In the future, they'll be read

While I was at the book store today I was looking at a couple of books from The List, reading the back cover; checking them out basically. I had no intention of buying any of them, as A, I'm not planning on buying any of the books for now. And B, I already have ten books sitting on my desk at home from the library, that need to be read.

One I looked at was Day of the Locust, which seems quite interesting. It's about someone trying to make it in Hollywood in the 1930's. Another was The Golden Notebook, about a divorced female author, suffering through writer's block. I was intrigued by both, but for the reasons stated above, left them both on the shelf. It got me thinking however, that although I've spent a lot of time thinking about my reading order, for the most part I haven't been considering the stories I want to read, and trying to spread them out amongst all the books I don't want to read, or at least think I don't want to read.

So far, I haven't done a bad job of this, and have managed to mix in Brideshead Revisited and Tropic of Cancer with Beloved and Housekeeping. This isn't to say I enjoyed or didn't enjoy any of these books, but rather that going into some books, I'm excited, and some I am not. Probably most of that is due to either the cover, or me having heard of the book somewhere else (this was the case of Tropic of Cancer which I knew only from 'Seinfeld'). So the two books I saw today seem like two books I would like to read, but I realize that I can't be reading them for a while.

Then it struck me, that going through a list of 100 books presents one with some odd situations. When I see Never Let Me Go, the book which I have decided I will read 99th, I realize that I won't be reading it for almost three years (okay, at my current pace, over three years). It's odd to say, 'Ooh I want to read this. I shall do so in 2014.' But I suppose that's what happens when you decide to make your way through a list such as this.  And of course my current read, Infinite Jest isn't helping this problem at all.

Speaking of Infinite Jest, I've basically reached the halfway point, sitting on page 529.  Only 540 to go!  It hasn't really gripped me yet, and I've basically lost any hope that it will.  Instead, it looks as if it will be a book a slug through over one thousand pages and then never speak of it again.

#19 - "Housekeeping" by Marilynne Robinson

My race to finish 25 books by mid November has made some progress, but will have to continue at a feverish pace to be successful.  Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, my 19th book, has helped my cause, thanks to it being a little on the short side, and for the most part is an easy read.

It's the story of two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, who are orphaned after their mother's suicide.  They move around between different relatives, until they settle in with their estranged aunt, Sylvie.  Or rather, she settles in with them.  The two sisters begin to grow in different directions, as one becomes closer to their aunt and one drifts farther and farther away, eventually running away from home to stay with neighbors.  Aunt Sylvie, who speaks mostly of bus and train stations from her drifting days, is a bit odd to say the least.  She returns to town to take care of her nieces, having arrived from places unknown.  While she had been married, nobody knows what happened to her husband, and Sylvie isn't really interested in telling anybody.  Aunt Sylvie isn't big on disciplining the girls, and for the most part lets them do as they please.  While at first both girls love it, this laissez-faire attitude to practically everything is what eventually drives Lucille to run away, but it is also what brings Ruth and Sylvie together.

Housekeeping reminds me of a couple other books on The List, The Sun Also Rises and Tropic of Cancer.  Not because it's about sexually frustrated ex-pats, living in Paris, but because nothing really happens in the book.  Housekeeping just seems to drift along, without any real plot twists or any pivotal events.  The end of the book is merely a little later in time than the start.  This isn't to say, however, that it is enjoyable to read this book.  It flowed very well, and I found myself very interested, despite realizing early on that nothing would happen.  I was still interested in reading it for its' style and I enjoyed the characters.  I suppose this is a sign of a well-written book and one of the reasons it is on The List, and I need to get a little better and recognizing 'good writing' when I see it.  I'm thinking 'writing quality' is what separates this book from say, a Clive Cussler novel.  Sure, lots of things happen in Raise the Titanic!, but in terms of style, it's likely a little lacking, much like a good movie over, say, "Death Wish."  So to summarize, not a lot happens in  Housekeeping but I enjoyed it, and it isn't anything like "Death Wish." (I think that's inside cover material!)

You can read the original TIME magazine review from February 2nd, 1981, here.


Next up, will be my 20th book on the list, a milestone of sorts I suppose.  Seeing as how there are a few books left on The List that I have already read, and there are some whose story I am very familiar with, I've decided to try and space those out a little, trying to read one every tenth book.  So, my next read will be James Dickey's Deliverance.  I've seen the movie several times, and even played the role of "Hillbilly Santa" in my Grade 8 Christmas Concert, in a skit entitled "A Christmas Deliverance."  I'm not kidding, that actually happened.  It was brilliant.

Come, and take choice of all my library

I've been getting most of my books from the Calgary Public Library, and am a big supporter of the library in general. However, that isn't to say there aren't problems with the institution. Now, understanding that although Calgary's library is the second most used system in Canada, it is also one of the most poorly funded. And the evidence of this is everywhere.

To begin with, many of the libraries are, for lack of a better word, dumps. And the crown jewel of the system, downtown, is the biggest dump of them all. From the outside it looks like either a drop-in center for the homeless or the building that houses the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It isn't inviting, it's run down, and needs to be replaced. Add to that, it is usually full of tramps and hobos, who I'm pretty sure are pretending to be reading so they can sit down in climate controlled comfort. I say this because there will be three or four tramps sitting at one table, each with giant books on their laps open right to the middle page. In two hours there earlier this week, I'm pretty sure not one page was turned at the table next to me. But, I digress, as these problems are not necessarily the library's fault, and have more to do with City Hall.

