ajm490's 75 book challenge

Well, last year for me was not so successful. I managed \ to complete only roughly half of the challenge (36 cover-to-cover, many more partial reads) but I plan on using the momentum gained from last year to continue reading and filling out the gaps in my classical and contemporary education alike.

Hopefully all of this will serve to chronicle my growth as reader, writer, analyst, person, &c., but perhaps it will simply be (like last year) yet another enumeration of my failures.

First read is 1) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. I don't feel like discussing it at the moment (I prefer to talk about classics more, simply because they invite discussion instead of leading the discussion themselves, as so many current novels and memoirs seem to do today), but I may edit this later with a more thorough analysis.

Hi, ajm, and nice to meet you. I think however many books you read &/or review can be considered quite an accomplishment. Not meeting an arbitrary goal in terms of numbers really doesn't seem like failure to me.

What sorts of books do you prefer reading?

Welcome to the group!

Hey ajm I'd agree with Muddy -- Great job reading last year. Hubby managed 3 :)

--Susan

2) Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. One long-ass motherfucking book. goddamn. I hated it from page 1-252, but on 253, my mindset flipped and I ended up loving it then and there, and our affair continued through the remainder of the narrative.

Most hate the epilogue, call it disjointed and too small to bring to close such a wondrous exploration of the mind. I say it is Dostoevsky's greatest accomplishment in the entirety of the novel.

May read more D. this year, if I can get through enough of my TBR pile.

LOL I'm glad you liked it after all that work!

3) King Lear by Shakespeare.

love shakespeare, good god it's like a drug. I found so many lovely quotations this time around, but then again, one could quote nearly any line from Shakespeare and have it be as beautiful. Lear is probably my favorite Shakespeare drama I've read thus far. It's fucking EPIC and yet it has so much insightfulness to offer on the nuances of madness and senility, and I loved the way the two plots--that of Lear & his daughters and Edmund the bastard son--were juxtaposed to shed some light on the concept of the outcast--be it the bastard unloved by his father or the king past his prime, living it a world not entirely our own.

"Ghosts are just shreds and fragments of other worlds" as Dostoevsky said.

King Lear is definitely amazing. I had a teacher in high school who believed that is was "the best thing ever written, and the best thing that ever will be written." I'm not sure if I would go that far, but it is a wonderful play.

I had the opportunity to see King Lear this summer at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. I stood in the "pit" where the peasants would have stood, and managed to secure a spot leaning right against the stage. It was probably the most sublime three hours of my life - being that close to the action was a totally different theatre experience from sitting in the rows. I was able to really see the emotion on the actors' faces, and feel the tension between the different characters. It was a superb show.

Nice observation regarding the role of the outcast. Another parallel can be made between Lear and Gloucester, both of whom place their trust in the wrong child, and suffer the consequences. Since Lear is the king, and Gloucester just a normal person, albeit of the upper class, Shakespeare portrays a situation that can happen to any level of society - making King Lear yet another example of a work that is universal and timeless.

Thanks for the insights, Cait86!

4) Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I looove Garcia Marquez. I only got through about half of OHYoS, but I hope to return to it sometime this year. Chronicle is a lot easier to understand, and I feel like Garcia Marquez triumphs in this small work as much as he does in his epics. The analysis of complicity was beautiful, if somewhat marred by the end (?...), and the view given on fate and how its perceived interpretation of it influences our choices, our complicity--overall quite a mind-expanding read.

Will read more Marquez.

>10 ajm490: sounds worth exploring.

5) Pendragon: The Pilgrims of Rayne

>10 ajm490: unfortunately I have to say Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the only one I've read by Marquez and I didn't care much for it...it's been standing in the way of me and other Marquez books as I keep thinking they'll be similar and I won't like them. :(

well you could definitely at least try One Hundred Years of Solitude. It's waaaay different. Although it's told in the oral tradition of Columbia, and I found it personally more difficult to get though.

6) No Exit For school. It was short, obviously, and very interesting. I don't really like plays though... They seem so compact as to have nothing to say, or in the case that they have quite a lot to say (like in this one), they profess too much in too small a space.

And yet I love Shakespeare. How strange.

