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1SCPeterson
After being inactive for 2015 through August 2016, I return to post my books for this year along with selected reviews.
2PaulCranswick
Nice to see you back. As I remember you edged past the 75 in December 2014 and I hope you can do it again. How is the reading coming along?
I see from your list of favourite writers that we should have plenty in common. WH Auden and Bernard Malamud would certainly figure in most of my (many) lists too.
I see from your list of favourite writers that we should have plenty in common. WH Auden and Bernard Malamud would certainly figure in most of my (many) lists too.
3SCPeterson
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Like Billy Pilgrim, reading this again left me feeling like I had traveled a time-warp. In my case, the trip took me back to around 1970 when I first read this book, soon after it was published. Vonnegut was a counter-cultural icon of the 1960s, popular among young college students of the time who, like me, were aghast at United States policy in Vietnam. While ostensibly this is Vonnegut's "famous" book about the fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, clandestinely it spoke to my generation about the horror of our unjust war against the "Communist" peasants of a Third World country on the other side of the planet. In fact, Vonnegut is not so subtle about this, with a few explicit references to Vietnam without necessarily naming the conflict, such as his synopsis of the imaginary novel of the imagined Science Fiction hack, Kilgore Trout, The Gutless Wonder, "...about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings. It was dropped on them from airplanes." To make it even more remarkable, perhaps, anticipating our own drone-besotted war culture of today, though unknown to Vonnegut at the time, he continues: "Robots did the dropping."
Whether it's Dresden, Vietnam, or the Middle East, what makes Slaughterhouse-Five a timeless classic is its comprehension and explication of not only the outrage of modern technological war, but how we human beings go about justifying and accepting it as either necessary or inevitable, or both. Billy Pilgrim travels through space and time metaphorically to cope with his PTSD, winding up on the planet Trafalmadore making love to a fantasy wife, the young buxom movie star, Montana Wildhack. The Trafalmadorians themselves are a comic yet creepy symbol of this displacement of human emotion, voyeuristically watching their captives mate within a bubble sheltered from the toxic atmosphere of their distant planet. The Trafalmadorian philosophy teaches Billy to accept his fate, because there is nothing he can do to control it, much less to mitigate the destructive impulses of his own species.
In the pairing of the innocent Billy with his zen-like Trafalmadorian hosts and their attitude of cosmic acceptance of all things horrible and otherwise, I am reminded of another great satire, Candide by Voltaire. Like the character Candide under the influence of the philosopher Pangloss, Billy encounters the worst conceivable inhumanity and is told to accept, if not with optimism, at least with indifference that this is the best of all possible worlds, with the certainty that it could hardly be different. As we pile one war on top of another and the evil forces governing our corrupt order build toward even greater destructive capacity, I am disheartened but inclined to agree that endless war for the human race is preordained.
One of the many special features of this novel, too many to mention, are the brief descriptions of the works of Kilgore Trout (like the robot story previously mentioned) that appear strategically at certain points in the narrative. For example, who can deny the wisdom of The Gospel from Outer Space, espousing a Jesus who rather than possessing a special divinity, is a nobody and a bum. Just before he dies on the cross, God speaks to the people from the heavens, telling them that he was adopting this bum as his son, and "From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!"
To me, it is these little précis that contain the real message of the book: we may not be masters of our own collective or individual fate, but that doesn't mean that we have to sanctify and worship the false idols of our mass idiocy and insanity.
Like Billy Pilgrim, reading this again left me feeling like I had traveled a time-warp. In my case, the trip took me back to around 1970 when I first read this book, soon after it was published. Vonnegut was a counter-cultural icon of the 1960s, popular among young college students of the time who, like me, were aghast at United States policy in Vietnam. While ostensibly this is Vonnegut's "famous" book about the fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, clandestinely it spoke to my generation about the horror of our unjust war against the "Communist" peasants of a Third World country on the other side of the planet. In fact, Vonnegut is not so subtle about this, with a few explicit references to Vietnam without necessarily naming the conflict, such as his synopsis of the imaginary novel of the imagined Science Fiction hack, Kilgore Trout, The Gutless Wonder, "...about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings. It was dropped on them from airplanes." To make it even more remarkable, perhaps, anticipating our own drone-besotted war culture of today, though unknown to Vonnegut at the time, he continues: "Robots did the dropping."
