The Secret Adversary

The Secret Adversary
by Agatha Christie
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

While The Mysterious Affair at Styles is a prototypical mystery novel, The Secret Adversary is really a spy story, with Bond-esque stakes involved. If amateur adventurers Tommy and Tuppence can't find a girl and a document, all of Western Civilization could collapse.

I suspected Julius early on because he used some British slang - "flat," "lift," etc. Is that how Americans talked in that time period, or was Christie taking some liberties?

MaddAddam

MaddAddam
by Margaret Atwood
read: 2014
MaddAddam Series, Book Three

There's a metatextual element to MaddAddam, where the story itself is being written as a conscious part of the story. Toby journals her experiences, even though it's unclear whether in the post-apocalyptic world of the novel that there's even going to be a notion of written history. And after teaching Blackbeard to write, she is unsure whether she should have just let writing and history disappear rather than preserving it.

In The Year of the Flood we learn Toby's backstory and that she's never really found love or happiness. MaddAddam is really Zeb's tale, and we learn that he too has experienced loneliness and heartbreak. In a world that's destroyed, and where the human species is practically on the verge of extinction, it's touching that they find happiness together.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Mysterious Affair at Styles
by Agatha Christie
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

The Mysterious Affair at Styles was Agatha Christie's first novel, but I was surprised to see how much of the mystery novel template was already fully-formed. The structure - red herrings, twists, a genius investigator who keeps everyone in the dark until the eleventh hour - is pretty similar to mystery TV shows of today.

The Year of the Flood

The Year of the Flood
by Margaret Atwood
read: 2014
MaddAddam Series, Book Two

I enjoyed The Year of the Flood less than the other Atwood books I've read. I'm having a hard time understanding whether Atwood (or her narrative voice) is poking fun at the Gardeners or exalting their style of life. Probably her real stance (and the rational one) is somewhere in the middle, or both. Toby and Ren both claim to have doubts about Adam One's teachings, but they find strength and solace in them in times of need.

Random note: Ren's chapters are in first person while Toby's are in third person. I don't have a theory about why that is.

Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
read: 2014
Pulitzer Prize

I'd say Olive Kitteridge is most similar to Winesburg, Ohio, of the books I've read. Both are collections of short stories that have some common settings and characters; in the case of Kitteridge, the titular Olive is at least mentioned in every tale. Both capture the zeitgeist of a small town, though Kitteridge is set in coastal Maine rather than Anderson's Midwest. Both also deal with the tragedies and triumphs of normal life rather than earth-shaking events on a global scale.

I wasn't crazy about Winesburg, finding it repetitive, cliched, sentimental, and overly morose. Kitteridge has some of the same flaws, particularly how depressing many of the stories are, but Strout's just such a good writer and hits on unspoken truths of human existence:

You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.

Kitteridge is dripping with these kinds of poetic observations of modern tragedy. Offsetting the heartbreak is Olive, whose blunt matter-of-factness often serves a humorous counterpoint to the weighty themes.

The Shining

The Shining
by Stephen King
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

This is only the second Stephen King novel I've read (after It), and something that struck me about both books is how he uses contrast. Describing horror, fear, depravity, and evil is obviously integral to the horror novel, but King spends just as much time showing goodness, bravery, altruism, and generosity. The touching relationship between Danny and his father Jack makes Jack's corruption, possession, and destruction all the more tragic. Dick's bravery in risking his life to save Danny, and the willingness to help of the various people he encounters, makes the story inspiring. The novel is called The Shining, and the shining itself is almost the hero of the story, set in opposition to the evil force of the hotel itself.

The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

When I was younger I read a lot of fantasy / science fiction novels, and I often enjoyed the world the author created but wanted to see it from the perspective of a "normal" person in it, rather than someone caught up in trying to save the universe. I wish I'd been turned on to Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid's Tale takes place in a dystopian future where women have been largely stripped of their rights. The protagonist isn't the leader of the resistance; she's just an ordinary woman whose role in the new society is to have rich men's babies.

As in The Blind Assassin, it's not to clear to whom the narrator is writing the story. We know that she is basically a prisoner in the Commander's house and has no access to writing utensils or paper, or anywhere to store a manuscript even if she could write it. Periodically she shows awareness that's she's narrating, saying "I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling" or "This is a reconstruction." Later she seems to address the tale to her husband Luke, expressing concern for the audience's perception of her when she has an affair. In the epilogue, which serves a frame story, it's suggested that The Handmaid's Tale is transcribed from taped records made at some point in the process of the narrator attempting to escape.

