Gravity's Rainbow was a "Bucket List Book" for me. We've all got "To Read" lists that are far too long, but even on those lists some of the books stand out. I've always been pretty good about working my way through them (I've loved the challenge ever since I took a Great Books class in college), but somehow even among the Bucket List Books, Gravity's Rainbow stood out. Maybe because I adore Pynchon, and this is considered his masterpiece. Maybe because it's notoriously difficult. Whatever the case, it was one of the biggies on my Book Reading Bucket List. And now, I'm glad I've read it. Even if I never really get it all.
I started Gravity's Rainbow in December. I finally finished Sunday night. 8 months it took me. Part of that was a function of some insanity in my life, but that added a couple months at most. Mostly it was that there were many days when I didn't pick it up at all, or when I did I would only read a page or two. I've had this experience with Pynchon before - when I read Against The Day - and like in that instance, finishing the book didn't necessarily leave me with an immediate sense of accomplishment. But I hope that experience proves instructive in a more important way.
When I read Against The Day I frequently felt lost as I read through it. Pynchon's prose can be extremely difficult. He gets lost in asides and transitions, and asides and transitions become the main story, main characters fade entirely from the story, minor characters jump back into essential roles, etc. I read ATD alone, and it was probably the biggest reading challenge I've ever faced. When I was done, I wasn't sure what I'd just finished. But as time passed, more and more things started to click. I feel like I really "get" ATD now. I don't feel that way about Gravity's Rainbow, but maybe in a few months I will. It's also worth saying that, having read both Against The Day and Gravity's Rainbow, that, right now at least, I feel like Against The Day is the better of the two. Gravity's Rainbow was Pynchon's first masterpiece, perhaps, but not his greatest. Maybe I'll feel differently, eventually, when I've had some time to sit with GR.
As for the content itself... My initial thoughts probably aren't worth much. I'm stunned. The ending was anti-climactic. My favorite character was a fairly minor person, I suppose. The protagonist, and indeed, the book, seemed to lack direction. A lot of that was on purpose, but it didn't change the maddening nature of the fact. I want to hear what others have to say about it. I want to sit down and talk about it. I feel like there's so much to be unpacked. It's a rare thing to read a book so dense, that so begs for conversation. I've got several dozen pages dog-eared to comment on. If others are willing, I'd be happy to jot down more specific thoughts in the comments.
For now, let me just say: I'm done. It is good to be done. It is a very good thing to be done with a Bucket List book.
So, how about it citizens? What have you been reading? What are your Bucket List books? Who wants to actually talk about Gravity's Rainbow? Pepper and DG (and others), are you ready for Pale Fire?
I was really underwhelmed by GR. Much like Philosofer, it was a book that I had on my bucket list, I had even tried to read it once before (in college, before I had any Pynchon experience - it didn't go well).
This time it took me 2.5 months to read (February through mid-April). For me, that's a long time to spend with one book, and I think that was an issue. I like to get sucked into a book and knock out bunches of pages at once, the flow of a book is important to my enjoyment of a book, I think. As Philo said above, all the asides and digressions and just the density of GR made it almost impossible to consume this in those big immersive chunks. The parts that I enjoyed the most were the parts where I could read through a 40 or 50 page bit without stopping.
For now, I'll finish this LTE by echoing Philo again. My favorite character, Pirate Prentice, was incredibly minor in terms of words devoted to him, but seemed to do a lot of the work that moved the plot forward.
It was Roger Mexico for me, but I definitely wanted to see more of Pirate Prentice too.
Slothrop as rocket man, then in a pig's suit.
Those were quite enjoyable. Also, parts of the book where you could get through more than a couple pages at a time.
Re: Pale Fire
Ready when everyone else is. I have it at the university library, so I can pick it up easily.
Pepper? NBB? Want to do it this month?
I just bought Pale Fire. As soon as I slog thru the rest of Ulysses, I'm on it. A huge VN fan.
