Reading Resolutions for 2013

Well, they Mayans were wrong, a new year is upon us, and I’m forced, once again, to type out a few reading resolutions for 2013. I’ve tossed this around quite a bit, and I’ve concluded that there are a few different paths I can take here.

I’ve long had a goal of tackling some of the more ginormous works of literature- those that come in at 1,000 pages or more. But a whole year of that, and I might never want to read anything again. I’ve also had this nagging urge to go back to some of the books I’ve left unfinished, and knock them out once and for all. That was especially cathartic when I bagged the great, white whale last year. On the other hand, I had a great experience re-reading a couple of favorite books in 2012, only to find them even better the second time around. So that’s kind of tempting as a goal. I still feel like I’m awfully behind on contemporary novels. But at the same time, I haven’t read anything really old (Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, etc.) since high school, so I’m probably due for a refresher. In the end, I don’t see why I should have to decide. So I’m going to pick all of the above. I will:

• Read something old-school
• Read something contemporary
• Re-read a favorite
• Finish (and most likely re-start) a “Did not finish”
• And tackle at least one of the big boys.

There! Simple, worthwhile, and I can count them off on one hand- And I’ve still got a whole lot of freedom to go wherever I want with this. It should be a good reading year. What about you?

My Shelf Life: 2012

-Still Life- French Novels, c. 1888, by Vincent van Gogh

This year I knocked off 37 books, and 10,842 pages- give or take. There were three other books I read pretty deeply into, before putting them on hold, but I won’t be counting those pages towards this year’s total. That means I averaged about 30 pages per day, compared to 31 pages per day last year. Pretty darn steady, all things considered.

So, what did I read, you ask? Well, I’d throw the vast majority of it in the classics or contemporary literary fiction category. “Read the best books first,” and all that jazz… But 14% of those pages were non-fiction, 11% of them were mainstream commercial fiction, 6% were plays, and 11% were short story collections. More importantly, I reached all my goals for this year, knocking off an Agatha Christie here, conquering a foreign language read some time before the clock strikes twelve tonight, and ensuring that a full 44% of my reading this year came from the pens of female writers. (Last year, you may remember, there was only one.)

Here is the final list, in the order I read them, with my top ten reads listed in bold (page numbers in parentheses):

1)      The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro  (349)

2)     A Bell for Adano, John Hersey  (269)

3)     Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta  (256)

4)     Wasatch, Douglas Thayer  (235)

5)      The Turn of the Screw, Henry James  (96)

6)     Curtain, Agatha Christie   (240)

7)      Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust   (496)

8)     Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte   (352)

9)     Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte    (320)

10) A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan    (352)

11)   The Vegetable, F. Scott Fitzgerald   (185)

12)  The Fifth Column & Four Unpublished Stories of the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway   (215)

13)  The Death of a Disco Dancer, David Clark    (336)

14) State of Wonder, Ann Patchett   (384)

15)  The Dead, James Joyce   (80)

16)  Blue Nights, Joan Didion  (208)

17)  Swamplandia, Karen Russell   (336)

18)  Silas Marner, George Eliot   (192)

19)  Home, Toni Morrison   (160)

20)To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee   (336)

21)  Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury   (288)

22) The Human Comedy, William Saroyan   (256)

23) Train Dreams, Denis Johnson   (128)

24)The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides    (416)

25) The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern   (400)

26) Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides   (544)

27) Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer   (416)

28) Moby Dick, Herman Melville   (464)

29) Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton   (106)

30)The Good Earth, Pearl Buck   (418)

31)  Out of Africa, Isak Denisen   (416)

32) Congo, Michael Crichton   (313)

33) Kongo, Michael Crichton   (310)

34) Mythologies, Roland Barthes   (288)

35) The War of Art, Steven Pressfield (158)

36) When the Killing’s Done, T. C. Boyle   (384)

37) Trg Oberdan, Boris Pahor   (140)

Now, coming up with a top ten is always tough. To Kill a Mockingbird  and The Good Earth  were reread precisely because they were already favorites of mine. Even so, there were a handful that could have made the cut if I’d been in a slightly different mood when I read them, but all I can go on is which books I enjoyed the most. 

