Reading Challenge Episode 2: 30-21

So, following in my tradition of taking two weeks to come up with enough polysyllabic words with pseudo-intellectual overtones to fill a blog post, here we are with the second 'countdown' post at which we reach the outskirts of the top twenty. I will next, of course, be leaping backwards to maul the ten books I hated the most (so much hate), but until then we are still in classic countdown mode.

As a prelude to this post, I should warn you that a ridiculous number of absolutely iconic books make it into this group of ten, and if I'm ever going to attract haters to this blog it will be with this post. With that in mind, let us begin with a bit of seeming incongruity...

30) Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

Fie! What mockery is this? The master work of Salman Rushdie, hallowed author of Sam’s earliest adulthood, banish’d to the squalid throes of rank 30? A pox on thee!

Well, to explain this point, I have to resort to my old get-out-of-jail-free card, expectations. Those of you who read my 2011 movie countdown (hi, Mother) will remember that something with considerably low expectations going in is liable to climb modestly up in the rankings, while something with remarkably higher expectations is going to slip quite quickly and joltingly down the Vaseline-soaked ladder.  Midnight’s Children is the victim of such a cruel twist of fate.

As most of you will know, Rushdie was the first writer whom I truly loved; the first who got me reading avidly, who expanded my imagination and whose name I dropped at cocktail parties to try and blend in with the eastern-suburbs intelligentsia whom I call ‘people I’ve never met but will pretend to have for a blog post’. Starting out with the mind-blowingly brilliant Satanic Verses (yes, it’s brilliant; deal with it, Pakistan) I moved on to read every piece of Rushdie fiction out there, while always saving one work ‘til last – his master work, his ‘Booker of Booker’ winner that exemplifies everything he is as a writer.

I refer of course, to Midnight’s Children. But when I came to it, I found it fragmented, inconsistent and simply not all that absorbing. The magic realism that gripped my imagination and forced me to think of the bigger picture in The Satanic Verses and The Moor’s Last Sigh felt more like flights of fancy here. While there were moments of fluid narrative brilliance where my heart felt that he was building it to some sort of culmination that would blow my mind, the story would get derailed into a plot diversion that felt completely detaching. To me it didn’t seem to grow organically from one causal event to the next, but instead seemed more pastiche storytelling, all part of the same artwork but woven from completely different threads.

Overall, though, it wasn’t so much a bad read as that I’d built it up so much in my mind that it couldn’t possibly adhere to those expectations, whereas by stark contrast, Rushdie’s 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet sounded like a dreary, try-hard piece of easy-reading drivel, but instead floored me with a crunching, solid literary left hook and has become my favourite of all his works.

With all that in mind, I gained a renewed appreciation for the significance and analogical aspects of Midnight’s Children from reading Rushdie’s essays on the book in his collected volume Imagined Homelands; while I wasn’t unconscious of the parallel storytelling of Saleem and the foundation of the Indian nation while I read the novel, reading about it through Rushdie’s essays gave me a richer understanding, and it’s possible that a re-read would be on the cards – if I did that sort of thing.

29) Animal Farm – George Orwell

And now we head back to that well of books left unread for years. Animal Farm was a book that I studied briefly in year 8, and when I say ‘studied’ I mean I read it in one night to impress my year 8 English teacher. And when I say ‘impress’ it was more that she had declared the day before that some of us might be able to knock it over in one night, and by that stage in life I hadn’t yet learned that being precocious, diligent and self-aggrandising doesn’t actually make you the most popular kid in school.

So what can I say about Animal Farm that hasn’t already been written? Very little of course, except that I personally reacted to it no doubt the way everybody does. It’s a very clever analogy couched in childlike narrative overtones, as well as a frustrating, disempowering fable. Approaching it as a 13-year-old (again, as most of us probably did), it gets the world-weariness ticking over early, and it’s one of the few occasions when you start to clamour for a happy ending after all the injustice that’s been dealt.