What is the library's fault and my main beef, is the catalogue search. Going to the library's website, the catalogue search is on the home page and is easy to access. It is the results that are the problem. Obviously the books from The List are well known, highly regarded books, but finding them is a gigantic pain in the ass. When I searched for The Great Gatsby, perhaps the most famous American novel of the past hundred years, it is the 20th result returned. Searching for Deliverance, the catalogue returned 36 results and the actual book was the last one. Titles that came up before Deliverance included The Deliverance of Dancing Bears and I Walk in Dread: The Diary of Deliverance Trembley, Witness to the Salem Witch Trials (Massachusetts Bay Colony 1691). While I'm sure both are fine works they should not be appearing before the book that's title exactly matches the search query. I'm thinking if somebody was looking for a book on the Salem Witch Trials, they'd type in more than 'deliverance' in their query.

The reason this happens is because their catalogue returns results newest to oldest and the novel is of course older than the 'study guide to' or the DVD or the audio recording. But this frustrates me to no end, because I think a library should return books before non-books. In an attempt to have this fixed, I began contacting the library, first via Twitter:

TheRevBW: I search for The Great Gatsby @calgarylibrary but the book is the 20th result. Shouldn't it be ahead of DVD's, audio recordings and essays?

The library responded a couple days later with this:

calgarylibrary: the results are automatically reverse chronological, can change this by selecting "sort by Old to New" once search has happened.

So, the library freely admits the search gives me the opposite of what I'm looking for. Perfect. Oh, and this didn't work for On the Road, which was the 203rd of over 500 results. Either way, it's going to be in the middle and I'll be stuck sifting through pages and pages of results.  While I hate to admit this, Toronto's public library returned On the Road 1st and Edmonton's returned it 2nd.

Not satisfied with my Twitter attempts I wrote an email to the library, outlining my problem with searching for great books. They responded telling me to use their "power search" feature, which allows the user to enter more detailed search criteria. I have used this feature, but when searching for multiple books, it can be very time consuming. Instead of one click shopping from the home page, you must go through about 300 steps to use power search. First off, you have to fail at your initial search before you have the option of using the power search and from there, you can enter more crucial data than just the title, such as the author, the publication date, or the ISBN (which I'm sure is great for Rain Man, but not for me). However, even all these options don't usually help.

The real key to the power search is to change the 'sort' of the returned results from 'new to old' to 'relevance.' Ah ha! And this is my point, why aren't all search results sorted by relevance, as I'm sure people are more interested in relevant answers opposed to newer answers. When I go to the grocery store looking for aged cheddar cheese, I don't want to be told where 'New and Improved' cheddar cheese soup is, despite it being 'newer.'  I've replied to the library yet again, explaining that I understand this process, but the point I am trying to make is that it needs to be changed. We'll see if I make any progress, but I vow to continue the fight for as long as I can!

End Rant.

As an aside, while at the Central library, I picked up a bunch of books, as my local branch doesn't have near the selection. I already had Housekeeping (which I'm reading), Deliverance (which I had delivered to my local branch), and Gravity's Rainbow (which I'm delaying, because I'm intimidated by its' 750 pages). I've now added Portnoy's Complaint, Herzog, Ragtime, Snow Crash, and On the Road to my loan collection.  My thought was they can be renewed several times and they can be returned to any branch, so while I'm downtown, why not grab a bunch...just in case. Only time will tell if this is a move so shrewd it's worthy of an Arab spice trader, or if this is a quick path to increasing my fine total.

#18 - "I, Claudius" by Robert Graves

History and fiction, combined into one book.  I may be in heaven.  Part of the reason I started the list, was to expand my horizons, and start reading a little more fiction.  For ten years after University, I could probably count the number of novels I read on one hand.  Meanwhile, I had put back half the World War II section at Chapters.  With, I, Claudius, I was able to combine my old reading habits and my new reading habits, in a spectacular novel from 1934.

The book is written as an autobiography of Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, who lived from 10BC to 54AD.  Born with physical disabilities causing a lifelong limp and stutter, Claudius spends his life in the Imperial Family, forgotten as an idiot and of no consequence.  He lives and writes about the turbulent times of the Roman Empire, an era filled with murder, treason, assassination, corruption, incest and war.  Very interesting times to say the least.  One gets the idea life was pretty cheap in Roman times, as murder seems to be as common as reading the paper.  Husbands are killed by wives, sons by mothers, daughters by fathers, brothers by sisters, and everybody by the emperor.  But through all these treacherous years, Claudius is able to avoid execution laying in the political weeds and eventually rise to become Emperor of the Roman Empire.  Having an interest in history, Claudius prides himself on being a capable historian, and spends most of his life writing about the scandals and politics of his family.

Basing most of the events in some way on historical record, the book, while fiction, can still be taken seriously as a rough guide to Roman times.  Myself, I had never really been too interested in that era, but see now that I was really missing out.  So much going on, so many political games, so much to learn.  What makes Graves' book so good, is the ease with which it reads.  Unlike a textbook, or other works focusing on the Roman era, I, Claudius uses more modern prose to tell its' story.  In the words of Time magazine, "Readers for whom the life of ancient Rome has been mummified by academic historians, museums and Latin grammar will give Author Graves a rising vote of thanks..."  I couldn't sum it up better myself.


You can read TIME's original review from June 18th, 1934 here.  Interesting to note, that in this review, the magazine refers to Claudius as "...a Roman of the Old School..."  Could this be the very first use of the expression 'old school'?  I always thought that had originated in the last five or ten years.

Listen to my discussion of I, Claudius on the CBC Eyeopener, right here.

For my next book, I am planning on reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.  It was quite an ordeal to get my next book from the library, but I shall save that story for another day.