Twenty six of those authors were brand new to me, which is exciting and disheartening at the same time. I am tearing through new writers at an amazing clip and am still  just scratching the surface. But that's what makes this so much fun.

Now it’s time for you to shame me with your own lists. Whadjyall read this year?

Update: How on earth did I leave On the Road  off this list! Not sure who I would bump from the top ten, but Kerouac definitely belongs in that group.

Author Look-Alikes: Vol. 9

It feels like time for another round of these, doesn’t it? I give you the stern, twin gazes of Jose Saramago and Alan Arkin:

And when you look at Margaret Atwood, don’t you half expect her to bring the house down in a Streisandian rendition of “Memories?” (Because I do.)

Then there’s Grace Paley. Keeping it real, no pretension, no time to brush her hair. She’s just gettin’ stuff done, a la Mrs. Weasley:

And since we’ve crossed over into the world of fantasy, let’s examine Lord of the Flies  author William Golding. He looks a bit like Lord of the Rings  hero Gandalf, three months after chemotherapy:

And this last one I’m not going to call a “look-alike” until someone can prove that both pictures are in fact not  one-and-the-same man. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for James Joyce, world-renowned author and banjo-playing contortionist:

Take us out, Jimmy-Jo!

A Child's Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas

As read by the author...

"They'd chuck'em at you"

When you stop to think about it, there’s really no better way to put yourself in the Christmas spirit than to read about poor tenement children having large Christmas trees flung at them by grown men. So, in that spirit, here is just such a passage from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , by Betty Smith:

There was a cruel custom in the neighborhood. It was about the trees still unsold when midnight of Christmas Eve approached. There was a saying that if you waited until then, you wouldn’t have to buy a tree; that “they’d chuck ‘em at you.” This was literally true.

At midnight on the Eve of our dear Savior's birth, the kids gathered where there were unsold trees. The man threw each tree in turn, starting with the biggest. Kids volunteered to stand up against the throwing. If a boy didn’t fall down under the impact, the tree was his. If he fell, he forfeited his chance at winning a tree. Only the roughest boys and some of the young men elected to be hit by the big trees. The others waited shrewdly until a tree came up that they could stand against. The littlest kids waited for the tiny, foot-high trees and shrieked in delight when they won one.

On the Christmas Eve when Francie was ten and Neely nine, mama consented to let them go down and have their first try for a tree. Francie had picked out her tree earlier in the day. She had stood near it all afternoon and evening praying that no one would buy it. To her joy it was still there at midnight. It was the biggest tree in the neighborhood and its price was so high that no one could afford to buy it. It was ten feet high. Its branches were bound with new white rope and it came to a sure pure point at the top.

The man took this tree out first. Before Francie could speak up, a neighborhood bully, a boy of eighteen known as Punky Perkins, stepped forward and ordered the man to chuck the tree at him. The man hated the way Punky was so confident. He looked around and asked;

”Anybody else wanna take a chanct on it?”

Francie stepped forward. “Me, Mister.”

A spurt of derisive laughter came from the tree man. The kids snickered. A few adults who had gathered to watch the fun, guffawed.

“Aw g’wan. You’re too little,” the tree man objected.

“Me and my brother — we’re not too little together.”

She pulled Neely forward. The man looked at them — a thin girl of ten with starveling hollows in her cheeks but with the chin still baby-round. He looked at the little boy with his fair hair and round blue eyes - Neeley Nolan, all innocence and trust.

"Two ain't fair," yelped Punky.

"Shut your lousy trap," advised the man who held all the power in that hour. “These here kids is got nerve. Stand back, the rest of youse. These kids is goin’ to have a show at this tree.”

