The Scarlet Letter

   
The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
read: circa 1995
Guardian 1000 Novels

I think this was the first novel I had to read in sophomore high school English. I remember it was a couple years before the Demi Moore movie came out. That movie looked terrible.

Hawthorne was living in Salem, Massachusetts, where the Salem Witch Trial took place (and where I live now), while writing The Scarlet Letter. His great-grandfather was a judge in many of the trials. It's hard not to see a parallel between the injustices heaped on Hester Prynne and on the women accused of witchcraft.

The Child In Time

   
The Child In Time
by Ian McEwan
read: 2013
Guardian 1000 Novels

I became a father for the first time a little over a year ago. The Child In Time's protagonist sees his daughter abducted in the supermarket, and the novel deals with his struggles to cope with that tragedy. It was a tough read in a way that it wouldn't have been for me a couple years ago.

One of the themes in the book is the capriciousness of life and death. Aside from the kidnapped daughter, we see a traffic incident that narrowly avoids a fatality, a character commits suicide, and a baby is conceived. Life is fragile and death can arrive at any time. The titular "child in time" refers to a metaphysical encounter between the protagonist and his mother, where he appears to her as a small child while she is pregnant with him and contemplating an abortion. Without that miracle, would our hero have ever been born? McEwan sets up his incomprehensible loss in opposition to the improbability of existing in the first place.

Great book, well constructed, the prose is outstanding. As a dad though, it was painful at times.

The Rainbow

  
The Rainbow
by D.H. Lawrence
read: 2013
Modern Library #48, Guardian 1000 Novels

The Rainbow is a story that spans generations, and while I sometimes like that formula (as in Wuthering Heights and The Cairo Trilogy), here I had trouble pin-pointing a common thread uniting the generations of Brangwens. It was a tough read

One thing I did like was a running theme through the novel, particularly the first half, that the written word is limited in the emotional depth and resonance it posses. One example: "It bored her to write a letter to him. After all, writing words on paper had nothing do do with him or her." Later heroine Ursula, in describing her favorite and least favorite courses: "Most tedious was the close study of English literature. Why should one remember the things one read?" The characters judge written language as dull, shallow, and static. Contrast this with Lawrence's own prose:

So the Brangwens came and went without fear of necessity, working hard because of the life that was in them, not for want of the money. Neither were they thriftless. They were aware of the last halfpenny, and instinct made them not waste the peeling of their apple, for it would help to feed the cattle. But heaven and earth was teeming around them, and how should this cease? They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds' nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away. The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men who saw it. They took the udder of the cows, the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men. They mounted their horses, and held life between the grip of their knees, they harnessed their horses at the wagon, and, with hand on the bridle-rings, drew the heaving of the horses after their will.

This is one of the very first paragraphs in the novel. It's rich with sensual imagery, words like seed, intercourse, nakedness, supple, desire. Lawrence's characters decry the limits of the English language even while Lawrence himself is trying to transcend those limits.

Jane Eyre

    
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Bronte
read: circa 1996
Guardian 1000 Novels

I liked Jane Eyre when I read it in high school, but by the time I read The Eyre Affair I didn't really remember the plot.

Wuthering Heights

   
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Bronte
read: circa 2005
Guardian 1000 Novels

Wuthering Heights is my dad's least favorite book ever. Maybe if I'd read it when I was 15 as required high school reading, I would have felt the same way, but I read it 10 years older than that and really liked it. It's almost perfectly constructed, it's emotionally powerful, and the prose is great once you get used to it being 150+-years-old.

The Wiki page says there's a role-playing game based on the novel, and you can find the rules here: http://unseelie.org/rpg/wh/. I really have nothing to say. I think I've been living my life incorrectly that I've never played this.

Pride and Prejudice

  
Pride and Prejudice
by: Jane Austen
read: circa 2006
Guardian 1000 Novels

When the last remaining suitor proposed to the titular Bachelorette in that show's finale a few weeks ago, she accepted with a breathless "Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!" This got me thinking about how much I hate that phrase and sent me down an Internet rabbit hole looking for the first known instance of it, the better to direct my hatred towards the correct individual responsible. I didn't find anything conclusive (it's probably related to "A thousand times goodnight" from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet), but it was apparently said in the movie version of Pride and Prejudice from 2005. It fortunately does not appear in the novel, which is excellent.

Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust

  
Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust
by Nathanael West
read: 2013
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #73, Guardian 1000 Novels

One of the wonderful things about reading through lists like those linked above is finding hidden gems. I never read Nathanael West in high school or college - in fact, I never heard of him. His short, tragic life - he died in a car crash at 39 - likely provides part of the explanation; with only four novels published, he's maybe not considered as essential as more prolific authors.

I loved "Miss Lonelyhearts," the novella that opens this collection. The letters the protagonist receives are heartbreaking that both his retreat from reality and his co-workers' defensive humor ring true. The absurdity and sad tone reminded me a lot of Wise Blood. And while it's an entertaining story, it's also got deeper levels - the paths Miss Lonelyhearts takes to cope with the horror he sees parallel the paths we take in our search for meaning in modern society.

The Day of the Locust had some similar elements - sadness, absurdity, a parallel between the protagonist's struggle and the challenges of modern life - but is longer and has a more-developed plot. I saw some similarities between Faye Greener and Breakfast at Tiffany's Holly Golightly. It also features a character named Homer Simpson, possibly the inspiration for the cartoon character. I didn't like it quite as much as "Miss Lonelyhearts," but both stories show that West is a master author, one that until now flew under the radar for me and perhaps many other readers.