Not that No Exit was bad, I just don't have feelings about it just now. Perhaps later.

7) Utopia

I read it because it's mentioned in perhaps my favorite film Ever After. Utopia was really soooo... socialist? It's great as an introduction of alternative ideas for society, but I don't really think it was a manual. I see where Danielle would find some satisfaction in it in the ideal of it--but there were slaves, which was the one really upsetting facet, and something I don't think Danielle would overlook considering that she was for all intents and purposes a slave.

8) The Alchemist.

Shittt. Life is NOT that simple. I feel that Coelho, in the words of his own character, "has a mania for simplifying things." It's written as a guide to life but is so removed from it that ultimately it's not applicable to anything. I think the fact that alchemy isn't really possible at all also sort of undermines his great metaphor, and makes it rather obvious that what he's talking about--Soul of the World, Personal Legends--have no objective basis and are just mind experiments whose results can't be generalized outside of the story alone.

Why so many people like this book. Don't even know.

LOL I totally, totally agree with your review of The Alchemist. I found it to be a complete waste of my time - yet I know people who love it. Oh well, different opinions are what make life interesting!

The only joy I got out of Coelho's books was being able to resell them at a good price.

The boy I fell in love with over the summer liked Coelho. His bookshelf was lined with books I hadn't read or that felt foreign to me. He had a whole shelf devoted to languages he wished to learn; he was fluent in three and nearly-so in as many more. It was lovely. Coelho was a stain upon it though.

Anyway, I went to Governor's School (of North Carolina) and it was a fascinating experience and perhaps the most enjoyable six weeks of my life. I brought more than 40 books anticipating plenty of free time to sit alone and read. Not so. I ended up only finishing one novel, and that was 9) East of Eden. I see why it's so loved, and in my own way I loved it, but as a narrator Steinbeck assumes he is the grand knower of everything. There is no element of uncertainty in his narration, and while it creates a lovely story, it remains something that feels inauthentic at its conclusion.

On top of that, I found the slow demise of Cathy Ames sort of silly, but the whole end felt like a slow sputtering out, so that may be intentional. He defended his choice of style, saying of the Genesis stories that every good story has the note of inevitability in it, or something similar. However, when Aron dies it feels inevitable but lacks any sort of tension or true sorrow. There's a price to be paid here, and I'm not sure resonance is the end-product.

So, mixed feelings. Steinbeck has a way with words and capturing the essences of things beyond my ability to do so at current, and to that extent, I admire him.

We were given a choice of three classes at GSE (Governor's School East), one a memoir writing class, another poetry-focused, and finally one about "storytelling" which covered a broad range of mediums and was most concerned with determining what could or could not be classified as a story. I chose that one. We read many short stories, and looked at a few movies, but on top of that we read graphic novels, which I will say definitively afterwards (i.e. now) ARE stories, and thus can be included here.

So.

10) V for Vendetta
11) Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
12) Blankets

and we were supposed to read Maus, but I minced my time on the Quad with friends instead, and feel my time much better spent.

I have many things to say about them, and I might, but not now. V was fascinating and much better than the movie. It made me feel, which I wasn't sure a graphic novel could do. Persepolis was a better film than comic, but the film made me believe in art again, and that the story would continue undiluted out of the tunnel of the post-modern and into the future. Blankets was beautiful and flawed and absolutely everyone should read it. It's massive but you can finish in a day. It's a lovely romance and a touching story with beautiful visual metaphors and fantastic clarity of execution.

That's all I want to say about them now. Eh.

Oh!

13) De Profundis. It became a sort of running joke at GSE that Oscar Wilde was my hero, but that's not terribly true. I admire the persona he created, the person he was at the society dinners and in conversation, but the real person is much more than that. He's a duality, there's the pomp but behind that resides its opposite. There's the social reformer and the anarchist. Woodcock said he had a "very deep cleft in his mental processes" and I agree. In De Profundis it becomes apparent. His torturous time spent in prison washed away much of his vanity and even more of his pretense, and left him just the shell of the person he was. It was sort of pitiable how concerned he was with finding a solution, and in finding it nowhere else, decided Jesus and Christianity would suffice. He was only human but I hate that about him.