I can't get it until next week, but if you and NBB are both gung ho for August, I'll give it a shot. (I thought you were going to mention pie, though!)
Bucket List Books are kind of what I decided to try this year with my "one big book per month" goal. So far I've finished 6 books off my list in 7 months, so I'm more or less on track.
Recently:
Seiobo There Below by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
This might be my favorite book of all time. It was incredible. No overall plot, it's almost a collection of stories sharing a theme. Almost every chapter is gorgeous and smart and powerful. There were so many good ones, I stopped keeping track of the chapters that made me close the book and take a minute to just soak them in. They were numbered in the Fibonacci sequence, which gave a little bit of a sense of everything adding together as the book went on. On top of all that were the 20 page sentences that occasionally crop up and just propel you through a chapter without taking a breath.
The book is about art; how we experience it, how we create it, how we preserve it, and mostly why we make it. At the same time, this book is art.
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
The first section of this book, told through the eyes of a young poet in Mexico City who falls in with the visceral realist poetry movement, is dynamite. The movement upends the kids life and he loves most every minute of it.
The second and third sections end up being a much more fractured set of narratives that don't have the same joy, indeed they seem to follow the decline of the founders of the visceral realist movement, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. The first time I picked this up, I struggled into the second section and couldn't finish it. This time it wasn't as much of a problem for me, but I still enjoyed that first youthfully exuberant section the most of the three.
That's not to say that the other sections were poor. They very much aren't, and I thought the ending was a powerful and very fitting conclusion to a very lengthy, very sprawling novel. Not an easy thing to do.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Another conceptual book, Marco Polo (or at least the idea of Marco Polo) relates short vignettes that describe various cities (or at least the ideas of these theoretical cities) to Kublai Khan (or the idea of Kublai Khan, you get the point). No linear plot here, but I like the way Calvino tackled a novel of ideas. This one didn't stay with me a whole lot once I finished it, but it was a very interesting read. I preferred "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler".
And finally, other books I've read since the last of these First Monday posts.
Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball
I love Jesse Ball. This is the story of a Japanese man who agrees to confess to a crime he didn't commit, and then refuses to speak to anyone around him. It ends up being an affecting story about communication that stuck with me a lot more than I thought it would when I finished it.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and The Looking Glass War by John LeCarre
Cold War paranoia! These were fun. I used to read a lot of spy novels back in high school, so it was nice to jump back into these. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was the better of the two, I'd like to read one where Smiley takes a more central role.
Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer and The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised Men by Gabriel Blackwell
These are some pretty deep meta-fiction novels. To the point that Blackwell is listed as an editor, not the author. Shadow Man is supposedly the story of Sam Spade's partner in The Maltese Falcon, and how he survived those events and followed the falcon as a private eye. Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and a bunch of others make appearances. I think this book undoubtedly succeeds at what it attempts to do. It takes classic noir and extends the stories and authors of the genre until they fray and start to unweave. It asks a lot of the reader, I wish that I had a little more inkling of that before I started. As it was, I'm positive I didn't get everything out of this book.
Natural Dissolution takes that same framework and applies it to Lovecraft. Blackwell (now a character in his own book) finds H.P. Lovecraft's last letter, written as he lays dying of an enormous tumor in his gut. It's addressed to a Gabriel Blackwell that doesn't seem to exist. Of course it contains a lot of Lovecraftian horror, which starts to affect Blackwell (the one that does exist). Again, it takes a genre, horror, and pulls at it until it starts to break down. I enjoyed this one more, partly because I had some idea of what was coming. Both books ended up being about the writing and storytelling process more than anything else. Interesting reads.
Tigerman by Nick Harkaway
This was one of those "I can probably finish this tonight" reads. Kept my attention throughout. An aging British sergeant is posted on an island that's becoming an environmental hazard requiring the attention of the global community. As governments try to decide how to contain the island, they simultaneously pull back from any responsibility for it and so the island ends up in a place where authority is something that's hard to determine. If that sounds like a metaphor for certain current diplomatic hot-spots, that's probably not an accident. Still the story doesn't hit anyone over the head with preachy truths, as the sergeant says "This is the world, now I'm in it."