The others made a wavering lane. Francie and Neeley stood at one end of it and the big man with the big tree at the other. It was a human funnel with Francie and her brother making the small end of it. The man flexed his great arms to throw the great tree. He noticed how tiny the children looked at the end of the short lane. For the split part of a moment, the tree thrower went through a kind of Gethsemane.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” his soul agonized, “why don’t I just give ‘em the tree, say Merry Christmas and let ‘em go. What’s the tree to me? I can’t sell it no more this year and it won’t keep till next year." The kids watched him solemnly as he stood there in his moment of thought. "But then," he rationalized, if I did that, all the others would expect to get 'em handed to 'em. And next year nobody a-tall would buy a tree off of me. They’d all wait to get ‘em handed to ‘em on a silver plate. I ain’t a big enough man to give this tree away for nothin’. No, I ain't big enough. I ain't big enough to do a thing like that. I gotta think of myself and my own kids." He finally came to his conclusion. "Oh, what the hell! Them two kids is gotta live is this world. They got to get used to it. They got to learn to give and take punishment. And by Jesus, it ain’t give but take, take, take all the time in this God-damned world.” As he threw the tree with all his strength, his heart wailed out, “It’s a God-damned, rotten, lousy world!”

Francie saw the tree leave his hands. There was a split bit of being when time and space had no meaning. The whole world stood dark and still as something dark and monstrous came through the air. The tree came towards her blotting out all memory of her having lived. There was nothing – nothing but pungent darkness and something that grew and grew as it rushed at her. She staggered as the tree hit them. Neeley went down to his knees but she pulled him up fiercely before he could go down. There was a mighty swishing sound as the tree settled. Everything was dark, green and prickly. Then she felt a sharp pain at the side of her head where the trunk of the tree had hit her. She felt Neeley trembling.

When some of the older boys pulled the tree away, they found Francie and her brother standing upright, hand in hand. Blood was coming from scratches on Neeley’s face. He looked more like a baby than ever with his bewildered blue eyes and the fairness of his skin made more noticeable because of the clear red blood. But they were smiling. Had they not won the biggest tree in the neighborhood? Some of the boys hollered “Hooray!” A few adults clapped. The tree man eulogized them by screaming,

“And now get the hell out of here with your tree, you lousy bastards.”

Francie had heard swearing since she had heard words. Obscenity and profanity had no meaning as such among those people. They were emotional expressions of inarticulate people with small vocabularies; they made a kind of dialect. The phrases could mean many things according to the expression and tone used in saying them. So now, when Francie heard themselves called lousy bastards, she smiled tremulously at the kind man. She knew that he was really saying, Goodbye – God bless you.”

…They set the tree up in the front room after spreading a sheet to protect the carpet of pink roses from falling pine needles. The tree stood in a big tin bucket with broken bricks to hold it upright. When the rope was cut away, the branches spread out to fill the whole room. They draped over the piano and it was so that some of the chairs stood among the branches. There was no money to buy tree decorations or lights. But the tree standing there was enough. The room was cold. It was a poor year, that one- too poor for them to buy the extra coal for the front room stove. The room smelled cold and clean and aromatic. Every day, during the week the tree stood there, Francie put on her sweater and zitful cap and went in and sat under the tree. She sat there and enjoyed the small and the dark greenness of it. Oh, the mystery of a great tree, a prisoner in a tin was bucket in a tenement front room.

On the Road, the movie

In an ideal world, I’d have a babysitter all lined up for tonight so that Mrs. DeMarest and I could go catch the long-awaited movie version of On the Road . Alas, I don’t. And even if I did, the last movie we saw together was Skyfall, which means we’d probably have to veer back to the chick flick side of the spectrum on our next outing. So I may not get to see another literary adaptation this holiday season.

