First off, Knut Hamsun's name is fun to say. Go on, try it: Ka-noot. Ka-noot, Ka-noot, Ka-noot. See what I mean?
His novel Hunger, on the other hand, is not so much fun. It's a fantastic piece of work, the kind of brilliant that makes you realize oh, now I see why he won a Nobel Prize. It just isn't a barrel of laughs, is all.
The plot is fairly straightforward: the protagonist is a struggling writer, and he starves for days at a time because his written output doesn't bring in enough money. The real character, though, is the process of starvation itself: the way it pains and gnaws at him, making him lightheaded and giddy and weak as he sobs and rants his way through increasingly desperate attempts to either fill his belly or forget his hunger for a few brief moments.
I've been told by a few people that Modernism really starts with Hamsun. After reading Hunger, I'd say that sounds about right.
Showing posts with label Matthew. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Matthew. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Monday, April 12, 2010
Matthew, Book Review, *Jose Saramago, *Blindness
Blindness (1995), by Portuguese author Jose Saramago, is a hell of a thing. And I mean that in a Cronenberg, Blood Meridian, oh man is this ever depressing and violent and crushing but I can't stop reading it sort of way.
As the novel begins, an unidentified man suddenly goes blind while driving home from work one day. A few hours thereafter, everyone he came in contact with after the onset of his blindness goes blind, followed by the people they came in contact with, and so on. The affliction spreads quickly, and the government reacts to the crisis by quarantining the blind in an empty mental hospital. The bulk of the novel takes place inside the hospital, where everything goes to hell in pretty much every way you could imagine it would.
Saramago likes to write in long, winding series of clauses spliced together with commas, with dialogue thrown in mid-stream with only a comma and a capital letter to call attention to itself:
Blindness isn't all doom and gloom, however; even in its darkest moments there seems to be an underlying sense of hope that I don't recall seeing in similarly bleak novels (I'm looking at you, The Trial and Blood Meridian).
As the novel begins, an unidentified man suddenly goes blind while driving home from work one day. A few hours thereafter, everyone he came in contact with after the onset of his blindness goes blind, followed by the people they came in contact with, and so on. The affliction spreads quickly, and the government reacts to the crisis by quarantining the blind in an empty mental hospital. The bulk of the novel takes place inside the hospital, where everything goes to hell in pretty much every way you could imagine it would.
Saramago likes to write in long, winding series of clauses spliced together with commas, with dialogue thrown in mid-stream with only a comma and a capital letter to call attention to itself:
In a few minutes, the rescuers reached their destination, they knew it before even coming into contact with the bodies, the blood over which they were crawling was like a messenger coming to tell them, I was life, behind me there is nothing, My God, thought the doctor's wife, all this blood, and it was true, a thick pool, their hands and clothing stuck to the ground as if the floorboards and floor tiles were covered in glue.Which reminds me, no one is ever given a name in this book. Instead of names, each character is referred to by their job, relationship, or a short physical description, thereby furthering the theme of dehumanization and degradation.
Blindness isn't all doom and gloom, however; even in its darkest moments there seems to be an underlying sense of hope that I don't recall seeing in similarly bleak novels (I'm looking at you, The Trial and Blood Meridian).
Monday, March 15, 2010
Matthew, Book Review, *Anatole France, *The Gods Will Have Blood
I am still managing to not be dead, which I assume means the surgery went well and I can now get back to writing about the books I've read without first boring everyone with the minutiae of my health problems. But enough of that -- on with the show.
By 1921, the year Anatole France was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Germany and France had been locked in mutual enmity for three centuries or more1. During the awards ceremony, France found himself standing on stage next to German chemist Walther Nernst, and, well, I'll let NobelPrize.org finish the story:
Gamelin is a fiercely passionate man who throws himself into everything -- conversations about fine art, defenses of the Revolutionary government's actions, his love affair with Elodie Blaise, etc. -- with equal force. His uncompromising approach to life is by turns admirable and disquieting; it's hard not to admire his resolve and strength of will, but when he is appointed to the Revolutionary Tribunal those same qualities lead him to order the executions of hundreds of his countrymen on the scantest of evidence.
Brotteaux, who lives in the same cramped building as Gamelin, is an unapologetic hedonist who insists that the pursuit of pleasure and beauty is paramount in life. In most authors' hands, a character with beliefs like his would invariably turn out to be a drunken, bug-eyed lech who double-entendres his way through every conversation. Instead, we are introduced to a good, gentle man who finds beauty and pleasure in the simplest of things, an atheist who willingly shelters a priest being hunted by the Revolutionary police, and a thinker who freely expresses his beliefs and ideals while all around him he sees others rounded up and executed for saying far less.
In the introduction included with my copy of the novel, translator Frederick Davies asserts that "Anatole France is one of the very few authors who have successfully portrayed both a very good man and a very wicked man in the same novel." I remember feeling skeptical of that comment at the time2, but after reading the novel I have to say that I agree. I'm also going to have to hunt down a few of Anatole France's other novels.
1The exact timeframe depends on whether one dates the origin of the animosity between the two nations to the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) or to some earlier conflict. If you really wanted to stretch things, an argument could be made for French-German revanchism originating in the Treaty of Verdun which split up the Carolingian Empire in the mid-9th Century. Some folks really know how to hold a grudge.