Round House by Louise Erdrich
A good book that seemed almost predictable. Not in a bad way, but because I started to know the characters so well, that there was nothing else that they could have done in the situation. A Native American teenager has to navigate a brutal crime perpetrated against his mother and his desire for justice, vengeance, and healing for his family.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
I don't like Neil Gaiman as much as I feel like I should. This was no exception.
SCARECRONE by Melissa Broder
Poetry. I really enjoyed it. I think one of the shortest poems in the book, really sums up a lot of the themes nicely.
Tour
My heart has nine chambers.
One of them contains
a mirror. The other eight
I do not remember
ever being inside.
The voice throughout is selfish and internal (almost self-absorbed - once she finds a mirror to look at herself, why explore farther?), but still beautiful.
I'd like to read one where Smiley takes a more central role.
You should probably read the Smiley trilogy then. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is one of my favorite books of all time. The Honorable Schoolboy doesn't feature him too heavily, but gives a very in-depth look at a single mission, and it's quite engaging. Smiley's People lacks the same stakes as the first two, but serves as a nice final note in the series.
TTSS was on my list, but it wasn't available at the bookstore (the two I read I got for a combined sum of 75 cents).
Can't complain about that. Especially since The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is considered one of his masterpieces; it really captures a lot of what LeCarre has to say about the evil of using people as means, which is probably the running theme of his work.
Philo made me read TTSS. Very much enjoyed it.
That guy is so bossy. 😉
He just does what's best for us.
Near the top of my list as well.
I really need to read TTSS again. I read it in high school and have enjoyed some of le Carré's other work since then, but I feel like I should revisit the book after watching the movie (underrated, in my book) when it was out. Fortunately, it seems like TTSS is available in every used book store I've ever browsed.
In the last month...
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth - amusing but rambling, but oh the mother is so my mother-in-law that it's terrifying (and motivated me to write a Survivor entry in Roth's style that is 100% based on my visit down there in June); I thought the final third was pretty unfulfilling
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose - a little too "cute" at times; the story is very interesting and the research is pretty good, but it was very Spielbergian at times in a winking, aren't-I-so-smart style of narration
Zealot by Reza Aslan - phenomenal book, I took several courses covering this topic in college so I had a lot of prior experience placing Jesus into a historical context, but Aslan makes the story extremely accessible. Very highly recommended!
I'm just finishing up The Human Stain by Philip Roth because I found it while we were cleaning out for the nursery and have no idea how it made its way into the house. Not as good as Portnoy's, but Roth still makes some very memorable characters
I really don't like Stephen Ambrose's stuff. As you said, it's too much "Look how clever I am"
Re: Undaunted Courage - I think your assessment is pretty accurate, but perhaps because of the topic/story - as you alluded to - I enjoyed this one. In general, I give Ambrose a pass because his stuff is pretty accessible, i.e., I could give it to a casual reader (like my 13-year-old nephew) and they'll probably appreciate it...even though it's "History."
I thought Zealot seemed interesting. I'll have to seek that one out.
It's well worth a read. Plus, it's short and sweet and can be digested in a day or two.
Wholeheartedly endorse Zealot too. Undaunted Courage is the only Ambrose book I've read so I don't have a whole lot of opinions on him as an author. UC was a great ripping yarn IMHO however.
Yup. Downloaded the library e-version late last night, finished this afternoon.
As for bucket list books, I have no idea what books should be on it. The only Pynchon I've read is Lot 49 and it didn't inspire me to go try more.
Yeah, but you also hated Dostoevsky.
I didn't hate Dostoevsky, but it wasn't nearly as good as either Anna Karenina or War and Peace.
Both of which are on my bucket list.
Read Anna Karenina pronto! It's soooooooooo good.
I finished three books while I was in Michigan at the end of June.