Whether it's Dresden, Vietnam, or the Middle East, what makes Slaughterhouse-Five a timeless classic is its comprehension and explication of not only the outrage of modern technological war, but how we human beings go about justifying and accepting it as either necessary or inevitable, or both. Billy Pilgrim travels through space and time metaphorically to cope with his PTSD, winding up on the planet Trafalmadore making love to a fantasy wife, the young buxom movie star, Montana Wildhack. The Trafalmadorians themselves are a comic yet creepy symbol of this displacement of human emotion, voyeuristically watching their captives mate within a bubble sheltered from the toxic atmosphere of their distant planet. The Trafalmadorian philosophy teaches Billy to accept his fate, because there is nothing he can do to control it, much less to mitigate the destructive impulses of his own species.
In the pairing of the innocent Billy with his zen-like Trafalmadorian hosts and their attitude of cosmic acceptance of all things horrible and otherwise, I am reminded of another great satire, Candide by Voltaire. Like the character Candide under the influence of the philosopher Pangloss, Billy encounters the worst conceivable inhumanity and is told to accept, if not with optimism, at least with indifference that this is the best of all possible worlds, with the certainty that it could hardly be different. As we pile one war on top of another and the evil forces governing our corrupt order build toward even greater destructive capacity, I am disheartened but inclined to agree that endless war for the human race is preordained.
One of the many special features of this novel, too many to mention, are the brief descriptions of the works of Kilgore Trout (like the robot story previously mentioned) that appear strategically at certain points in the narrative. For example, who can deny the wisdom of The Gospel from Outer Space, espousing a Jesus who rather than possessing a special divinity, is a nobody and a bum. Just before he dies on the cross, God speaks to the people from the heavens, telling them that he was adopting this bum as his son, and "From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!"
To me, it is these little précis that contain the real message of the book: we may not be masters of our own collective or individual fate, but that doesn't mean that we have to sanctify and worship the false idols of our mass idiocy and insanity.
4SCPeterson
Thank you Paul. Unfortunately I am well off pace for 75 this year but I will give it the old college try.
I will try to get to a review of Auden's poetry, truly a daunting subject. Malamud is also very dear to me, I've read many of his works including his collected short stories, which are fantastic.
I will try to get to a review of Auden's poetry, truly a daunting subject. Malamud is also very dear to me, I've read many of his works including his collected short stories, which are fantastic.
5PaulCranswick
>4 SCPeterson: I may add those short stories this week to my own collection since I have seen it gathering dust in the local bookstore. Kuala Lumpur doesn't seem to have heard of Malamud but his The Fixer is one of my absolute favourite American novels.
WH Auden's poem September 1, 1939 is probably my favourite of his and ends thus:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
That together with Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal makes up key parts of Britain's pre-war poetry.
WH Auden's poem September 1, 1939 is probably my favourite of his and ends thus:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
That together with Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal makes up key parts of Britain's pre-war poetry.
7SCPeterson
Thank you, good doctor. In the meantime, I will endeavor to live up to the 75-book "touchstone". Having a goal seems to inspire me to read more. I need to spend less time on You-Tube and more time with the great books.
8SCPeterson
It's interesting that the magnificent poem of W. H. Auden, ending "May I ... show an affirming flame" was one that he later disowned. It was not even included in W. H. Auden Collected Poems, although it is contained in W. H. Auden Selected Poems. Fortunately I am in possession of both volumes.