Naturally, though, by the time you get around to watching the terrible animated movie version - where the animals triumphantly rise up ‘again’ and crush the fascist pigs with their hooves and shit – the cynicism is now deeply internalised, and the ‘happy ending’ you were ‘craving’ feels crudely tacked on, but the moral of that happy ending becomes part of a bigger cycle. Revolution follows revolution, and dictatorship will supplant dictatorship; it’s how it happens in the real world and it serves as a reminder of why Animal Farm with its annoyingly curt and ambiguous ending is a timeless parable. It has that effect.

28) A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

This is a funny one, particularly regarding its ranking. The thing is I do kind of like everything about A Clockwork Orange, but the problem is I unapologetically let my own personal feelings creep into my rankings here, and Kubrick’s 1971 film holds a far dearer place in my heart than Burgess’ book ever could. Moreover, the fact that Burgess famously derided Kubrick’s adaptation – and resented the fact that this book was regarded as the most laudable and memorable thing he achieved in his illustrious career – makes me kind of personally dislike the bloke.

He is, though, a bit of a genius – as manifested in the innovation in language and purity of political conscience that he exudes in these pages. The anti-Skinnerian agenda that Burgess considered so important is predominant here, with more emphasis on the character of Mr Alexander, the subversive counter-culture he leads and the political propaganda he writes (which explains the bizarre title), all of which is virtually expunged from the film adaptation.

What is also expunged – and rightfully so, in this case – is the final chapter of this book, the ‘epilogue’ if you will in which Alex encounters one of his droogs years later and finds that they have both been assimilated into society as regular functioning people. While I’ve read Burgess-apologists couching the final chapter in far more flattering philosophical terms, it didn’t work for me. It’s an odd, extraneous and simpering final chapter that I believe undermines the dystopian and satirical ramifications of the rest of the tale – it almost makes it a story of wayward youth which we all go through, and just puts too neat a bookmark on an otherwise nightmarish fable of dehumanising totalitarianism.

Good book, but I maintain that the film is at least as good, and with its artistic ambiguities is simply less self-righteous.

27) Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis

Okay, so now I really feel like I’m going against everything I’ve ever stood for. An Amis makes the list? And isn’t right at the bottom? Hold on, I even READ an Amis?

Yes, the sad truth is that, although Lucky Jim perpetuates the Amis mentality that being a lying, cheating, cynical shit is all you need to be the hero of a book - and that being a generally decent, hard-working human being will probably make you a boring, hypocritical pariah for all of the Amis family’s childish gripes about the world – it also happens to be one of the most light-hearted books on the whole list.

The message, if it exists, seems to be that the establishment are twats, and dishonesty and sabotage are the only ways to survive in the world. In spite of that, though, it’s all a bit of a caper in this book and the ambiguities of our protagonist are such that the vicissitudes of his fortune leading up to the climax are at least amusing. I read the final chapter as hopelessly sarcastic, which made the book as a whole rather enjoyable, and I think Mr. Amis would be pleased with that interpretation, even if it weren’t what he intended.

As far as narratives of lives spiralling out of control go though, this is my middle of the road rank. The concept is handled with far more seriousness and gravitas in John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samara and we will cross that particular book later in the list.

26) Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien

Aaha. Now then. Steady there, internet people. I’m not attacking your beliefs; please don’t hurl that flaming garbage at me. Oh, look, that’s just childish. I needed those eyeballs for seeing.

In defending the lowly position that this paragon of frighteningly obsessive fandom occupies on this list, I have two main points to make. The first is slightly vague, and it is that I’m not really the sort of person who falls in love with mythologies. I’m not a stranger to them; I’ve studied a fair amount of medieval literature and poetry, and I read a fair bit of the fantasy genre in my formative years.  It’s easy to get sucked in while reading but for me, it’s just as easy to drop as soon as I’m done. As much as I appreciate the vivid depth and clarity with which Tolkien constructs his world, and the entertaining, high-stakes narrative that he weaves into this fabric, it’s just not enough to capture my undying love and devotion.

