I know this; and thus I challenge it.

I'm about three quarters of the way through number 75, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, and am happy to report it I'm enjoying it. I started it a couple of weeks ago, but was away at a golf tournament last week, on an annual trip that doesn't afford me much reading time. Looking back at the Victoria Day weekend the past few years, I see there is always a gap in my reading each time. But I'm back on track now, and plan to finish it before I leave on another trip this Thursday.

When I do finish it, I might be in a bit of a conundrum with regards to what to read next. Right now I'm planning on reading A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul, and I do currently have it out from the library. The problem is that it is getting more and more difficult to plan my next read, simply because there are fewer books to choose from.

Here's a change indeed!

I was reading Pale Fire. In fact two weeks ago, I started it. But in reality, I only read three pages. Then I was out of town for a week. Normally, I find a lot of time to read when I'm away, but this was a trip to Disneyland. Disneyland does not afford me a lot of time to read. My days were occupied by trying to go on as many rides as possible, while my nights were spent recovering from having spent all day trying to go on as many rides as possible.

While Disneyland continues to be as fun as ever for me, if not more fun, I've found that the older I get, the harder a 12-hour shift at the Happiest Place on Earth becomes. What attempts I did make to read ended with me falling asleep, and having no recollection of the previous one or two pages.

I was surprised at how many people I would see reading at Disneyland. 100% of these people were ladies over the age of 70, who I'm guessing aren't the biggest fans of rides, but it was still odd. I've also seen, on more than one occasion, people reading at sporting events. I guess if you love to read, you bring a book with you wherever you go, as you never know when you might have a couple of spare minutes.

Upon my return to Calgary, I realized my copy of Pale Fire was due back to the library while I had been away, and since somebody else had placed a hold, I was unable to renew. I debated just holding it until I finished, but having only progressed another two or three pages, didn't feel I'd be able to get it done soon enough. So, for the second time, I have stopped reading a book on this list (Neuromancer was the other) and moved on to The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene.

This isn't a reflection of Pale Fire at all, in fact it was one I was really looking forward to, having enjoyed Lolita  so much. The timing just didn't work out I guess. I have since placed a hold on it, and should be able to make it number 69 or 70.

My progress on The Heart of the Matter is going much better, and I am about a third of the way through it. And it's very enjoyable.

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Less. what's next?

As I make my way through Revolutionary Road, I've started to think about what I should be planning to read for the next few months.  As you may have noticed, I've tried to space out the bigger reads a little, so as not to get bogged down by them, but also in an effort to not leave them until the end.  But really, there hasn't been any order set in stone.  Mostly I've been getting what I can from the library and going from there.  However, after having read 58 books there are simply fewer books to chose from than two years ago, so the decision over what to read next is more difficult, but also more important.

Of the final 40 books, I have already decided on the final five.  I'm ending with Nineteen-Eighty Four as I've read it several times, and if you recall, was actually going to start the list with it until I discovered my tattered copy was missing the first fifteen pages.  I've also decided to read Never Let Met Go and A Passage to India as numbers 99 and 98 respectively, as they are the newest and oldest books on the list.  Numbers 97 and 96 will be Neuromancer and A Death in the Family, as those are two books that I own a copy of.  I figure with only five novels left, it might be more difficult to get them from the library so I should be sure to read ones I can get my hands on.

So that leaves 35 other books to read (I'm reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest next, as #60), and there are still a few behemoths left.  I've identified, Gravity's Rainbow, Lord of the Rings, Call it Sleep, The Man Who Loved Children, and A Dance to the Music of Time as the most challenging book I still have to read.  Some will be challenging because I have been told how unreadable they are by a co-author of the list (Man Who Loved Children)  while others will be difficult simply because of their length (Lord of the Rings and A Dance to the Music of Time).

Anyone for a little light reading?

I'm starting to realize that one of these five books needs to be #61 or #62, and I'm not sure which one it is going to be.  Of those five, Lord of the Rings is probably the most appealing and Gravity's Rainbow the least.  I can't keep putting the other Pynchon novel off though!  However, Call it Sleep is sitting on the shelf behind me right now, but, it's thicker than four other books combined.  Maybe it's large print.  Really large print.  Or think paper.

Of course for every long book there are shorter ones.  Looking at what I have left I'm predicting that To Kill a Mockingbird, Are You There God? It's Me Margaret, Lord of the Flies, Watchmen, and Wide Sargasso Sea, will be my easiest reads.  Don't be surprised if the books mentioned earlier are followed by one of these.

But I suppose for now, this is all like planning tomorrow's lunch when you haven't even begun to finish making today's.  Let's get back to our regularly scheduled program, Revolutionary Road.

