Dawn's Reading Blog

Rarely have I been so excited to finish a book as I was Studs Lonigan. It doesn’t help that it was three books, more than 900 pages in all. The first and third books weren’t so bad but the middle one was pretty tedious, and overall it was about 700 more pages of Studs than I needed.

The book is set prior to and during the depression in Chicago amongst Irish Catholics. Of all the socio-economic groups in the world, the Irish Catholics are probably the one I relate to the least. I shouldn’t even read books about them. It just pisses me off. Religion can be very, very bad for you and Irish Catholics are the best example of that I can think of.

On top of not having any innate sympathy for the denizens of Farrell’s Chicago neighborhood, I absolutely loathed Studs, who’s a petty minded, prejudiced, vile little nothing of a boy/man. He’s supposed to be “everyman” but he’s not any man I know or would care to associate with. Even giving him allowance for being a product of his environment, he’s a particularly poor product of it. The book is peppered with people who manage to do better.

In the first book, two things happen: he kisses a girl and he wins a fist fight. In the second book, nothing happens. He spends a lot of time remembering how he kissed a girl and won a fight. In the third book, some stuff happens again. I realize this is meant to be a slice of life but it’s nine fucking hundred pages of slice of life. How is this book on the 100 Best list?

Oh well, it’s still a million times better than Unnatural Exposure. At least what plot it does have is believable and the characters, while not sympathetic, are real and original. What I mean to say is that this is a very well done book about a lousy guy and his lousy life which he fritters away anyway. The writing is excellent. The point is hammered home (and hammered and hammered). The detail is amazing and the picture is drawn with breathtaking clarity. I’m just glad I’m done with it.

Winesburg, Ohio is on the 100 Best list and is the first from the list I’ve read in quite a while. By and large I haven’t been enjoying the books on that list all that much, not compared to recommendations from others or picking and choosing what appeals to me. Winesburg, Ohio is another one I feel lukewarm about. To me, it was a milder version of The Dubliners. Of course, I do realize Anderson was there first but Joyce did it better.

These are character sketches. You can’t call them short stories. There’s one character who keeps appearing over and over and by the end I guess you could say that there was a story about him, but mostly the chapters end just as you’re getting interested in the character and wanting to know what happens next. Then they fizzle out.

Considering the time and place, there’s a surprising amount of sex and sexual innuendo, including some regularly occurring homosexual undertones. Or maybe I just have a dirty mind.

What can you say about A Clockwork Orange except that it’s very, very strange. There probably aren’t enough very’s in that sentence. I’d never seen the movie so this was my first exposure. My initial and most overwhelming response was to the language. I totally understand what Burgess was doing and you certainly do start to get a feel for it and make out what a lot of the words mean, but it’s just so hard to read. Like Tom Sawyer which may be genius but it takes such plodding.

I’m glad I forged through. The book is worth reading and the language has a purpose. This is one of those books you don’t forget for the rest of your life.

I’m signed up for a BNU class on The Maltese Falcon this month but it hardly seems worth it. It’s a detective story of a particular genre and that’s about it. It’s not even a great detective story and I personally find this genre tiring and unappealing. How this makes it to the 100 Best list I really can’t understand. Pretty much anything Agatha Christie or Ed McBain ever wrote is better than this. Oh well, maybe if I go peak in on the class I’ll understand.

I wasn’t expecting to enjoy A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man but I mostly did. The best part of the book was the chapter where the preist gives a couple of sermons about hell. It’s easy to understand how a person raised hearing that kind of thing would believe in it for life. If the average priest could deliver a sermon half as well as Joyce writes one, there would be no lapsed Catholics.

Some pieces of the early chapters were hard to follow because the narrator himself wasn’t understanding what was going on around him due to his youth. Those parts were rather Faulkneresque. The book got a bit boring and stupid towards the end. As the narrator ages he becomes pompous and intellectual and less interesting. There’s not much of an ending, only a drifting off. The best part was the middle where the narrator was old enough to understand and communicate what was happening around him but not old enough to take himself so seriously.

There’s one more Joyce book on the 100 Best list. I hope I like it as much as this one.

