Vicar of Wakefield and The Regeneration Trilogy

No contrast could be greater than that between these books. On the one hand, Oliver Goldsmith's pleasant, optimistic tale of virtue overcoming misfortune. On the other, Pat Barker's brutal but thoughtful epic of how a society at war becomes a culture of war.

The Vicar of Wakefield tells the story of a family fallen into misfortune through the fault of others and how, by keeping his honesty and good humor intact, the Vicar pulls through in the end. It is both a mild sermon on morality and a gentle satire on the literary cliches of Fielding and Richardson. Full review here.

I reported on Regeneration earlier, and have since finished the other two volumes in this trilogy. The three novels comprise a chronicle of the psychological and social impact of the First World War. The Regeneration Trilogy belongs on the shelf of great war novels alongside All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Badge of Courage, and Catch-22. Here are my full reviews of each volume: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road.

Kokoro, Garp, and Regeneration

In the last couple of weeks I've finished three more books from my list. Though they are very different in plot, context and style, they share one common theme: Guilt.

Kokoro by Natsume Soseki is considered Japan's first modern novel. It is a story reflecting the conflict in Japan between traditional values and the newly-adopted Western institutions. Full review.

The World According to Garp by John Irving is the wild story of a writer struggling against the influence of his tragic personal life on his writing... and much more. Full review.

Regeneration by Pat Barker is the first book in a trilogy depicting the treatment of cases of combat-induced mental illness in Britain in World War I. Most of the characters are historical figures, and the depictions of therapy are taken from actual published case studies. Full review.

Steven's Update

I've finished three more books from my list since my last update:

Atonement by Ian McEwan - a powerful and multi-faceted novel about love, war, class, guilt, and the literary imagination. Full review.

Neuromancer by William Gibson - an interesting vision of the future (already realized in part) where human and cybernetic intelligence begin to merge. Full review.

them by Joyce Carol Oates - a gritty novel about the lives of the urban poor, set in Detroit from the 1930s to the riots of 1967. Full review.

With nine books down in four months I suppose I'm on pace to finish my list in five years, but there are some 1000+ page monsters still lurking on the list!

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

The Human Stain is a much-honored novel about identity, honesty, and the destructive power of hate. It also touches upon many timely social issues, especially education.

The story revolves around Coleman Silk, a college professor unjustly accused of racism and misogyny by his ambitious colleagues. His troubles are amplified when his lover's ex-husband, a deranged Vietnam vet, begins persecuting him. But all the while, Silk is hiding a secret that would both astound and perplex.

My full review is here.

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Naked Lunch is a book about heroin addiction written, supposedly, while under that drug's influence. It is a series of often incoherent hallucinatory images of human degradation. Throughout the novel there are deliberately vulgar and graphic images of disease, of mutilation and of bizarre sex acts. In mid-book, however, there emerges a quite lucid satire on the various forms of political control. Burroughs sees drug addiction as a metaphor for totalitarianism, saying the only result of control is a desire for more control.

My full review can be found here.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Housekeeping is a brilliant book about identity and memory, and perhaps the greatest novel I've read this year. It is the story of two sisters in Idaho in the 1950s from a family marked by tragedy and suicide. The are raised by their aunt, a former transient, whose unreformed lifestyle scandalizes the townspeople and forces the sisters to make a choice between freedom and conventionality.

This is a serious novel deep in meaning and rich in imagery, but its beautiful language is highly readable. I highly recommend it. My full review is here.

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

The Pickwick Papers was Dickens's first novel. It was begun as a series of illustrated pamphlets, and it was only as Dickens's writing caught the public fancy that it began to take on the characteristics of a novel. So it's a story that changes form as it goes along, but is always entertaining and often moving.

The plot is essentially an account of the adventures of Mr. Pickwick and his friends as they travel about England in search of novel experiences. Because of the nature of its publication, each of the early chapters is more of a standalone story full of slapstick comedy and just a touch of satire. As the novel progresses, it becomes more of a complete work resembling Dickens's other novels. There are moving scenes of debtor's prison, scathing commentaries upon the law courts, etc, just as one will find in his later novels. Reading The Pickwick Papers gives you the unique experience of witnessing from chapter to chapter the literary emergence of one of the greatest novelists of all time.

