100 Books! a.k.a. Challenge Completed! a.k.a. A Cautionary Tale

This is it, folks. The last chapter. Five and a half years, triple-digit classics, and—in self-congratulations—the pie party to end all pie parties.

IT’S MY PARTY AND I’LL PIE IF I WANT TO.

On my long and harrowing journey across the wilderness of my own bookshelf, I visited 30+ countries—some real, some imaginary. I met heroes, villains, God, and the devil. I went to war and fell in love and traveled through time and witnessed magic. I worried and grieved and LOLed and maybe, slightly, occasionally lost my mind.

And I wrote and wrote and wrote, trying to find it again.

I never doubted that I’d finish—mostly because I try not to make a habit of self-doubt. I’m still convinced that if I really wanted to, and worked really hard at it, I could be an Olympic triathlete, or a Mars-bound astronaut, or a turtle whisperer with my own TV show. And while that kind of certainty is probably diagnosable, it may also be the very reason I was able to finish The Challenge. Predicting how this story ended was—spoiler alert!—the easiest part.

The hardest part was, of course, everything else. The 100 Greatest Books of All Time don’t read themselves—and it was up to me, day after day, to sit down and turn pages. My best estimates suggest that I read 50,817 pages to close out The List, one determined word at a time. The shortest book on The List was 75 pages.

The longest was 4,217.

But it’s all over now, and I can devote my remaining lifespan to full-time snobbery. I can casually name-drop Proust, and sneer at the very idea of e-readers. I can even call myself a literary badass, if there is such a thing.

I won’t, obviously, do any of that. But I will take a moment out to shake my own hand, feather my own cap, and pat myself on the back for a mundane victory. What is life, after all, without a little revelry? Why even bother existing, without the slightest swagger?

I hope I never find out. But if I do, it will probably be in a book.

…

When I celebrate, I celebrate in lists. (Well, and pie.) Every milestone up until this point—50 books, 75 books, 80 books, 90 books—has been commemorated with at least one list, but usually several. And even though I don’t believe in tradition for tradition’s sake, I do believe in the power of lists to spread peace, love, joy, and the satisfaction of a job well-organized.

So here we go, one last time: The List, in lists. 

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Strategies for Every Readventurer

(Or, How I Read 100 Classics)

 

1. Engage in wanton book polygamy. The idea of reading several books at once used to give me an insta-headache, but The Challenge changed all that. Anyone reading books so bloated they require two epilogues, or come with an author’s apology, is bound to burn out hard and fast. I’ve learned to love “revolving door reading,” and never looked back since.
2. Play it by ear. Audiobooks are the easiest way to read loads and remain lazy. You don’t even need to change your existing routine, except to press a button once in a while. And to all those who insist that “audiobooking isn’t reading,” I’d like to say this: You do you. But audiobooks, in my mind, enhance the reading experience—and they’ve been one hell of a sidekick throughout The Challenge.
3. Proceed not with caution, but with confidence. Even if a notoriously rabid, 800-page beast of a book with a barely pronounceable Russian name sounds mildly intimidating, ignore that initial instinct to dip a couple of dainty toes in the water. Cannonball into that book. Commit right up front. I read somewhere once that if you can dog-paddle your way through 25 pages of Ulysses per day, you’ll be done in a month. (Math agrees, and so do I.)
4. Just keep reading, reading, reading. Can’t keep up with your own ambitions? There’s still hope. Success can be a sprint, but more often, it’s a marathon. Yours depends on turning just a few pages—five will do—every night before bed. I got through some of the most head-scratching, mind-boggling, brain-bruising novels this way: a little at a time.
5. Use your resources. Don’t give up on that impossible read just because it’s impossible. Dial 911—a.k.a. SparkNotes, Cliff Notes, Shmoop, and the blogosphere—and ask for help. There’s always some brave hero(ine) out there waiting to save the day. Let them come to your rescue—then turn around and pay it forward.

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Biggest Takeaways

(Among Countless Lessons Learned)

 

1. Just because someone did it first does not mean they did it best. Often, it means just the opposite. So can we stop worshiping the ground trodden by Tolkien, and Lawrence, and Hemingway? Or at least acknowledge that their imagination far outstripped their implementation? No? OK. I tried.
2. No book is made “classic” by accident, and we’re leaving a lot of our fellow humans out of the club. If the Literary Canon were a person, he’d be a straight, white, rich, able-bodied colonialist, probably with a beard and a monocle. He’d definitely be a he. And while his voice deserves to be heard, just like anyone else’s, the anyone elses have been patient enough. It’s the Canon’s turn to listen, and to make a little room.
3. Don’t judge a book by its cover. Not even by its back cover. Plot summaries can be woefully misleading at the best of times, and tragically deterrent at the worst. There were moments during The Challenge that I fully anticipated an epic struggle with an epic hate-read (Lolita, A Clockwork Orange)—or prepared a place on my bookshelf for a brand new favorite (Wuthering Heights, Tristram Shandy)—only to be taken by surprise. But you know what? There’s a reason they call it the thrill of discovery. And it’s probably the reason we should read outside our comfort zone.
4. Don’t waste time reading books you hate. This might seem counterintuitive, since I spent five and a half years doing just that. But I couldn’t agree less with that snooty Atlantic writer who thinks there’s shame in DNF’ing. I admit that I’m unable to abandon books en route, but I consider this a weakness instead of an asset. Quitting books is a habit I’d give anything to cultivate—if only to continue reading like crazy while (hopefully) remaining sane.
5. There’s only one thing that makes any book Great: You. You decide. Don’t listen to any publishers, reviewers, hipsters, or lists telling you there’s anything objective about Greatness. You may not know yourself what makes you connect with one book, and shudder at another. But the good news is that nobody can tell you you’re wrong.

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My Favoritest Classics of All Time

(In No Particular Order)

 

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
2. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
3. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
4. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
6. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
7. Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
8. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
9. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
10. Beloved, Toni Morrison

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Works of Indisputable Genius

(Whether I Liked Them or Not)

 

1. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
2. 1984, George Orwell
3. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
5. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
6. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
7. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
8. King Lear, William Shakespeare
9. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
10. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

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My Literary Grudges

(May Their Ink Fade Away and Their Pages Crumble to Dust)

 

1. Rabbit, Run, John Updike (to be referred to hereafter as “The-Book-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Named”)
2. Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
3. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
4. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
5. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
6. Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence
7. Herzog, Saul Bellow
8. Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais
9. The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
10. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

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The Most Challenging of the Challenge

(Especially Difficult and/or Tedious Classics)

 

1. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce

We should probably stop here and camp out for a while. That’s how formidable Finnegans Wake turned out to be.

For the sake of time, though, we’ll move on. Just know that there’s a boundless, hopeless chasm between the Wake and the rest of this list.

1. Finnegans Wake (it bears repeating)
2. Ulysses, James Joyce
3. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
4. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
5. Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
6. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
7. Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett
8. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
9. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
10. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

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Buried Literary Treasures

(Books I May Never Have Read, and Loved, Without Taking on The Challenge)

 

1. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
2. All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
3. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
4. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
5. The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu

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Frequently Asked Questions

(Or, More Accurately, Questions Literally No One Has Asked Me)

 

1. Will you read any more classics after this?

Of course. I’m even more excited to read the classics now that I know which authors to seek out (Baldwin, Morrison, Vonnegut)—and which ones to avoid like puddles on a subway platform (Updike, Steinbeck, Joyce).

