But he's a learned man. may he continue

I think I learned something today.  Well, I think I probably learn something everyday, but today, I learned something about reading a list of 100 books.  When you talk on the radio each week about the books, it is much, much easier to talk about books you really like.

This morning I discussed one of my favorites so far, I, Claudius by Robert Graves.  Not only did I have a lot to say, but I could hear the excitement in my voice.  In reality, I could probably fill an hour talking about this book; there's so much to discuss.

Now through 42 books, there have only been a couple that I really didn't enjoy.  Most of the books have been, at worst, enjoyable reads.  But even an adequate book is often difficult to talk about, or at least difficult to be really enthusiastic about.  I guess it's sort of like a meal.  When you eat at a really good restaurant, every bite can be fantastic, always leaving you wanting more.  But when you eat at McDonalds, the food is adequate, but it doesn't give you the urge to write home and tell your folks about it.

When I talk about The Moviegoer or Appointment in Samarra, I have no problem at all with either book.  However, by no means am I over the moon, and hence I don't get all that excited.  Where a book like I, Claudius, I want to tell everybody about it, and recommend they read it as soon as possible.

So now I'm left to wonder.  Do I try and be more enthusiastic about these 'average' reads, or should I just be honest about my indifference?  I suppose honesty is always the best option, but enthusiasm probably makes for a better show.  Maybe the best idea is to read really good books, and this problem will take care of itself.

Forty Down, Sixty to Go

I've now hit my next 'milestone', book number forty.  I am now two-fifths of the way through this list of 100 All Time Novels.  Two-fifths doesn't sound like as many books as 'forty' does, so I'll stick with that; I'm forty books into this list.

The second twenty books has had some ups and downs, and has taken me from October 2010 to today.  By far the two longest books I've read were in the last twenty, those, being, Infinite Jest and Gone With the Wind, which are both 400 pages longer than any other book I've read so far.  The shortest two books have also been since October, with The Bridge of San Luis Rey and The Day of the Locust.  I had assumed The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or Are you there God? It's Me, Margaret. would be the shortest.  I suppose the latter still could be. 

I've also noticed I've changed by library borrowing habits in this past segment, having returned 19 books without reading them, including Gravity's Rainbow twice.  I also incurred more fines this go around, with 13 book, totalling $13.30 in fines.  I guess this is because I now usually have 10 to 20 books from The List borrowed from the library at any given time.  It ensures I'll always have something ready to read, but also that I'll incur more fines.

Lastly, I see I've been on an American author kick, with 17 of the past 20 books being my American authors.  This is purely by coincidence, as I haven't ever really taken the author into consideration when selecting my next title.  But, I think I'll try to make a concious effort to squeeze in a few more international talents in the next twenty reads.

Well, forty books down, only sixty more to read!


Here's the second twenty books 'by the numbers':

Misc.:
Shortest - The Bridge of San Luis Rey - 107 pages
Longest - Infinite Jest - 1,076 pages
Oldest - The Bridge of San Luis Rey - 1927 (Gatsby - 1925)
Newest - Infinite Jest  - 1996 (Atonement - 2002)
Longest Reading Time - Infinite Jest - 50 days (To the Lighthouse - 56 days)
Shortest Reading Time - Play it as it Lays - 6 hours (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - 4 hours)
Books Started but Not Finished - 0
Books borrowed from Library and returned, unread - 19

Books by Decade from this Twenty: (total)                                           
1920's - 1  (4)        1960's - 4  (6)                           
1930's - 3  (7)        1970's - 3  (4)                           
1940's - 3  (4)        1980's - 2  (5)                            
1950's - 2  (6)        1990's - 2  (2)                            
               2000's - 0  (2)                          


Nationality:
Books by American Authors - 17
Books by British Authors - 2
Books by Russian Authors - 1

Source of Book:
From the library - 19 (35 Total)
Borrowed from friends - 0 (3 Total)
Books I own - 0 (1 Total)
Book Stolen from Rural Hotels - 1

Library Fines:

Gravity's Rainbow - $2.80
Herzog - $0.70
On the Road - $0.70
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - $1.05
Play it as it Lays - $0.35
The Death of the Heart - $1.05
The Blind Assassin - $1.05
The Berlin Stories - $0.35
An American Tragedy - $1.05
Painted Bird - $0.70
Lolita - $2.10
Slaughterhouse Five - $0.70
All the King's Men - $0.70
Total Fines: $13.30


References to The List:

Infinite Jest - William Burroughs is mentioned by one of the characters

The Sportswriter  - Frank Bascombe is reading The Sun Also Rises
The Sportswriter - Bascombe refers to Tropic of Cancer
Appointment in Samarra - A character is reading Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms
Appointment in Samarra - One of the club members reportedly went to school with F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Second Twenty Books:
Ragtime
Falconer
Snow Crash
On the Road
Herzog
Play it as it Lays
The Berlin Stories
Infinite Jest
Lolita
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Day of the Locust
The Sheltering Sky
Gone With the Wind
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Sportswriter
Rabbit, Run
Blood Meridian
Appointment in Samarra

The First Twenty Books:
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Brideshead Revisited
Naked Lunch
Light in August
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
The Great Gatsby
Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
Beloved
Tropic of Cancer
Midnight's Children
The Corrections
Atonement
The Power and the Glory
To The Lighthouse
Lucky Jim
The Sun Also Rises
I, Claudius
Housekeeping
Deliverance

#40 - "Appointment in Samarra" by John O'Hara

A book I knew nothing about, from 1934, made for a quick read this weekend, and a damn good one at that.  Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara is exactly my type of book; focusing on realistic, interesting characters.  As I inch closer to the halfway mark of this list, I'm finally starting to realize what type of books I enjoy reading.

Set in the fictional Pennsylvania town of Gibbsville, Appointment in Samarra follows the self-destruction of one Julian English, over three days at Christmas, 1930.  A well-to-do man of 30 years, English owns a Cadillac dealership, has a college education, is member of all the best clubs, and is married to Caroline; a woman he loves and a woman that loves him.  But behind the seemingly perfect life, lives a deeply flawed man.

Julian's problems start at a party on Christmas Eve when in a drunken state he throws his drink into the face of Harry Reilly, one of the wealthier men in town, giving him a black eye in the process.  While by no means the beginning of his problems, it does begin a chain reaction that threatens to destroy every part of Julian's life.

I'm always of fan of what I would describe as 'character-driven' novels, where the setting and happenings are almost secondary to the development and growth of the central figures.  In Appointment in Samarra, O'Hara uses some of the frankest and most realistic interactions I've ever read.  Too often I find characters in novels or in movies talk in, well, a scripted fashion.  They use a formality that real people don't use and a wit real people don't have.  This naturally become even more prevalent in older books, where characters must avoid swearing or discussing sexual situations.

I remember hearing or reading that parts of Appointment in Samarra were quite 'racy' for the time, so I was assuming there would be explicit sexual scenes, or profane language.  Of course as usually is the case, there wasn't anything in Appointment in Samarra that you wouldn't see on television today.  While I suppose there would be some minor 'swearing', it certainly wouldn't be anything I'd be hesitant to use in any public setting.  As for sexual scenes, there is nothing explicit, as in Tropic of Cancer.  Everything in Appointment in Samarra is merely suggested, and not any specific sexual acts, merely the fact that adults have sex (who knew!?).

But despite the rather tameness of the sexual scenes or the 'adult situations', the characters still discuss them in a realistic manner.  They talk of sex, as something that everybody does, not as if it's something that doesn't really exist and should never be discussed.  I always have this image of earlier eras, where nobody swears, and nobody talks about anything even remotely private.  This no doubt arises from the fact that in the movies of these by-gone eras, nobody talks about sex, nobody swears, and people are always quite formal.  This is what I found made the dialogue in this book so great.  These are characters that are really just like the people of today.  They talk about sex with their spouse or with the guys, they swear when they're mad, and they talk about other people's tragedies with a touch of humor; happy it hasn't happened to them.  And I'm sure the people of the 30's were no different.  Except for maybe my grandparents, who I simply cannot picture using the word sex, never mind discussing it in any way, shape, or form.