9PaulCranswick
>8 SCPeterson: Technically wonderful poet WHA and marvellous intellect. Crying shame that he got the wrong side of the Nobel committee as I can't think of many poets more deserving of the prize who didn't win (Robert Frost, perhaps excepted).
10SCPeterson
Certainly Frost, especially with his four Pulitzers, but what about Thomas Hardy!! He should have won twice, once for his novels and again for his poetry. Also left off the list: Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Rilke! They got it right with Yeats and Eliot, but in general, few poets have won the prize. Other notable exclusions: Conrad, Chekhov, Twain, Ibsen, Henry James, Proust, Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Nabokov. You get my point, Auden is not alone in the alternative universe of should-have-been Nobel Prize winners. An amusing list of these and other names is available at one of Ted Gioia's websites, http://tedgioia.com/NobelPrizeAlt.html
11SCPeterson
So here is my running list for 2016:
January (6)
The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov
Not his strongest effort but great for chess fans.
2. Olives by A. E. Stallings
A nice book of formal poetry by one of my favorite contemporary poets.
3. Ballistics by Billy Collins
Amusing fluff.
4. Cheating at Canasta by William Trevor
Skillful but I expected more ... New Yorker fare.
5. Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition edited by Robert Pinsky
Really?
6. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Like the movie, this book haunts me. Worthy of a full review.
February (2)
7. The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Some great shorter fiction, recommended for any fan.
8. As You Like It by William Shakespeare
Not his greatest but still wonderful. I am on a quest to read all of the Bard (and to see them performed).
March (3)
9. The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-up, & the Expose by David Ray Griffin
If you still believe the official fairy tale, read this. Meticulous and credible.
10. Richard III by William Shakespeare
Superb. Devastating. Up there.
11. Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue by Sam Harris
Irritating. Sam Harris is brilliant but so misguided.
April (2)
12. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass
Somewhat repetitious but one of the best books on the assassination. Again, it's time for the truth.
13. War is a Racket by Smedley D. Butler
Awesome, short book that basically says it all - they are in it for the money!
May (4)
14. The Nigger of the Narcissus by Joseph Conrad
I love Conrad. Worthy of a full review.
15. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
A must-read. Early days of Vietnam and the CIA. Historical fiction of the highest order.
16. Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
Somehow, I didn't connect, and that's a shame.
17. Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws are Failing Us by Emily Horowitz
Uneven, but scholarly. Politicians should read it, but they won't.
June (3)
18. State of Fear by Michael Crichton
Not good, but his point is well taken - Climate Change a hoax? I think so!
19. Redeployment by Phil Klay
Excellent. Iraq War short stories that pack a gut-punch.
20. Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman
Words can't do this justice. The nightmare of Stalin. Needs a full review.
July (4)
21. The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
Huge. A very funny central character who bears uncanny resemblance to a Donald Trump of Victorian London.
22. Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare
OMG. This is awesome. Read it! I saw it performed in Central Park!
23. The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
Early Bard. Terrific, of course.
24. The Money Mafia: A World In Crisis by Paul Hellyer
I respect the author and some of his ideas but this is not really a very good book.
August (6)
25. Amerika by Franz Kafka
Not up to The Trial or The Castle but still off the charts great. Will review.
26. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
So it goes. See the full review, above.
27. The Phoenix Program: America's Use of Terror in Vietnam by Douglas Valentine
And you thought Hitler and Stalin were bad. ISIS? How about the CIA? Torture, assassination, etc. Made in America, exported to the World.
28. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Tough book - obviously, end of the world stuff. Parts are annoying, but it packs a punch. Makes me want to buy a gun and a year's supply of canned beans.
29. Homage to Robert Frost by Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott
Where else do you get essays of three Nobel winning poets on a great poet? Brodsky's is the highlight.
30. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
A gift. Clever and amusing but ultimately, a nonsensical mess. Death by Vogon poetry.
September (9)
31. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
Penetrating and entertaining look at the financial collapse of 2007-8. Better than the film.
