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.