The Craft of Intelligence - by Allen Dulles - I had been working on this one on-and-off for awhile. It was more interesting as an insight into the mindset of someone at the highest levels of the US government during the Cold War than an actual spy manual. Man, people just did not like Communists, did they?
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy - My third experience with McCarthy's work. I saw, then went back and read, No Country for Old Men and watched The Road. This was bleaker than either of those. It was well written with an interesting concept. I'm still not a fan of his punctuation style though.
90% Of Everything - by Rose George. The subtitle on this one is "Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate " It was a really interesting look at the way the world moves stuff around. A lot of the stuff reminded me of season 2 of "The Wire". Simon & co did a really good job researching the world of the docks/shipping.
I almost put down Blood Meridian. It was so unrelentingly violent for the first 100 pages that I set it down for two weeks and had a mental argument with myself about whether I should keep going. I'm glad I finished it, McCarthy does biblical language really really well, and the judge is a fantastic character.
and watched The Road. This was bleaker than either of those
The Road was the most soul-sucking thing I have ever read. Saramago's Blindness is #2. I wish I could unread both of them.
The Road was the first thing I read on my Kindle, and I tore through it at my mother-in-law's in the space of a day or so. I have a hard time imagining something much more bleak that that book, and that's having read a fair amount of Soviet-era Russian literature.
Yeah, it didn't take me more than two days to read it. It's amazingly engrossing- I just kept going, hoping something would happen that wasn't completely depressing.
Philo, congrats on finishing G.R., a marathon of letters.
When I started reading it, I was constantly looking up new words and place names, like that was supposed to somehow matter. I gave up on that around page 10 and never looked back.
I do feel like I need to read something else by Pynchon to better feel out if 1) GR is truly a literary masterpiece, or 2) Pynchon was on some strong stuff when he wrote it. Ulysses has a very similar stream of consciousness to it. (On page 345, past the halfway point!).
The stream of consciousness stuff is what always throws me with Pynchon. I recommend all of The Crying of Lot 49, V., and Against The Day. TCOL49 is shortest, and most accessible. V. is an easier version of Gravity's Rainbow, with a bit more direction. Against The Day is more sprawling than GR, but had more points where you could chew through pages at a time, and I really, really loved it, in retrospect.
I finished the Dallek LBJ series and, based on FB discussion with some WGOMers, spent the entirety of the second book regretting that I went with Dallek instead of Caro. I'll have to come back to that. I will say that Dallek's first volume held my interest for longer periods of time, but part of that is LBJ just became less likeable as he gained more power.
I am awaiting the shipment of Before the Storm and Nixonland, DP and Free's other recommendations, which were not available at my library.
I also read A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway and reread Nine Innings by Daniel Okrent.
I think I've reread Nine Innings two or three times. Definitely a great baseball book.
One of my favorite baseball books. I would think it would appeal to a lot of citizens, given that Okrent essentially uses a meaningless June game to flesh out the appeal of baseball, but he avoids the sappiness that can infect baseball writing
I also found a ticket stub -June 15, 2003 vs Arizona - that I used as a bookmark the first time through.
AFTA was a good read, very Hemingway-esque (like that?).
Although I couldn't figure out how all of these banks would keep forwarding him money without some form of collateral.
We stayed in that Hotel on Lago Maggiore (Grand Hotel Des Iles Borromes) a couple years ago - nice digs.
I finished Tony Judt's Thinking the Twentieth Century, which had been my daily bus read. Judt co-wrote the book with Tim Snyder while fighting a losing battle with ALS. The book is simply fantastic. There are parts I don't agree with Judt on, where I think he overextends himself, or where I think he's a bit myopic, but overall it's a fantastic inquiry and meditation on the major currents of political thought, political economy, and twentieth century history. It gets my highest recommendation.
Not sure if I mentioned the recent cycle of poetry I read, but I received some good recommendations from a friend, including Mary Oliver's American Primitive, Jaswinder Bolina's Phantom Camera, and Judy Jordan's Carolina Ghost Woods. American Primitive, was my run-away favorite, but all of them were pretty good.
