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...