The second point I need to make is that I, like many people (many? Maybe; some, anyway), watched the whole Peter Jackson trilogy without having touched a volume of Tolkien’s work. Indeed, I only picked up these books about three months ago for the first time, and only then because they were on this list and because I’d run out of other things that I could access to read. 

The fact is, I think Lord of the Rings suffers from the reader already being familiar with the plot. Aside from the above-mentioned vivid and deft weaving of mythology, the plot itself is very episodic, and knowing what happens next dulls the exhilaration to a large extent. It also, as I mentioned in my write-up of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, increases impatience to reach the next stage of narrative. So when you’re dealing with 1500-odd pages, that impatience is rife throughout. Even though there are more than a few changes made in adapting these to the screen, they really didn’t stand out to me as divergent enough to make the books special. I think they would, if you really get engaged with the mythology and/or characters (eg. and cases-in-point, Treebeard, Faramir), but I didn’t. The plot was what really drives these for me, and so being familiar with it just dulled the impact.

I understand though, fanboys and fangirls, that you will probably want to make no dulling of impact vis-à-vis my skull and sharp objects hurled in its direction, in retaliation for this write-up. Just relax, we’re all friends here.

25) Beloved – Toni Morrison

Dear me, a lot of beloved (no pun intended) icons of literature being splayed across this post, aren’t there?

I picked up Beloved at a second-hand book store, in the early stages of this actually being a reading challenge, because it seemed like something I wouldn’t read otherwise. It also happens to be on every single list of the “greatest books of any time period ever”, “greatest books by anyone who’s ever lived”, or “greatest things in history or ever likely to exist in the future” on the internet. So expectations were pretty high.

Half an annoyingly patchy and obfuscating book later, I was willing to give up the idiots who make lists on the internet (I mean, what sort of idiot...) for useless morons without an iota of taste. The funny thing about Beloved, though is that the final third or so of the book is absolutely outstanding. Emotionally powerful and jarring, with a profound Gothic undertone and a heartbreaking ambivalence for the flaws of humanity (I refuse to use the term ‘human condition’). But for the majority of the book, although one or two very vague hints are dropped of the ‘thing Sethe did’, it otherwise just seems like your run-of-the-mill narrative about the plight of Black people in society today – remember I mentioned there were more of these books to come.

What really could have helped my own engagement with the story (at least) is more foreshadowing of the chilling final act which is ultimately the unravelling of a mystery I really wasn’t full aware of. The gothic underpinnings of the denouement are not really present in the early stages, and the classic narrative technique of prolepsis is what would have grabbed and kept my attention from the first page. It’s possible that my attention span was just lacklustre at the time, and it’s highly likely that I will absolutely love this upon a re-reading, but first time around it was a fair amount of tedium interrupted by a huge dramatic wake-up call of a finale.

24) White Noise – Don DeLillo

This is the most recent title I read, indeed the one with which I finished the challenge. Before outlining my particular gripes (and gripes there shall be) with the book, I’ll explain why I chose to finish my reading challenge with this one. Don DeLillo is an author I consider myself fairly familiar with – at least relative to most of the other authors represented here – and as with other writers whose other works were familiar to me, it was disappointing to find a title I hadn’t read make TIME’s list, ahead of those I had read. But I felt safe in DeLillo’s hands, so decided to leave this one until last.

My gripe with this book, though, is not a gripe with the book at all but a gripe with the fact that this made the list ahead of Underworld. I know that for some reason people seem to remember White Noise as DeLillo’s big stand-out work, but aside from it being classically understated, reflective and existential as is his wont, it just didn’t have the depth of penetrating humanity or the breadth of vision vis-à-vis twentieth century America as the later, and lengthier, novel.

Perhaps I’m more drawn to New York-focussed narratives than the Midwest, or more sweeping visions than narrower, more personal ones, but in this meditative look at ageing, death, mental illness and natural disaster, I discovered little more than depression and anxious rumination. It had a lot to say about humanity and society, and yet didn’t say all that it could have. The small ‘every-town’ focus provides a little snapshot of Americana, but again, Underworld painted a wide-ranging and brilliantly colourful tableau vivant not only of America but of the whole western world during the cold war.