My full review is here.

Free Online Course on the American Novel

Yale University has posted video recordings of a number of its courses as a free public service. One of the courses is titled "The American Novel Since 1945," taught by Professor Amy Hungerford. The course consists of 25 lectures which you can watch online or download to your PC. Each lecture covers a specific book, so you can watch the whole course, or just the session that pertains to what you are reading now. I've watched about a third of the course so far, and the lectures are very interesting and helpful even if (like me) you have absolutely no academic background in literature.

Here is the link: http://oyc.yale.edu/english/american-novel-since-1945 Click on "class sessions" to see a list and links to the individual titles.

Note that by watching these lectures you are not officially taking the class. There is no credit given (and no homework). You don't have to register; you just click the links and watch the class.

Here is a list of the books discussed in the course. Each one is the subject of at least one 1-hour lecture, some of the them of two or three. Almost all of them are on at least one person's "100 List":

Black Boy by Richard Wright
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - Steven's Review

My second book for this challenge was truly a "fill in the gap," because I don't recall ever reading a spy novel before. It was enjoyable, but I wouldn't want a steady diet of the genre. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is said to be one of the best, probably because of its unvarnished commentary on the evils of espionage and similar dark deeds in the name of national defense. This is a message told forcefully and convincingly. My full review is here.

Steven, Book Review, *J. M. Coetzee, *Waiting for the Barbarians

My first book for this challenge could be one of the very best. Waiting for the Barbarians is a brief but unforgettable novel about the corrosive effects of power. The setting is a remote fortified frontier settlement on the western fringe of a nameless and imaginary Empire. The narrator is the Magistrate who presides over this peaceful and unassuming community. He is a thoughtful man of mild temperament, enjoying fine foods and an occasional evening with a local prostitute.

The Magistrate's placid life is forever changed by the arrival of Colonel Joll, an agent of the imperial police, with several captives. The prisoners are barbarians, people who live beyond the Empire's western border. To the Magistrate the barbarians have always been a people of interest as potential trading partners, but Joll represents the new official policy that the barbarians are a threat to the Empire and are to be treated as enemies. Joll brutally tortures his captives, and begins insidiously to turn the townspeople towards his view of the barbarians as subhuman beasts whose only desire is to kill and plunder. Eventually the people joyfully take part in the torture of captives, even children taking their turns bludgeoning barbarians in the town square. The Magistrate alone attempts to stop the tortures and the punitive expeditions into the desert. He even takes a captive barbarian girl, now crippled from Joll's abuses, into his house in an attempt to expiate his nation's collective sins.

As one might imagine, Waiting for the Barbarians is a brutal story with graphic descriptions of violence and suffering. It is also a timeless allegory. While the novel may have been inspired by apartheid in Coetzee's native South Africa, one can't avoid disturbing thoughts about America's waterboarding controversy. But Coetzee's message is a more general one. Near the end of the novel the Magistrate reflects upon his inability, not just to live a simple day-to-day live, but even to understand those who do:

"What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies.... By night it feeds on images of disaster."

This is very thoughtful stuff. As citizens of a great empire, are we not only trapped in its historical paradigm, but doomed to project that paradigm into our own lives? Is it our birthright to be incapable of enjoying our day-to-day lives, free from conflict and free from the cloud of worry about the future?

Steven's List

I am a compulsive collector of "greatest books" lists, so I have used these sources to determine which books to put on my list. I started by including the 18 books I still need to read to finish all the works in Daniel S. Burt's "The Novel 100." The rest of the books are the novels or short story collections I haven't read that have appeared on the most lists, won the most awards, etc. The exceptions are: no author appears more than once, and books I've alread started don't appear on the list.

Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Algren, Nelson - The Man with the Golden Arm
Amis, Kingsley - Lucky Jim
Amis, Martin - Money: A Suicide Note
Auster, Paul - The New York Trilogy
Balzac, Honore de - Eugénie Grandet
Barker, Pat - Regeneration Trilogy
Bellow, Saul - Humboldt's Gift
Berger, John - G
Borges, Jorge Luis - Labyrinths
Burney, Fanny - Evelina
Burroughs, William S. - The Naked Lunch
Calvino, Italo - Invisible Cities
Capote, Truman - In Cold Blood
Cather, Willa - My Ántonia
Chandler, Raymond - The Big Sleep
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Coetzee, J. M. - Waiting for the Barbarians
DeLillo, Don - Mao II
Dickens, Charles - Pickwick Papers
Diderot, Denis - Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Doblin, Alfred - Berlin Alexanderplatz
Dostoevsky, Fyodor - The Idiot
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan - The Hound of the Baskervilles
Du Maurier, Daphne - Rebecca
Farrell, J. G. - Empire Trilogy
Fielding, Henry - Joseph Andrews
Fontane, Theodor - Effi Briest
Fowles, John - The French Lieutenant's Woman
Franzen, Jonathan - The Corrections
Fuentes, Carlos - The Death of Artemio Cruz
Gaddis, William - The Recognitions
Galsworthy, John - The Forsyte Saga
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel - Love in the Time of Cholera
Gaskell, Elizabeth - North and South
Gibson, William - Neuromancer
Gide, Andre - The Counterfeiters
Gissing, George - New Grub Street
Goldsmith, Oliver - The Vicar of Wakefield
Gombrowicz, Witold - Ferdydurke
Greene, Graham - The Power and the Glory
Hamsun, Knut - Hunger
Hardy, Thomas - The Mayor of Casterbridge
Hoban, Russell - Riddley Walker
Hogg, James - The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Irving, John - The World According to Garp
Ishiguro, Kazuo - The Remains of the Day
Keneally, Thomas - Schindler's List
Kesey, Ken - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Le Carre, John - The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
Lessing, Doris - The Golden Notebook
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
Malraux, Andre - Man's Fate
Mann, Thomas - Doctor Faustus
McEwan, Ian - Atonement
Mitchell, Margaret - Gone with the Wind
Morrison, Toni - Song of Solomon
Munif, Abdelrahman - Cities of Salt
Murakami, Haruki - The Wind Up Bird Chronicle
Murdoch, Iris - The Sea, the Sea
Musil, Robert - Young Törless
Natsume Soseki - Kokoro
Oates, Joyce Carol - Them
O'Brien, Flann - The Third Policeman
Ondaatje, Michael - The English Patient
Paton, Alan - Cry, the Beloved Country
Peake, Mervyn - Gormenghast Trilogy
Proulx, Annie - The Shipping News
Pynchon, Thomas - V.
Richardson, Samuel - Clarissa
Robinson, Marilynne - Housekeeping
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Roth, Philip - The Human Stain
Rousseau, Jean Jacques - La Nouvelle Héloïse
Rushdie, Salman - The Satanic Verses
Sartre, Jean Paul - Nausea
Scott, Sir Walter - Waverley
Smith, Zadie - White Teeth
Smollett, Tobias - Humphry Clinker
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr - Cancer Ward
Stead, Christina - The Man Who Loved Children
Sterne, Laurence - A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
Stone, Robert - Dog Soldiers
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Svevo, Italo - Confessions of Zeno
Undset, Sigrid - Kristin Lavransdatter
Updike, John - The Rabbit Angstrom Novels (4)
Wallace, David Foster - Infinite Jest
West, Nathanael - Miss Lonelyhearts
Wharton, Edith - Ethan Frome
White, Patrick - Voss
White, T. H. - The Once and Future King
Wolfe, Thomas - Look Homeward, Angel
Wolfe, Tom - Bonfire of the Vanities
Woolf, Virginia - Orlando
Xueqin, Cao - The Dream of the Red Chamber
Yourcenar, Marguerite - Memoirs of Hadrian
Zola, Emile - Germinal

I have also posted this list on my new blog, "The Library Annex" http://libraryannex.blogspot.com/