The frame story shines a spotlight on the "normal" person perspective I highlighted above. The tapes were found decades after the narrator's struggle, and we learn that the patriarchal society has collapsed. But we never learn what happened to "Offred," or even what her real identity was. Even though we know that the horrible oppression has stopped, the narrator's fate still matters. It's easy to look at history's global impact, but events affect individuals, too, and we can forget that. The Handmaid's Tale reminds us.

Dracula

Dracula
by Bram Stoker
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

The pacing in the first section of Dracula, where Jonathan Harker meets Count Dracula and stays at his mansion in Transylvania, felt outdated. A more modern take would have created more suspense, but in Dracula Harker knows that he's been imprisoned by a superhuman creature in first 30 pages or so. After his escape, however, the novel shifts locations to England, and the struggle to save Lucy's life and determine what is plaguing her had a lot more mystery and suspense.

As long as I can remember, vampires have been portrayed as attractive in popular culture. There's a little of that in Dracula, with the female vampires Jonathan encouters in Dracula's mansion, but Dracula himself is a monster. To the extent that he's able to compel behavior in others - and not just women, but men, too - it's clear that it's the result of dark powers, not super-sexiness. It's typical of Hollywood to reduce any male / female interaction to a romantic or sexual relationship, and in this case I think it's a little demeaning towards women. The influence of demonic powers have been reduced to, "that dark guy with the accent is cute!"

The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings
by J.R.R. Tolkien
read: 2012
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

In most fantasy novels, the reader is brought into the world by an outsider. Tolkien uses this convention in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The reader doesn't see the world through the eyes of Gandalf or one of the elves, but through a lowly hobbit. This allows him to learn about the world as Bilbo or Frodo does. But partway through The Lord of the Rings, the narrative shifts perspective from Frodo to Samwise Gamgee. This is a sign that Frodo's extended ownership of the ring has transformed him from a simple hobbit we can relate to it into someone wrestling with forces beyond our understanding.

Tolkien's best characters tend to possess a lot of humility. Gandalf knows he cannot possess the ring because it will destroy him. Gandalf is also the only wizard who is interested in the lesser beings of Middle Earth, such as the eagles and the hobbits, and this ends up being one of the major factors in his success. Frodo recognizes his own lack of courage and this inspires his brave choice at the end of book two - he knows he must leave alone with the ring right then because he will not be strong enough to do so later.

Rosemary's Baby

Rosemary's Baby
by Ira Levin
read: 2014

My favorite part of Rosemary's Baby is the rich world that Levin created outside the scenes and actions described in the novel. He alludes to a Higgins / Eliza Doolittle history between Hutch and Rosemary; that informs the relationship, but he doesn't write much about it. Terry's journey, including the Castavets plans for her, seem interesting enough to spawn a whole novel, but we just get one conversation around a washing machine. The Castavets themselves are fascinating. The point of view is almost entirely Rosemary's, however, and she has a limited perspective for the history of the people she encounters. But the hint of other tales and stories flesh out the characters and give the story depth.

My biggest issue with the novel, however, also has to do with actions "off-screen." We don't know what the conversations were like leading to Guy deciding to sacrifice Rosemary to be raped by Satan. Did he believe that would actually happen? Did he think the Castavets were crazy? Was he secretly on the verge of bankruptcy? Did he have any occult leanings before? It seems strange, abrupt, and monstrous that Guy would serve up Rosemary having known the Castavets for only a short amount of time.

The War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds
by H.G. Wells
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

At one point in The War of the Worlds, the protagonist runs into another survivor and they discuss plans for surviving underground as a human species in a world controlled by the Martians. It's a funny sort of post-apocalyptic novel where the apocalypse does not actually happen.

The Golden Notebook

The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing
read: 2014
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

I've read few books that have as much depth and as many themes as The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing's magnum opus can be viewed as feminist literature, exploration of Communist society, or the tale of one woman's inner journey. It has themes of sex, politics, race, motherhood, infidelity, and the relationship between men and women.