Having read DeLillo’s slightly amateurish, unfocussed first novel Americana, it’s obvious that White Noise marks the point where a brilliant writer finally found his voice. But while White Noise can be held up as this particular milestone, there is no demarcation in Underworld: it’s the unrivalled product of a prodigious artist who knows his craft backwards.

I apologise to White Noise (because one totally apologises to books) for using my entire write-up to sing the praises of its younger brother, but the bare truth is this: White Noise is a great book, but Underworld is twice the book it will ever be. To me, anyway.

23) Herzog – Saul Bellow

Oddly enough, following directly on from the last book read in my reading challenge, a ruminative meditation on mortality and mental deterioration by an Italian-or-Jewish demigod of American literature, we have this, the second-last book read in my reading challenge, a ruminative meditation on mortality and mental deterioration by... Yeah, you get the idea.

I’m not very familiar with Jewish literature (by ‘not very familiar’ I mean ‘completely, insultingly ignorant’), and so this was my first foray into the literary mores associated with the Jew in contemporary society. I don’t think that this opinion is anti-Semitic, although I’m wary of it sounding a bit like saying “all Asian people look alike”, to note that the tone and substance of Herzog reminded me quite a lot of a monologue from a Woody Allen film. There’s something very kindred about Bellow’s neurotic, introspective Moses Herzog as he stumbles, emotionally-stunted, from one failed relationship to the next, and say, Alvy Singer from Annie Hall.

There are of course, though, merits and idiosyncracies all of their own. The parallel tone that I noted to myself during the early stages disappeared quite quickly as Bellow’s narrative got far deeper into the business of self-analysis, and became far more of a parable of modern social isolation. While Herzog is neurotic, and comically unfortunate (like most Allen characters), his reflections on life, literature and politics are acute and finely honed, and his towering mental faculties make him seem at times more like a classic tragic hero than the everyday mensch he wants to be.

Bellow’s intellectualism is far more challenging and precarious than the light-hearted whimsy of Allen, and as such I don’t think he can be fully appreciated with just one read-through. What’s more, the story is pointedly, truncated, and the whole ‘tragic hero’ misfortune left me feeling a little emotionally hollow. Other than that it was highly engaging and enjoyable.

22) Possession – A.S. Byatt

If you are actually reading this, there’s quite a good chance that you are Catie, and therefore blindly incensed and rampaging about whatever space you are occupying, setting things on fire in extreme fury at Possession only being #22 on my list. For those of you who aren’t Catie, though (Hi, Mother), I will need to set the scene a little here.

Coupled with the fact that Possession was a recommendation from Catie (and the book she loves to toss out recommendations for) and loaned by her, it also happens to be a crystallisation in book form of everything she loves and holds dear: academia and literary scholasticism, archaeology, romantic poetry and fairytales. It would be like, for me, if Rushdie took the celebrity satire, magic realism, Gothic tropes, Loki and Georges Dumézil references from The Ground Beneath her Feet and supplanted it into a speculative dystopia. It’s so much Catie’s ideal book that as I read it, I kept thinking “Hmmm, that’s quite interesting. I bet Catie would love that bit.”

This, of course, dulled my own personal engagement with the novel, although only slightly. A lot of it comes down to personal preference.

I was really fascinated by this book and it’s really quite an astounding achievement, particularly with reference to what Bakhtin called heteroglossia, the ability of the author to adopt different types of speech for different characters or purposes. Given the span of time, narrative focus and literary forms that Byatt uses here, to be perfectly honest there were times when I really started to doubt whether I was reading fiction, or the actual documentation of a literary mystery being investigated and unravelled.

Astounding though the book is, it’s still chock full of poetry, fairytale imagery, and corpse exhumations (together at last), none of which are really the key elements that make me want to jump naked into a hot tub with a book – in the sexual -and-yet-completely-metaphorical sense.