32. & 33. 1 and 2 Samuel: King James Bible
David and Goliath. The violent roots of religion and culture laid bare.
34. The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon
Superb, noir Cold War thriller with relevance. Unique and disturbing on so many levels.
35. Bonjour tristesse by Françoise Sagan
Hello sadness. A remarkable psychological dissection of mimetic jealousy from the adolescent lens.
36. Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi
Levi's evocative, insightful memoir of his year as a political prisoner, marooned in a backward village in Fascist Italy.
37. Goldfinger by Ian Fleming
Bond. James Bond. A classic of the genre - fun to re-read after all these years.
38. Mrs. Warren's Profession by Bernard Shaw
A shocker in it's time, performances were banned in Victorian Britain due to Shaw's spotlighting issues of incest and prostitution. Still pertinent.
39. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald
One of the most important books of our time. Reads like a cross between a thriller and a philosophical treatise on privacy. Big Brother is watching you - for real!
October (7)
40. Renascence and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay
One of the great poems by a 19-year old; otherwise a mixed bag. Includes the great sonnet: "If I should learn, in some quite casual way".
41. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
Many-layered and for the most part fascinating, brief tales.
42. The Holy Terrors by Jean Cocteau
Strange, evocative, incomprehensible, thankfully short.
43. Hillary the Other Woman: A Political Memoir by Dolly Kyle
Saw the author on Infowars. While much of this rings true, the sad fact is that it is poorly organized and without documentation. Still, there is a lot to chew on about this woman Hillary and her rapist co-president husband; I hope I can forget about them both forever after November 8th.
44. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
SF owes it all to this book. A grim vision of the future.
45. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges
Superb memoir of a war correspondent in 1980s-90s El Salvador, Bosnia, Kuwait, and elsewhere, and his reflections on the fatal attraction of mass slaughter.
46. King Lear by William Shakespeare
The ultimate internecine family feud ... biblical.
November (10)
47. The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis
Lewis was a prophet. Go to any University or just turn on the tube ... the dictatorship of the Conditioners is upon us.
48. Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Hadn't read since High School ... needs some deep analysis. Where the Crisis of Degree may lead.
49. An Iliad by Lisa Peterson
I saw a local production in Philadelphia. An interesting attempt to bring modern relevance to Homer.
50. Simone Weil's The Iliad or The Poem of Force: A Critical Edition by Simone Weil, James P. Holoka (translator)
Along my recent themes of war, tragedy, and myth, this is a profound essay that fundamentally changed my views, not only of Homer, but also the relationship of Rome and the Old and New Testaments to collective violence.
51. The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State by Jacob Hornberger
Preaching to the choir ... unfortunately, a somewhat repetitive pamphlet that can't do full justice to the topic.
52 - 56. The Cask of Amontillado; The Tell-Tale Heart; The Black Cat; The Fall of the House of Usher; and The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
Admittedly cheating by counting each story, but hey, this is catch-up! All are true classics; first reading of Poe since school days.
December (11)
57. I See Satan Fall Like Lighting by René Girard
My second time through; Girard's genius see's through the devil. Girard's commentary on our "modern concern for victims" is particularly cogent and relevant.
58-59. The Murders in the Rue Morgue; The Gold-Bug by Edgar Allan Poe
More Poe!
60. The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James
An awesome short tale.
61. The Book of Genesis by Robert Crumb
Oddly, my first time through the entire book; Crumb brings it to life.
62. On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
The tyranny of the majority revealed.
63. Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac
The Human Comedy in 19thC provincial France.
64. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
Groundbreaking, dense, slow-going.
65. An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen
Connecting the dots between the "liberal" press, entrenched elites, and mob rule.
66-67. The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar; The Imp of the Perverse by Edgar Allan Poe
A good way to end a ghoulish year.