2. Will you continue blogging?

That’d be a heartfelt maybe. Someday I hope to get a pet and blog about it.

3. Was The Challenge worth the time and effort?

God, no.

4. Really? Not even for the bragging rights? 

I avoid discussing The Challenge as much as possible—mostly because reading The 100 Greatest Books of All Time makes me sound like an asshole. In the end, The Challenge has mostly served to fuel my reckless TBR on Goodreads (see #1) and my Christmas gift ideas for friends and family.

I mean, yeah, I read some incredible books (Lolita, Midnight’s Children, The Canterbury Tales). But whether or not those Kings Among Books outrivaled all the monsters (Tristram Shandy, Finnegans Wake, The-Book-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Named) isn’t something I’m equipped to measure.

5. What is the greatest book of all time? 

That’s up to you to decide for yourself. The book that stood out to me the most among all the masterworks on The List—the book that, for me, transcended every other reading encounter I’ve ever had or expect to have—was Beloved.

6. So, what now? Book-wise?

I don’t know! And I’m trying to be OK with that.

…

And so, on my very last page, I wish you—forever and ever—happy reading. Consider yourself invited to my pie party, happening now at a bakery near you.

COME AT ME, PIE. IT’S EAT OR BE EATEN. I hope you’re up to the challenge.

#27 Native Son, Richard Wright

The summer after I graduated from high school, I got a part-time job working at a dog kennel in my hometown. On my very first day, a 30-year-old stoner named Daryn gave me a tour of the facilities and showed me how to rotate the dogs between indoor and outdoor kennels. Most of the dogs were lodged individually, but dogs from the same household were allowed to stay together if requested by the owner.

When we reached the “large dog” wing, two mean-as-shit Rottweilers broke out in a fight. Daryn told me later they were brothers, which explained why they were sharing a kennel and why they were sharing it poorly. Daryn jumped into their kennel to wrestle them apart, shouting “Get the hose!” over his shoulder, and I did. I grabbed the hose and blasted the two dogs right in the chest, one after the other, startling them just enough for Daryn to split them up. I spent the next twenty minutes or so bandaging Daryn’s bloody hands, since he insisted “based on experience” that they didn’t need stitches.

As we left the break room, Daryn laughed and said, “Welcome to Best Friends Pet Resort.” And I remember thinking, This is a TERRIBLE first day on the job.

Native Son opens in 1930s Chicago and the dead of winter. Twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas assures his mother of his plans to accept a job chauffeuring for the Daltons—a rich white family that, incidentally, owns the building Bigger lives in. That afternoon, he meets Mr. Dalton, who agrees to hire him and requests that he drive Mary, his daughter, to school.

But instead of going to school, Mary directs Bigger to pick up her Communist boyfriend, Jan, for a wild night on the town. On returning home early the next morning, Bigger helps a drunken Mary upstairs to her room and panics when her blind mother walks in the door. Hoping to quiet her so she doesn’t give him away, Bigger smothers Mary with a pillow—accidentally killing her.

In an effort to destroy the evidence of his crime, Bigger feeds Mary’s body into the furnace. But when her head doesn’t fit, he is forced to decapitate her with a knife (and, later, a hatchet) before returning home for a few hours of sleep.

And I remember thinking, No, THAT is a terrible first day on the job.

This is not to say that Bigger is a likable, sympathetic character. In many ways, he is aggressively unlikable: a violent, contentious bully and rapist, Bigger feels little remorse for killing Mary and actually forgets about his subsequent attack on Bessie (the girlfriend he hopes to silence when it’s clear she can’t tag along on his getaway).

But Wright intended, all along, to write a monster—not a hero. Bigger isn’t meant to be likable; he is meant to demonstrate how the cycle of oppression, hatred, and violence so deeply rooted in U.S. race relations is both self-perpetuating and universally destructive. A poor black man with an eighth grade education, Bigger doesn’t bother with hopes and dreams for the future: With only odd jobs available to support his family, a cramped and rat-infested apartment that still manages to be a ripoff, and a sense of self informed only by the mocking, hateful portrayals of black people in the media, why would he? In his own words:

A guy gets tired of being told what he can do and can’t do. You get a little job here and a little job there. You shine shoes, sweep streets; anything… You don’t make enough to live on. You don’t know when you going to get fired. Pretty soon you get so you can’t hope for nothing.

For the reader, as for Bigger, the events of the novel feel like a series of inevitabilities slowly closing in. From its earliest pages, Bigger expresses a generalized apprehension—a feeling “like something awful’s going to happen” to him. When something does—Mary’s death—it’s an accident, but he knows no one will believe him. “I knew that some time or other they was going to get me for something,” he says. “I’m black. I don’t have to do nothing for ’em to get me. The first white finger they point at me, I’m a goner.” The discovery of Mary’s body seems inevitable, as the hours tick by, as does Bigger’s imminent flight. Bessie’s slaughter seems inevitable the more she refuses to be his accomplice, and Bigger’s capture seems inevitable the more his manhunt grows in fury. His execution is, of course, a given—and Bigger knows that, too.

Still, murder makes Bigger feel, for the first time ever, powerful. He is both smug and outraged when the Dalton family and a group of reporters underestimate his intelligence in assuming he had nothing to do with Mary’s disappearance or the ransom note he fabricated. His actions following Mary’s death are, absurdly, among the first decisions he ever makes by and for himself. But, ultimately—inevitably—he winds up back where he started:

Not only had he lived where they told him to live, not only had he done what they told him to do, not only had he done these things until he had killed to be quit of them; but even after obeying, after killing, they still ruled him. He was their property, heart and soul, body and blood; what they did claimed every atom of him, sleeping and waking; it colored life and dictated the terms of death.

In Native Son, Wright forces us to confront the gruesome realities of racism and the role we play in it—how fear and hate are both cause and effect when it comes to racial oppression. Just as whites dehumanize(d) blacks, Bigger dehumanizes them, too, leading on both sides to violence. The stereotype of the “barbaric black aggressor,” like most stereotypes, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—and the cycle continues to spin its wheels.

Bigger embodies all of this and more as a black man standing before the “looming mountain of white hate.” He has no choices in life, and therefore no control. And, within this context—our own shared heritage as a nation—Wright asks us: Is Bigger individually responsible for his crimes, or does society share some of the blame? Is it fair to condemn the villains we ourselves created? And is it possible, for one person or many, to turn the tide of the inevitable?

In his essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” Wright attempts to account for the resentment, anger, anxiety, and despair that define Bigger and his real-world counterparts. He describes the “Biggers” in his own life, and the fates they met with, and what he learned from them. In pulling at the threads of their shared experience, Wright unravels a truth universally acknowledged yet often taken for granted: We are all, in our essence, alike—and it is our environments that differ.