Now, I did see Life of Pi, but since I’d never read the book, I can’t judge it on adaptation merits. (Although the opening credits alone are worth your time- that is one good-looking picture.) Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby was supposed to be a Christmas time release, but it got bumped to next summer, unfortunately. And I’m not exactly dying to see Les Miserables- I’ve never read the book or seen the stage version, and who are we kidding, Susan Boyle has ruined all other “I Dreamed a Dream” renditions for me, so watching a shaggy-headed Anne Hathaway belt it out isn’t going to cut muster. As for a singing Russell Crowe… I’m not sure I’ll ever be up to that (I’m picturing something slightly worse than Pierce Brosnan’s effort in Mamma Mia.)

That’s all a very long way of saying that I have really, really been looking forward to On the Road since I read the book for the first time this past summer. And I’m bummed that I probably won’t see it until it pops up at my local grocery store’s Redbox. Ah well… If you happen to have better luck, fellow movie-goer, or even if you don’t, let us whet your appetite with an On the Road roundup. Here is a smattered assortment of posts we’ve done on Kerouac’s rambling American masterpiece:

• There’s Kerouac in his own words.
• The follow-up post, documenting the Kerouac-Seuss connection.
• Myreview of the book that too many people hate.
• The map of Kerouac’s wanderings.
• A couple posts on his writing style, and how you can do it, too.
• A Kerouac look-alike.
• A medical diagnosis based on literary evidence.
• Some bookish nerd bait from the book.
• And of course, talk like a beat day.

Literary Fan Fic?

So you’ve finished a great book, and the author has left you wanting more. Happens all the time, right? Like George Costanza, they’ve gone out on a high note. Well, if you happen to be reading the hottest new sci-fi, YA or fantasy title, you have options- there’s a whole world of fan fiction out there, where enthusiastic amateurs  create sequels, prequels and continuations of the very story and characters you loved so much.

But what if you have a bent for the classics?  Out of luck, right? I thought so, too. But not so fast my friend. Check out the following sub-pages at FanFiction.net:

Catcher in the Rye

The Great Gatsby

To Kill a Mockingbird

Nineteen Eighty-Four

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Of Mice and Men

Tender is the Night

Animal Farm

Fahrenheit 451

Pride and Prejudice

Gone with the Wind

Great Expectations

Mansfield Park

Sense and Sensibility

Persuasion

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Hunchback of Notre Dame

Les Miserable

Scarlet Pimpernel

Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde

And those are just the ones with 25 or more selections available. I haven’t poked around to see if any of it’s any good, but I thought it was interesting just the same.

Review: Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton

As is usually the case here in Atlanta, we’re not expecting a white Christmas. This is kind of a bummer for an old mountain boy like myself, but I know I’m not alone. If your  present location is lattitudinally or altitudinally challenged, you might just have to turn to literature to get a taste of the white stuff this year. And what book could fit the bill any better than Edith Wharton’s wintry, New England classic, Ethan Frome ?

I’d never read Wharton before this year, but my pleasant surprise with George Eliot's Silas Marner - another  boring, character-name title that does a poor job of advertising its contents-  inspired me to give Ethan Frome   a go. And hey- if Silas Marner  can bring the world of the anti-social, cataleptic weaver to life, who am I to judge the sleep-inducing title of Ethan Frome ? Maybe it can surprise and delight in the same way.

One thing’s for sure: the last thing on earth I would have guessed to be hidden between the covers was the story of a somber sledding tragedy. But that’s exactly what made it three kinds of awesome. From the very start Wharton makes us feel sorry for Ethan Frome- sorry for his family situation, sorry for his missed career and financial troubles, sorry for his being stuck with an overbearing hypochondriac for a wife, and sorry for having true happiness dangled temptingly in front of him when he finally meets his unobtainable soulmate, Mattie.

But it’s all a heart-wrenching tease. Propriety’s too powerful for these star-crossed lovers, and they’re forced to go their separate ways. Or are they? There are hints of a happy resolution, if they’ve only got the guts to make it happen.

And it could just be that I’m a pretty daft processor of foreshadowing, but I was hoping for and predicting the two of them running off together to close out the story- a happy ending a la Silas Marner. I did not see the "super sledding suicide pact" coming. That one hit me like the Elm tree that paralyzed Mattie and disfigured poor old Ethan. 

