Feb

25

Some Lists of My Own

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There’s been this meme going around with a list of 100 books compiled by the BBC where you mark off the ones you’ve read. I found the list rather bizarre, although I could at least feel impressed with my tally of 63. But I liked the idea of putting together a new list myself. One that at least has coherence to me, even if it doesn’t to anyone else. Except that just making a plain old to-read list is boring. The classics are great. That’s why they’re classics. So I went a little bit outside the box.

First, my recommended not-on-great-books-lists books. Some of these are lesser-read books by well-known authors, some are more recent and haven’t yet become classics, and some should be better-read than they are. Second, my list of shame, the classics I haven’t read. Finally, a list of classics that it’s probably okay that you skip. I may love the author’s other works, but these are probably ones you can avoid. (To make things easier, I’ve limited myself from 1800 to the present.)

If you’d like to consider yourself tagged, please do. You needn’t make lists of 25 (it was actually the easiest number for me, that was when my lists felt full), lists of 10 are perfectly acceptable.

25 Non-Obvious Must-Reads
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Clockers by Richard Price
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
The Group by Mary McCarthy
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
The Magus by John Fowles
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

25 Literary Sins of Omission
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Thank You, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Ulysses by James Joyce
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

10 Classics I Will Pardon You For Missing
Ada by Vladimir Nabokov
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

Feb

20

The Rooster Has Landed

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Just in time for my desire for more books, The Morning News is having their annual Tournament of Books, which is kind of like the March Madness, except with books.  This year’s list makes me feel very ashamed.  I have read two and a half of the 16 contenders (The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks and A Mercy, both of which were favorites of mine last year, and I’m halfway through The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon).  Let’s compare to previous years.

In 2008 I’d read 8 of the 16 entries:Run by Ann Patchett, On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, New England White by Stephen L. Carter, Remainder by Tom McCarthy, What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman, and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Brock Clarke.

In 2007 I had 4, not quite as good, but I wasn’t reading as much that year so I think it’s respectable.  There was One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson, Arthur and George by Julian Barnes, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud.  In 2006 I had 7 with  Never Let You Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Home Land by Sam Lipsyte, No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, The Accidental by Ali Smith, On Beauty by Zadie Smith, and Saturday by Ian McEwan.  And in its inaugural year of 2005 I had 6 with The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, The Inner Circle by T. C. Boyle, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe.  (I have a suspicion I may have read one or two more but it was a while ago and I can’t be sure.)

When I look back at those books, I think they’re a great list of reading.  But this year’s list just doesn’t excite me.  Was 2008 a bad year for books or is this just a boring list?  Of the remaining books I haven’t read, there were only two I was planning on reading: Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri and The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher.  And I wasn’t exactly in a rush.  I was planning on skipping The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (even though it won the Booker),  2666 by Roberto Bolano (after an aborted attempt at The Savage Detectives a few months ago), Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen (Total cheating.  It’s three previous books changed around and lumped together.  I’d heard about it but it just sounded overwhelming), Harry, Revised by Mark Sarvas (a book blogger whose blog I don’t really like, and the reviews made it sound bleh, and I suspect it’s on this list because of the blog rather than the book),  Netherland by Joseph O’Neill and Home by Marilynne Robinson (both of the last two because I just didn’t think they were my style).

Some that look promising: The Dart League King by Keith Lee Morris, City of Refuge by Tom Piazza.  Guess what?  Neither one is carried by my library.  (Neither is Steer Towards Rock by Fae Myenne Ng.)  This means of the list of 16, with 13 left to read, there are only 4 that I haven’t crossed off my list in one way or another.  Much to my chagrin, one of them is about a former 60’s radical.  Have I mentioned before how much I hate books about 60’s radicals?  Yes, I have.  But I probably haven’t said it often enough to emphasize just how overdone this genre is.  (And just to say it again, why go there when Susan Choi and Philip Roth have already gone there and done it brilliantly?  You cannot possibly do it that well.)

For now, I have put on hold A Partisan’s Daughter by Louis de Bernieres, My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru (stupid 60’s radicals), The Northern Clemency and Unaccustomed Earth.  That will eventually get my tally to a more respectable 7.  Assuming I actually like them all.  I still can’t really say if this is just an overly stuffy list or if it was just a slow year.  The only really notable absence for me is Lush Life by Richard Price, one of my favorites of 2008 and definitely deserving of a slot, if only to round out the list a little.  It feels a bit too literary for my taste, not enough variation.  Still, at least I can add some books to my list.  (Lockhart’s book, the only YA on the list and one I’d love to root for looks like it may get steamrolled in the first round by Shadow Country, a very weird matchup if ever I’ve seen one.)

Feb

18

It Ain’t Heavy, It’s My Movie

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My reading has picked up a bit since last time, but the quality is still middling.  This is mostly my fault, since I’ve had a higher-than-usual percentage of thrillers, which always ends up with a high mediocre-to-good ratio in my reading.  However, I can say that I was surprised at how well Open Season by C. J. Box and Karin Slaughter’s newest book, Fractured, worked.  Box plays it simple, but uses the geography of his setting nicely.  (There is a sad shortage of books set in the West anymore.  And no, L.A. doesn’t count.)  And I’m usually frustrated by Slaughter’s limited character list, but the new novel is outside of her normal crew, which certainly helped.  Even if the eventual ending was a bit disappointing.