Among millions of people the deepest convictions of life are never discussed openly; they are felt, implied, hinted at tacitly and obliquely in their hopes and fears. We live by an idealism that makes us believe that the Constitution is a good document of government, that the Bill of Rights is a good legal and humane principle to safeguard our civil liberties, that every man and woman should have the opportunity to realize himself, to seek his own individual fate and goal, his own peculiar and untranslatable destiny. I don’t say that Bigger knew this in the terms in which I’m speaking of it; I don’t say that any such thought ever entered his head. His emotional and intellectual life was never that articulate. But he knew it emotionally, intuitively, for his emotions and desires were developed, and he caught it, as most of us do, from the mental and emotional climate of our time. Bigger had all of this in him, dammed up, buried, implied, and I had to develop it in fictional form.

Wright notes, in closing, that early American authors “complained bitterly about the bleakness and flatness of the American scene.” If only they had lived to see the 20th century, he says, they would find enough tragedy in the African American experience to satisfy their creative appetite: “And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.” 

Harsh words, maybe—but ones we need to hear, and keep hearing. Which just so happens to be Wright’s specialty.

Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time?

Wright insists that he doesn’t know “if Native Son is a good book or a bad book.” My vote? Neither. Native Son is a great book, earning its place on The List and then some.

Favorite Quotes:

“Don’t you love me?”
“About as much as you love me.”
“How much is that?”
“You ought to know.”

Either he was too weak, or the world was too strong; he did not know which.

But what was he after? What did he want? What did he love and what did he hate? He did not know. There was something he knew and something he felt; something the world gave him and something he himself had; something spread out in front of him and something spread out in back; and never in all his life, with this black skin of his, had the two worlds, thought and feeling, will and mind, aspiration and satisfaction, been together; never had he felt a sense of wholeness.

Read: 2016

Quick Reviews, Part IV

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#63 An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser 

It was, I think, Mignon McLaughlin who once said:

It’s innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn’t.

This pretty much sums up my hatred for An American Tragedy (1925).

Everyone in this book is insufferable. Everyone. There’s Asa and Elvira Griffiths, hapless and helpless to the tips of their fingers. There’s Hortense Briggs, and her whining, and her shopping addiction. There’s Roberta Alden and her drab insecurity, Gilbert Griffiths and his pointless grudge, Sondra Finchley and her baby-talk, and the rest of the Lycurgus social elite. All of these people make Voldemort seem warmhearted and vivacious by comparison.

Most of all, there’s Clyde Griffiths, our watered-down protagonist, who pairs an insipid personality with a cutthroat sense of greed. THESE ARE A FEW NONE OF MY FAV-O-RITE THINGS.

There is, frankly, nothing and no one to like here. Dreiser’s plot is tedious, and his writing simplistic. The moral of the story seems to be that chasing the American Dream will get you strapped into an electric chair… but so will being a murderous asshole.

By my estimation, we, the readers, are the real victims here—so Clyde can close his sniveling gripe-hole any time now.

Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time?

It wouldn’t be the greatest book of all time if it were the only book ever written. Stick to your day job, Dreiser.

Favorite Quotes:

As they sang, this nondescript and indifferent street audience gazed, held by the peculiarity of such an unimportant-looking family publicly raising its collective voice against the vast skepticism and apathy of life.

Read: 2016

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#85 The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

Now we’re talking. What do you get when you try to write four books at once?

A fifth book, apparently. A golden one.

At least, that’s how the story goes for Anna Wulf, who fills four color-coded notebooks with the most intimate of details: black for her childhood in Southern Rhodesia, red for her time in the Communist Party, yellow for her manuscripts, and blue for her personal diary. Anna decides, ultimately, to unite this fragmented rendering of her life into one final notebook: The Golden Notebook (1962).

This, folks, is what we call postmodernism.

Among Lessing’s more prominent themes are mental and societal breakdown, anti-war protest and communism, women’s liberation, romantic love, and parenthood. This takes it, inevitably, quite far from being a light read, but it is a compelling one. There is something raw and fearless about it, something deeply honest but carefully engineered—something that tells me I’ll pick this book up again someday to take another ride.

Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time?

I wouldn’t jump right to “Greatest” from a preliminary read, but there’s nothing else quite like it on The List.

Favorite Quotes:

I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkenness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility, of danger, the secret ugly frightening pulse of war itself, of the death that we all wanted, for each other and for ourselves. 

Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.

People don’t mind immoral messages. They don’t mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sex’s sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a little. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is love. What they can’t stand is to be told it all doesn’t matter, they can’t stand the formlessness. 

“For Christ’s sake, you must understand sex isn’t important to me, it just isn’t important.”
I said: “You mean sex is important but who you have it with isn’t.”

Read: 2014

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#56 Animal Farm, George Orwell

George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) came out of left field and blew me away, to the point that I was disappointed when it ended.

Well, OK, almost disappointed. The List is really long, guys.

Orwell intended Animal Farm as an allegory for the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent Stalin regime, and he was NOT subtle about it. Stalin is literally depicted as a tyrannical pig named Napoleon. Following a farm-wide rebellion against their cruel human caretakers, the crafty Napoleon wrests power away from his fellow leaders with an army of dogs. All the ideals of their revolution, from equality to loyalty, are either crushed or forgotten as time passes and oppression soars. In the chilling final pages of the story, the pigs begin to walk on two legs… much like their human masters of old.

A democratic socialist, Orwell opposed communism, along with the totalitarian propaganda that so often fuels it. He described Animal Farm as an effort “to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole,” which sounds boring but isn’t. Take it from me—someone who is, broadly speaking, repulsed by politics—that this is worth a read anyway. Orwell’s writing style is simple but riveting, and his farm animal cast makes a play-by-play of totalitarianism surprisingly readable.

Just keep in mind that this is not “a fairy story” with a happy ending. After all, this is the book that gave us the famous saying “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time?

Absolutely. It meets my two criteria—originality + expert craftsmanship—and then some.

Favorite Quotes:

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Read: 2015

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#18 On the Road, Jack Kerouac

I’ve always understood On the Road (1957) to be a love-it-or-hate-it kind of phenomenon, like Taylor Swift or Marmite.

My take? It’s the same for all three, actually: something in between. I love them, sure, but only in small doses. I love them in spite of their flaws, and sometimes because of them. And I love them most of all for their ability to provoke, despite being pretty damn harmless.

The ultimate road trip narrative, On the Road is perhaps less about purpose or destination than the feeling of adventure. This book evokes travel, and the American landscape, like no other. There’s an undeniable appeal in the vitality of it—the anarchy of it—as it matches stroke for stroke, in form and function, the feel of being young, and wild, and free, and stupid. The manifesto of the Beat movement characterized by hedonism and experimentation, On the Road invites us on a spontaneous journey to rescue ourselves from tradition and conformity, all for the cost of paper and petrol.

Jack Kerouac famously drafted On the Road on one continuous scroll of paper over the course of three weeks in 1951. The story follows Sal Paradise (based on the author) and Dean Moriarty (based on Neal Cassady) on a series of cross-country jaunts marked by sex, drugs, and jazz. Controversial at the time of publication, On the Road still marches to the beat of its own drum, occupying a unique corner in the American imagination.

As much as I admire Kerouac’s monument to freedom and Americana, I felt a restlessness reading On the Road that had less to do with my own life than the choices Sal and Dean made with theirs. As it turns out, even adventure can become monotonous. Which is why I’ll say it again: The best way to fall in love, with On the Road or with your own soul mate, is carefully, in small doses.