But there you have it. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young hadn't yet sung their famous diddy, so all Frome had to go on was Mattie's warped toboggan deathwish: If you can't be with the one you love, mangle their spinal chord so you can at least have them always nearby. 

Review: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, by Edgar Allen Poe

Edgar Allen Poe only wrote one full-length novel. The modern reader may not hear much about it anymore, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t plenty influential in its day. Baudelaire translated it into French and riffed on it in some of his own poetry. Jules Verne is said to have greatly admired the book, even penning what can only be called a “fan-fiction” sequel called An Antarctic Mystery . Henry James alluded to the book in The Golden Bowl  and Jorge Luis Borges praised it as Poe’s greatest work. Moby Dick may have drawn pretty heavily on parts of it, and readers of Life of Pi  (or viewers of the gorgeous new movie by the same name) may not even realize that the tiger’s name, Richard Parker, is an homage to Poe’s only novel.

Having said all that, I can’t remember a book I’ve read in the past couple years whose ending was so unworthy of its beginning. In reality, it’s kind of impossible to give Pym  a fair reading in this day and age. In the latter half of the book Poe was postulating about the completely unknown world of the Antarctic- something even casual modern readers know quite a bit about nowadays. For this reason, the whole last half of the book fell flat for me. But the beginning was something else!

This book started out promising intrigue and adventure, and did a great job delivering on both counts. Our narrator is secreted away in the inaccessible lower decks of a ship by his friend, the nephew of the captain. They agree that they need to wait a certain period of time before exposing their stowaway plan, so that it becomes impractical to turn back to port. But when the prearranged period comes and goes with no word at all from the friend, Pym is left in his stuffy hellhole of a hiding place, having exhausted his supplies of food or drink and having no clue what’s going on above deck. As the narrator plays out his mental and physical suffering, we’re treated to some classic Poe-ian angst, every bit as good as the suffering in the “Tell-tale Heart.”

From there the story leaps into a classic adventure tale, filled with mutiny, violent sea storms, starvation, cannibalism and finally, rescue.

And here’s where I wish I had put the book down. The survivors are rescued by a boat en route to the Antarctic for the purpose of exploration. (Keep in mind, no one knew of Antarctica when Poe put his story down on paper.) But what follows is page after page of sleep-inducing, faux-scientific detail about the flora and fauna on various islands in the southern seas. Seriously, by the time you’ve used the word “declivity” for the sixth or seventh time, I think it’s safe to say your story has come off the rails.

Their discoveries include a black-skinned, black-teethed race of men, and some fifteen foot long relative of the polar bear. The crew is eventually slaughtered by this strange native people, all except for Pym and another man, who continue south in a dinghy into mysterious, milky-white seas where a giant magical figure appears out of nowhere and brings the book to a close.

Really, that’s how it ends. I guess if I had picked up the book when it was published in 1838, and the Antarctic region was still as unknown to Poe’s readers as some distant planets are to us, it might have fared a little better in my judgment. As it is, though, I can only say that Poe started out strong, then put me to sleep, then woke me up and repeatedly jumped the proverbial shark.

"A fairy city made of silver cardboard"

-image source

"While Katie was arguing with the movers, Johnny took Francie up to the roof. She saw a whole new world. Not far away was the the lovely span of the Williamsburg Bridge. Across the East River, like a fairy city made of silver cardboard, the skyscrapers loomed cleanly. There was the Brooklyn Bridge further away like an echos of the nearer bridge.

“It’s pretty,” said Francie. “It’s pretty the same way pictures of in-the-country are pretty.”

“I go over that bridge sometimes when I go to work,” Johnny said.

Francie looked at him in wonder. He  went over that magic bridge and still talked and looked like always? She couldn’t get over it. She put her hand out and touched his arm. Surely the wonderful experience of going over that bridge would make him feel  different. She was disappointed because his arm felt as it had always felt.

-from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , by Betty Smith