I read De Profundis in an attempt to acquaint myself further with his life; I'm doing my IB Extended Essay on something related to him. So I'll probably reread Dorian Gray within the next week. The essay is due on the 27th and I'm much behind. I'm also reading Europe: In Our Time for a 20th Century History class I'll be taking when school recommences, and I'm finding it quite enjoyable. Also, I have to read Reading Lolita in Tehran and will probably do that soonish (?).

Just keeping in touch. You know.

14) Europe in Our Time: A History by Walter Laqueur. ugh, I hate that I read as slowly as I do. I'm sure people here could lay waste to this book in a few hours but it took me much concentrated effort from Sunday until today, which is ridiculous. And it was only like 600 pages long, albeit pleasantly stuffed with factual information.

The world is such a wonderful place. Reading of it always makes me sad though, because I recognize my personal smallness more so than within my own community. Laqueur is a level-headed, moderate historian, and he does well to not build his themes off of the information and not construe the world in any particular fashion. However, in shifting between such scales in time and place, sometimes the story feels a little disjointed and a bit lost.

Whatever, I guess you can't treat a history as a fiction. Oh well. On to Tehran again, which should be informative if not entertaining.

15) Reading Lolita in Tehran is thinly-veiled, self-indulgent literary criticism. Thus of course I loved it. It was interesting reading it so soon after Persepolis and it was rather fascinating to see the same images and motifs appearing through what are essentially very different tales. Iran was/is a beautiful-terrible place. I love reading about it.

I was worried this was going to be a lot like Bookseller of Kabul but Dr. Nafisi is a professor not a journalist, and she indulges the reader in a lot of pseudo-fiction tropes. Very beautiful metaphors, although she repeats them to the point of redundancy.

Overall a very pretty work that made me more interested in Nabokov and James and made me reevaluate and cherish even more Fitzgerald and Austen.

16) The Picture of Dorian Gray How lovely a work. I've read enough Wilde, and bits of biography and criticism to recognize that Wilde is not the man he purports to be. He is not Lord Henry. In fact, he has a social conscience and is in De Profundis rather conservative and clerical in his intentions, a far cry from the views he espouses here.

I'm writing a very long essay about hypocrisy in Dorian Gray for IB, and I'd post it here if it were allowed, but alas, it's not.

Thus I've been marking it up in red and reading it rather closely than I did the last time. Wilde is fantastic but flawed. He's certainly no hero, but he is fascinating.

I want to read Joyce. I want to read another Irishman haha. I want to read Ulysses but I know right now that isn't feasible. I'm working through Madame Bovary though, which is rather long, but it's also terribly easy reading. All 19th century stuff is. It was only the 20th when things became difficult to get through. Eh.

For English we're reading Michael Ondaatje which is terribly exciting, but not The English Patient which is strange. A memoir, instead that my teacher likes. Beloved and Hamlet too but I feel those are sort of lame books to read, lame in the sense of sterile, impotent. I wish my teachers would stretch themselves to more obscure Shakespeare. I'm indifferent to Morrison, but whatever.

Onward ho.

17. Running in the Family Mixed feelings. The book isn't well composed. The story makes little sense and runs in and out of a thousand tiny stories. However, I think that matches the author's intentions as far as form - a fluid, blurred memory.

Beautiful, beautiful images and metaphors. It took a life and made it more beautiful than perhaps it was, or showed me something that was all along so grand.

A lovely read, but lacking in impact.

18. The Lost Symbol Shit, but in the most exciting way.

The Bell Jar seminal, fantastic, with borders clearly defined.

The Reader Maybe it's just German lit, or maybe it's the whole trend towards the postmodern, but I feel as though these modern works are saying less in an attempt to mean more. They try to be clear and in so trying excise the thought patterns that bring us places. I'm not advocating stream-of-consciousness, because sometimes the mind doesn't deserve to be followed to the endpoints of its whims, but I think that we're leaving some things unexplored, and even if our answers seem nice, bow-tied and complete, they aren't really as striking as what has been written in bygone eras.

Rilke wrote fascinations. I don't even remember this writer's name.