2I've found that when it comes to praise, introductions tend to err on the side of the sort of effusiveness that would embarrass the most obsequious of yes-men -- doubly so when they're written by translators. Hell, just look at this passage from the translator's note in my copy of The Magic Mountain:
By 1921, the year Anatole France was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Germany and France had been locked in mutual enmity for three centuries or more1. During the awards ceremony, France found himself standing on stage next to German chemist Walther Nernst, and, well, I'll let NobelPrize.org finish the story:
After Anatole France had received his Prize from the hands of the King, there occurred an incident which left a strong impression on all present. When the venerable had gone up to the rostrum again, he turned to Professor Walther Nernst, Prize winner in Chemistry, and exchanged a long and cordial handshake with him. The Frenchman, the «last classic», and the German, the great scientist and representative of intellectual sobriety, the citizens of two countries which had for a long time been enemies, were united in a handshake - a profoundly symbolic gesture. The audience applauded, feeling that the two nations, which for years had fought against one another, had just met in reconciliation. (source)This was not new territory for France -- the very backbone of his writing style is his ability to contrast (and sometimes even reconcile) opposites in interesting, insightful ways. In The Gods Will Have Blood, which is set during the Reign of Terror that marked the final blood-frenzied days of the French Revolution, this style manifests itself in several ways, the simplest of which are oxymoronic descriptions like "fanatic patience" and "reasoned dogmatism." The novel also spends a great deal of time contrasting the life-and-death seriousness of the Revolutionary Tribunals and deadly political infighting amongst powerful intellectuals with the largely unaffected daily lives of the French commoners. But the best two examples of this style of opposites in The Gods Will Have Blood are its two main characters, the aging ex-nobleman and epicurean Maurice Brotteaux and the opinionated, highly principled young painter Evariste Gamelin.
Gamelin is a fiercely passionate man who throws himself into everything -- conversations about fine art, defenses of the Revolutionary government's actions, his love affair with Elodie Blaise, etc. -- with equal force. His uncompromising approach to life is by turns admirable and disquieting; it's hard not to admire his resolve and strength of will, but when he is appointed to the Revolutionary Tribunal those same qualities lead him to order the executions of hundreds of his countrymen on the scantest of evidence.
Brotteaux, who lives in the same cramped building as Gamelin, is an unapologetic hedonist who insists that the pursuit of pleasure and beauty is paramount in life. In most authors' hands, a character with beliefs like his would invariably turn out to be a drunken, bug-eyed lech who double-entendres his way through every conversation. Instead, we are introduced to a good, gentle man who finds beauty and pleasure in the simplest of things, an atheist who willingly shelters a priest being hunted by the Revolutionary police, and a thinker who freely expresses his beliefs and ideals while all around him he sees others rounded up and executed for saying far less.
In the introduction included with my copy of the novel, translator Frederick Davies asserts that "Anatole France is one of the very few authors who have successfully portrayed both a very good man and a very wicked man in the same novel." I remember feeling skeptical of that comment at the time2, but after reading the novel I have to say that I agree. I'm also going to have to hunt down a few of Anatole France's other novels.
1The exact timeframe depends on whether one dates the origin of the animosity between the two nations to the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) or to some earlier conflict. If you really wanted to stretch things, an argument could be made for French-German revanchism originating in the Treaty of Verdun which split up the Carolingian Empire in the mid-9th Century. Some folks really know how to hold a grudge.
2I've found that when it comes to praise, introductions tend to err on the side of the sort of effusiveness that would embarrass the most obsequious of yes-men -- doubly so when they're written by translators. Hell, just look at this passage from the translator's note in my copy of The Magic Mountain:
But of the author of The Magic Mountain it can be said in a special sense that he has looked into the seeds of Time. It was indispensable that we should read his book; intolerable that English readers should be barred from a work whose spirit, whatever its vehicle, is universal.It's enough to make you stick a finger down your throat.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Matthew, Book Review, *Paul Auster, *Collected Prose, *Lord Berners, *First Childhood, *A Distant Prospect
My health has kept me absent from this blog as of late, and I've got another surgery coming up so I'll be returning to absentia in the near future, but in the meantime I'm going to take care of all the reviews that've been waiting patiently for me to get around to writing them.
Collected Prose (2003) by Paul Auster is just that, a collection of the author's various nonfiction works. Two of the these, The Invention of Solitude and Hand to Mouth, have been published previously as individual books and are still widely available, but the rest of the collection is comprised of shorter works culled from a variety of sources that are harder to find. As in most collections, the works included are of varying quality and the shorter works tend towards essays on French writers and loosely organized lists of stray thoughts and anecdotes, but on the whole I found the collection reasonably interesting and enjoyable.
The Invention of Solitude (1982) focuses on the author's father, then recently deceased. Through a mixture of autobiography, biography, and philosophical rumination, Auster explores how his father's family and past shaped him into the person he became, and how his father's influence in turn shaped the person Auster himself became. The narrative falls apart towards the end as Auster's peregrinations through various abstract lines of thought begin to push everything else to the periphery, but that seems to happen more out of a reluctance to stop writing the work than any loss of focus on his part. As he explains earlier in the text,
Hand to Mouth (1997) is an account of Auster's early years as a writer and the struggles he endured as a result of his decision to make his living solely through writing. Granted, there are a great many times I found myself wanting to shout GET A DAY JOB YOU DOOF at the page, but aside from that urge I found the work to be an engaging, sobering look at the economic realities of pursuing a career as a professional writer. There's also a brief, hilarious interlude in which he tries unsuccessfully to sell a baseball card game of his own invention to various game manufacturers. (When Hand to Mouth was printed in hardback, several pages in the middle of the book were dedicated to color reproductions of every card for the game, which I suppose was his way of finally getting the damn thing published.)
When I first started reading Lord Berners' autobiography First Childhood (1934) and its sequel A Distant Prospect (1945), I wasn't sure I was going to like it terribly much. Most of the first chapter or so is comprised of descriptions of the opulence of his family and ancestral home, but after he gets done telling the reader just how rich his family is (and then telling the reader again, and again, and...) Berners settles into a fun, light narrative. First Childhood follows his life from birth up through his first four years at a boarding school, and A Distant Prospect picks up from there and follows Berners through his time as a student at Eton where he first began to indulge his interest in the arts and music in particular. I know that probably sounds like thin gruel for one book, let alone two, but the narrative is helped along by Berners' knack for understated humor:
And I bet you thought your high school teachers were bad.