Other (8)
There were a number of books that I started but did not complete in 2016. If they were included in the overall count I could perhaps claim to have met my goal. With a few notable exceptions, most of these did not really hold my interest. A few others are just long-term projects.
68-70. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
71. Either/Or, Part 1 by Søren Kierkegaard
72. Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden by Randall Jarrell
73. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft
74. Selected Poems by W. H. Auden
75. The Complete Works by Michel de Montaigne
January (6)
The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov
Not his strongest effort but great for chess fans.
2. Olives by A. E. Stallings
A nice book of formal poetry by one of my favorite contemporary poets.
3. Ballistics by Billy Collins
Amusing fluff.
4. Cheating at Canasta by William Trevor
Skillful but I expected more ... New Yorker fare.
5. Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition edited by Robert Pinsky
Really?
6. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Like the movie, this book haunts me. Worthy of a full review.
February (2)
7. The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Some great shorter fiction, recommended for any fan.
8. As You Like It by William Shakespeare
Not his greatest but still wonderful. I am on a quest to read all of the Bard (and to see them performed).
March (3)
9. The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-up, & the Expose by David Ray Griffin
If you still believe the official fairy tale, read this. Meticulous and credible.
10. Richard III by William Shakespeare
Superb. Devastating. Up there.
11. Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue by Sam Harris
Irritating. Sam Harris is brilliant but so misguided.
April (2)
12. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass
Somewhat repetitious but one of the best books on the assassination. Again, it's time for the truth.
13. War is a Racket by Smedley D. Butler
Awesome, short book that basically says it all - they are in it for the money!
May (4)
14. The Nigger of the Narcissus by Joseph Conrad
I love Conrad. Worthy of a full review.
15. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
A must-read. Early days of Vietnam and the CIA. Historical fiction of the highest order.
16. Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill
Somehow, I didn't connect, and that's a shame.
17. Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws are Failing Us by Emily Horowitz
Uneven, but scholarly. Politicians should read it, but they won't.
June (3)
18. State of Fear by Michael Crichton
Not good, but his point is well taken - Climate Change a hoax? I think so!
19. Redeployment by Phil Klay
Excellent. Iraq War short stories that pack a gut-punch.
20. Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman
Words can't do this justice. The nightmare of Stalin. Needs a full review.
July (4)
21. The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
Huge. A very funny central character who bears uncanny resemblance to a Donald Trump of Victorian London.
22. Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare
OMG. This is awesome. Read it! I saw it performed in Central Park!
23. The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
Early Bard. Terrific, of course.
24. The Money Mafia: A World In Crisis by Paul Hellyer
I respect the author and some of his ideas but this is not really a very good book.
August (6)
25. Amerika by Franz Kafka
Not up to The Trial or The Castle but still off the charts great. Will review.
26. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
So it goes. See the full review, above.
27. The Phoenix Program: America's Use of Terror in Vietnam by Douglas Valentine
And you thought Hitler and Stalin were bad. ISIS? How about the CIA? Torture, assassination, etc. Made in America, exported to the World.
28. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Tough book - obviously, end of the world stuff. Parts are annoying, but it packs a punch. Makes me want to buy a gun and a year's supply of canned beans.
29. Homage to Robert Frost by Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott
Where else do you get essays of three Nobel winning poets on a great poet? Brodsky's is the highlight.
30. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
A gift. Clever and amusing but ultimately, a nonsensical mess. Death by Vogon poetry.
September (9)
31. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
Penetrating and entertaining look at the financial collapse of 2007-8. Better than the film.
32. & 33. 1 and 2 Samuel: King James Bible
David and Goliath. The violent roots of religion and culture laid bare.
34. The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon
Superb, noir Cold War thriller with relevance. Unique and disturbing on so many levels.
35. Bonjour tristesse by Françoise Sagan
Hello sadness. A remarkable psychological dissection of mimetic jealousy from the adolescent lens.
36. Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi
Levi's evocative, insightful memoir of his year as a political prisoner, marooned in a backward village in Fascist Italy.