Marmite-style.

Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time?

I’m going to go with yes. It’s not perfect, but few classics are.

Favorite Quotes:

The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then.

I have finally taught him that he can do anything he wants, become mayor of Denver, marry a millionairess, or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races.

I told Terry I was leaving. She had been thinking about it all night and was resigned to it. Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.

If nobody’s home, climb in through the window. Signed, Remi Boncoeur

What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

So I went up and there she was, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long. We agreed to love each other madly.

“We gotta go and never stop going till we get there.”
“Where we going, man?”
“I don’t know but we gotta go.”

Read: 2014

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#59 Gargantua & Pantagruel, François Rabelais 

Don’t be fooled by those back-cover references to the “dazzling and exuberant comic Chronicles of Rabelais,” or the “ingenious wordplay and mastery of language” evoked by Gargantua & Pantagruel (1532–1564).

This book is so, so boring.

Listen to some of these chapter titles:

• On the Origins and Lineage of the great Pantagruel
• How Pantagruel fairly judged an amazingly hard and obscure controversy so equitably that his judgement was termed more wonderful than that of Solomon’s
• How Pantagruel departed from Paris on hearing news that the Dipsodes were invading the land of the Amaurots. And why the leagues are so short in France. And the Exposition of a saying inscribed upon a ring
• How Gargamelle, when carrying Gargantua, took to eating a great profusion of tripe
• How Gargantua was dressed
• Gargantua’s colours and livery
• What the colours white and blue do signify
• How Gargantua spent his time when it was rainy
• Why everyone avoids monks: and why some men have noses which are bigger than others
• How Panurge had a flea in his ear and gave up sporting his magnificent codpiece
• The Excuse of Panurge; and an exegesis of a monastical cabbala concerning salted beef
• How lawsuits are born and how they grow to perfection
• How Xenomanes describes Quarêmeprenant anatomically
• How in the Court of the Master-Inventor Pantagruel denounced the Engastrimyths and the Gastrolaters

You’re already bored, aren’t you? I’m bored all over again just looking at this book.

It had potential. I’ll give Rabelais that much. This 16th-century pentalogy follows two giants (a father and son) on their many misadventures in Medieval/Renaissance France. Much is made of the book’s satirical, scatological, and violent themes, but even these could not deliver me from indifference. And just in case you don’t believe me, and want to try it out for yourself: Give those chapter titles one more read.

I think we’ll see eye to eye in no time.

Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time?

I don’t even know—I only half-paid attention.

Favorite Quotes:

Then they gave us heartfelt advice: if we wanted to rise in the courts of great noblemen, to be as economical as possible of the truth.

Would you say (as one may indeed logically infer) that the world was heretofore daft but now become wise? How many and what conditions were required to make it daft? And how many and wise to make it wise? And why was it daft? And why should it now be wise? By what qualities did you recognize its former folly? By what qualities, its present wisdom? Who made it daft? Who made it wise? Who form the greater number: those who liked it daft or those who like it wise? For how long was it daft? How long has it been wise? Whence proceeded its antecedent folly and whence its subsequent wisdom? Why did its antecedent folly end now and not later? Why did its present wisdom begin now and not earlier? What ill did that antecedent folly do to us? And what good, the subsequent wisdom? How could that old folly have been abolished? And how could the present wisdom be restored? 

Nothing is more dear nor more precious than time: let us spend it on good works.

Read: 2016

…

Check out Quick Reviews: Part I, Part II, and Part III for more fun and games whining and mocking.

Oh, and here’s the premise behind the Quick Reviews series. (I’ll give you a hint: It’s laziness.)

#51 The Tin Drum, Günter Grass

Oskar Matzerath is no ordinary three-year-old.

He’s not even three years old.

Oskar decided, in fact, to remain three years old no matter how much time went by—all because #adulting held so little appeal.

But wait—there’s more.

Oskar has this drum, this tin drum, a drum he’s obsessed with to the point of violence and betrayal. Also, his scream can shatter glass. So Oskar drums and screams his way around his native Danzig, like a three-year-old but not as a three-year-old, while the Nazi Party gains power over in Germany and begins its march toward Poland.

When he finally decides to grow up a little (mentally and physically) after the war ends, Oskar:

• works a series of random jobs (gang leader, tombstone engraver, nude model, and jazz band drummer, to name a few)
• is accused of murdering his neighbor, and
• winds up in an insane asylum.

His only regret is that he’s innocent.

This is a nasty piece of literature narrated by a nasty piece of work. Oskar is a lying, thieving, whining, bragging, manipulating sociopath. He hits pregnant women and kicks dogs. He has a God (or, more accurately, a Jesus) complex. Worst of all, he regularly refers to himself in the third person.

We can only assume Mr. Burns and Dolores Umbridge are saving him a seat in Hell.

And yet, despite my generalized disgust for The Tin Drum, there is one contextual detail I find endlessly intriguing. Günter Grass, like Oskar, grew up in the Free City of Danzig (now called Gdańsk) and moved from Poland to Germany after the war. With The Tin Drum, published in 1959, Grass hoped to force a post-war Germany to confront its past—military members and civilians alike. What Grass didn’t mention until 2006—almost 50 years later—was that, at 17, he himself was a member of the Waffen-SS and trained as a tank gunner. 

Accused of hypocrisy for holding himself up as a “moral authority, [and] a rather smug one,” Grass nevertheless felt the time had come to confront his own past. Shmoop, always spot-on, sums up the controversy like this:

What do you think? Did Grass earn a ton of money and a Nobel Prize by claiming a moral high ground he really didn’t deserve? Or did having to confront his own participation in the war give him the right to demand that others confront theirs?

If you like unreliable narrators, demon children, historical themes, and magical realism, you might enjoy The Tin Drum. Just know that the longer you spend with it, the dirtier your hands will get.

Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time?

Audiobook was probably the wrong format for this novel. I’ll have to get back to you on this when my ears stop ringing from all the moaning, wailing, screaming, and sneering.

Also the criminal third person.

Favorite Quotes:

When Satan’s not in the mood, virtue triumphs. Hasn’t even Satan a right not to be in the mood once in a while?

Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings.

Boredom may well be the very essence of evil.

Read: 2016

Literary Incest: Classics Within Classics

The more time you spend with the classics, the more you notice the time they spend with each other.

Because, as it turns out, the classics spend a lot of time with each other. They’re kind of obsessed with each other, consumed by each other, locking each other into their own word prisons playgrounds whenever they have the opportunity. It’s a little bit sick, and a little bit twisted, how wrapped up they are in each other’s interests and arms.

That’s why I call this phenomenon Literary Incest.

When I first took on The 100 Greatest Books Challenge way back in 2011, I created a spreadsheet to track meta-themes. My reasons ranged from the obvious (mere curiosity) to the nerd-tacular (spreadsheets are a hobby) to the profound (a need to extract meaning from this endeavor, in the form of half-assed statistics). I tracked recurring subject matter as broad as “social commentary” and “religious commentary,” plot points as specific as “protagonist dies,” “protagonist kills self,” and “protagonist attempts to kill self,” and personal impressions as vague as “characters have weird names” and “book is categorically boring.” As soon as I finished a book on The List, I would dive into my spreadsheet to tick off every box that applied.