#43 - "The Blind Assassin" by Margaret Atwood

I suppose in a way, I'm now more Canadian than I was last week.  Why, you ask?  Because I've finished my first Margaret Atwood book, The Blind Assassin.  No doubt one of the most popular and most highly respected authors to come out of Canada, I think of it as some sort of rite of passage to have finally read one of her books.

I'm happy to report, it was one I truly enjoyed.  I say I'm happy I enjoyed it because of the two types of reactions I seem to encounter when I mention to fellow Canadians that I'm reading an Atwood book.  For the most part people say, 'oh, I really like her books' or something to that effect.  But others look like they just bit into a lemon as they same something like 'She's okay, but I'm not crazy about her..."  It's almost as if they don't want to say they don't like her because it might be considered unpatriotic.  Being the honest guy I am, I'd probably just say I didn't like her, and could then be accused of being a maple leaf-hating traitor.  But, I liked it, so I guess I'm safe from those accusations.

The Blind Assassin starts out with a series of newspaper clippings outlining a young woman's death in a car accident in 1945, her brother-in-law's death of a stroke in 1947, and her niece's death in 1975.  From there, the story begins with the birth of Iris Chase Griffen, the dead woman's sister, the brother-in-law's husband, and the niece's mother.  She narrates the story of her childhood in a wealthy family, her marriage, and in the end, her tragedy.  And tragedy is really what the story is, as she explains the details and events which lead to said deaths.

Iris is the only person left who knows the truth behind the deaths, and looks to set the story straight for her estranged granddaughter.  The book jumps from present to past frequently, as Iris talks of her life now, and the changes that she has experienced, then revisits her past to make sense of those changes.  The book also uses passages of a novel-within-a-novel entitled The Blind Assassin, which her sister became posthumously famous for writing, and tells the tale of a wealthy woman and her elicit affair with a local vagabond.

At times I find books that use time shifts like this to be confusing, as I did in Faulkner's Light in August, but Atwood's use of them is very accessible.  Instead of losing the reader, The Blind Assassin is able to hold their attention, and the technique is very adept at piecing the plot together.  I found it fun in a way to guess how the combination of stories from the past and the allusions in the novel-within-a-novel would turn out in the main story.

I also really enjoyed Atwood's writing style and her use of words.  She uses a lot of similies and metaphors, so many of which I found create really vivid descriptions.  Plus, she writes with a wit I wasn't expecting.  There were so many great lines in this book, many of which left me smiling, if not giggling.  My list-reading counterpart in Nashville, Robert Bruce, has assembled many of these lines in a recent post on his site, 101 Books.

This was truly an enjoyable read and I'll be sure to revisit Atwood in the future.  After I read the next 57 books from The List, that is.


Click here to read TIME magazine's review from September 11, 2000.

You can hear me talk about The Blind Assassin on the Calgary Eyeopener right here.


Notes: This is the only truly Canadian book on The List. Neuromancer was written by William Gibson who holds dual citizenship but was born and educated in the United States, and Saul Bellow was born in Montreal but moved to Chicago when he was nine years old.

As a funny aside, I noticed in Time's explanation for why this book made The List, they refer to the book's setting as 'a chilly Canadian town.' I never got the feeling it was really cold in the book, save a couple of mentions of snow or ice in the dead of winter, but nothing to make me think they lived in a particularly cold place, and certainly nothing worth noting. Perhaps it is assumed all Canadian towns are really cold. But then wouldn't that be redundant to mention it, like saying a book was set in a warm Hawaiian town?


Next up is still to be decided, but I'm leaning toward Malcolm Lowry's 1947 novel, Under the Volcano.

If any order might be thought upon

I was looking at the 16 books from The List the I have sitting on my desk right now.  Sure, I'll never be able to read all of them before many of them will be due back at the library, but it allows me a few options when I'm selecting my next book, and I'll never have to worry about not having a book ready to go.

I also decided to sort of map out my future reading a little bit better. Up until now, I had just been picking up whatever was available at the library, and reading that.  Now with so many books, I thought I should put a little bit more thought into what'll be next.

I have decided I would read Nineteen Eighty-Four last.  I had tried to start the list with that book, until I found my copy was missing the first few pages.  Then I thought I would read the other two books I had previously read, Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird, 80th and 90th.  That would keep with my idea of reading a book I am kind of familiar with every tenth book.  That's why I read Deliverance 20th, and why I plan to read Gone with the Wind 30th, A Clockwork Orange 40th, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 60th and The Big Sleep 70th.  I also thought I would read the oldest and newest books on The List, 98th and 99th; meaning A Passage to India and Never Let Me Go will be the second and third last.  Now I just need to figure out what order I'm going to read the other 67.

There are seven authors who have two books on The List, so I thought I wouldn't read two of their books in the same half.  That means I can't read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, or The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, until after I've finished 50 books.  It also means I need to read one book by Nabokov, Bellow, Roth, Orwell and Pynchon before I hit 50.  And since I'm reading Nineteen Eighty-Four last, I'll need to make sure Orwell's Animal Farm is before 50.