The metafictional elements of the novel bring the thematic components to a new level. In the introduction, Lessing writes that "fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record." The protagonist of The Golden Notebook, Anna, a writer herself, also recognizes this paradox. Unable or unwilling to publish anything after a moderate initial success, she writes in notebooks of different colors. Some of these stories feature Ella, a woman whose biography bears a strong resemblance to Anna's. Is Ella just Anna roman a clef? If so, why the veil of fiction at all? Or are the two characters different? Even Anna struggles with this: "Why a story at all - not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?"

In the titular Golden Notebook, Anna writes the story of an affair between Ella and an American, but when we see the story of Anna's affair outside of the lens of the notebooks, it plays out very differently. Is this a sign that Anna has broken from reality? Is it a sign that she's ready to write again? The layers to the fiction can be read many ways, giving the novel terrific depth.

The Island of Doctor Moreau

The Island of Doctor Moreau
by H.G. Wells
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

I saw the Val Kilmer / Marlon Brando movie when it came out in 1996. The premise - that a reclusive scientist makes a race of beast men on a remote island - makes more sense in modern times with all the advances we've made in genetic engineering than it did 100 years prior when Wells wrote the novel. Wells' Moreau employs not genetic engineering but vivisection techniques: cutting up animals, grafting on parts, and physically transforming animals into man via surgery. This is a lot less realistic than genetic engineering, but it is a lot more horrifying.

The Time Machine

The Time Machine
by H.G. Wells
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

I guess you can't write a novel about the future without making it some kind of political commentary, and The Time Machine is no exception. Wells' Time Traveler finds himself in the year 800000-something, and humanity has splintered, with a weak, stupid race living indolent communal lives above the earth while an underground race of cannibals toils for them. Wells paints this in a Marxist light:

At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position.

He goes on to lament that the "human intellect ... had committed suicide." The novels takes the pessimistic view that man's progress "must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end." 

I, Claudius

I, Claudius
by Robert Graves
read: 2014
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #14, James Tait Black Prize

It's hard to read Graves' characterization of Caligula and not think George R. R. Martin drew from it heavily in his depiction of King Joffrey. The two share their young age, cruelty, and inflated sense of importance. A Song of Ice and Fire owes a lot from I, Claudius - the story brims with plots and conspiracies, assassinations, strategic marriages, affairs, incest, murder, war, and intrigue. It was a lot more fun and readable than I expected a book that's 80 years old (and is written about things happening 2000 years ago) to be.

There are some interesting meta-textual elements to the novel. The story is written as autobiography. Claudius writes:

This is a confidential history. but who, it may be asked, are my confidants? My answer is: it is addressed to posterity.

There's an early argument between historians Pollio and Livy about the proper way to write history. Pollio holds the truth above all else, eschewing the easy or dramatic narrative for the way things really happened. Livy is willing to take more poetic license, saying, "If I come across two versions of the same episode I choose the one nearest my theme." The young Claudius sides with Pollio, yet I, Claudius is written in Livy's style. This is explained late in the story, with the idea that Claudius gains access to the empire's "secret archives." "Even the mature historian's privilege of setting forth conversations of which he knows only the gist is one that I have availed myself of hardly at all." Is Graves winking at us here?

The Naked and the Dead

The Naked and the Dead
by Norman Mailer
read: 2014
Modern Library #51, Guardian 1000 Novels

The Naked and the Dead has both a more limited and a more expansive scope than other war novels I've read. I say "limited" because it doesn't deal with the whole war, but rather one campaign for an island in the South Pacific. I say "expansive" because the story jumps between third-person perspectives, so we see how the war affects the whole platoon, plus General Cummings, Lieutenant Heard, and a other leadership figures in the unit. We see how the men in World War II fight, march, sleep, get letters, fire guns, eat, get medical attention, live, and die. We get glimpses of the decisions Cummings makes and the consequences to the Recon platoon.

There are a few action scenes where Mailer captures the danger and adrenaline of combat, but the bulk of the story is spent in day-to-day affairs. Danger is a fairly uncommon opponent - fatigue, the damp jungle, weakness, uncertainty, and loneliness beset the platoon much more frequently. Compared to what I'm used to from war stories, the novel spends a lot of time dwelling on day-to-day life. Consistent with this theme, the campaign is ultimately won not by some strategic master stroke or feat of individual heroism but because a shell hit a supply depot, resulting in the Japanese army's stores being depleted and their forces nearly starving.