When I decided to read the 100 Best, I discovered that I already owned Tropic of Cancer because it had come as part of a four book set of “classic porn” that I’d picked up at some point. Tropic of Cancer is really bad porn.

When I first started reading it, I thought it was bad period. But it grew on me. In fact, now that it’s done I find myself wanting to pick it up and read more which is usually the sign of a really good book, although I don’t think I liked it that much.

It’s the story of a young man, the author himself I suppose, bumming around in Paris and mostly worrying about how he’s going to eat. There are some chapters that are hugely entertaining snapshots of his fellow ex-pats. Then there are others that are almost nonsensical stream of conciousness (and a not-very-sober concious at that) which is how the book started which is why it was so painful to read in the beginning.

The other problem with the book is that it contains a lot of inside references to Paris sights and establishments and even events and people of the day. These aren’t references to the classics or Greek mythology which we might be expected to know. They’re mostly things that only someone living in Paris under his circumstances would know. I felt I could have gotten more out of some passages if I’d know what he was referring to.

Invisible Man is an impressive piece of work although it has its low points. The individual scenes are breathtaking, so vivid I sometimes couldn’t stop reading. In between the scenes, the transitions are unsatisfactory. It’s best to just accept that this happened and then that happened and not worry about the fact that that wasn’t all that likely to happen after this.

The worst part of the book was the prologue. I almost put it down after reading that prologue. I never did find a good reason for its existence either. Skip the prologue.

It said “nameless narrator” on the back of my copy of the book or I’m not sure I would have noticed it. At one point in the book he gets a new name assigned to him and I did realize that we were never told what that name was. But when I saw that “nameless narrator” comment, I was sure that I’d known what his name was before the name change. But I thought and thought, and it turned out I didn’t. It’s impressive somehow that you can know a character that well without knowing the most fundamental thing about him.

Along those same lines, Ellison is slow to tell you whether characters are black or white as they’re introduced. That’s kind of curious in a book that’s largely about race relations, but I guess he wants you to figure out a character’s race from the way he’s being treated or spoken to by the other characters. Interesting, but I found myself wanting to know. If someone was speaking nicely to the narrator I wanted to know that minute if it was a white person with an enlightened viewpoint or another black person. But I think the uncertainty was probably intentional. There’s at least one point where a person turns out to be the opposite of what you’re meant to guess.

I’m not positive I learned anything about the black exerience. The book was a series of riveting vignettes, usually dealing with race but from many different viewpoints. I don’t know whether Ellison intended to deliver a message or illustrate a life. He did a great job of illustration.

I had to go looking on the internet to try to make sense of the title: The Postman Always Rings Twice. Turns out noone understands it any better than I do. There was a vague rumor out there that it was an old British saying, but given the lack of hits on that phrase that weren’t related to the book/movie, it seems doubtful. Apparently one of the movie versions cooked something up at the end to try to explain the title, but I haven’t seen it and I haven’t seen a description of it, just that it’s pretty stupid if you’ve read the book.

Aside from the title, I didn’t have a strong reaction to the book. I’d never read one of those “hard boiled” mysteries before but I’d read parodies of them, which was almost what this seemed like. Like a parody of itself. It gets off a little cheap at the end too – wrap it up nice and simple. A happy ending in some ways and getting what you deserve in others and no worries about what comes next because nothing does.

It’s not a style I’ll read more of, but I’m glad to have read what I guess is the best example of this genre. It’s a quick read and light-hearted considering the subject.

I saw one blogger describe Brideshead Revisited as: rich people, drunk. Another reviewer said he hates the story but loves Waugh’s style. Both seem like fair comments.

I like stories about British aristocrats–drawing room dramas, usually centered around getting some girl married off. This isn’t that kind of book.

At first I thought the book was about the narrator and Sebastian and just exactly how fond of each other they were. You know, the typical British school-boys in love but could never admit it sort of thing. Then Sebastian all but disappeared from the plot and the narrator switched to his sister, Julia.