21) Lord of the Flies – William Golding

So rounding out the non-top-20 portion of my reading challenge, we have the book that everyone in the world has read, and of which nobody needs to hear my opinion. Truth is, in spite of this book being quite a revelation to me when I read it some 8-to-15 years after the age when people usually read it (I was roughly 26/27), I’m still a bit surprised at how high it is on the list.

It’s a rough read for the most part, holding up an uncomfortably dark-side mirror to ourselves and cast in the shadow of innocent unfortunate youth. As a whole it doesn’t really leave you feeling like hugging random strangers on the street, or donating half your life savings to UNICEF.

It does, though, keep you reading in spite of the uncomfortable subject matter, and contains so much iconic imagery there’s no need to repeat here. I’m not averse to a little bit of discomfort in reading, particularly in the service of self-examination, but what sets Lord of the Flies apart from books whose uncomfortable moments and interactions just become unpleasant (and I’ve mentioned a few, above this) is its characterisation.

Not only do we relate with Ralph as the ordinary kid who’s trying to do his best in a trying situation, but there is also a very clearly identifiable picture drawn of Jack, who takes up the dictatorial position in stark opposition and organises his own society around the principle that might is right. It’s not something we want to agree with, but his motivations are organic and transparent, and that’s the power of Golding’s storytelling.

The ending, too, is something that really stuck with me, and it’s that to which I can attribute its high(ish) rank here. I love a good ambivalent ending at the best of times, particularly one that doesn’t also include ambivalence’s meddling cousin ambiguity. The ending here is clear-cut, satisfying and final, and yet leaves you so deliriously pondering what comes next. 

Anyway, so that's my second countdown. In the next exciting instalment, I will be tossing linguistic knives at many, many beloved writers and works. You won't want to miss it.

Reading Challenge Episode 1: 40-31

So, a good two weeks after I posted my introduction to this series, the first of the series finally arrives. I’ve been doing these write-ups when I have a spare few moments – ie. practically never – and as a result I have to admit to having been in different moods and humours for different books. That’s part of the joys of reading my inconsistent blog posts, right? Now, remember as discussed, to keep myself interested, I’m posting these in the order 40-31, 30-21, 41-50, 20-1. So these are not the bottom or the top of the pile. To summarise the post in so many words, these ten books are those that I didn’t really hate, but there were maybe things I hated about them; or just nothing I really loved.

Note: With all of the titles, I'm going to link, where possible, to the buying page for that title on the website for the QBD bookshop, for two reasons: 1, it's not Amazon, and 2, I got some very good service from them this week, so I'll hopefully throw some web traffic their way, if not some actual customers.

Without further ado, I will begin the first countdown with my #40.

40) The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger

Hooray! I’m starting off this series with controversy! I’m expecting any number of half-eaten pigeons, human faeces, mouldy double cheeseburgers, etc. mailed to me by pissed off emo teenagers whose sole purpose in life is to pretend Catcher in the Rye is the greatest thing ever to be achieved by mankind without heavy eyeliner.

So, ranting aside, why is this monolith of whingeing so low? A couple of reasons. Firstly, I wasn’t a hormonal, pizza-faced adolescent with notebooks full of angsty poetry about pubic hair when I read it, so I obviously wasn’t in Salinger’s target demographic. Secondly, I just found the book aimless, disjointed and very mean-spirited – obviously in spite of Holden’s ‘catcher in the rye’ fantasy and his obvious deference for his kid sister, it’s meant to be; but his whole misunderstood good, honest guy deep-down act just didn’t wash with me.

It would, though, be horribly dilettantish of me to dismiss this book as meritless. It’s a finely, if clumsily, crafted character study and the voice and style are all its own. If this book speaks to you, it will really speak to you. However, the unfortunate truth is it didn’t speak to me, and I was fairly well pleased when I was relieved of Mr. Caulfield’s company. As I always say in these write-ups, my personal enjoyment is the only thing at stake here, so if you vehemently disagree, feel free to dismiss my own experience as, well, none of your business.