At the far end of the spreadsheet was a column labeled Incest: references within the classics to other classics. It was here that I recorded every member of the literary “family tree”—and here that I discovered the Greek and Latin classics to be a sort of father figure to all the rest.

It’s an understatement of irresponsible proportions to say that the Greek and Latin classics show up everywhere in literature. Among the classics that make direct reference to The Iliad, The Odyssey, or The Aeneid are:

• The Divine Comedy
• Middlemarch
• The Portrait of a Lady
• The Magic Mountain
• Tristram Shandy
• Tom Jones
• In Search of Lost Time
• Gargantua & Pantagruel

And those are just the ones I happened to make note of, and that happen to appear on my List. Add to this the fact(s) that Joyce’s Ulysses parallels The Odyssey, that Lowry’s Under the Volcano parallels Ulysses, and that Virgil’s Aeneid is a kind of Odyssey/Iliad two-for-one deal, and we’ve got quite a lot of inbreeding in our hands.

Well beyond Homer and Virgil, though, we can still find countless cases of classic overlap. Middlemarch also contains allusions to Don Quixote, The Canterbury Tales, and Gulliver’s Travels. On the Road makes reference to Gargantua & Pantagruel, The Sun Also Rises, and Moby-Dick. Brave New World has a Shakespearean fixation, and Tristram Shandy is on speaking terms with Pilgrim’s Progress, Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Gargantua & Pantagruel.

Naturally, the older the book, the more often it is referred to. After the Greek and Latin epics, no book is cited more frequently than Dante’s Divine Comedy: Lolita, The Count of Monte Cristo, An American Tragedy, In Search of Lost Time, and Middlemarch borrow pieces of his genius. And some books, of course, make incest their own filthy habit. Finnegans Wake invokes nearly every preceding classic, and Lolita teases at least six others:

• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Alice in Wonderland
• The Divine Comedy
• King Lear
• Madame Bovary
• Brideshead Revisited

…

So what are we to make of all this? If my spreadsheet is any indication, not much. Lately arrived on its deathbed, this blog is the brightest glimpse of daylight it will ever see.

But if we all put our heads together like some big, perverted family, we might come to the conclusion that the literary greats looked toward one another for inspiration. And when they found it, they gave credit where it was due. And when we’re writing, we should consider doing the same.

Or maybe it was just as show-offy then as it is now to casually name-drop Homer or Dante into conversations/publications, and they were trying to look cool.

But hey, who cares?

There are worse crimes.

#98 The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

I like to think of The Count of Monte Cristo as a scientific experiment conducted by God during one of Earth’s more tedious centuries. What happens when you surround a man with enemies, watch them lock him up in prison for 14 years, give him an education, give him endless riches, give him back his freedom, and then unleash him on the world at large?

The Count of Monte Cristo happens. And it ain’t pretty.

Edmond Dantès is, at 19, a happy, well-liked, and gifted young sailor with a doting father and a devoted fiancée. Fortune smiles upon him like a favorite pastime. The future looks bright enough for Ray-Bans.

But Edmond is crushed under his own windfall of good luck when three local dickheads let jealousy get the better of them. Danglars, the treasurer of Edmond’s ship; Fernand Mondego, a local fisherman in love with his fiancée; and Caderousse, his resentful neighbor, accuse Edmond of treason on the eve of his wedding to Mercédès. (Edmond does, indeed, carry a letter from Napoleon, exiled to Elba, but only as a favor to his friend and former captain.) The prosecutor, Villefort, sees Edmond’s innocence for what it is and intends to send him home… until Edmond reveals the intended recipient of Napoleon’s letter: Monsieur Noirtier, a.k.a. Villefort’s father. To protect his own interests and cover up his father’s treasonous affairs, Villefort sends Edmond to the notorious island prison known as the Château d’If.

Edmond is educated in secret by another prisoner (a former Italian priest) before finally making his escape over a decade later. Once freed, he follows a tip from the priest to the island of Monte Cristo and discovers unfathomable sums of buried treasure. The next time we meet him, Edmond has become the Count of Monte Cristo, an omniscient and omnipotent god-like figure with mysterious, foreign habits and an appetite for revenge.

At this point, only a quarter of the way into the book, things really start to heat up. Edmond takes his vengeance on Danglars, Fernand, Caderousse, and Villefort slowly, surely, and mercilessly. He lays complicated traps for each of his prey, adopts numerous aliases, spends an enormous fortune, and generally takes “obsession” to new levels of entertainment.

The Count of Monte Cristo is an adventure tale in the truest sense of the word. Originally written in serial format, it is 117 chapters of rollicking thrills, dark secrets, and moving romance. We read a separate novel’s worth of stories-within-the-story and witness many of the dramatic events that changed the course of French history. We watch Edmond play the role of Karma and take Destiny into his own hands—for the good of some and the detriment of many.

Since its 2002 release, The Count of Monte Cristo has been one of my favorite movies. And while many alterations were necessary to squeeze 1200 pages into two hours of film (and gratify a Hollywood audience), it captures the spirit of Dumas’s original reasonably well: Revenge is satisfying, but not as much as you’d think. We can change who we are, but only by a little. Happiness will elude us as long as we compare our lot with others’. It’s all there, even if it takes a different form.

Between The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers alone, Alexandre Dumas has left a considerable legacy. Born in northern France in 1802, his background was both aristocratic and mixed-race. He moved to Paris in his twenties and worked at the Palais Royal for the Duc d’Orléans. By the time he died in 1870, Dumas’s bibliography included much more than his popular adventure novels: His works ranged from travel narratives on Florence and Naples to historical dramas about famous English actors to essays on infamous European criminals.

By way of curious anecdotes, he had at least 40 mistresses throughout his (apparently very busy) lifetime and fathered a handful of illegitimate children. He also built a country house (circa 1846) and named it the Château de Monte-Cristo—along with a writing studio he called the Château d’If.

The best part of The Count of Monte Cristo? It is said to be based on a true story.

I wholeheartedly recommend this lively and rewarding read, even if it leaves you contemplating vengeance on your own bullies of days gone by.

Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time?

It may not be Lolita or War and Peace, but it’s way better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.

Favorite Quotes:

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another.

It is for justice to avenge those she has been unable to protect.

All human wisdom is summed up in these two words: “Wait and hope.”

Read: 2015

#70 Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

All the Thoughts I Had While Listening to Robinson Crusoe on Audiobook

…

…

Early On

• So, Mr. Crusoe, your first sea voyage ends in shipwreck, and the second ends in your capture by Moorish pirates. Upon escaping slavery, your first move is to get back on a boat??? Fool me thrice, and all that.
• Glad to hear you feel one measly qualm about selling Xury after he helped liberate you from bondage, Crusoe. Seriously, I’m dabbing a tissue to my eye’s flooded edge as we speak.
• Cue another shipwreck. Didn’t see that coming for a minute.
• “Island of Despair.” Ha. Hahaha. Karma’s a bitch, isn’t she?
• Hang on—did I hear that right? Penguins?