I often think of World War II as a triumph of the Allied powers over the evil, anti-Semitic Nazis, but The Naked and the Dead reminds us that plenty of rank-and-file Americans harbored no love for the Jews. We see this in the blatant anti-Semitism of Gallagher and even Cummings, but also just in the subtler alienation that Goldstein and Roth feel throughout the story. It's an interesting angle.

Jaws

Jaws
by Peter Benchley
read: 2014

I've read that Benchley had some regrets about the anti-shark hysteria that has sometimes followed Jaws (especially after the movie), but I found it pretty reasonable. Benchley clearly did a good amount of research, and even with the greater knowledge nowadays (Shark Week didn't even exist back then!) there isn't much that's blatantly incorrect. I wasn't impressed with the prose, however; it felt almost pulpy.

All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
read: circa 1996
Guardian 1000 Novels

Required reading for high school, at one point. I don't even remember which year.

The Gospel According to the Son

The Gospel According to the Son
by Norman Mailer
read: circa 2008

This is a great idea (re-writing Jesus' story from his perspective) and an ambitious one, but I don't know that it totally came together as a novel.

An American Dream

An American Dream
by Norman Mailer
read: circa 2005

A co-worker lent me this novel after we had discussed the Time Top 100 list. This was a mean, arguably misogynistic novel, but it has some indelible images, such as the protagonist walking along the edge of a roof while having a conversation with his wife's father towards the end of the book.

The Hobbit

The Hobbit
by J.R.R. Tolkien
read: circa 2001
Guardian 1000 Novels

Bilbo's acquisition of The One Ring in The Hobbit doesn't seem especially significant - it's just a cool ring that turns him invisible. It wasn't surprising when Tolkien Professor Corey Olsen explained that Tolkien didn't  initially conceive of the ring as a dark artifact of Sauron, and in fact that he re-wrote The Hobbit a bit to make it more menacing in subsequent editions.

Professor Olsen spent a lot of time talking about luck, coincidence, and deus ex machina devices in The Hobbit. In light of Tolkien's strong religious believes and the framework he's set up in The Silmarillion, these apparent lapses make more sense - there is literally a "deus" in Iluvatar pulling the strings.

Shoeless Joe

Shoeless Joe
by W.P. Kinsella
read: 2014

The book on which Field of Dreams is based. The prose can be florid at times. I think that's by intention, creating a gauzy, dream-like romance, but it's still distracting. The novel's anti-religion bent, actively replacing religious belief with a faith in baseball, is distracting too. I think it's a rare instance where the movie is better than the book, though it's still a good read.

The Silmarillion

The Silmarillion
by J.R.R. Tolkien
read: 2014

I would have had a lot of trouble getting through The Silmarillion if not for Professor Corey Olsen's course on J.R.R. Tolkien's works. Tolkien's fascination with names is distracting - he will often give three or four names for something and few other distinguishing details. The prose style is often lifeless, akin to a textbook. But Professor Olsen introduces a concept at the beginning of his lecture series on the book: events in The Silmarillion echo other events in the book, in other works of Tolkien, and other mythological and religious stories. These echoes paint a fascinating, almost fractal pattern reverberating through the world - we see the same behaviors, flaws, tragedies, and triumphs repeated, but writ smaller and smaller as time goes on. We start out with the Valar opposing Morgoth and end with Elves and men against Sauron (and in The Lord of the Rings, men and hobbits against an even weaker version of Sauron). The inhabitants of the world become more and more distant from Iluvitar, the creator of all - in a way that it's not hard to imagine Tolkien (a devout Catholic) finds mirrors our society's relationship with God.

Sophie's Choice

Sophie's Choice
by William Styron
read: 2014
Modern Library #96, Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award

I was going to write this post on the parallels between slavery and the Holocaust, but the Wiki page covers this pretty well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie's_Choice_(novel)

One thing that stood out to me on reading Sophie's Choice was the attention narrator Stingo pays to names. Early on he describes how he got the nickname "Stingo" (a corruption of "Stinky" for less-than-stellar hygiene habits). An early benefactor "bore the jaunty name of Artiste." He describes Gundar Firkin as a name that "sound[s] odd or made-up." He loves the names of his fellow flatmates "for nothing other than their marvelous variety" before he even meets them. He notes that love interest Leslie Lapidus' name rhymes with "Ah, feed us."