Collected Prose (2003) by Paul Auster is just that, a collection of the author's various nonfiction works. Two of the these, The Invention of Solitude and Hand to Mouth, have been published previously as individual books and are still widely available, but the rest of the collection is comprised of shorter works culled from a variety of sources that are harder to find. As in most collections, the works included are of varying quality and the shorter works tend towards essays on French writers and loosely organized lists of stray thoughts and anecdotes, but on the whole I found the collection reasonably interesting and enjoyable.
The Invention of Solitude (1982) focuses on the author's father, then recently deceased. Through a mixture of autobiography, biography, and philosophical rumination, Auster explores how his father's family and past shaped him into the person he became, and how his father's influence in turn shaped the person Auster himself became. The narrative falls apart towards the end as Auster's peregrinations through various abstract lines of thought begin to push everything else to the periphery, but that seems to happen more out of a reluctance to stop writing the work than any loss of focus on his part. As he explains earlier in the text,
In spite of the excuses I have made for myself, I understand what is happening. The closer I come to the end of what I am able to say, the more reluctant I am to say anything. I want to postpone the moment of ending, and in this way delude myself into thinking that I have only just begun, that the better part of my story still lies ahead. No matter how useless these words might seem to be, they have nevertheless stood between me and a silence that continues to terrify me. When I step into this silence, it will mean that my father has vanished forever.
Hand to Mouth (1997) is an account of Auster's early years as a writer and the struggles he endured as a result of his decision to make his living solely through writing. Granted, there are a great many times I found myself wanting to shout GET A DAY JOB YOU DOOF at the page, but aside from that urge I found the work to be an engaging, sobering look at the economic realities of pursuing a career as a professional writer. There's also a brief, hilarious interlude in which he tries unsuccessfully to sell a baseball card game of his own invention to various game manufacturers. (When Hand to Mouth was printed in hardback, several pages in the middle of the book were dedicated to color reproductions of every card for the game, which I suppose was his way of finally getting the damn thing published.)
When I first started reading Lord Berners' autobiography First Childhood (1934) and its sequel A Distant Prospect (1945), I wasn't sure I was going to like it terribly much. Most of the first chapter or so is comprised of descriptions of the opulence of his family and ancestral home, but after he gets done telling the reader just how rich his family is (and then telling the reader again, and again, and...) Berners settles into a fun, light narrative. First Childhood follows his life from birth up through his first four years at a boarding school, and A Distant Prospect picks up from there and follows Berners through his time as a student at Eton where he first began to indulge his interest in the arts and music in particular. I know that probably sounds like thin gruel for one book, let alone two, but the narrative is helped along by Berners' knack for understated humor:
At Eton the method of teaching the Classics was very much the same as it had been at Elmley. That is to say, no effort was spared to make them as uninteresting and unprofitable as possible. It is to be presumed that the school authorities, in making the Classics the principal item of their curriculum, had some edifying purpose in view, but if they thought that the study of pagan modes of thought was going to be useful to young Christians, it looked as if the masters thought otherwise and were bent on diverting the attention of their pupils to questions of syntax. In their hands Homer became tedious, Horace commonplace and Greek Tragedy a grammatical Inferno; and they contrived that the works were studied in so piecemeal a fashion that it was quite impossible to understand what they were about.
And I bet you thought your high school teachers were bad.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Matthew, Book Review, *Cormac McCarthy, *Blood Meridian
I finished Blood Meridian (1985) a few days ago, but I needed a few days to digest what I'd read before posting anything. The novel follows The Kid, a teenager from Tennessee who joins a group of outlaws in Mexico and helps them murder, rape, and steal their way across the countryside. McCarthy doesn't gloss over any of the nasty parts, either -- the violence in the book is graphic, unsettling, and abundant. Even so, I don't want to give the impression that the violence in the book is needlessly gratuitous. I mean, it is absolutely gratuitous, excessive even, but never needlessly so. Every last bit of it is central to the several themes of the novel.
On one level, Blood Meridian is a blunt de-mythologizing of the Wild West. Hollywood's cattle rustlers whose bullets never hit their target and strangely honorable duel-at-high-noon bad guys have been replaced with the actual wanted men, cavalry soldiers, and Indian warriors who terrified populaces across the West and Southwest in all their psychopathic, nigh-feral grotesqueness. Men are disemboweled and mutilated, babies are dashed against rocks, women are scalped and raped as they lay dying. It's damned tough to romanticize anything about this part of North American history after you understand the sorts of things that really went on back then.
The violence also serves as an exploration of the depravities in which humans are capable of indulging, and some of those explorations take the form of ad hoc discourses by Judge Holden, the outlaw gang's second in command and one of the most remarkably complex characters I've come across in recent memory (he's a sort of Death/Old Testament/Satan figure, among other things).
The dark subject matter makes the book uncomfortable to read in places, but hopefully that won't stop someone from reading it themselves. A large part of its impact on the reader lies in the stark power of its unflinching depictions of human cruelty, and the book absolutely deserves every bit of the praise that's been heaped upon it over the years. Just expect to come out of the experience a bit drained.
On one level, Blood Meridian is a blunt de-mythologizing of the Wild West. Hollywood's cattle rustlers whose bullets never hit their target and strangely honorable duel-at-high-noon bad guys have been replaced with the actual wanted men, cavalry soldiers, and Indian warriors who terrified populaces across the West and Southwest in all their psychopathic, nigh-feral grotesqueness. Men are disemboweled and mutilated, babies are dashed against rocks, women are scalped and raped as they lay dying. It's damned tough to romanticize anything about this part of North American history after you understand the sorts of things that really went on back then.
The violence also serves as an exploration of the depravities in which humans are capable of indulging, and some of those explorations take the form of ad hoc discourses by Judge Holden, the outlaw gang's second in command and one of the most remarkably complex characters I've come across in recent memory (he's a sort of Death/Old Testament/Satan figure, among other things).