Later

• My, aren’t we resourceful.
• Actually, “resourceful” is putting it mildly.
• OK, we’ve now ventured way beyond resourcefulness and traipsed into surrealism. Is anyone a man of this many talents? Or did the entire English population of the 17th century know how to farm, fish, craft pottery, weave baskets, build rafts, carve canoes, fashion clothing, and make candles, cheese, bread, and wine?
• Forgive me, Mr. C., for the impertinence, but shouldn’t you have gone crazy by now? Shouldn’t you be carving yourself a cedar family at this point, instead of all those canoes?
• So many cats, so few bullets. *Shakes head.*
• I’m pretty sure that, under the same circumstances, I would have abandoned religion instead of adopting it. But whatever. At least there’s no one around to evangelize.
• JUST KIDDING. Thank God for Friday.

Later Than That

• What are the odds of strolling into the middle of a cannibal party?
• OK, Wikipedia says the odds aren’t THAT slim. Fine, then.
• So… once you taught Friday to speak English, dearest Crusoe, you couldn’t have asked him his real name?
• Holy crap is this book racist.
• OOF racist.
• Racist!!!
• ALL THE RACISM.

Very Late

• Bear with me for a minute, Crusoe. So you saved Friday’s life once, and he vowed to serve you as lord and master. I get it. I really do. But now that Friday has saved your life at least five times, shouldn’t you switch???
• Also, why is every slave in this book so excited to be a slave? (Except you, NATCH.)
• Well done, Crusoe. You finally realized the moral of your own story: Travel overland.

The End

• But look out for wolves.

…

Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time?

The concept trumps the execution in this case. (The same, of course, can also be said of all reality TV, of which Robinson Crusoe is an ancestor.)

Favorite Quotes:

It put me upon reflecting how little repining there would be among mankind at any condition of life, if people would rather compare their condition with those that were worse, in order to be thankful, than be always comparing them with those which are better, to assist their murmurings and complaining. 

It is true, I had been very unfortunate by sea and this might be one of the reasons. But let no man slight the strong impulses of his own thoughts in cases of such moment. Two of the ships which I had singled out to go in, I mean more particularly singled out than any other, that is to say, so as in one of them to put my things on board, and in the other to have agreed with the captain; I say, two of these ships miscarried, viz. one was taken by Algerines, and the other was cast away on the Start, near Torbay, and all the people drowned, except three; so that in either of those vessels I had been made miserable, and in which most, it was hard to say.

Read: 2015

Quick Reviews, Part III

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#72 Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence

On the back cover of my Signet Classics edition of Sons and Lovers, E. M. Forster declares D. H. Lawrence to be “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.”

This is ironic for two reasons:

1. There is nothing imaginative at all in Sons and Lovers. The book is known, in fact, to be largely autobiographical.
2. E. M. Forster himself—a fellow member of Lawrence’s generation—is more imaginative. And even that isn’t saying much.

Sons and Lovers is no more than a protracted look at the Oedipus complex—and not a very insightful one, IMHO. At the head of the Morel family stand an alcoholic miner hated by his children and an anguished housewife adored by them. Eventually, the sons grow up and fall in love/lust, and the shit hits the fam. All of them spew a steady stream of verbal abuse at each other—father and mother and sons and lovers—from start to finish.

Apparently the “sex scenes”—by which I mean vaguely sensual forest romps—were considered obscene back in 1913. To the modern reader, they are too ambiguous to be sexy and too boring to advertise.

I am pleased to say Lawrence and I can call it quits now that I’ve put Sons and Lovers and Women in Love behind me. I fail to see how his work is in any way outstanding, well-crafted, or entertaining.

And that’s putting it nicely.

Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time?

May I quote Bart Simpson? “I didn’t think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows.”

Favorite Quotes:

She could not be content with the little he might be; she would have him the much that he ought to be.

Then Dawes made a remark which caused Paul to throw half a glass of beer in his face.
“Oh, Mr. Morel!” cried the barmaid, and she rang the bell for the “chucker-out.”
Dawes spat and rushed for the young man. At that minute a brawny fellow with his shirt-sleeves rolled up and his trousers tight over his haunches intervened.

He loved her. There was a big tenderness, as after a strong emotion they had known together, but it was not she who could keep his soul steady.

Read: 2015

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#28 Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, sayings things she didn’t mean…

writes Virginia Woolf of her genteel heroine. That, and PTSD, provide the outline for this modernist masterpiece.

Modernism describes the literary period from around 1900 to the end of World War II—a period marked by dramatic experimentation with traditional narrative forms. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and pretty much everything written by Joyce and Faulkner fall squarely into this category.

Woolf toys with both style and substance in Mrs. Dalloway (1925). The novel takes place over a single day, largely inside the minds of its two protagonists (the eponymous Clarissa Dalloway and a World War I veteran by the name of Septimus Warren Smith). Major themes include isolation and oppression, memory and madness, and the trauma inflicted on an entire generation by war and its aftermath.

I say give it a chance. Mrs. Dalloway will walk you through the streets of Westminster, buy you flowers, and throw you a party. And even if you hate London, and flowers, and parties, hey-o… this book is super short.

Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time?

It’s hard to pull off a meaningful “day in the life” portrait, but Woolf manages it with seeming ease.

Favorite Quotes:

The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.

She had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying — what one felt.

The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in his hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained — at last! — the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence — the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

Read: 2013

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#95 King Lear, William Shakespeare

Like I always say (or said, at least, that one time): If you’re going to write a tragedy, make it the TRAGEDY TO END ALL TRAGEDIES.

The problem with this advice is that only Shakespeare can write a truly sensational tragedy. And only Shakespeare can top Shakespeare.

So… yeah. Good luck with your tragedies, and all.

Here we go:

King Lear wants to retire. But first, he has to divide up his kingdom. Easy, he thinks. I’ll just slice it into thirds and pass one wedge to each daughter. I’ll even put a little whipped cream on top. That’ll be easy, too, because it comes in this handy aerosol can.

But it’s not easy. Nothing is easy for idiots. King Lear decides to give the largest share of land to the daughter who loves him the most.

The ass-kissing that follows is exquisite.

But, soon, everything starts to suck. Daughters are disowned. Earls are fired. Kings run naked across stormy heaths. Eyeballs get torn out. And then everyone dies.

In other words: King Lear is your family Thanksgiving.

Here’s hoping y’all skip the pie.

Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time?

Duh.

Favorite Quotes:

The rain it raineth every day.

But his flawed heart—/Alack, too weak the conflict to support—/’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief/Burst smilingly. 

If Fortune brag of two she loved and hated/One of them we behold. 

Read: 2015

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#35 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Noteworthy features of the so-called “World State” in Aldous Huxley’s famous (and infamous) 1932 novel include:

• Babies are bred and grown in test tubes.
• Each member of society is assigned to one of five castes, from Alpha on down to Epsilon.
• A hallucinogenic drug known as soma is the primary form of recreation.
• Casual sex and public orgies happen on the reg.
• Social conditioning discourages critical thinking, individualism, and emotional connections, while promoting both production and consumption of material goods.

With this in mind, we get to know Bernard Marx. Bernard is an Alpha but feels like an outcast, which is hardly fair. So on his trip to a “Savage Reservation” (similar to the Native American reservations of today), he picks up a souvenir that will catapult him to celebrity: his boss’s son, John, raised by his mother and Shakespeare’s collected works among the villagers there.