There's something meta-fictional going on here, and I don't know that I've entirely pieced it together, but I think a lot of it is set up for the character who presents Sophie with the titular "choice": Fritz Jemand von Niemand. As a work of fiction, presumably all the characters names are fabricated, but von Niemand's is invented even within the context of the novel, chosen by Stingo "because it seems as good a name as any for an SS doctor." Stingo takes similar liberties inventing an elaborate backstory for von Niemand, and this backstory is integral to explaining how a human could do some of the things the Nazis did in the Holocaust. Ultimately, this story rings false to me, and I think it's supposed to ring false - but the alternative is an incomprehensible evil.

Octopussy and The Living Daylights

Octopussy and The Living Daylights
by Ian Fleming
read: 2014

In "Octopussy," the title story to this collection, Ian Felming describes a character Major Smythe, who becomes rich through a combination of luck, murder, and deviousness. His wealth doesn't bring him happiness, however; he becomes an alcoholic, has a couple heart attacks, his wife commits suicide, and he's socially ostracized and basically drinking himself to death when James Bond arrives on the scene. It's similar to some of the studies in books like Stumbling on Happiness where researchers find lottery winners and those who lose a limb are equally happy a year after their respective events. I don't think that data was present in Fleming's day, but he had an intuitive understanding of the phenomenon.

The Man with the Golden Gun

The Man with the Golden Gun
by Ian Fleming
read: 2014

It's become a cliche that Bond villains, when they finally have Bond captured and at their mercy, always deliver monologues rather than the coup de grace, but in The Man with the Golden Gun we see Bond similarly self-impaired:

Jmaes Bond got into the car behind Scaramanga and wondered whether to shoot the man now, in the back of the head - the old Gestapo-K.G.B. point of puncture. A mixture of reasons prevented him - the itch of curiosity, an inbuilt dislike of cold murder, the feeling that this was not the predestined moment ...

James Bond knew he was not only disobeying orders, or at best dodging them, he was also being a bloody fool.

This sets up an interesting scenario - Scaramanga is a faster draw than Bond, so Bond can't take him in a fair gunfight, but he is reluctant to ambush him unawares. Fleming has to jump through some hoops to set up a scenario where Bond can win and keep the moral high ground.

You Only Live Twice

You Only Live Twice
by Ian Fleming
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

In You Only Live Twice, Ian Fleming paints an incredible picture of Japan. Bond's mission is to work himself into the good graces of Tiger Tanaka, head of Japanese intelligence, and this involves everything from eating sashimi to getting ninjitsu training to reading haiku poetry. Tanaka and Bond frequently verbally spar about the differences between their societies, and I'm not sure anyone really gets the upper hand. I wonder if Japanese readers would find it as even-handed, or think it slightly racist.

The novel begins with the conceit that Bond is, understandably, emotionally disturbed after Tracy's death at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but we're mostly told this through an expository discussion between M and Bond's psychologist. Fleming doesn't really have the heart to take us inside Bond's trouble mind, and once the story moves to Japan it's barely mentioned.

One of Ours

One of Ours
by Willa Cather
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

Death Comes to the Archbishop took me by surprise because it wasn't a novel I expected a female author to write. The main characters were pretty much all men, and the setting was in the American West.  As I started One of Ours, another Cather book, I was a little disappointed to see it as kind of a conventional coming-of-age story, of dreamer Claude trying to find meaning in his life in a farming community in Nebraska. It was almost like a D.H. Lawrence novel.

Then Claude gets sent off to World War I, and everything changes. I understand the criticism that Cather glorified the war, but I don't think that's entirely fair. Soldiers die, or are injured, even in just the journey by boat across the sea. We see the war destroy towns and destroy culture; this is especially epitomized by David abandoning the violin to join the infantry. But for Claude, the war is a way for him to escape the tedium of farm life, and it exposes him to worlds and people he could not have encountered otherwise. His connection to David is probably more important than his connection to his wife (who is barely mentioned in the second half of the novel); he's a person that Claude would not have met in peacetime. The dichotomy between the horror of war and the perverse freedom it affords the small-town solider is brought out well in this passage:

All the garden flowers and bead wreaths in Beaufort had been carried out and put on the American graves. When the squad fired over them and the bugle sounded, the girls and their mothers wept. Poor Willy Katz, for instance, could never have had such a funeral in South Omaha.