The dark subject matter makes the book uncomfortable to read in places, but hopefully that won't stop someone from reading it themselves. A large part of its impact on the reader lies in the stark power of its unflinching depictions of human cruelty, and the book absolutely deserves every bit of the praise that's been heaped upon it over the years. Just expect to come out of the experience a bit drained.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Matthew, Book Review, *F. Scott Fitzgerald, *The Last Tycoon, *Voltaire, *Candide, *Xenophon, *The Persian Expedition
Three books in one post? I didn't realize that I'd fallen so far behind in posting my reviews, but I am nothing if not forgetful.
I'll start off with The Last Tycoon (1941), which F. Scott Fitzgerald was in the middle of writing when he died of a massive heart attack in his mid-40s. The focus of the story is Monroe Stahr, who in spite of his successes as a movie exectutive is thoroughly unhappy and has nearly succeeded in working himself to death. One night, Stahr has a chance encounter with a young woman who closely resembles his late movie star wife, and his quest to find her again (and later, his attempts to woo her) is intertwined with subplots involving the dozens of other concerns assaulting him from all sides: attempts by business partners to oust him, departmental infighting, employees and their personal troubles, the burgeoning unionization movement, and the romantic advances of Cecelia, the daughter of a rival business partner and narrator of the novel.
While the writing was interesting, what I most enjoyed was reading the outlines, character sketches, and notes he produced as he worked on the novel. Together with the rough first chapters, these extra documents made for a fascinating glimpse into Fitzgerald's writing process, halted forever in mid-stride.
Before I get to the other two books, I want to say that it never fails to amaze me how lively and immediate so many classic books turn out to be once I finally get around to reading them. I've noticed a tendency in myself and others to view works by literary icons like Voltaire and Xenophon as intimidating, unapproachable tomes that exist far beyond the ability of our puny mortal brains to comprehend them. Of course, nearly every time I give a work by one of those monoliths a chance it ends up being as readable and compelling as any great book put out in the last decade, but those experiences never seem to dispel that initial feeling the next time around.
Anyway, on to Voltaire. Candide (1759) is a picaresque novel (think Cervantes' Don Quixote and Fielding's Joseph Andrews) with an extra dose of mordant caricature. Through a fast-paced, wildly shifting plot, Voltaire manages to rail against the evils of religion, politics, warfare, and philosophy (especially philosophy of the optimistic variety) without breaking the novel's tone of humorous naivety. The ending was cryptic enough that at first I thought I might have missed something important earlier in the plot that would have made the final message more comprehensible, but after doing a little research I found that pretty much everyone else has had the same reaction to Candide's ending, which made me feel better about my confusion (or at least as better as I'm likely to feel about being confused). Also, I apologize for being rather vague about plot specifics, but I don't think I could say too much more without ruining the fun of watching Voltaire's plot unfold yourself.
Xenophon's The Persian Expedition (379 - 371 BCE) (the title used on my copy -- the more commonly used name the work is Anabasis) is, if I may be blunt, insanely awesome. The book is an account of Xenophon's experiences as part of a Greek mercenary army led by Cyrus, a Persian prince bent on overthrowing his brother the king. The Greek army marched across Asia Minor, finally engaging the giant Persian army in the Battle of Cunaxa (in the vicinity of modern-day Baghdad). Despite the Persians' superior numbers, the Greeks prove to be the better fighters and Cyrus and his bodyguard almost succeed in killing the king before Cyrus himself is killed.
Naturally, this turn of events does not bode well for an invading Greek army in the middle of Persia. A few days later, the situation gets even worse as the Persians use treachery to capture and execute several of the Greek army's remaining leaders. The leaderless mercenaries are ordered to lay down their arms and surrender themselves into slavery. But instead of giving up, the Greeks elected new leaders (one of them being Xenophon) and managed to fight their way back to Greek soil across hundreds of miles of hostile territory.
I'll start off with The Last Tycoon (1941), which F. Scott Fitzgerald was in the middle of writing when he died of a massive heart attack in his mid-40s. The focus of the story is Monroe Stahr, who in spite of his successes as a movie exectutive is thoroughly unhappy and has nearly succeeded in working himself to death. One night, Stahr has a chance encounter with a young woman who closely resembles his late movie star wife, and his quest to find her again (and later, his attempts to woo her) is intertwined with subplots involving the dozens of other concerns assaulting him from all sides: attempts by business partners to oust him, departmental infighting, employees and their personal troubles, the burgeoning unionization movement, and the romantic advances of Cecelia, the daughter of a rival business partner and narrator of the novel.
While the writing was interesting, what I most enjoyed was reading the outlines, character sketches, and notes he produced as he worked on the novel. Together with the rough first chapters, these extra documents made for a fascinating glimpse into Fitzgerald's writing process, halted forever in mid-stride.
Before I get to the other two books, I want to say that it never fails to amaze me how lively and immediate so many classic books turn out to be once I finally get around to reading them. I've noticed a tendency in myself and others to view works by literary icons like Voltaire and Xenophon as intimidating, unapproachable tomes that exist far beyond the ability of our puny mortal brains to comprehend them. Of course, nearly every time I give a work by one of those monoliths a chance it ends up being as readable and compelling as any great book put out in the last decade, but those experiences never seem to dispel that initial feeling the next time around.
Anyway, on to Voltaire. Candide (1759) is a picaresque novel (think Cervantes' Don Quixote and Fielding's Joseph Andrews) with an extra dose of mordant caricature. Through a fast-paced, wildly shifting plot, Voltaire manages to rail against the evils of religion, politics, warfare, and philosophy (especially philosophy of the optimistic variety) without breaking the novel's tone of humorous naivety. The ending was cryptic enough that at first I thought I might have missed something important earlier in the plot that would have made the final message more comprehensible, but after doing a little research I found that pretty much everyone else has had the same reaction to Candide's ending, which made me feel better about my confusion (or at least as better as I'm likely to feel about being confused). Also, I apologize for being rather vague about plot specifics, but I don't think I could say too much more without ruining the fun of watching Voltaire's plot unfold yourself.