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt: Arg, I crashed and burned; I got through the first 100 or so pages before I had to return it to the library. Fortunately my mom bought it. She finished last night, so now I can start up again.
Smile by Raina Telgemeier: middle grade graphic novel memoir. This is really well done. On the surface, it’s the story of a girl in middle school/junior high who falls and knocks out her two front teeth. A period of lengthy (and sometimes bloody and painful) orthodontic work follows as she tries to navigate the normal challenges of adolescence. In the end, it’s about accepting yourself and finding your tribe.
Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword by Berry Deutch: middle grade graphic novel. A strange tale, but strange in a good way. The story takes place in a rural orthodox Jewish community. Mirka is 11 years old and is a bit of a rebel; she keeps a book of stories about monsters hidden under her bed. She comes across a talking pig and while they first fight bitterly, they eventually become friends (of sorts) when she saves him from some bullies. This leads her to a quest for a sword, which she will win if she can defeat a troll. The battle? Knitting a sweater in a single night. All the weirdness really kept me engaged.
Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures by Kate DiCamillo: middle grade novel. Holy bagumba! This is a fantastic book—probably the best middle grade novel I’ve read since becoming an adult. DiCamillo won the 2013 Newbery medal for this book, and deservedly so. The novel opens with a squirrel getting sucked up into a runaway vacuum, a process that confers it with superpowers. Ridiculous adventures ensue, but underneath the novel has a lot of heart and the ending left me with tears in my eyes. One of the few novels I’ve ever started rereading the moment I finished it.
Those were my June books. I managed just a couple in July.
Guy in Real Life by Steve Brezenoff: young adult novel. This has some really interesting questions at its center, but I felt like they weren’t sufficiently explored. Lesh Tungsten (what a name!) develops a crush on the angelic Svetlana Allegheny, a senior at the high school where he is a sophomore. Lesh is grounded and in the evenings starts play a MMORPG in which he starts playing the character “Svvetlana.” Late in the book, the real Svetlana finds out about this and asks the critical question: “Do you want to be with me or do you want to be me?” Unfortunately, the book just scratches the surface of all sorts of interesting questions about gender roles—both in real life and online.
Landline by Rainbow Rowell: adult novel. Another one that didn’t sufficiently delve into the questions it raised. This one is about a woman who is almost 40, works as a television writer, and has two young daughters and a husband who stays at home with them. She has the chance at a big break in her career, but it involves her staying in LA over Christmas to work on some scripts instead of going to Omaha with her family to see her husband's parents. So the whole set-up is all about how she's going to prioritize a demanding job and her family (especially her relationship with her husband). The gimmick is that the landline at her parents house ends up opening some sort of portal in time that allows her to talk to her husband back when they were both in college and on the cusp of getting engaged.
Tried to think of some other bucket list books last night.
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
James Joyce - Ulysses
Cervantes - Don Quixote
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris or maybe His Master's Voice
Walter Miller - Canticle for Leibowitz
I'm sure there's more.
Frankenstein is a great book and highly recommended. Also if you're going that route, Bram Stoker's Dracula is pretty damn good too. Very creepy.
Maybe it's because I've read a ton of books that borrowed from Miller's work, but Canticle didn't do that much for me. I'd hate to say it hasn't aged well, but I think that's my main complaint.
Frankenstein kicks ass, though.
Huh. I re-read it last year and continue to be impressed.
Frankenstein gets a double recommendation from me. I spent far too much time on that book and the series of Frankenstein films for a course in college. I also recommend watching Gods And Monsters.
Don Quixote was excellent.
Ulysses - I go back and forth on this one. I'm just not that interested in it. I like other great books though, so maybe I should be? But I'm just not. I don't really know too many people who actually recommend it beyond the "it's great literature" thing. Except for one guy. And he's the guy who recommends Pynchon and such too... So I don't know. For me, it stays as a "maybe" for now.