It's true - poor Willy wouldn't have had this elaborate funeral in Omaha, but he probably wouldn't have needed a funeral at all if he had stayed. Maybe I'm giving Cather too much credit for that unstated part of things, but I don't think so.

Lucky Jim

Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
read: 2014
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

Humor has a hard time holding up over even a decade or two, much less the 60 years since Lucky Jim was written, but it's easy to imagine the events of the novel in a half-hour sitcom. In one scene, Jim wakes up at his boss' house, hung over, to find that in his sleep he has damaged the sheet, blanket, bedside table, and rug with a lit cigarette. But in classic sitcom fashion, he tries to cover up the damage rather than fess up to what he's done. It's the sort of madcap situation that's just as funny today as it was in the 1950's.

Amis' prose adds to the humor. When a paper Jim writes is accepted by an academic magazine, he concludes, "Perhaps the article had had some merit after all. No, that was going too far." This dry British wit and deep cynicism pervades the novel. The humor also helps the reader understand the class struggles that undercut the novel. It's not always easy to relate to British social politics, but it's easy to side with Jim against the rich, pompous, useless blowhards that make up his world, and to take joy in him undermining them with pranks and other small measures of revenge.

A Dance With Dragons

A Dance With Dragons
by George R.R. Martin
A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5
read: 2014

There's some stuff that happens in this book, like the introduction of "Young Griff," that makes me think George R. R. Martin might be making things up as he goes along. That doesn't bode well for him finishing the series.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Memories of My Melancholy Whores
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
read: circa 2007

Gabriel Garcia Marquez' last novel (really more a novella), Memories of My Melancholy Whores was written almost two decades after Love in the Time of Cholera, but shares some of the same focus on aging. The protagonist is a man who is given a virgin prostitute for his 90th birthday, but the story is more touching than creepy. It's not his magnum opus, but it's a fitting final tale to a great writer's career.

Love in the Time of Cholera

Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
read: circa 2003
Guardian 1000 Novels

I liked but didn't love One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I adored Love in the Time of Cholera. Part of that was the time when I read it; in my livelorn early 20's, the struggle of protagonist Florentino Ariza really resonated with me. Now, his obsession kind of smacks of the classic Onion headline "Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested."  Really, asking a woman out at her husband's funeral?

Aside from the love story, the novel has a number of passages of what it means to grow old. There's one passage about Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his memory of being able to urinate long distances in a tight stream, and how that contrasts with the present indignity of having to sit down like a woman to pee. It's a silly detail that's stuck with me because of how evocatively it captures aging's effects on even the most mundane activities.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

    
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
read: circa 1997
Guardian 1000 Novels

This was one of the assigned books before senior year of high school, world literature. One of the quotes on the back of the book was "the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race." I read the novel and liked it, but that praise seemed overblown to me, and my senior year English teacher told me once he felt the same way. Still, I always felt like I was missing something.

Under the Volcano

Under the Volcano
by Malcolm Lowry
read: 2014
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #11, Guardian 1000 Novels

I'm not a lover of stream-of-consciousness novels, but Under the Volcano uses the technique to great effect, putting the reader in the mind of consul Geoffrey Firmin as he descends into alcoholic destruction. Time sometimes jumps to simulate an alcoholic blackout, disorienting the reader, and the narrative swirls between the present and the past, obscured with a haze of beer, tequila, and the devil mescal.

Cat's Cradle

    
Cat's Cradle
by Kurt Vonnegut
read: circa 1997

Cat's Cradle is an almost wistful post-apocalyptic novel.

Breakfast of Champions

    
Breakfast of Champions
by Kurt Vonnegut
read: circa 2000
Guardian 1000 Novels

I read this back in college, but I remember almost nothing about it - just the fictional painting "The Temptation of St. Anthony," one vertical line on a solid field. The painting draws a lot of criticism, but the artist feels that the fact that any child can reproduce it is a good thing, not a drawback. I think about this a lot when it comes to music: many great folks compositions have simple rhythms, chord structures, and rhyme schemes.