Xenophon's The Persian Expedition (379 - 371 BCE) (the title used on my copy -- the more commonly used name the work is Anabasis) is, if I may be blunt, insanely awesome. The book is an account of Xenophon's experiences as part of a Greek mercenary army led by Cyrus, a Persian prince bent on overthrowing his brother the king. The Greek army marched across Asia Minor, finally engaging the giant Persian army in the Battle of Cunaxa (in the vicinity of modern-day Baghdad). Despite the Persians' superior numbers, the Greeks prove to be the better fighters and Cyrus and his bodyguard almost succeed in killing the king before Cyrus himself is killed.
Naturally, this turn of events does not bode well for an invading Greek army in the middle of Persia. A few days later, the situation gets even worse as the Persians use treachery to capture and execute several of the Greek army's remaining leaders. The leaderless mercenaries are ordered to lay down their arms and surrender themselves into slavery. But instead of giving up, the Greeks elected new leaders (one of them being Xenophon) and managed to fight their way back to Greek soil across hundreds of miles of hostile territory.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Matthew, Book Review, *Dante Alighieri, *Purgatorio, *Paradiso
I first read Dante's Inferno back in high school when it was assigned to me by an English teacher who decided I needed a challenge, and in the years since then I've read it a few more times (once for a college class, and a couple more times for various research projects of my own devising). But like most people, I never seemed to be able to talk myself into checking out the other two-thirds of the Divine Comedy (1308 - 1321), Purgatorio and Paradiso. I guess reading poetic medieval theology loses its appeal when it doesn't involve demons, grotesque torments, and an infernal hierarchy stuffed to overflowing with Dante's political rivals.
By the end of Inferno, Dante and his guide Virgil (as in the Roman author of the Aeneid) have traveled down through the rings of Hell, passed by Satan in his icy prison at the center of the Earth (yes, the center of Dante's hell is frozen--keep that in mind the next time someone whips out that tired old "when hell freezes over" line), and come out on the other side of the planet to find themselves at the base of Mount Purgatory. Purgatorio takes up the story there, following Dante and Virgil as they ascend the cornices of Mount Purgatory and finishes with them arriving at the Earthly Paradise located between purgatory and heaven. Paradiso then follows Dante and his new guide Beatrice as they ascend through the spheres of the Ptolemaic universe, each of which serves to introduce Dante to a different subgroup of saved souls, and ends with him being allowed to look upon God himself.
I have to admit, it was hard to motivate myself to finish Purgatorio. In many respects, it is the mirror opposite of Inferno. Hell's rings are arranged from the least serious sinners (the lustful) to the greatest (traitors) in Inferno, while purgatory's cornices in Purgatorio are arranged from greatest sin to least; while the damned in hell are trapped against their will for all eternity, the souls in purgatory stay at each cornice of their own free will until they feel they have been purged of that particular sin; and so on. In short, Purgatorio was pretty much everything I feared it would be: a dull, tedious imitation of Inferno, lightened only by sporadic bursts of cattiness directed at various people who had earned Dante's ire.
Imagine my surprise when Paradiso turned out to be deft, innovative, and eminently readable. Granted, it still includes many of the same opaque discourses on the finer points of medieval theology and astronomy, but the rest of the work is fascinating enough to make these digressions bearable. To Dante, heaven exists in an abstract form that is beyond the ability of the mortal mind to comprehend, so what he is shown by Beatrice is an artificial framework used to put a concrete face on a purely ethereal realm. The balance Dante strikes in his poetry between the apparent reality visible to him and the actual reality that lurks behind it gives Paradiso a vitality that helps it to match -- and in some places surpass -- what he was able to accomplish in Inferno.
By the end of Inferno, Dante and his guide Virgil (as in the Roman author of the Aeneid) have traveled down through the rings of Hell, passed by Satan in his icy prison at the center of the Earth (yes, the center of Dante's hell is frozen--keep that in mind the next time someone whips out that tired old "when hell freezes over" line), and come out on the other side of the planet to find themselves at the base of Mount Purgatory. Purgatorio takes up the story there, following Dante and Virgil as they ascend the cornices of Mount Purgatory and finishes with them arriving at the Earthly Paradise located between purgatory and heaven. Paradiso then follows Dante and his new guide Beatrice as they ascend through the spheres of the Ptolemaic universe, each of which serves to introduce Dante to a different subgroup of saved souls, and ends with him being allowed to look upon God himself.
I have to admit, it was hard to motivate myself to finish Purgatorio. In many respects, it is the mirror opposite of Inferno. Hell's rings are arranged from the least serious sinners (the lustful) to the greatest (traitors) in Inferno, while purgatory's cornices in Purgatorio are arranged from greatest sin to least; while the damned in hell are trapped against their will for all eternity, the souls in purgatory stay at each cornice of their own free will until they feel they have been purged of that particular sin; and so on. In short, Purgatorio was pretty much everything I feared it would be: a dull, tedious imitation of Inferno, lightened only by sporadic bursts of cattiness directed at various people who had earned Dante's ire.
Imagine my surprise when Paradiso turned out to be deft, innovative, and eminently readable. Granted, it still includes many of the same opaque discourses on the finer points of medieval theology and astronomy, but the rest of the work is fascinating enough to make these digressions bearable. To Dante, heaven exists in an abstract form that is beyond the ability of the mortal mind to comprehend, so what he is shown by Beatrice is an artificial framework used to put a concrete face on a purely ethereal realm. The balance Dante strikes in his poetry between the apparent reality visible to him and the actual reality that lurks behind it gives Paradiso a vitality that helps it to match -- and in some places surpass -- what he was able to accomplish in Inferno.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Matthew, Progress Report
I've been thoroughly absent lately, what with getting married and all, but I did manage to make some progress on my list:
Finished:
Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri
Paradiso by Dante Alighieri
Candide by Voltaire
Currently Reading:
The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Persian Expedition by Xenophon
I'll add some reviews for the above sometime in the next few days, but for now I'm just going to collapse on the couch for awhile and be really glad my wife and I don't have any more wedding planning and preparation to do.