37. Goldfinger by Ian Fleming
Bond. James Bond. A classic of the genre - fun to re-read after all these years.
38. Mrs. Warren's Profession by Bernard Shaw
A shocker in it's time, performances were banned in Victorian Britain due to Shaw's spotlighting issues of incest and prostitution. Still pertinent.
39. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald
One of the most important books of our time. Reads like a cross between a thriller and a philosophical treatise on privacy. Big Brother is watching you - for real!
October (7)
40. Renascence and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay
One of the great poems by a 19-year old; otherwise a mixed bag. Includes the great sonnet: "If I should learn, in some quite casual way".
41. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
Many-layered and for the most part fascinating, brief tales.
42. The Holy Terrors by Jean Cocteau
Strange, evocative, incomprehensible, thankfully short.
43. Hillary the Other Woman: A Political Memoir by Dolly Kyle
Saw the author on Infowars. While much of this rings true, the sad fact is that it is poorly organized and without documentation. Still, there is a lot to chew on about this woman Hillary and her rapist co-president husband; I hope I can forget about them both forever after November 8th.
44. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
SF owes it all to this book. A grim vision of the future.
45. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges
Superb memoir of a war correspondent in 1980s-90s El Salvador, Bosnia, Kuwait, and elsewhere, and his reflections on the fatal attraction of mass slaughter.
46. King Lear by William Shakespeare
The ultimate internecine family feud ... biblical.
November (10)
47. The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis
Lewis was a prophet. Go to any University or just turn on the tube ... the dictatorship of the Conditioners is upon us.
48. Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Hadn't read since High School ... needs some deep analysis. Where the Crisis of Degree may lead.
49. An Iliad by Lisa Peterson
I saw a local production in Philadelphia. An interesting attempt to bring modern relevance to Homer.
50. Simone Weil's The Iliad or The Poem of Force: A Critical Edition by Simone Weil, James P. Holoka (translator)
Along my recent themes of war, tragedy, and myth, this is a profound essay that fundamentally changed my views, not only of Homer, but also the relationship of Rome and the Old and New Testaments to collective violence.
51. The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State by Jacob Hornberger
Preaching to the choir ... unfortunately, a somewhat repetitive pamphlet that can't do full justice to the topic.
52 - 56. The Cask of Amontillado; The Tell-Tale Heart; The Black Cat; The Fall of the House of Usher; and The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
Admittedly cheating by counting each story, but hey, this is catch-up! All are true classics; first reading of Poe since school days.
December (11)
57. I See Satan Fall Like Lighting by René Girard
My second time through; Girard's genius see's through the devil. Girard's commentary on our "modern concern for victims" is particularly cogent and relevant.
58-59. The Murders in the Rue Morgue; The Gold-Bug by Edgar Allan Poe
More Poe!
60. The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James
An awesome short tale.
61. The Book of Genesis by Robert Crumb
Oddly, my first time through the entire book; Crumb brings it to life.
62. On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
The tyranny of the majority revealed.
63. Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac
The Human Comedy in 19thC provincial France.
64. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
Groundbreaking, dense, slow-going.
65. An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen
Connecting the dots between the "liberal" press, entrenched elites, and mob rule.
66-67. The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar; The Imp of the Perverse by Edgar Allan Poe
A good way to end a ghoulish year.
Other (8)
There were a number of books that I started but did not complete in 2016. If they were included in the overall count I could perhaps claim to have met my goal. With a few notable exceptions, most of these did not really hold my interest. A few others are just long-term projects.
68-70. Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
71. Either/Or, Part 1 by Søren Kierkegaard
72. Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden by Randall Jarrell
73. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H. P. Lovecraft
74. Selected Poems by W. H. Auden
75. The Complete Works by Michel de Montaigne
12PaulCranswick
>10 SCPeterson: I did an alternative Nobel list on my thread a couple of years ago now and should go and find it. I remember Strindberg, Greene, Fuentes, Borges and Zola were on it. To be fair to the committee Proust and Kafka died young and much of their work was canonised after their passing.