Reading Meg Wolitzer’s new book The Ten-Year Nap was a given at some point, and I finally got around to it.  It was about as terrifying as I expected it to be.  It isn’t a horror novel, but a book about former professionals who left their lives to have babies, which I’m a bit vulnerable about right now.  However, I ended up unsure if Wolitzer missed her own point or made it subtly on purpose: her protagonists never seemed to have a handle on themselves to begin with, so their lack of focus as their kids grew wasn’t new, it was just a return to normalcy.

My favorite recent read was a firecracker of a book, Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell.  It has a blurb by Lisa Lutz, which was quite persuasive, since I’m a fan of her wacky Spellman books.  BTR is totally insane.  It’s got the mob, it’s got contract killings, it’s got sharks.  And yet, much of it is set in the inane setting of a hospital resident just trying to make it through one day.  I was talking about it all day after I finished it, it was very in-your-face, and the style really helped.  I can see the idea falling flat in other hands.  Mostly, my favorite part was afterwards when I would ask Eric about different medical things the book brought up and he verified which ones were correct and which weren’t.  (The author, a doctor himself, acknowledges at the end that he made up a lot of stuff.)  Some that I didn’t question were off, while others that I thought sounded crazy are actually quite normal.  (The one that shocked me most: bad nurses will put normal stats on patients’ charts instead of actually checking them.)

Still working on Graham Greene’s biography.  I’m 250 pages in or so, but it’s not even halfway through, and it’s still the first volume.  I feel like Greene is becoming more of an enigma rather than less of one.  The timid boy he appeared to be in his youth turns into a very wild man in college.  (He played Russian Roulette.  Alone.  Many times.)  But I’m looking to see if it’ll change.  He’s about to convert to Catholicism, and Greene’s strange relationship with religion is one of my main interests since it is so heavy in his fiction.  Still, I’m remembering why I’m not big on biographies.  There’s only so much you can know about someone, and simply giving the events of their life, even as they themselves describe them, often robs it of real information about personality and motivation.

As far as movies go, I’ve been on a weird kick lately.  With a single exception, the last several movies I watched are all pretty heavy.  Persepolis had the Iranian revolution.  Army of Shadows was about the French resistance.  The Killing Fields showed the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.  And today I figured I’d just let the streak keep going, so I watched last year’s Oscar winner for foreign film, The Counterfeiters, set in a concentration camp.  I’m nearly out of depressing war movies now.  But I do have 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days waiting for me in my queue.

The middle two were the highlights for me.  I remember hearing about Army of Shadows when it finally got an American release a couple years ago, but I didn’t see it and completely forgot about it.  I wasn’t sure I would finish it when I started watching it a while ago.  I had to stop a ways in and still felt very disconnected from the story and not even sure of when or where it was set since I came in knowing nothing about it.   But I’m glad I stuck with it.  It may be one of the bleakest movies I’ve ever seen, but that didn’t make it unenjoyable.  Instead, it was one of the more thought-provoking experiences I’ve ever had with a film.  As I watched, knowing the French resistance didn’t play a big role in the war, you’d never have thought it from the way the characters acted.  Everything was of the utmost importance, and there was a complete willingness to work and sacrifice.  It really made you think of how important such a movement can be, even while you wondered if you’d be able to summon the courage to involve yourself.  (Personally?  No, as pessimistic as that sounds.)  And when the main character is confronted with death over and over again, it manages to always be resonant instead of many films where death is supposed to mean something but just doesn’t play right.  I found his thoughts on mortality very affecting.  I’m growing more found of Jean-Pierre Melville, this is his second film I’ve seen this year.  I’ll definitely add more, especially Le Samourai and Bob Le Flambeur.

I was surprised at how much I liked The Killing Fields.  In large part, it was because I’m relatively unfamiliar with its story.  I know about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and I know about the US’s bombings in Cambodia during Vietnam, but I don’t know much in depth and I had never realized how much they were intertwined.  I don’t know that I would have been as affected had I been an adult in the 70’s and 80’s when it was higher on the radar.  Especially since, in many ways, the film is one of those big 80’s movies, telling a big story and screaming for Oscars.  But it worked for me.  Being mostly naive, I could let the movie tell me its story and take me along.  Maybe in some ways it’s missing an emotional core, but I found myself liking that, especially when you compare it to Platoon, which is in many ways a similar film (and one I really like) but one that definitely tells you just how you’re supposed to feel at the important moments.  I was very taken by Haing S. Ngor, the non-actor who played Dith Pran.  (I swear I know him from somewhere, but couldn’t find anything else on IMDb that I’d seen of his.)  I was happy to learn after I watched the film that he won an Oscar, though I thought it was definitely a lead rather than a supporting performance.  My reading after the film went on much longer than I expected.  I found out that Ngor had been through many of the same hardships as the character he played, and that he was eventually murdered in the 90’s.  There’s a lot about Pran himself in the Times, though much of it is not accessible through their free archives.  I found myself still not sated after my reading so I’ve even put a book on the US’s bombings in Cambodia on reserve at the library.  For someone who’s not big on nonfiction, it’s a big step.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty more for me to watch in the coming days.  But my reading list is sadly short.  I have only one book on hold at the library, when I usually get 2 to 3 a week.  And I have no clue what to read next.  I am in desperate need of guidance.