I will echo all the love for Frankenstein. That story rules, and the story behind the story is even more impressive.
Dido. I also thought Dracula was great when I read it as a teen. Have never re-read either, so don't know how they would play with adult me.
Joyce (other than Portrait) seemed to be trying to hard to be "art." Ulysses and Dubliners, at least.
trying to hard to be "art."
That's OK by me.
I tried reading Ulysses right after college. I got through maybe 100 pages, and I don't recall it being tough reading, but I just felt like I was missing so much of whatever Joyce was trying to do that my reading was a little pointless. I'd like to go back to it someday, though.
Not bucket list, because vacation. But finished Guy Gavriel Kay's excellent Under Heaven (now have to lug a Big Book around in luggage) and something called Will Not Attend (assholish autobiographical essays by the screenwriter of Cabin Boy, as if that were an endorsement. Wife thought book was hysterical. I was underwhelmed).
I don't know if everyone is familiar with the 33-1/3 series which are basically short books (120-180 pages) on the making of a particular album.
The books are all over the place and are sometimes more about the author than the album subject matter. One example is the book I'm reading now about Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville. It' more about the place of women in "Indy Rock" than the making of the album. This is a big disappointment to me not only because I'm a dude, but also because through a mutual friend I was able to hang a little bit one summer with the Urge Overkill guys and their entourage, including a little sprite named Lizzy. It would have been interesting to me to see how those summer parties had a role in the songs on Exile.
I haven't been reading enough lately. The only book I've finished in the past few weeks was The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. It's about a dude who is obsessively devoted to Edgar Allen Poe, and his efforts to investigate the author's mysterious death. I didn't really enjoy it. I've heard that Pearl's other book The Dante Club is a lot better, but I don't know if I would even want to slog through another 300 pages of his writing.
I didn't particularly enjoy The Dante Club. It was a long time ago, so I don't remember anything in particular that bothered me about it, I just know that I was never tempted to read any of Pearl's other books.
Good to know. Now I won't feel guilty at all about skipping it.
Yeah, Mehworks.
Was looking up some book lists. Came across Modern Library's list. They also had a readers' list.
Top 10 from the Readers' list:
ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand
THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand
BATTLEFIELD EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
1984 by George Orwell
ANTHEM by Ayn Rand
WE THE LIVING by Ayn Rand
MISSION EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard
Hmm. Notice anything?
50% are women authors?
Something like that. I suppose more commentary gets into the Forbidden Zone.
40% are Ayn Rand and 30% are L. Ron Hubbard? No thanks.
Battlefield Earth is actually pretty entertaining. The novel, I mean.
Yeah, I did like Battlefield: Earth enough to try some of his other books, and I ended up wholly regretting that.
A few on my bucket list that haven't yet been mentioned:
John Dos Passos: U.S.A.
James Baldwin: The Fire Next Time
Italo Calvino: If On a Winter's Night a Traveler
Dalton Trumbo: Johnny Got His Gun
Wallace Stegner: Crossing to Safety
Gwendolyn Brooks: Maud Martha
Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems
Vasily Aksyonov: Generations of Winter
Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory
Haruki Murakami - 1Q84
Calvino is great. As mentioned above, I've now read two of his (Winter's Night and Invisible Cities) and enjoyed them both.
I have Murakami slotted for sometime later this year as well. The university library has 1Q84 and Kafka on the Shore (already read Wind-Up Bird Chronicle). Not sure which I will tackle just yet.
The mrs is about one hundred pages in to Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Says really interesting, but still no idea what it is about.
A lot of these I have never heard of - I will have to investigate.
Actual Bucket List Books for me:
Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
War And Peace - Tolstoy
The Sound And the Fury - Faulkner
100 Year Of Solitude - Garcia Marquez
The Idiot - Dostoevsky
Infinte Jest - DFW
Confederacy Of Dunces - Toole
I started but didn't finish Anna Karenina (entropy) and Confederacy of Dunces (intense dislike of the main character).
