am one of the last people to read this book from 2003 and don't really have any business recommending it. But I still do.

First book of '08

I finished my first book of the year yesterday, "The Human Stain" by Philip Roth. Do you know what is ridiculous? I just realized that I saw the movie adaptation of this book years ago and had absolutely no recollection of it the entire time I was reading the book. Ha! Not exactly an endorsement for the movie.

Anyway, the book is a decent 3 out of 5. I am fairly new to Philip Roth. I read Portnoy's Complaint in Mexico last year and loved it! I did not love "The Human Stain" but it was not a waste of time either. The guy has an absolutely enviable command of the English language, and he is a total show-off about it. Sometimes, the narrative suffered because the vocabulary was too painstaking. It's as though he went out of his way to be overly intellectual and high-brow. "Portnoy's Complaint" had a much better flow than this book.

The themes have been done before, and better, and this book will probably be forgotten in time. The narrator is a writer who is telling us the story of a disgraced classics professor/former dean at a small New England college, with whom he had a brief friendship. The gist of his downfall is that he has been accused of racism after making a benign comment about some students he has never laid eyes upon. There's some pretty astute commentary about the damaging effect of politics on the educational system. Turns out he's been hiding a pretty big secret about his own racial history. His disgrace is also heightened by an affair he is having with a woman 40 years younger than him. So sexual politics are at the forefront too. Roth parallels the main character's pitfall with Bill Clinton's scandal with Monica Lewinsky (book was written in 1998). All of the characters are well developed, although there's at least one I believe the book could do without entirely, and when the truth comes out about the big secret the professor has been hiding his whole life, the pathos of the human condition is just laid right out before you on a big, sad table.

Not the most uplifting book to start out the new year, but a good read for anyone who loves books that explore race theories, human imperfections, and that age-old question: how much do we control our own fate?

Next up: "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides. I've decided to give it a go, despite Oprah's big obnoxious seal of approval on the cover. *Shudder*