Sirens of Titan

    
Sirens of Titan
by Kurt Vonnegut
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

Vonnegut was one of the first "literature" authors I got into, reading books like Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five when I was in high school. He's a natural bridge into more serious stuff for someone like me who grew up reading science fiction almost exclusively, as his books often have sci-fi elements. He also has a conversational narrative style that's easy to read. Sirens of Titan was written in 1959, but the prose still feels fresh because it's written in the same style modern authors like Jonathan Safron Foer use today.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

   
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by James Joyce
read: circa 2005, re-read 2014
Modern Library #3, Guardian 1000 Novels

Stephen Dedalus, the protoganist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is one of the more insular characters in literature. There are other characters in the novel - his father, some of his teachers, a few classmates - but their threads are vague and mostly irrelevant to the narrative. The story is about Stephen's interior journey, from star pupil at a prep school, to frequenter of whore-houses, to guilt-wracked religious zealot, and finally to the titular artist.

Stephen is drawn to language early in life, not just the meaning but the sounds of the words themselves, even commenting that the lines in his spelling book "were like poetry." When he ultimately writes a villanelle, his experience is that "the liquid letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery, flowed forth over his brain." James Joyce is known for his use of language for rhythm and sound as well as meaning; we can see some of the foundation for that here.

Galveston

Galveston
by Nic Pizzolatto
read: 2014

Galveston is True Detective creator / writer Nic Pizzolatto's first novel. There are some similar themes to True Detective: it's ostensibly a crime novel, though protagonist Roy is on the wrong side of the law. It takes place in the same general area of the country, spilling from New Orleans to Galveston, Texas, and back. Most significantly, it features a hard-boiled character over a long period of time. In both Galveston and True Detective, Pizzolatto uses the passage of time to ruminate on the phenomenon of storytelling. Once events have passed, they exist only in the stories those who remember them tell. An ex-girlfriend of Roy's tells him:

"Listen to me," she said. "The past isn't real." This struck the center of me like a pickax. She said, "you remember what you want."

At another point, after explaining how he got into a life of crime, Roy thinks, "It was true, but the story didn't feel correct. It didn't really explain anything, did it?"

This is how Pizzolatto's worlds are built: on a shaky foundation of stories. The past is malleable, and since in the long run everything is past, all of reality is ultimately subject to the biases and vagaries of those who live to tell about it.

EDIT: That said, Pizzolatto isn't making the case that there's no such thing as objective truth; in fact, the objective truth is important to the characters in the story. Late in the story, Roy is confronted with the choice to tell his story to a new generation or let it die with him, and he elects to keep the truth alive.

The Color Purple

The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

The Color Purple is written in letter format. In the first chunk of the book, each letter is addressed to God. Later, Celie begins addressing her letters to her sister Nettie.

DEAR NETTIE,

I don't write to God no more. I write to you.

What happen to God? ast Shug. 

Who that? I say.

The novel doesn't have an atheist perspective, but more of a spiritualist one. The final chapter is addressed "DEAR GOD. DEAR STARS, DEAR TREES, DEAR SKY, DEAR PEOPLES. DEAR EVERYTHING. DEAR GOD." Celie's faith essentially carries her through periods of her life where very little good happens to her, whether that's faith in God, faith in Nettie, faith in her friend (and sometime lover) Shug, or just an irrational faith that things will somehow get better.

I was predisposed to dislike this novel based on Ralph Wiley's comments on it in Why Black People Tend to Shout, but I found I enjoyed it. Wiley objected to the portrayal of black men in Walker's world, but by the end of the tale some weight was given to the environmental factors that shaped Albert, Harpo, and even Alphonso. They aren't excused for their sins, but they aren't unredeemable either, and Albert in particular makes great strides to atoning for his wrongdoing.

The King In Yellow

The King In Yellow
by Robert W. Chambers
read: 2014

I've already mentioned my interest in HBO's True Detective, and like many folks watching the show I saw the article pointing out "the Yellow King's" literary heritage. I've already read most of H.P. Lovecraft's works, so another set of creepy stories along those lines sounded pretty appealing.

The King In Yellow is a funny collection, though. The first four tales are full of Lovecraftian darknesses, featuring the titular play which drives anyone who reads it insane. The rest of the stories are more mundane, culminating in two longer romance stories set among art students in Paris. It's a jarring contrast to the insidious science fiction of the first four stories.