39 – The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers

I’m expecting less controversy for this one, but maybe that’s just because I don’t hear quite so much effusive adoration for this book, although I’m sure it’s out there.

I really found myself struggling with this book; for one thing it’s about twice as long as it needs to be. It’s like an overlong episode of a TV drama: we start with a set piece about the two deaf friends, one is then put away into an institution and the other lives alone in a rented room in town. Then we’re introduced to all the other characters who are a range of variously unlikeable misfits, who all take an outrageous shine to our poor deaf friend.

The trouble with this book is that once it gets around to this part of the story it’s already a long way in, and it follows quite a predictable path thenceforth. In fact, worse than this, it actually starts to feel like it’s repeating itself: the same sort of things keep happening to each of the characters, perhaps to worsening degrees, but it just got rather tiresome.

If I’m to continue with my pattern of ranting about hating something, followed by praising its merits, though, this book is also emblematic of a poetically bittersweet view of the human condition, and if it were half as long it could have been toying with the top 20 or even (unlikely though) top 10. It isn’t, though, and I’d simply stopped caring by the time I finished it.

38 – Their Eyes were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

According to the blurb of this book, Alice Walker (author of The Color Purple of course) said that it “speaks to her like no other book ever has”. I can totally see her point and why it would, but unfortunately, not being an African-American woman, it doesn’t really speak to me. Now, before you go off playing any number of cards you could play in outrage at this statement, let me justify myself further.

The trouble with this book and its relation to me is that, living in the time and place I do, there doesn’t seem to be anything unique about it. What I can glean from reading it is that it constructs a tale about a female African-American character who is a whole, normal person, dealing with the world in the way that female African-American people do. She is not a plump, matronly goddess of homespun wisdom, nor is she a reactionary firebrand-type, in fact she isn’t any type. She’s a fully formed human being and the tale that Hurston spins is sweet-natured, uplifting; inspirational even. But ultimately, I also found it a bit blandly written.

It just makes me question, if this book feels so revolutionary, then that’s more a sad indictment of the history of black voices in literature, because I feel like there’s nothing really special about this book on its own; it just seems to be the first one that breathed a real voice into African-American literature with which everyday people could identify. I may be wrong, and obviously I’m about the least-qualified person in the world to comment on ‘plight of black people in society’-type books, but I’m just putting my own reaction forward. Furthermore, there’s still more ‘plight of black people in society’ books to come. 

37 – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis

Okay, well here we get into ‘Sam is a worthless hack’ territory. Why is this beloved children’s pseudo-religious analogical fantasy so low in this list?

Well, the truth is when Sam does a challenge like this, he doesn’t re-read stuff (He also talks in the third person, because fuck you). He also uses a sorting program to rank the items, and chooses his options based on personal feelings and experience on the day.

So yes, I haven’t read this since I was 8. It’s down this low in no small part due to the fact that books I read when I was 8 are more easily dismissed to the ash pit than books I read when I was three months younger than I am now. But let me attempt a defence of its lowly position anyway.

Firstly, I do rank things purely on subjective experience, and when I read this I was already very familiar –and rather in love with – the BBC miniseries version (the 'Lucy with the overbite' one), and as such my reading of the book was clouded by over-familiarity with the plot and impatience to get to the really interesting bits. Like that bit with the black-hawk helicopter chase across the Kalahari.

Secondly, it retains an overall children’s book vibe for me, and yet I can’t claim the book itself as a cherished memory of yore. The story itself, perhaps, but not the book. There’s a lot of merit to it, and I’m glad it makes TIME’s list, but I think even if I were to institute a rule to have read or re-read everything in the past year, I still wouldn’t rank this much higher, because it’s more nostalgia than pure enjoyment for me.

36 – The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West

Now, the first thing about Day of the Locust that I – and, of course, anyone born after 1980 upon approaching this book for the first time – appreciated with a little incredulous squeal of delight is obviously the fact that one of the main protagonists goes by the name......anyone want to guess, who hasn't read it? Fine, I'll tell you: Homer Simpson. 