Of course this frank treatment of everyday situations caused quite a stir at the time of publication.  The book has been described as vulgar, infantile, and crass.  Most critics seemed to enjoy the style and story, but were turned off by O'Hara's attempt to push the envelope of what was acceptable for publication at the time.  Ultimately, the book was never banned in the United States, unlike so many others of the time, so I suppose he was successful.  Reading things like this often make me thankful I don't live in an era so prudish that critics can't praise a book they enjoyed, simply because two adults had sex and one person called another a bitch.



You can read the original review in TIME from August 20, 1934, by clicking here.


To listen to my discussion of Appointment in Samarra on The Eyeopener, click here.


For my 41st book, I'm going up a couple of decades to 1961's The Moviegoer by Walker Percy.  Following a New Orleans stockbroker, it's said to combine Bourbon Street elegance with the spiritual urgency of a Russian novel.

#39 - "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy

In honor of the Calgary Stampede, I thought I'd read the closest thing to a Western on The List, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.  I suppose both involve horses, but really the similarities end there.  While the Stampede may have it's downsides, they don't usually involve scalping, bludgeoning or beheadings.

Set mostly around 1849, near the Mexican-American border, the book tells the story of a roving band of mercenary scalp hunters, who under the guise of protecting the locals from the dangerous Apache, reek havoc and chaos on the area.  The group, known as the Glanton Gang, roam the countryside travelling from town to town.  While at first they only hunt down their designated enemies, their thirst for blood and more importantly their lack of guilt or apprehension toward spilling it, leads them to expand their scalp hunting to include almost every living being they encounter.

As can be judged from the plot, Blood Meridian takes the cake as the most violent read from The List so far.  While the body count must be in the thousands, it is the graphic description of the violence that really stands out.  Instead of merely describing a beheading, McCarthy will describe blood shooting out of a headless neck like a fountain, before it trickles between the floor boards and into the hellish river that flowed nearby.  He describes the sounds and the smells and the tastes of so many killings, it almost desensitizes the reader by the end.  While I don't have a problem with violence, in that it doesn't offend me, I just found it to be a little much in Blood Meridian.  While the violence may be integral to the plot, often the long, drawn out descriptions were not.  Instead of being descriptive, I often only found them to be a little dull.

I think it was this language or style that lost be in the end.  I found this to be one of the harder reads I have had recently.  McCarthy uses an almost biblical-style of language, that would seem more fitting in a 19th century novel be Dickens or Melville.  While I couldn't deny it is a well written book, I found the language to be an obstacle instead of an invitation, to really get into the story.  Not only does it not seem to really fit the setting or the story, it also tends to lose my interest.  For whatever reason, I find this type of prose quite tedious.  And also for no real reason, I found it very frustrating reading dialogue, as McCarthy has decided to eschew quotation marks.  It didn't make it confusing or anything like that, but it bothered me.

But besides the style, I also never became enamoured with the characters.  Much of the book centers on a man known only as "The Kid", who joins up with the Glanton gang after is army troop is slaughtered by some Apaches.  We learn very little of the Kid's background, and thus very little of his motivations.  While he could be described as the protagonist I suppose, I never really had any interest in him or his fate.  He really never seemed integral to the story and could have been replaced by any number of characters throughout book.

If there were to be an antagonist, which is difficult, because almost every character in the novel could be considered one, it would by Judge Holden, known simply as the Judge.  The Judge seems to be a rather well-educated man, knowledgeable in a wide variety of subjects, who also happens to be a cold-blooded killer, a child rapist and basically devoid of any morals.  As the leader of the Glanton Gang, the Judge often takes on an almost god-like persona, seemingly indestructible and infallible.  While many have described him as one of the best fictional characters in recent memory, with Harold Bloom even describing him as 'the most frightening figure on all of American literature,' I found him to be too much of an enigma to really enjoy reading.  Like The Kid, there just didn't seem to be enough there for me to get into these characters, and as a result, I never really got into this book.



You can hear me discussing Blood Meridian on the CBC Eyeopener, here.


For my next book I'll be reading Appointment in Samarra which is yet another book I know nothing about.