11 posts tagged “thenovel100”
Lately I've had no ambition to do anything but sit on the patio with a pile of books and read. No movies, no music, no blogging, and definitely no work around the house. (Well,truth be told, a bottle of Stoly and some ice are always welcome companions. Maybe that has something to do with the ambition thing.)
Here are a few things I've been reading lately:
The Scarlet Letter - a Novel 100 read - Finished up Vanity Fair, which I loved, and decided to go with something a little less ambitious. This was a quick and easy read full of snappy passages like this one, where Hester and her daughter Pearl, who is dressed in scarlet, walk into Boston:
As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the children of the Puritans looked up from their play - or what passed for play with those sombre little urchins--and spoke gravely one to another.
"Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter: and of a truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running along by her side! Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!"
Crazy kids!!
Currently reading: Wuthering Heights.
Child 44 - this first novel by screenwriter Tom Rob Smith was heavily promoted by Barnes and Noble, with a prominent display in the front of the store. It was already discounted 30% for members and I had a coupon for an additional 30% off so I figured how bad can it be for a buck two ninety? Turns out is was well worth the hype. It's the story of a Stalin-era Russian policeman who is trying to track down a serial murderer of children in a society where, officially, crime does not exist. Smith really captures the through-the-looking-glass paranoia and terror that pervades every aspect of his characters' lives. A first class mystery with a fascinating historical context. This novel really piqued my interest in the history of that time, and today I found a copy of Robert Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow: A History of Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine for sale in our local library's Book Cellar. It's one of the histories that Smith used in his research for Child 44.
The Last Refuge and Two Time are two excellent mysteries by Connecticut ad-man Chris Knopf. The setting is the Hamptons on Long Island and I worried a little that they were going to be novels about rich people. In fact, they're more centered on the real locals and on the destructive influence the influx of so much wealth has had on their world. Sam Acquillo is a former corporate executive, sometime amateur boxer, and all-around tough guy who lives in a ramshackle cabin built by his brutal father on the shores of the Peconic Bay, one of the few original dwellings left standing in a sea of mammoth grotesqueries erected by the big money types who have invaded the island. Having escaped the corporate world (by means of punching one of his company's top executives in the face) and following an ugly divorce, Sam is content to sit in his Adirondack chair with a book and a large tumbler of Absolut and to watch the light and the weather work their magic on his beloved Bay. (Why do I like this guy so much?)
In the first novel, The Last Refuge, Sam is drawn into a whirlwind of money and corruption when he discovers the body of an elderly neighbor. In Two Time, Sam and a lawyer friend are injured when a local investment advisor is blown to bits in a car bomb explosion. Sam is recruited by a local cop to clandestinely investigate the case.
These books are full of great characters and smart, funny dialogue worthy of Bogie and Baby. On the basis of only two novels, Knopf has earned a place pretty high in my pantheon of favorite mystery writers. I just discovered that the third novel in the series Head Wounds, came out in May. I'm all over it.
Here are some recent reads:
The Glass Castle - Jeanette Walls's memoir of growing up with two wildly dysfunctional parents. From the desert Southwest to the hills of Southern West Virginia, dodging bill collectors, sometimes scrabbling for food, Walls and her siblings somehow survive. Hilarious and heartbreaking at once.
Empire Rising -Thomas Kelly's novel of Depression era New York is in part the story of the Empire State Building and the men who built it. It's also a story of Tammany Hall and of the corruption, bribery and deal-making that were part of Jazz Age New York politics. Michael Briody is a WWI veteran, recent Irish immigrant, steelworker, semi-professional boxer, and sometimes IRA gun runner who loves his new city and proudly works the high iron. Briody is not only entagled in the political complexities of the Irish 'Troubles'; he also becomes romantically involved with fellow immigrant Grace Masterson, an artist who is the mistress of Johnnie Farrell, Mayor Jimmy Walker's corrupt bagman. Kelly's love for New York and his respect for the working men shine through. If you're as afraid of heights as I am, you'll certainly experience some moments of stomach twisting terror reading about these brave men, casually going about their work as the building rises further and further into the sky. (I was in our library's Book Cellar the other day - where they sell used books to raise money - and came across a copy of one of Kelly's earlier novels The Rackets which I picked up for 25 cents. Sweet!)