Finished:
Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri
Paradiso by Dante Alighieri
Candide by Voltaire
Currently Reading:
The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Persian Expedition by Xenophon
I'll add some reviews for the above sometime in the next few days, but for now I'm just going to collapse on the couch for awhile and be really glad my wife and I don't have any more wedding planning and preparation to do.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Matthew, Book Review, *J.D. Salinger, *Franny and Zooey, *B.S. Johnson, *Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry
Well, I appear to have emerged from a flurry of wedding planning with two more books read. I'm not entirely sure how that happened, but there it is.
Franny and Zooey (1961) by J.D. Salinger is one of those short, compact novels that feels like you need to read it two or three times before its contents really begin to sink in. I should correct myself, though, as this novel isn't really a novel so much as it is a short story ("Franny") and a novella (Zooey) that are thematically and chronologically linked to one another. The two main characters, Francis "Franny" Glass and Zachary "Zooey" Glass, are the two youngest siblings of the Glass family; most, if not all, of Salinger's short stories focus on members of the Glass family.
In summary form, the two plots seem straightforward enough: "Franny" involves Franny dealing with a growing sense of disgust during a date (my apologies for the alliteration there) that leads to her having a breakdown of sorts, and Zooey follows Zooey as he attempts to help Franny get through her existential crisis. Within those two sparse frameworks is an exploration of religion, family, faith, and eastern philosophy that manages to be deep, readable, and briskly paced all at the same time. I can think of more than a few authors who could stand to learn some lessons from Salinger's economy of language.
Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (1973) by B.S. Johnson exhibits much of the same linguistic economy as Franny and Zooey, but in the service of a much different sort of story. The titular character, Christie Malry, is a young Englishman who decides to apply his understanding of double-entry bookkeeping to his interactions with society at large (one column for credits, another for debits, and every debit transacted must be balanced by a credit of equal or greater value). His boss yells at him (debit), so he steals some office supplies (credit); an ugly new office building annoys him (debit), so he scratches the finish on its brickwork with a coin (credit). It isn't long before the debits begin to pile up much faster than the credits, and Malry is forced to increase the severity of his attempts to recompense himself, escalating from faking delivery orders for his employer, to calling in fake bomb threats, to setting off actual bombs. From adherence to a simple ideal, a domestic terrorist is born.
Johnson is famous for his structural and narrative inventiveness (the most famous example of which being The Unfortunates, a "book in a box" composed of twenty-seven individually bound chapters meant to be read in any order--incidentally, The Unfortunates was recently republished in its original form) and Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry is no exception. Among other things, the author converses directly with his main character Malry, and characters freely discuss their actions in terms of what best suits the needs of the novel. Take for example this section, written in play format in order to focus solely on dialogue:
Franny and Zooey (1961) by J.D. Salinger is one of those short, compact novels that feels like you need to read it two or three times before its contents really begin to sink in. I should correct myself, though, as this novel isn't really a novel so much as it is a short story ("Franny") and a novella (Zooey) that are thematically and chronologically linked to one another. The two main characters, Francis "Franny" Glass and Zachary "Zooey" Glass, are the two youngest siblings of the Glass family; most, if not all, of Salinger's short stories focus on members of the Glass family.
In summary form, the two plots seem straightforward enough: "Franny" involves Franny dealing with a growing sense of disgust during a date (my apologies for the alliteration there) that leads to her having a breakdown of sorts, and Zooey follows Zooey as he attempts to help Franny get through her existential crisis. Within those two sparse frameworks is an exploration of religion, family, faith, and eastern philosophy that manages to be deep, readable, and briskly paced all at the same time. I can think of more than a few authors who could stand to learn some lessons from Salinger's economy of language.
Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (1973) by B.S. Johnson exhibits much of the same linguistic economy as Franny and Zooey, but in the service of a much different sort of story. The titular character, Christie Malry, is a young Englishman who decides to apply his understanding of double-entry bookkeeping to his interactions with society at large (one column for credits, another for debits, and every debit transacted must be balanced by a credit of equal or greater value). His boss yells at him (debit), so he steals some office supplies (credit); an ugly new office building annoys him (debit), so he scratches the finish on its brickwork with a coin (credit). It isn't long before the debits begin to pile up much faster than the credits, and Malry is forced to increase the severity of his attempts to recompense himself, escalating from faking delivery orders for his employer, to calling in fake bomb threats, to setting off actual bombs. From adherence to a simple ideal, a domestic terrorist is born.
Johnson is famous for his structural and narrative inventiveness (the most famous example of which being The Unfortunates, a "book in a box" composed of twenty-seven individually bound chapters meant to be read in any order--incidentally, The Unfortunates was recently republished in its original form) and Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry is no exception. Among other things, the author converses directly with his main character Malry, and characters freely discuss their actions in terms of what best suits the needs of the novel. Take for example this section, written in play format in order to focus solely on dialogue:
SUPERVISOR: Where were you yesterday afternoon?Thankfully, Johnson uses these postmodern devices in a way that complements and enhances the narrative without being overly precious or smugly clever, two problems that run rampant through many postmodern works. In short, B.S. Johnson is good stuff.
CHRISTIE: At my mother's funeral.
SUPERVISOR: Why didn't you ask permission?
CHRISTIE: She died at very short notice. In fact, with no notice at all, on the evening before last.
SUPERVISOR: Long enough for you to arrange the funeral for the next day?