>11 SCPeterson: Some good stuff there - Greene and Grossman are favourites.
>11 SCPeterson: Some good stuff there - Greene and Grossman are favourites.
13SCPeterson
It's been a dark year. After The Road I may be hitting rock bottom. Too much death and destruction. Maybe I need to read something funny - actually, Slaughterhouse-Five was funny. No humor, though, in The Road. Completely grim, but what do you expect for a novel about survivors of nuclear winter trudging down a road to nowhere? I have to admit it made me cry. There is kind of, just kind of, a light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe humanity is not totally, entirely depraved. There are "good guys" out there who won't eat you just because there are no groceries and all the plants and animals are dead. But is that (this) a world worth living for? The message seems to be that you just have to keep trying. Don't give up! But I'm not sure why.
14SCPeterson
As a postscript to my initial review/reaction to The Road, I watched the film last night. And it occurred to me that what this book is "about" is the survival of the human spirit under the most dire circumstances. Indeed, when the man is dying, he tells his son that he can't come with him because the boy has to "carry the fire", and when the boy asks if it is real, the man says unambiguously that "It's inside you". At the end, the question the boy has for the stranger who adopts him is "Are you carrying the fire"?
Thus, the story is remindful of the work of the holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Victor E. Frankl, most notably Man's Search for Meaning. In the concentration camps, Frankl discovered that those who survived had something to hold onto that gave their life meaning, often the presence or memory of a loved one. "The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved." In The Road, the man's love for his son perfectly illustrates this concept. And "carrying the fire" is how human beings bear suffering, even under the complete collapse of civilization; in the words of Frankl, it is the "spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful."
So I thank The Road for reminding me of this great insight, and so powerfully portraying it.
Thus, the story is remindful of the work of the holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Victor E. Frankl, most notably Man's Search for Meaning. In the concentration camps, Frankl discovered that those who survived had something to hold onto that gave their life meaning, often the presence or memory of a loved one. "The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved." In The Road, the man's love for his son perfectly illustrates this concept. And "carrying the fire" is how human beings bear suffering, even under the complete collapse of civilization; in the words of Frankl, it is the "spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away - that makes life meaningful and purposeful."
So I thank The Road for reminding me of this great insight, and so powerfully portraying it.
15SCPeterson
In a life spanning 73 years, the Italian Carlo Levi was an author, artist, medical doctor, and politician. For a period under Mussolini prior to WWII, he was also a political prisoner confined to a small backward village in southern Italy, which he writes about indelibly in Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year. Full of memorable characters and events, vividly portrayed, Levi chronicles a universe that time had already forgotten, a dirt-poor world of moral innocence, and despite its proximity to Rome, hardly touched by Christianity or modern Western Civilization. The peasants of Aliano (fictionally referred to as "Gagliano" in the book) are essentially pagans, with primitive belief systems based on magic, superstition, and witchcraft. Their institutions are all failed: schools, medicine, religion, nothing operates properly and their resentments are kept in check only through their utter powerlessness. Their common bond is hatred of the government, and of each other. Levi's message is that such a failed social system cannot be resurrected by the State, unless the peasants "feel they have some share". This is a timeless message that can be applied anywhere and at any period, and as I read I couldn't help think of our own society, either failing or surely on life support, where masses of people deify the State in the same way that most of Italian society deified Fascism in Levi's time, yet to such little effect for the disenfranchised many. Levi was able to escape his confinement and lived to write about it in a truly wonderful, poetic memoir that beautifully captures a lost era and a way of life. While it may not give hope to our common salvation, it does inspire belief in the sanctity of the individual human being, and the story of Levi's year is indeed a testament to the survival of the human spirit under privation, duress, loneliness, and political repression.