Bernard decides to take John back to London as a kind of social experiment. The experiment, as you could probably guess, is a disaster, rife with shame, drug abuse, self-flagellation, and exile (in that order, or almost).

Thirty years after the publication of Brave New World, Huxley revisited his vision of the future to assess its accuracy. In what was hardly a class act, he gave a smirk and announced, “Haha, told you so.” But he probably wasn’t referring to the public orgies… unless he caught a glimpse of MTV.

Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time?

It’s got something—I’m just not sure if it has enough of that something.

Favorite Quotes:

Wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way. 

But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

Crying: My baby, my mother, my only, only love; groaning: My sin, my terrible God; screaming with pain, muttering with fever, bemoaning old age and poverty — how can they tend the wheels? And if they cannot tend the wheels… The corpses of a thousand thousand thousand men and women would be hard to bury or burn.

Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London.

Read: 2014

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#55 Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett

WTF, Beckett.

WTF.

Like, what is this? I can’t even.

In the words of the great Wikipedia Britannica:

One does not get a sense of plot, character development, or even setting in this novel.

Oh no—no, of course not, because that would be preposterous. That would result in a book, whereas this is meant to be…

Well, I don’t know, really. You’d have to ask Samuel Beckett, if he’s not too busy listening to Fleetwood Mac. All we’ve been able to make of this postmodernist mess (yes, we’re into post-modernism now) is that it largely records the rambling interior monologue of Malone, an old man lying naked in a hospital OR insane asylum (we can’t be sure, because Malone isn’t). Highlights of this meditation include a nurse with a crucifix carved into her tooth, a bearded giant (aren’t they all?), a boat and a picnic, a dropped pencil, and a boy named Sapo, who is later renamed Macmann because Malone can’t “stomach” the name Sapo anymore.

Beckett translated Malone Dies from French to English himself and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969…

…which just goes to show how easy it is to confuse lunacy with genius.

I kid, I kid! Although now that I mention it, history is teeming with examples. Hmm.

Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time?

Your guess is as good as mine. EVEN IF YOU’VE NEVER READ IT.

Favorite Quotes:

There is naturally another possibility that does not escape me, though it would be a great disappointment to have it confirmed, and that is that I am dead already and that all continues more or less as when I was not.

It is because it is no longer I, I must have said so long ago, but another whose life is just beginning. It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old all down the unchanging days and die one day like any other day, only shorter.

Let me say before I go that I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life and then the fires and ice of hell.

Read: 2015

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If you missed Quick Reviews, Part I, or Quick Reviews, Part II, you can find them here and here.

If you missed the premise behind the Quick Reviews series, you can find it here.

The One Where I Review What’s Left of Faulkner with What’s Left of My Mind

It is with great sadness indescribable joy that William Faulkner and I announce our separation. After nine wonderful agonizing years together, we both feel that it is time to move on. We ask that you please respect our privacy join in celebrating alongside us during this difficult time before we run out of cake and champagne. Our two beautiful children mutual regret and shame remain, as always, our top priority immune to all forms of therapy.

P.S. For the record, it was all his fault.

…

If you’ve accidentally stumbled upon this blog in the past, you may already be up to speed on my thoughts re: Faulkner. You may already know that I consider him one of my literary arch-enemies, a formidable challenge-within-The-Challenge, and something of a sadistic son-of-a-bitch even on his best days. I’ve made snide remarks about his use (or abuse) of grammar, his sour relationship with Hemingway, and my suspicion that it was, in fact, his cat who did the bulk of the work on many of his best-known novels. I’ve even written up Four Rules for Reading Faulkner as a kind of CPR for all those issuing Do Not Resuscitate orders mid-way through a reckless attempt at taking him down one-on-one.

But I’ve got one thing left to say to him before we part.

First, though, I must offer up some sort of sacrificial review to the literary gods, since I swore to report back (in some form, at least) on all 100 books on The List. The Sound and the Fury, which I compare to an army crawl, is here. But that leaves three more to revisit before we wash our hands of this mess—because, of course, Faulkner was not just “Great” in the eyes of his critics, not just demanding in the eyes of his readers, but also startlingly industrious.

It figures.

Here we go:

Absalom, Absalom! and I go way back. It was, in fact, my first encounter with Faulkner, long ago in my early college years, and the origin story of our Epic Struggle. And OK, that struggle might have been a little one-sided, but it’s hard to believe Faulkner didn’t mean any of it personally. This is some sick, Saw-level shit.

Here’s the Absalom, Absalom! excerpt I shared in my Four Rules post:

I can see him corrupting Henry gradually into the purlieus of elegance, with no foreword, no warning, the postulation to come after the fact, exposing Henry slowly to the surface aspect–the architecture a little curious, a little femininely flamboyant and therefore to Henry opulent, sensuous, sinful; the inference of great and easy wealth measured by steamboat loads in place of a tedious inching of sweating human figures across cotton fields; the flash and glitter of a myriad carriage wheels, in which women, enthroned and immobile and passing rapidly across the vision, appeared like painted portraits beside men in linen and a little finer and diamonds a little brighter and in broadcloth a little trimmer and with hats raked a little more above faces a little more darkly swaggering than any Henry had ever seen before: and the mentor, the man for whose sake he had repudiated not only blood and kin but food and shelter and clothing too, whose clothing and walk and speech he had tried to ape, along with his attitude toward women and his ideas of honor and pride too, watching him with that cold and catlike inscrutable calculation, watching the picture resolve and become fixed and then telling Henry, ‘But that’s not it. That’s just the base, the foundation. It can belong to anyone’: and Henry, ‘You mean, this is not it? That it is above this, higher than this, more select than this?’: and Bon, ‘Yes. This is only the foundation. This belongs to anybody.’: a dialogue without words, speech, which would fix and then remove without obliterating one line the picture, this background, leaving the background, the plate prepared and innocent again: the plate docile, with that puritan’s humility toward anything which is a matter of sense rather than logic, fact, the man, the struggling and suffocating heart behind it saying I will believe! I will! I will! Whether it is true or not, I will believe! waiting for the next picture which the mentor, the corruptor, intended for it: that next picture, following the fixation and acceptance of which the mentor would say again, perhaps with words now, still watching the sober and thoughtful face but still secure in his knowledge and trust in that puritan heritage which must show disapproval instead of surprise or even despair and nothing at all rather than have the disapprobation construed as surprise or despair: ‘But even this is not it’: and Henry, ‘You mean, it is still higher than this, still above this?’

Please note that in Faulkner Land—Yoknapatawpha County, or the Ghastliest Place on Earth—all of the above is one sentence.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned reading Faulkner, it’s that with every Epic Struggle comes an Epic But. Usually the But goes something like, “But it’s so rewarding!” “But you’ll feel so much better afterwards!” “But it’s totally worth it!” I know you won’t believe that, though, not after seeing the savage beast of a sentence above.

No, Faulkner is not exactly what I would call rewarding, BUT he is what I would call gratifying. And Absalom, Absalom! has its unfair share of gratifying moments. (You’ll see for yourself, later, when we reach my Favorite Quotes.)

Faulkner’s ninth novel, Absalom, Absalom! (1936), is the story of one Thomas Sutpen, whose life mirrors the rise and fall of the American South in the Civil War era. Sutpen sets out to establish a powerful dynasty in Jefferson, Mississippi, but can’t shake the dark secrets lurking in his past. (By dark, I mean, of course, black. This book is full of racists.)