Then I thought it was a book about the deterioration of a rich family. I’ve never seen “deterioration of a rich family” mentioned in a list of standard plots but maybe it should be. I’ve already come across two other novels in the 100 Best list that use it: The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner and The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. Want to write the great American novel? Find a nice family and document their decline.

But eventually I decided that Brideshead Revisited wasn’t about either repressed homosexual love or aristrocracy in decline. It’s about how bad being Catholic can screw you up, especially if you’re a lapsed Catholic. Apparently you can run, but not hide, from Catholicism.

At first it seemed the religious references were just background filler–something to know about the family, like that they tended to be tall. But religion kept playing a bigger and bigger role until by the end it had defined and controlled all the Catholic characters, especially the ones who had tried to leave the church.

I’d call this over-reaction except I knew someone a bit like that once. He wouldn’t confess so he couldn’t take communion but he kept going to church, and God and his sins seemed to haunt him. We were nineteen and dating and he wouldn’t have sex. I guess the Catholic church does a pretty good job of getting under your skin so you can never get it out. Count me glad not to have been raised Catholic.

The book was interesting and built to a nice conclusion. My only argument with the style would be the bracketing current-day chapters, which were full of uninteresting and complex Army manoeuvrings. I guess the war was on everyone’s mind when Waugh wrote this so perhaps it seemed necessary to frame the story in the context of the war, but all these years later the war seems an external intrusion into what is otherwise an internal story.

The most interesting part of Sons and Lovers was that I participated in an online reading group via Barnes and Noble University. It was interesting to see what others thought and how it corresponded to what I thought. We also had a moderator, who had written the introduction to their edition of the book, who tried to feed us the appropriate interpretations. It’s been a long time since a professional tried to explain a book to me. Not since college. I was impatient with it then and I’m not much better now. I feel uninterested in analyzing a book to the point where you have to read or know something beyond the book.

For instance, Sons and Lovers is apparantly largely autobiographical. Does knowing that change my feelings about the book or my interpretation of the contents? I don’t know. It makes me wonder if Lawrence knew that his lead character comes across as selfish and immature. Does he recognize himself as selfish and immature or does he think he’s painting a different picture?

Then there’s the subject of the other son’s death. According to our moderator, Lawrence first tried to write the book without that death (which had really happened to his brother) but wasn’t able to. But in the book, the death comes across as arbitrary. It’s clumsily foreshadowed (real life deaths are rarely foreshadowed) and the attempt to blame it on some kind of inability to choose between mother and lover is ridiculous. No one dies from loving their mother too much in real life. So it’s a stange blending of fiction and reality. Knowing that there’s some reality behind it helps explain the clumsiness but doesn’t excuse it.

Then there’s the intepretation of various poetic moments, largely dealing with nature, found in the book. I refuse to interpret these in light of biblical events or to equate petals with virginity. If the author manages to convey an emotion to me while I’m reading, then good. That’s what he’s supposed to do. But if I have to scour the book with a copy of the bible at hand to figure out what he meant, I’m not interested. I’m not saying that’s necessary with Sons and Lovers, only that that’s the sort claptrap raised in literary discussions that makes me not like to have literary discussions.

Despite all the above ranting, I’ll participate in another of these sessions in the future. Reading the other students’ responses was very interesting and I did contribute a few comments of my own.

So how did I feel about the book aside from the class? I thought the first and third parts were OK and the middle was boring. The lead character, Paul, wavers around so much that dramatic tension was lost. Perhaps this is Lawrence’s inability to explain his own motivations and resulting actions in a satisfactory way. He wants Miriam, he doesn’t want her, he’ll want her again someday. He’s stringing her along, he’s giving her up, he’s taking her virginity, he’s through with her. Real life does seem to work in tides – the old two steps forward, one step back cliche. Rarely are there the abrupt breaking points we’re accustomed to in novels. Having now read through a couple hundred pages of someone going two steps forward and one step back, I see that real life makes for very dull reading.

It’s not clear to me what makes this one of the 100 Best books of the 19th century. Most likely it had something to do with historical context, which is also not an excuse in my opinion. I don’t care if the middle section being so focused on the internal was a new technique at that time. It’s handled poorly. Show me the first novel that handled it well. That’s the one I want to read.