When perusing The List, I've been, in a way, fearing a couple of books.  Sitting on my desk right now are Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest and Gone With the Wind, which clock in at a combined 2,600 pages.  Then I was at the bookstore the other day, and spotted Lord of the Rings sitting on the shelf.  I noticed each movie has its own book, and each book looks pretty hefty.  In fact, the three books total almost 3,000 pages.  Then it occurred to me that maybe The List is only counting the first book, Fellowship of the Rings.  Looking on Time's website, I wasn't able to find the answer, so I emailed Lev Grossman, literary critic and writer, who was one of the 'authors' of The List.

Grossman was quick to respond, saying "...I'm afraid I do consider all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings as one single mega-novel. Tolkien did -- he only agreed to split it into three volumes because the publisher couldn't sell a single book at that length ..."  I don't find it very assuring when a literary critic refers to a book as a 'mega-novel.'  Either way, I'll have one very long book to read, so I decided to make it the halfway point and read it 50th.  I guess that means I'll be reading Lord of the Rings starting around November of 2011, and hopefully finishing before November of 2012.

The rest of the books will, in a way, be left to the fates.  I'm still going to be trying to get books from the library, so I'll take what I can get., but this will become increasingly difficult, as I read more and more.  With fewer books to choose from, it will obviously become more and more difficult to borrow books from the library.  I currently own copies of two books from The List, neither of which I've read; Neuromancer and A Death in the Family.  Perhaps I should be saving these for later on, when I get to a point where I have only ten books left.  Since I have a copy, I won't need to worry about it being checked out or put on hold.

Now having said all that, I still don't know what I'm going to read after I finish On the Road.  It seems I've done more 'mapping' of the last ten books than I have for the next book.  I want to make sure I kind of alternate between short and long books, so I suppose I'll just take a look at the pile on my desk when I'm finished, and pick something that fits that bill.

Seventh sweet, adieu

It happened today. I gave up on a book. I've been reading Neuromancer, or rather trying to read it for almost a month. But after all this time, I've only read fifteen pages. Yes, you read that correctly, fifteen lousy pages. I have all kinds of excuses, which I will list here:

1. It's science-fiction. I don't like science-fiction, so it's tough for me to get into the story. Of course I went in with the wrong attitude, but none the less, I don't really care for sci-fi
2. The Winter Olympics. They're on TV constantly all day and all night, in glorious high-definition. I don't normally care for the Olympics, but I've had a hard time not watching. Let's see, I can pick up a book I don't really like, or I can watch people crash down a mountain at 100km/h. That's a no-brainer.

Okay, that isn't a very long list, but its' points are powerful. I think.

The final nail in the coffin for Neuromancer came yesterday, when I buddy of mine brought me two books from the list; Catcher in the Rye and Catch-22. Seeing these two books sitting on my desk beside Neuromancer is like going in to you garage and seeing a Porsche and a Hyundai. It's hard to not drive the Porsche until the Hyundai's ran out of gas.

So, to make a long story short, Neuromancer is out, and Catcher in the Rye is in. I will, of course, come back to Neuromancer at a later date, but it just isn't working for me right now. I've chosen Catcher, as I need to make up some time again, after wasting three weeks essentially reading nothing. Yes, I've read it before. Yes, that'll make three books in a row that I'd already read before starting the list. But I don't care. I really liked Catcher in the Rye when I first read it, and am excited to read it again.

I'm not proud of what has happened here, but I have to move on.

I wonder on't; he was wont to shine at seven.

Before I headed to the library, I discovered that I own another book on the list, Neuromancer by William Gibson. I'm not really sure what it's about, but it seems to be some kind of science-fiction book. Or it might be one of those "set in the not too distant future" books, where all technological advances seem to be accompanied by a complete collapse of civilization. Does this future always have to be so dreary, dirty and awful? I'm thinking of movies like "Blade Runner" and "Total Recall" which portray the future as some sort of apocalyptic hell. I think this will be the type of book that uses "credits" instead of a known currency. I'm not sure why these stories can't use dollars or pounds or pesos or yen. Why do they have to use credits? Perhaps the ipad (available for only 499 credits) will be the technology that leads to the eventual destruction of mankind.

I shouldn't be so negative of course, as I don't really know anything about Neuromancer. It could be a sci-fi version of "It's a Wonderful Life" for all I know. However, even if it is that, I often have trouble reading sci-fi novels. Of course the few I've read have been more of the "pulp" variety, but it just isn't my favorite genre. I guess though, if the list has taught me anything, its that these books are on the list for a reason, and I shouldn't assume I'm not going to like this one.

Time to blast off I guess... (and I am fully aware of that terrible pun)