Told out of sequence by a diverse cast of characters from multiple generations and with more or less distant connections to the Sutpen family, Absalom, Absalom! is one of the most confusing, laborious, and fascinating classics I’ve come across in The Challenge. It has been called the best Southern novel of all time and contributed to Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. It also contains a 1,292-word sentence that earned an entry in the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records.

So, yeah, we might have to come up with some new superlatives for this book. Backbreaking-est? Punishing-est? Surpassing-est? Faulkner-iest?

I’ll keep working on it in my abundant free time.

…

Remember what I said about the Epic But? Well, some Epic Buts are more predictable than others. I’d pretty much resigned myself to my Epic Struggle with Faulkner after The Sound and the Fury and Absalom Absalom!, only to receive another curveball to the face—another Epic But—in the form of Light in August.

Far from being another trek through the word jungles that flourished in Faulkner’s fertile mind, Light in August (1932) was more of a stroll through the countryside—pleasant, fresh, and invigorating. Sure, it’s about the decapitation of an abolitionist woman and the manhunt for her killer. But it’s also a love story, a study of race and identity, a Southern gothic influenced by history and mystery, and—most importantly—highly accessible in terms of style (at least, compared with Faulkner’s other novels).

It’s the only one out of all four novels (Faulkner appears more often than any other author on The List) that I actively enjoyed, if only because it felt less like a hammer to the skull. It left me, in fact, to wonder if Faulkner thought it best for the two of us to apologize, shake hands like gentlefolk, and call time on our by-now-lukewarm rivalry.

But just to be safe, I kept one wary eye on him.

…

Last up was As I Lay Dying (1930). I listened to it on audiobook for reasons I have since forgotten. Fortunately, audiobook proved to be a format well-adapted to the story, which follows the many perspectives of the Bundren family as they transport their mother’s corpse to Jefferson, Mississippi (her hometown and requested burial ground). Unfortunately, the cover image that graced my Moto G for the duration of As I Lay Dying fueled countless nightmares:

A neighbor to Light in August in terms of style, As I Lay Dying is a much more straightforward read than either Absalom, Absalom! or The Sound and the Fury—but it lacks their coquettish intrigue and chaotic vitality. Three novels later, I’d come to expect a certain… well, sound and fury from Faulkner’s heavyweight imagination, and this book didn’t even put up a fight. Anticipating, once again, an Epic Struggle, I was left with yet another Epic But.

And this time, for the very first time, as dusk crept up on The Challenge, Faulkner left me disappointed.

…

So what was it, you ask—the last thing I want to say to Faulkner before we bury our firearms, turn about-face, and march on forever toward separate horizons?

A soldier’s farewell, of course: Good-bye. Good luck. And see you in Hell.

Because I have a feeling—a tickling suspicion—that we’ll meet again someday.

Old enemies friends always do.

Are They Four of the Greatest Books of All Time?

I would never have admitted this during my reading, but in retrospect—and from, now, a great distance—Faulkner brought something unique to The Challenge, something unprecedented and unrivaled.

…Which must be why, then, he has a habit of making the reader his adversary.

Favorite Quotes:

Absalom, Absalom!

But that our cause, our very life and future hopes and past pride, should have been thrown into the balance with men like that to buttress it—men with valor and strength but without pity or honor. Is it any wonder that Heaven saw fit to let us lose? 

Perhaps I couldn’t even have wanted more than that, couldn’t have accepted less.

I waited not for light but for that doom which we call female victory which is: endure and then endure, without rhyme or reason or hope of reward—and then endure.

Don’t talk to me of love but let me tell you, who know already more of love than you will ever know or need.

I now believe that you and I are, strangely enough, included among those who are doomed to live.

I will tell you what he did and let you be the judge. (Or try to tell you, because there are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less, and this is one of them. It can be told; I could take that many sentences, repeat the bold blank naked and outrageous words just as he spoke them, and bequeath you only that same aghast and outraged unbelief I knew when I comprehended what he meant; or take three thousand sentences and leave you only that Why? Why? and Why? that I have asked and listened to for almost fifty years.)

That was the miscast summer of my barren youth which (for that short time, that short brief unreturning springtime of the female heart) I lived out not as a woman, a girl, but rather as the man which I perhaps should have been. 

There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.

And then one afternoon—oh there was a fate in it: afternoon and afternoon and afternoon: do you see? the death of hope and love, the death of pride and principle, and then the death of everything.

I will accept either an apology or a bullet, as you prefer.

Read: 2014

Light in August

She continues to watch him with that expression not so much concerned for the future as suspicious of the now.

I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it’s the good men that cant deny the bill when it comes around.

Yet neither surrendered; worse: they would not let one another alone; he would not even go away. And they would stand for a while longer in the quiet dusk peopled, as though from their loins, by a myriad ghosts of dead sins and delights, looking at one another’s still and fading face, weary, spent, indomitable.

It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.

It is as though he has already and long since outstripped himself, already waiting at the cabin until he can catch up and enter. And then I will stand there and I will. . . . . . . He tries it again: Then I will stand there and I will. . . . . . . But he can get no further than that. He is in the road again now, approaching a wagon homeward bound from town. It is about six oclock. He does not give up, however. Even if I cant seem to get any further than that: when I will open the door and come in and stand there. And then I will. Look at her. Look at her. Look at her———

Read: 2015

As I Lay Dying

I told Addie it want any luck living on a road when it come by here, and she said, for the world like a woman, “Get up and move, then.” But I told her it want no luck in it, because the Lord put roads for travelling: why He laid them down flat on the earth. When He aims for something to be always a-moving, He makes it longways, like a road or a horse or a wagon, but when He aims for something to stay put, He makes it up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man.

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too. 

She was watching me. But then, in the eyes all of them look like they had no age and knew everything in the world, anyhow. 

Sometimes I ain’t sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It’s like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

Read: 2016

The Ideal Marriage, According to Novels (The New Yorker)

This article is long-ish, but also fascinating-ish. Adelle Waldman looks at romance and marriage in classic literature old and new and argues that male and female authors approach them differently—in a way that just might offer some insight into gendered perspectives on love IRL. In her own words:

The ideal mate, for Jane Austen’s heroines, for Charlotte Brontë’s, for George Eliot’s, is someone intelligent enough to appreciate fully and respond deeply to their own intelligence, a partner for whom they feel not only desire but a sense of kinship, of intellectual and moral equality.

Female protagonists, when authored by women, evaluate their suitors based on intellect, taste, and the potential for conversation. Male authors and characters, however, tend to characterize love as a “profound, mysterious attraction” with an emphasis on the physical.

Waldman points out that “men have been, in a sense, the real romantics,” but offers her own theory to explain why:

For centuries, men have had far more opportunities to find intellectual outlets outside the romantic sphere—they’ve been able to travel more, to meet a broader range of people, to have professions, to win the respect of peers. Women, on the other hand, were forced to lean more heavily on love and marriage, for intellectual recognition and companionship as for everything else.

Compelling stuff. Here’s hoping it comes up on your Valentine’s dinner date. And that you follow it up with 10 p.m. tickets to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.