I later found out that on one of the audio commentaries for the first season of the Simpsons, Mike Reiss mentions the fact that Homer Simpson is the name of the character from Day of the Locust, but after having listened to that audio track a few times, I'd evidently never paid attention to his saying that until I was familiar with the book.

There is, though, more to the book than the fact that one of the characters is called Homer Simpson, but there really doesn’t need to be.

The thing about Day of the Locust is that the ending is very good: searing, powerful satire with a healthy dose of cynicism. And while the majority of the book is a coherent lead-up, I also found it fairly unexciting, and ploddingly episodic. There are many scenes that are both overlong and quite frustrating. Since they deal so heavy-handedly with celebrity obsession and passive masculine devotion, the inactivity of the characters is far from endearing. This is largely the point, but because there is so much of this and such a short denouement, it comes as a bit of an anticlimax, and I felt I suffered for a very long time with these foolish people. Their 'comeuppance', at least in terms of the cynical treatment the author gives, becomes too little too late.

It’s a landmark book, though, and there are a lot of deliciously biting things said about Hollywood and the celebrity-obsessed culture. It was probably most relevant and necessary when it was published in the thirties, when movie stardom was universally celebrated, and fame couldn’t be accessed just by being in the right place at the right time, but there’s a lot of residual black humour that can be applied to today’s culture.

35 – Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

Now we really come to that point in the discussion where my own personal experience outweighs the book’s intrinsic value in its ranking on the list. Wide Sargasso Sea, ostensibly a prequel to Jane Eyre, tells the story of the wild exotic 'woman in the attic' and her upbringing in the Caribbean. There she leads an outcast life in a family believed to be cursed; that is until she is ‘rescued’ by a headstrong but unnamed Englishman who is obviously meant to be Rochester.

It’s a remarkably well-constructed book, with a unique and interesting voice, that is nevertheless largely unsavoury to read. Bleak, frustrating and with an uncanny and overwhelming sense of outrage and injustice, it’s a short, sharp stab to the soul.

What it did for me was get me more interested in Jane Eyre, although obviously the two books are not to be taken together, and I would say it's doing Rhys’ narrative an injustice by applying it only as the imagined prequel. It can be read more universally as an indictment of colonial exploitation in general and the cultural clashes and mistreatment experienced by indigenous peoples at the hands of the British empire, but aside from that it simply left me cold and unloved. I heartily recommend this book if you think you’re suffering from too much happiness and need a cure, but ‘enjoy’ is not really the word for how I experienced it.

34 – White Teeth –Zadie Smith

If you’d asked me when I was about 100 pages into White Teeth where I would expect it to end up on my list, I would have estimated a numeral more than twenty places elevated from where it is now. At that stage I was really, genuinely loving Zadie Smith’s witty, well-rounded ensemble piece that looked with a piercing eye at life in multicultural suburban London.

About two hundred pages later (and it’s ~450 pages all up, FYI), I realised I no longer had any idea where the book was going, and in fact I hadn’t had any clue from the start. I’m hitting there upon its key strength, which is that it’s entertaining, and very easy to lose yourself in it.

The initial mélange of poor suburban folks with a culture-shock blend Indian, Jamaican and white-English heritage was an amusing bunch, whom I was happy to keep company. However, once the privileged white family gets involved (can't even remember their damn name), the narrative really started to go off the rails for me and I completely lost what I was reading about. It touches on genetic engineering, Islamic faith, ideals of beauty, friendship, haunted pasts, coming of age, the rich-poor divide, all thrown together into a melting pot and stirred furiously with the wooden spoon of incoherence.

It’s not incoherent, actually, but somewhere in there the story slipped under my attention, and I ended up being really quite disappointed after such a promising and enjoyable start.