CHRISTIE: There wasn't any more time. It's a short novel.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Matthew, Book Review, *J.G. Ballard, *Crash
I've been alternately sick and busy as of late, but I finally finished another book on my list: Crash by J.G. Ballard.
Reading Crash (1973) reminded me an awful lot of my experience reading William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch, in that both left me with the distinct impression that Dante really lowballed his idea of what hell could be in the Inferno. The book is narrated by one James Ballard, a television advertising producer who gets into a nasty car crash and is subsequently drawn to become part of a group of people for whom car crashes and sexuality are intrinsically linked.
Yes, you read that correctly: Crash involves sex, violence, and car crashes, but mostly various combinations of the three. Don't get me wrong, the novel isn't all just creepy, nightmarish smut -- it also raises plenty of questions concerning our increasing reliance on and relationship with technology, especially the dangers inherent in allowing those technologies to mediate or even replace our relationships with other human beings. Still, you're going to need a strong stomach if you want to read all the way through to the end. Ballard once explained his reasons for writing the book thusly: "I wanted to rub humanity's face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror." On that account, I'd say he succeeded.
On another note, I remember seeing Ballard's novel Empire of the Sun on at least one reader's list here. An acquaintance of mine once said that after he finished Crash, he was left wondering what would have to happen to a person to make them write a book like that; after reading Empire of the Sun, he thought, "yeah, that would probably do it." Make of that what you will.
Reading Crash (1973) reminded me an awful lot of my experience reading William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch, in that both left me with the distinct impression that Dante really lowballed his idea of what hell could be in the Inferno. The book is narrated by one James Ballard, a television advertising producer who gets into a nasty car crash and is subsequently drawn to become part of a group of people for whom car crashes and sexuality are intrinsically linked.
Yes, you read that correctly: Crash involves sex, violence, and car crashes, but mostly various combinations of the three. Don't get me wrong, the novel isn't all just creepy, nightmarish smut -- it also raises plenty of questions concerning our increasing reliance on and relationship with technology, especially the dangers inherent in allowing those technologies to mediate or even replace our relationships with other human beings. Still, you're going to need a strong stomach if you want to read all the way through to the end. Ballard once explained his reasons for writing the book thusly: "I wanted to rub humanity's face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror." On that account, I'd say he succeeded.
On another note, I remember seeing Ballard's novel Empire of the Sun on at least one reader's list here. An acquaintance of mine once said that after he finished Crash, he was left wondering what would have to happen to a person to make them write a book like that; after reading Empire of the Sun, he thought, "yeah, that would probably do it." Make of that what you will.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Matthew, Book Review, *Stanislaw Lem, *Solaris, *Francis Bacon, *The New Atlantis
Having seen the movie adaptation directed by Steven Soderbergh, I felt that I knew what to expect from Solaris (1961): a meditation on death and love set in an isolated space station.
Well, I was right on the space station part, at least.
As it turns out, Soderbergh's movie ignored most of the book in order to focus on a single, small aspect of it -- the real main thematic focus of the novel is on exploring our concept of alienness. In a great many science fiction works, the aliens might look or sound totally different from us, but live and act according to motivations that are easily understandable to humans (for a nice visual example, look at how many alien species in Star Trek are only differentiated from humans by the shape of their foreheads and a handful of social quirks). By contrast, the alien species in Solaris, a sentient ocean covering an entire planet, is so mentally and physically different from humans that we might never be able to understand much of anything about it, much less succeed in talking to it. How we cope with the possibility that some subjects are beyond our ability to comprehend them is another major theme in the novel.
Moving on, I was surprised by how short The New Atlantis (1627) by Francis Bacon ended up being (it's only fourteen pages long in Britannica's Great Books of the Western World set). While the book is definitely lousy with the goofy, starry-eyed tone peculiar to all utopian novels, it's still interesting in that its main focus isn't on the minute details of how the utopian nation's society and government work, but on "Salomon's House," an institution devoted to learning, research, and scientific discovery. The way Bacon goes on at length about the scholarly virtues and social benefits of Salomon's House might sound quaint and antiquated when compared with our modern scientific laboratories and research universities, but back when The New Atlantis was first published in 1627 his ideas were far more groundbreaking.
Well, I was right on the space station part, at least.
As it turns out, Soderbergh's movie ignored most of the book in order to focus on a single, small aspect of it -- the real main thematic focus of the novel is on exploring our concept of alienness. In a great many science fiction works, the aliens might look or sound totally different from us, but live and act according to motivations that are easily understandable to humans (for a nice visual example, look at how many alien species in Star Trek are only differentiated from humans by the shape of their foreheads and a handful of social quirks). By contrast, the alien species in Solaris, a sentient ocean covering an entire planet, is so mentally and physically different from humans that we might never be able to understand much of anything about it, much less succeed in talking to it. How we cope with the possibility that some subjects are beyond our ability to comprehend them is another major theme in the novel.
Moving on, I was surprised by how short The New Atlantis (1627) by Francis Bacon ended up being (it's only fourteen pages long in Britannica's Great Books of the Western World set). While the book is definitely lousy with the goofy, starry-eyed tone peculiar to all utopian novels, it's still interesting in that its main focus isn't on the minute details of how the utopian nation's society and government work, but on "Salomon's House," an institution devoted to learning, research, and scientific discovery. The way Bacon goes on at length about the scholarly virtues and social benefits of Salomon's House might sound quaint and antiquated when compared with our modern scientific laboratories and research universities, but back when The New Atlantis was first published in 1627 his ideas were far more groundbreaking.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Matthew, Book Review, *Evelyn Waugh, *A Handful of Dust
After finishing A Handful of Dust (1934) by Evelyn Waugh last night, my first reaction was "man, this book hates the British upper class with a burning passion." That being said, the novel never makes the mistake of becoming a mere invective-laden screed; it skewers England's upper-crust society not by attacking it directly, but by showcasing the vapid lives and shallow thinking of its rich, aristocratic (and wannabe-rich, wannabe-aristocratic) characters. The fast, light pace of the book at times lessens the bite of its satire, but on the whole Waugh seems to have added in just the right amount of content to make his point and satisfactorily flesh out his plot and characters without bogging it down with minutiae and unrelated tangents. I don't want to spoil the ending, but I do want to say that I enjoyed the anti-colonial bent of it.