Song of Solomon

Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

The names in Song of Solomon stand out right away - Milkman, Guitar, First Corinthians, Macon Dead, Pilate - but while they sound nonsensical, there's a method to Toni Morrison's madness. The names African Americans have is distorted by slavery and oppression, as Malcolm X notes in the following conversation:

The protagonist's given name is "Macon Dead III," but he's called "Milkman," a nickname given to him by a neighbor who glimpsed him breastfeeding at the age of four. For most of the story, he doesn't know the origin of his name or the embarrassing implications. But "Macon Dead" is no better - it was given to Milkman's grandfather by a registry board, who asked for his place of origin ("Macon") and his father's occupation ("dead"), and erroneously filled them in the first and last name boxes. The first Macon Dead, originally named Jake, was encouraged to keep the new name by his wife Sing, herself having shortened her name from its original Indian name, Singing Bird. His last name is unknown, but his father was Solomon, whose name in corrupted form provides the town of Shalimar its name - or is it Solomon that's a corruption of Shalimar? The names characters have is a series of accidents and mis-steps, which reinforces the lack of identity African-Americans have in a world dominated by the white man.

Milkman's sisters are named based on random words in the Bible, as is his Aunt Pilate, who keeps her name (the only word her illiterate father ever wrote) folded up in a gold box dangling from her ear. It's not until late in the book that Milkman understands the power of names and why Pilate treasures hers so much:

How many dead lives and fading memories were buried in and beneath the names of the places in this country. Under the recorded names were other names, just as "Macon Dead," recorded for all time in some dusty file, hid from view the real names of people, places, and things. Names that had meaning. No wonder Pilate put hers in her ear. When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do.

Milkman doesn't own his name - his given name is washed away by his nickname, his family name was washed away by the bureaucrat's error, and undoubtedly his true African name was washed away by slavery. Because of this, he has no sense of who he is or where he came from, and during the final part of the book he realizes that this has more value than the gold he's seeking that could set him free financially.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

On Her Majesty's Secret Service
by Ian Fleming
read: 2014

In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Bond finally finds (and marries) a woman who is willing to take him for what he is:

I wouldn't love you if you weren't a pirate. I expect it's in the blood. I'll get used to it. Don't change. I don't want to draw your teeth like women do with their men. I want to live with you, not with somebody else. 

Between Here and the Yellow Sea

Between Here and the Yellow Sea
by Nic Pizzolatto
read: 2014

I've been watching the first few episodes of True Detective on HBO, and I thought I'd track down some of creator / writer Nic Pizzolatto's writing. Between Here and the Yellow Sea is his first published work, a collection of short stories. I'd liken it to Flannery O'Connor's short stories in terms of weight and style, as well as the Southern setting. He doesn't do neat or happy endings. Every character seems to be chasing something he can't find, usually a void produced by a death or abandonment.

In a recent interview about True Detective, Pizzolatto talked about his interest in "memory and the idea of an objective truth." That theme permeates Between Here and the Yellow Sea. In "Two Shores," a man learns he may be the father of a child, but the mother and baby are both dead. "It's a truth that can't do anything for you," his girlfriend admonishes him, asking why he pursues paternity tests. "Because it's the truth," he responds. In the title story, the narrator travels across country to find a girl he once knew, only to be stunned when he realizes her eyes are a different color than he remembers in his mind's eye. Pizzolatto's characters are haunted by their false memories, and when they try to fill the voids in their pasts with present substitutes, it predictably ends in tragedy.

Gone With the Wind

Gone With the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
read: 2014
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, Pulitzer Prize

Scarlett O'Hara is maybe the worst mom in literature. Here's a typical quote:

Babies, babies, babies. Why did God make so many babies? But no, God didn't make them. Stupid people made them.

She's an interesting character, though. It was hard not to admire her courage even as I was disgusted by her Machiavellian tactics and lack of maternal instinct.

This is a book that draws criticism for being racist. One can make an argument that Mitchell wasn't espousing a racist viewpoint but rather showing her characters' perspectives on blacks, slavery, and race relations, but she certainly doesn't give any of her black characters equal time.

The Good Earth

The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck
read: circa 1994
Pulitzer Prize

This was the first assigned reading book I had for high school English. I remember two things from the book:
1. the women's feet were bound to make them attractive, which makes it sound awful to be a woman in China during that time period.
2. the main character made it his mission in life to acquire land and valued land above all else.