33 – Loving – Henry Green

When I first discovered the TIME list and formulated my challenge, I assigned each unread title a priority based on how interesting it sounded and how important I considered that book in my education. Henry Green’s Loving was assigned the lowest priority of all books that haven't been made into classic movies. That is, it was the ‘unfamiliar’ book I was least interested in, possibly because I’ve seen enough above-and-below-stairs stories on screen that it sounded a little samey. Then when I found it in Kinokuniya I read that Henry Green was “probably the most underappreciated author of the twentieth century”, and I thought fuck you Sam, who are you to underappreciate Henry Green?

The other two things about Henry Green that I gleaned from the introduction to this book is that he is more challenging than “Greene” (ie. Graham, about whom we will hear more later on) and that he is said to provide “joy” to all who read him.

There is at least entertainment, certainly, in the manipulations and subterfuge of the classic upstairs-downstairs dynamic. There’s something quite light and free-spirited about the way Green writes in this book, almost free-wheeling at times with a sense that he doesn’t really have a firm idea of where he’s going. It is also true that his prose at least requires more attention, but the downside is that with greater concentration doesn’t really come greater enjoyment; his prose is just slightly difficult - I might even say clunky.

There is probably more to the story than the vague, seemingly directionless plotting would have me believe, but vis-à-vis my own enjoyment, it was haphazard, and I didn’t really find myself caught up in the drama or involved in the stakes all that much. It’s fun and worth a read, and I think it might get better with the re-reading, but if a book needs re-reading to be fully enjoyed then it’s always going to end up around #33. At least, at first.

32 - The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

Now as we work through my totally coherent way of ordering this list, you’re going to hear a fair number of my opinions on a movement called ‘modernism’. I’ll leave you in suspense now as to the very nature of most of my opinions about ‘modernism’, but if I drop the hint that The Sound and the Fury was studied as part of a ‘modernism’ course in second year uni, and that I appreciated and enjoyed it far, far more than any of the other abject shite pretentious cock-sucking dickhead drivel... you’ll have a vague idea of where my preferences lie.

Faulkner has a way of challenging traditional methods of constructing narrative, voice-adoption, temporality and character, while at the same time driving story forward, and making his books actually about something you care about. I think his technique is most effectively used and most finely honed in this book, at least among the Faulkners I’ve read – and we will be hearing more later.

This book, though, suffers from the same affliction as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I can’t really come up with anything bad to say about it, but it having been a good long while since I read it, my reasonable appreciation of the book has been dulled over time. What’s more, most of my enjoyment of the book has to be taken on a relative scale, in the sense that I enjoyed it primarily because it wasn’t Ulysses. But that in itself isn't really enough to recommend a book, since there are many other books that aren't Ulysses. What's more, getting disemboweled by a wayward chainsaw also isn't Ulysses, and I'd have to think hard about which of those contains more pure enjoyment.

However, I do recommend The Sound and the Fury if you're interested in deep south American literature, or modernism without the bollocks. It's a good book.

31 – Play it as it Lays – Joan Didion

To wrap up the first countdown split, we have another sprightly, whimsical book of childish glee, filled with sizzling hot gypsies. Or, to put it another - and slightly more accurate - way, cynical and mean-spirited book about emotional abuse occasioning mental fragmentation and instability.

Didion writes in a very haphazard and fragmented way herself, jumping around temporally and situationally in a very laissez-faire manner. This actually works to good effect in portraying the protagonist’s state of mind which is lost somewhere between despairing regret and psychosis.

Like Wide Sargasso Sea, Play it as it Lays is a little too unpleasant a read to climb too high in the list but, paradoxically as it may sound, I think it’s higher than Rhys’ book because it didn’t pack quite the emotional punch. So, less effective maybe, but more enjoyable and commendable as a result. Moreover, the ambivalence of the characters is such that I think the sadistic part of me enjoyed seeing them suffer, so the sense of injustice wasn't quite so strong.

In summary, if you enjoy the films of Nora Ephron, you should definitely read Play it as it Lays, because some reality might do you some good.*

*. Please note: This sentence is pure sarcasm and I have literally no interest in debating it.

In the next exciting instalment, Sam counts down to the brink of the top 20 before leaping bizarrely backwards in the list, and he might even encounter an old literary hero of his...