Lush Life - It's no surprise that Richard Price was hired to write for The Wire. His novels have always covered the same gritty urban territory. In this, his latest, Eric Cash manages a restaurant and is coming to the realization that his dreams of becoming a screenwriter or novelist will probably come to nothing. One night, after a round of bar-hopping, Eric and his companions are accosted on the street and someone is killed. Eric is initially a suspect but even after he is cleared he has difficulty dealing with the repercussions of the event and his life slowly begins to unravel. Lush Life is populated by the same crowd as The Wire - cops, perps, politicians, victims, project dwellers, citizens. A good one from one of my favorite writers.
Madame Bovary - At #7 this is the highest I've gotten on Burt's Novel 100 list. A bit slow but worth the effort. Emma's romantic fantasies and her efforts to escape the banalities of rural life lead to her doom. Flaubert handily skewers the clergy and the bourgoisie. The novel was controversial in its time because it deals with - gasp! - adultery. In fact Flaubert was dragged into court on obscenity charges. From Wikipedia:
Madame Bovary, on the whole, is a commentary on the entire self-satisfied, deluded, bourgeois culture of Flaubert's time period. His contempt for the bourgeoisie is expressed through his characters: Emma and Charles Bovary lost in romantic delusions; absurd and harmful scientific characters, a self-serving money lender, lovers seeking excitement finding only the banality of marriage in their adulterous affairs. All are seeking escape in empty church rituals, unrealistic romantic novels, or delusions of one sort or another.
Vanity Fair - currently reading - I knew relatively little about this book before I started it. I'm only about half way through at this point, but I'm already sure it'll be one of my favorite Novel 100 reads. Thackeray injects his wry wit and sarcasm into the proceedings in a thoroughly modern way. Very funny.
The Silver Swan - John Banville wrote one of my favorite novels of the past few years, The Sea, which won the Man Booker prize in 2005. The Silver Swan is Banville's second mystery written as Benjamin Black, a follow up to last year's excellent Christine Falls. Set in 1950's Dublin, the novel marks the return of the crusty pathologist Quirke, who can never seem to leave well enough alone and who, once again, finds himself investigating the death of a young woman, an apparent suicide.
The Spellman Files - Recovered screenwriter Lisa Lutz (Plan B) has written a delightfully wacky novel about a family of crazed private detectives. Just hilarious. Can't wait to read the next installment, The Curse of the Spellmans.
These are the Novel 100 books I read in 2007.
My favorite: The Grapes of Wrath edges out Bleak House by a nose.
I loved The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, too, until Tom Sawyer showed up at the end and spoiled it. That boy is one big pain in the ass. (Now that Huckleberry has won the Iowa caucuses, he'd be well advised to keep Tom out of the picture.)
Most difficult - Absalom, Absalom by a longshot.
My current Novel 100 read:
Here's what I've been up to lately.
THE NOVEL 100
Finished Toni Morrison's phantasmagorical 1988 Pulitzer Prize winner Beloved, a weird, harrowing tale of slavery and its aftermath. This happens to be the most recent book included in Burt's Novel 100.
Now reading Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom. Prose so dense you have to pry the words apart with a crowbar. And after you read a couple of chapters of this, you just want to take a shower to rinse off the stench of corruption.
AUDIOBOOKS
Just finishing up Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, an interesting thought experiment. What would happen to the planet if humans disappeared? It's not a pretty picture, unless maybe you're a bird or a cat. Cities and most of what man has wrought will crumble in a few hundred years. Chemical plants, oil refineries and pipelines will corrode and burn, spewing toxic material into the atmosphere. Nuclear plants will melt down. Radioactive waste with a half life of hundreds of thousands of years will contaminate large areas. Not to mention plastic. There are already vast areas of ocean, where currents come together, that are nothing more than garbage dumps, swirling with floating plastic waste. Plastic will be around until something evolves that can metabolize it. Think it can't happen? The great Mayan civilization disappeared in a few hundred years. 75% of all species were wiped out during the Permian Extinction. And the dinosaurs were gone in a flash. There's always the chance of a pandemic. How about runaway technology? It's not a matter of 'if', it's just a matter of 'when'. Sleep tight.
Queued up: Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine
MISCELLANEOUS
Jeffery Eugenides' Middlesex is another Pulitzer Prize winner. This book never really appealed to me but my wife read it while we were on vacation and highly recommended it. It's the story of an extended Greek family which escapes Greek/Turkish conflict early in the 20th century and emigrates to Detroit. It's narrated by Calliope Stephanides who, due to some questionable breeding practices among her ancestors, is a hermaphrodite. Raised as a girl, Callie doesn't find out that she's genetically male until she's a teenager. Middlesex not only tells the amazing story of Callie and her (er, his) family, but also tracks the history of a great American city through the century, from the rise of the auto industry to the 1967 riots and the city's subsequent decline. Really a delightful, funny, fascinating tale, full of wonderful characters.
Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series is one of my all time favorites, and One Step Behind may be the best Wallander novel I've read so far. In many ways it's a typical cops-chasing-serial-killer novel, but Mankell, as always, gets us deep inside Wallander's head as he struggles to make sense of the random killings of three young people, to come to grips with the murder of a police colleague, and to cope with his own failing health. I can't recommend Mankell highly enough.
I started Middlemarch back in August (!) and, trying to knock off a couple of chapters a day, only finished it a couple of days ago. Today we're used to big, sprawling, wide-ranging novels but, for its time, Middlemarch was revolutionary, depicting as it does the lives of ordinary provincial citizens and their most intimate thoughts and dreams, all in the larger contexts of town life and of British politics.
The main characters are all, in their way, young idealists who find their idealism challenged by the realities of provincial life - the constraints of propriety, the petty scandals, and the often mean-spirited gossip that swirls around the town.
Kind and beautiful Dorothea Brooke dreams of doing great deeds and, to everyone's shock, marries the dour clergyman Mr. Casaubon, thinking that she can help him in his great intellectual pursuits. But Casaubon is not the great intellect that he pretends to be. Their marriage is gray and dismal and the jealous, vindictive Casaubon even finds a way of controlling Dorothea's life from beyond the grave.
Dr. Tertius Lydgate hopes to make great contributions to medical science but falls for and marries the beautiful but superficial Rosamond Vincy, whose spending brings him to the brink of bankruptcy.
Rosamond herself has her childish illusions of married life shattered. Her brother, Fred, struggles to find his place in the world. And Casaubon's nephew, Will Ladislaw, an itinerant artist and writer, is thwarted in his love for Dorothea.
These characters are surrounded by a huge supporting cast, representing all levels of Middlemarch society - the landed gentry, the clergy, shopkeepers and businessmen, farmers and common laborers. Middlemarch paints us a vivid picture of provincial life in the 1830's.
Dorothea, Lydgate, Rosamond, Fred and Will all find some measure of happiness and success by novel's end, but none in keeping with their youthful dreams.
Unlike other novels of its time, Middlemarch is a celebration of ordinary life and ordinary folk. In the book's final paragraph, a touching valediction to Dorothea, Eliot tell us that, even though her grand dreams never came true, her life was important.
Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
****
So, after Bleak House and Middlemarch, I think I'm coming back home for a while. Next up:
It took me a couple of months, but I finally finished Bleak House yesterday. At close to 1000 pages, I think it may be the longest novel I've ever read. It was truly enjoyable, wonderfully written, packed with those memorable Dickens characters (Mr. Guppy, Turveydrop, Mr. Skimpole to name a few) and offering up equal portions of laughter and intrigue, along with a few lumps in the throat. I've also been re-watching the excellent Masterpiece Theater series with Gillian Anderson in parallel with reading the book.
I've decided to read something a little lighter for my next Novel 100 book. At a paltry 794 pages, it's a mere bag o' shells.
(By the way, I just started Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother and, early on in the book, two recently retired guys are talking and one asks the other "Got through the World's Hundred Best Novels?". It's nice to be a walking cliche.)
Actually I just recently finished John Updike's Terrorist. Updike provides not only a serviceable thriller, but a look deep inside the mind of a young Muslim who is drawn to terrorism.
Ahmad Ashmawy, the son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father, is a New Jersey high school student and devout Muslim who is horrifed by the shallowness of the culture he sees around him. (One must assume from the sympathetic portrait of Ahmad that Updike agrees.)
Infidels, they think safety lies in the accumulation of the things of this world, and in the corrupting diversions of the television set. They are slaves to images, false ones of happiness and affluence.
Despite a good academic record and college prospects, Ahmad is steered by his somewhat shady imam, who recognizes the boy's deep devotion, into studying for a truck driver's license. As the story progresses, Ahmad is manipulated by other adults in the Muslim community into volunteering for a 'martyrdom' operation.
The story is a tad contrived and preachy in parts, and the book was not well reviewed. All in all, though, I thought it was a decent read, kind of a fictional companion to The Looming Tower, and I'd give it a lukewarm recommendation.
Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children was on a lot of "Best of" lists last year. It's the story of a group of 30-ish Manhattanites who are attempting to come to grips with 'Real Life' - careers, relationships, adulthood. I haven't gotten too far in this one yet, but I realized as I was reading it the other day that, with its eccentric characters and great sense of humor, it kind of reminded me of Dickens. Maybe it's just a simple case of two wonderful writers. Based on the high praise it has received and on what I've read so far, I would definitely recommend this one.
I usually have an audiobook going, too, which I listen to on my lunchtime walks. Right now I'm listening to The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg, a highly entertaining and absolutely fascinating history of the English language. From its early Germanic roots, English somehow survived the Danish and Norman invasions of Britain, and was actually strengthened by adopting words and usages of the conquerors. There was a great chapter on Chaucer, but my hero so far is John Wycliffe who, in the 14th century, dared to translate the Bible into English, undercutting the power of the Church and the clergy. An amazing story. This is probably the only audiobook I've listened to that I thought was actually better listened to than read. Being able to hear the Old English words and how the language evolved is wonderful and the reader does an excellent job. I'm only up to the 14th century at this point, but I'm getting the feeling that this may end up being my favorite non-fiction book of the year. Highly recommended.
I still have a yellowed paperback copy of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, left over from my freshman year in college, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The blurb on the back cover says something about "a young Negro's search for identity". (Most of you are probably too young to remember but, at one time, there were Negroes living in America.) My name is inscribed inside the front cover along with my dorm room number. The book cost 95 cents.
I don't know why anyone, even the Jesuits, would think that a 17 year old could even begin to grasp the richness and profundity of this book, but I guess the fact that I've carried it around with me from place to place for 40 years means that it made some kind of impression on my young mind.
It's truly an amazing novel, well deserving of its high rank in The Novel 100. The chaotic violence of The Battle Royal, the Golden Day, and the riot in Harlem alone are worth the price of admission..
As Lelyn said, "while Existentialists were unveiling the emptiness of all human identities, the Civil Rights movement was constructing a new myth of manhood (for obvious historic reasons). This book bridged the gap."
Obviously it's a story about race in America, but it's also about manhood, blindness and invisibility, and, ultimately, identity.
And now all past humiliations became precious parts of my experience, and for the first time, leaning against that stone wall in the sweltering night, I began to accept my past and, as I accepted it, I felt memories welling up within me. It was as though I'd learned suddenly to look around corners; images of past humiliations flickered through my head and I saw that they were more than separate experiences. They were me: they defined me. I was my experiences and my experiences were me, and no blind men, no matter how powerful they became, even if they conquered the world, could take that, or change one single itch, taunt, laugh, cry, scar, ache, rage or pain of it.
So far my forays into The Novel 100 - The Trial, The Grapes of Wrath, and now Invisible Man - have been most rewarding. I'm feeling ambitious. Bleak House anyone??
Run, Joseph K, run!!
For my first foray into the Novel 100 I decided to read Kafka's The Trial, first, because I already had a copy - probably a remnant of some long ago college course - and second, because... well... it's thin. No sense starting out with War and Peace or Moby Dick. You don't start an exercise regimen with the Boston Marathon.
I found much of the book a bit of a slog; partially, I think, because the edition I have is an older, rather turgid translation. The first line of the book, for example, is "Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning." where a more modern translation is, "Someone must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested" I think the more modern translation might have been an easier and better read. And, while The Trial was no doubt revolutionary for its time, the ideas it presents have become such cliches that my reaction, at first, was mostly "Yeah, yeah, I get it. Let's move it along."
Early on, I was forcing myself to get through ten pages or so of The Trial before picking up the other book I'm reading. At some point, though, I found that I had fallen into the rhythm of the book - the dreamlike atmosphere and the endless circular logic became almost hypnotic. In a good way. The characters seemed to come alive as well - the lawyer, the tradesman, the painter, the priest. By the end, I was totally involved in this disturbing tale and curious about the amazing mind that produced it.
Up Next: Definitely something a little more accessible. Having just read The Worst Hard Time, I think I'm going with The Grapes of Wrath.
I've started a new collection called Novel 100 where I'm going to collect the books that I've read from the Novel 100 list.
I'm only including a) books that I'm reading now or have read recently enough to remember: b) books that I may have read years ago but that I remember very well, or; c) books that I read years ago but that I have no interest in re-reading, like Gone With the Wind.
There are a lot of books on the list that I can count as having been read, but I read them so long ago that I don't remember too much about them. I'd definitely like to re-read many of them.