I read The Sound and the Fury in college and found it difficult. I'm not sure what I would think of it now when I have a bit more reading experience.
The Idiot is on my nightstand now, that will be next after Nabokov, it's my dad's favorite book of all time.
I really enjoyed Confederacy of Dunces, but I get a nice dose of the insanity of New Orleans a few times a year.
The Sound and the Fury was the rare book I tackled, got almost halfway through, and then gave up. I liked As I Lay Dying, but couldn't find TSatF accessible at all.
I started but have not finished A Confederacy of Dunces I didn't dislike the characters so much as find them (and the story) without allure. It's currently sitting on my bedside table...not sure if I'll ever finish it.
The Sound and the Fury was also a challenging college read, but going through it within the structure of coursework improved my comprehension but seemed to, somehow, detract from the substance? Not sure...
The Idiot is my 3rd favorite novel, after Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov. Then there's some other stuff, Camus, Hesse, Conrad.
Idiot was great.
I never got the hype about Dunces. Killing yourself does not elevate your work. It was entertaining, but not on any of my all-timer lists.
I read The Sound and the Fury in high school and loved it. (Suck it, DG!) (kidding) It was the first Faulkner I'd ever read and probably also the first stream-of-consciousness writing I'd encountered. It blew my mind. I did have a "cheat sheet" of sorts from my English teacher to help make sense of the sudden shifts in time within the narration.
Our class had been given a choice of several books, and I was one of the only students who chose this one. We had to do a project on our book, so another student and I composed some music--each of the major characters got their own piece. I know a cassette recording once existed, but I have no idea where it is now.
I'm not really one for bucket lists. But if I were to make a reading bucket list it would pretty much just be :
1) read more Dickens
2) finish Infinite Jest
The first one is far more likely to be accomplished than the second.
2) finish Infinite Jest
One of these days I'm going to finish that damned book.
Me too. My Kindle says I'm 7% of the way through, but that doesn't take into account the fact the footnotes I've read are at the back of the progress bar, so I have no idea how much I've actually read.
I'll throw in a vote for Midnight's Children - Rushdie.
Among the many Great Books read in college, that one stood out for me as a particularly enjoyable story. A bit of magical realism a la One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Ooh! I read the first half of that one! (said about almost all of the books from that class).
Yeah, I know owe Don Quixote and V (among others) another read just for having forced through them at the time while probably too tired to really absorb and enjoy. That and I somehow ended up with abriged versions of DQ and War and Peace.
Since my job is proofreading transcripts, I don't read much for my own pleasure. About the only reading I do, besides surfing online, is when I read to the boys at night. Right now we're reading Wings of Honor by Tom Willard, which is about the Tuskegee Airmen. It's a little slow on action and took a while to get to the actual flying of airplanes, etc., so I'm not sure how much they're getting out of it.
On the 4th of July, we happened upon a used bookstore having a $1 sale on everything in the store. I went to the fiction section for junior readers and found a couple books I read when I was young - The Wind in the Willows and The Yearling - and a couple books that I think they'll enjoy - Captains Courageous and The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. We'll probably read one of those books next, although the boys did ask to read The Lord of the Rings next. I'm afraid that is a little over their heads, especially Trey, who's 9, and we only have the first book in the series. I'll probably try to convince them to go through these books first before we tackle that one.
Willows, Yearling and Courageous are great books - excellent choices.
Perhaps start them off with The Hobbit? That's how I first got into Tolkien's world.
Naw. LotR is very doable for that age. It's an adventure story! Swords! Sorcery! Songs! Feasts!
But no kissing. 🙁 William Goldman probably was disappointed by it.
Yeah, I remember picking up The Hobbit in fifth grade.
That's when I read The Once And Future King. Also Pet Cemetery.
I think you mean "sematary"
No, wait, it was Pet Seminary.
My eight year old is working his way through David Copperfield this summer. He hasn't gotten far, but he's still at it after two months, which is saying something for this boy. I told him it was worth giving him $20 if he finished it.