Well, that's one down, ninety-nine to go. This is fun.
Well, that's one down, ninety-nine to go. This is fun.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Matthew's List
My list ended up being heavy on books of the massive and/or overly complicated variety, mainly because those are the ones that tend to sit unread on my bookshelves the longest. Hopefully my choices will end up being more engaging and fun than masochistic.
1) Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
2) Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm
3)Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio
4)Dante Alighieri, Paradiso (i.e., Inferno's younger, duller brothers)
5) Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
6)Paul Auster, Collected Prose
7)Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis
8) Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
9) Francis Bacon, Essays
10)J.G. Ballard, Crash
11)John Barth, The Floating Opera
12) John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
13) John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy
14) Robert Bolano, 2666
15) Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions
16) Samuel Beckett, Molloy
17) Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
18) Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable
19)Lord Berners, First Childhood and A Distant Prospect (I've been told these two should be treated as two halves of the same book, so I am)
20) John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress
21) Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
22) Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
23) Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys
24) John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle
25) Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (I've tried reading the first chapter a couple times now, so I'm pretty confident that this one will make my ears bleed)
26) Don DeLillo, Underworld
27) Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
28) David Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
29) William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
30) F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
31)F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon
32) Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End (technically this is four novels, but whatever)
33)Anatole France, The Gods Will Have Blood
34)Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
35) William Gaddis, The Recognitions (who knows, I might even finish it this time)
36) William Gaddis, Carpenter's Gothic
37) Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
38) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
39) Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
40) Graham Greene, The Quiet American
41) Luo Guanzhong, Three Kingdoms
42)Knut Hamsun, Hunger
43) Joseph Heller, Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man
44) Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
45) Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
46) Herodotus, The Histories
47) Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
48) Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
49) Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon
50) John Irving, The Cider House Rules
51) John Irving, A Widow for One Year
52)B.S. Johnson, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry
53) Franz Kafka, Amerika
54) Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
55) Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Nation
56) Ursula K. le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
57)Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
58) Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad
59) Livy, The Early History of Rome
60) Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
61) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
62) Carole Maso, Defiance
63)Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
64) Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
65) Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (and possibly the rest of the Border Trilogy)
66) Herman Melville, Moby Dick
67) Arthur Miller, The Crucible
68) David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
69) Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
70) Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
71) Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister
72) The Nibelungenleid (I'm hoping to be able to pronounce that title properly by the time I'm done reading it)
73) Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
74) Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
75) Kenzaburo Oe, A Personal Matter
76) Ovid, Fasti
77) Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
78) Plato, The Republic (I've never liked Plato, but I suppose reading him builds character or something)
79) The Poem of the Cid
80) Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
81) Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon
82) Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
83)J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
84)Jose Saramago, Blindness
85) Nevil Shute, On the Beach
86) Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
87) Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
88) The Song of Roland
89) Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome
90) Tacitus, The Germania
91) Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
92)Voltaire, Candide
93) David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System
94) Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall
95)Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
96) Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (I've been meaning to read this one ever since I read about Waugh covering the Second Italo-Abyssinian War in The First Casualty by Philip Knightley)
97) Richard Wright, Black Boy
98) Richard Wright, Native Son
99)Xenophon, The Persian Expedition
100) Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi
1) Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
2) Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm
3)
4)
5) Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
6)
7)
8) Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
9) Francis Bacon, Essays
10)
11)
12) John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
13) John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy
14) Robert Bolano, 2666
15) Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions
16) Samuel Beckett, Molloy
17) Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
18) Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable
19)
20) John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress
21) Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
22) Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
23) Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys
24) John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle
25) Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (I've tried reading the first chapter a couple times now, so I'm pretty confident that this one will make my ears bleed)
26) Don DeLillo, Underworld
27) Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
28) David Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
29) William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
30) F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
31)
32) Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End (technically this is four novels, but whatever)
33)
34)
35) William Gaddis, The Recognitions (who knows, I might even finish it this time)
36) William Gaddis, Carpenter's Gothic
37) Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
38) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
39) Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
40) Graham Greene, The Quiet American
41) Luo Guanzhong, Three Kingdoms
42)
43) Joseph Heller, Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man
44) Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
45) Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
46) Herodotus, The Histories
47) Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
48) Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
49) Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon
50) John Irving, The Cider House Rules
51) John Irving, A Widow for One Year
52)
53) Franz Kafka, Amerika
54) Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
55) Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Nation
56) Ursula K. le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
57)
58) Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad
59) Livy, The Early History of Rome
60) Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
61) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
62) Carole Maso, Defiance
63)
64) Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
65) Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (and possibly the rest of the Border Trilogy)
66) Herman Melville, Moby Dick
67) Arthur Miller, The Crucible
68) David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
69) Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
70) Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
71) Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister
72) The Nibelungenleid (I'm hoping to be able to pronounce that title properly by the time I'm done reading it)
73) Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
74) Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
75) Kenzaburo Oe, A Personal Matter
76) Ovid, Fasti
77) Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
78) Plato, The Republic (I've never liked Plato, but I suppose reading him builds character or something)
79) The Poem of the Cid
80) Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
81) Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon
82) Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
83)
84)
85) Nevil Shute, On the Beach
86) Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
87) Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
88) The Song of Roland
89) Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome
90) Tacitus, The Germania
91) Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
92)
93) David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System
94) Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall
95)
96) Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (I've been meaning to read this one ever since I read about Waugh covering the Second Italo-Abyssinian War in The First Casualty by Philip Knightley)
97) Richard Wright, Black Boy
98) Richard Wright, Native Son
99)
100) Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi
