Reading Challenge: My Top Ten

So I promised that before the new year was up, you would have my top ten to fall asleep while reading. So, just in the nick of time (I'm making a habit of this), here it is. Since it's been such a long time coming, I won't beat about the bush but will kick off the big countdown with number 10...

10) The Heart of the Matter – Grahame Greene

(I apologise for that link; it seems QBD don't sell any physical copies of the book)

Graham Greene! Yes, Google, there’s more Graham Greene on my blog. Plenty of Graham Greene to go around.

This was my first taste of Graham Greene and in some ways it’s possible that I think of this one more fondly than the Power and the Glory for that reason. I also came to this book not knowing how highly rated it was, or that it was on TIME’s list; I just picked it up in a second-hand bookshop thinking “Hmmm… Graham Greene… there’s someone I’ve never read.”

While it took me a little while to get into The Heart of the Matter, there also wasn’t a point where it suddenly became engaging. It was more like: I started it, it seemed like an English colonial story, akin to The English Patient perhaps, and before I knew it the story was nearly over and I’d been engrossed the whole time.

What I wanted to say about Greene in my earlier post, but felt it applied better to this novel, is that he cuts against a lot of my more esteemed favourite authors, such as Rushdie, Kundera, etc. in that he saves little room for reflection and introspection. What he represents to me is a return, or maybe just a perpetuation, of old-fashioned storytelling, and proves himself more than adept at weaving a captivating story without the need to stop frequently and look around.

However, in telling the story of the honest colonial policeman Scully and the dilemma that confronts him when he falls in love with a tragic widow in the absence of his equally tragic wife, Greene manages to dovetail it with his customary reflection on Catholicism and the wrestling with guilt and conscience.

It does run counter to what I usually enjoy in stories, but the deftness with which it engaged me throughout opened my eyes a bit to how much great storytelling I could be missing. I can’t recommend this book enough, particularly if you’re in the mood for a damn good story told damn well.

9) Appointment in Samarra – John O’Hara

When I officially started my challenge, and assigned each book a number based on my eagerness to read it, this one came up on top, largely because I love the Somerset Maugham short story from which it takes its title.

I think I mentioned this book very early on in my write-ups, or at least when I wrote up The Great Gatsby. Basically I describe this book as really rather similar to The Great Gatsby, only not shit. It’s certainly set in a similar milieu; wealthy socialites in or near the 20s, country clubs, balls, etc.

Where this sets itself apart though is, well firstly, that it’s not hollow and pointless, but because it grapples with themes far more interesting, and a lead character who is also far more interesting and psychologically well drawn. It's a compelling fatalistic fable depicting a man’s life spinning faster and faster out of his control. This is where the Somerset Maugham allusion in the title comes in: the message goes that no matter what you strive to do to escape, or rectify the situation, once your number has come up, it’s up.

The book itself is quite tragic, and gets quite frustrating and upsetting at times too: the young mover and shaker Julian English, in an instant of drunken madness, throws a drink in the face of an influential denizen, bruising his eye with an ice cube. Hoping to shrug it off as just the moment of madness it was, English stumbles from one attempt at reviving his social climbing hopes to the next, as the ice cube in the glass becomes the catalyst for a series of ostracising exercises from which he can’t extricate himself.

O’Hara writes with quite a chilling detachment, giving the bourgeois world he is painting a clinical examination, and in particular how finely woven are the threads of propriety and kinship around such a culture.

8) Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

Well, I mentioned in my last post that Nineteen Eighty Four was the second-last book that has a huge long gap between my reading it and my doing this challenge. This is the last.

In fact, it’s quite significant that it has been so long since I read this book, because I’m really not sure it has enough intrinsic quality to rank at number 8 on my list, but it holds a special place in my heart because of the circumstances under which I read it.

Basically, in late-ish high school, I turned from being a mildly rebellious teen, who didn’t really misbehave or go off the rails but rather just did poorly in class in the hope that someone might suffer from it apart from himself, to a slightly more disciplined academically-minded teen, who sought to improve his mind through extra-curricular reading in areas that might challenge his ways of thinking. In other words, there was a point when I decided I was going to become a pretentious twat, and for some reason Catch-22 was the first book I chose to read to start improving my mind.

Of course, that wasn’t such a silly choice, because the book is a finely-tuned piece of anti-war satire, written with a keen, all-seeing eye that at some turns seems to be missing the bigger picture but will happily turn and slam that bigger picture right down your throat. At times hilarious, at other times slightly irritating, it is most definitely a book worth reading. I don't remember details well enough to give it a point-by-point critique here, but I found it very enjoyable and provocative at the time.

So to summarise, Catch-22 is certainly a fine book, but its importance to me is far more significant than the simple fact that it is a fine book. 

7) Rabbit, Run – John Updike

I have mixed feelings about John Updike. Going into this challenge, where the only representative from his very comprehensive oeuvre is this hackneyed-sounding cliché of every critic’s book list, I had read only one other of his works; the 2006 effort Terrorist, and I found it dealt very dryly and uninterestingly with very trenchant and difficult subject matter.

Rabbit, Run follows a tired and fairly uninspired premise: a former high school sports hero, after an encounter with some school-age kids on his way home to pregnant wife and young son, enters a sudden and severe mid-life crisis and decides to uproot and steal away from the rut he finds himself in. And for the most part, reading it, I felt the premise was indeed tired and Updike’s treatment was similarly dry to his treatment of Terrorist.

But (and there is a BIG but) while four-fifths of the book seem tired/dry, they aren’t  poorly written, and they are absolutely necessary in setting up the penultimate chapter which is undeniably, to me, the most harrowing and earth-shattering chapter of literature I’ve ever read in my life.

I’m going to keep these reviews relatively spoiler-free, but suffice to say that it involves a character in the book getting mind-bendingly drunk and the resultant dire catastrophe. The chapter is harrowing not simply because of what happens, but because Updike’s blow-by-blow rendition of an alcoholic slipping with alarming acceleration into a stupor at the most troublesome moment is so painfully, shockingly vivid, and rings so many alarm bells for anyone who, like me, has found themselves in a similar downward drunken spiral in their life. Reading this actually made me appreciate how lucky I’ve been to have been in the company of responsible, relatively-sober people every time I’ve been in this situation and that nothing so terrible has ever befallen me or those around me.

The final chapter that follows it, too, is wildly, anarchically ambivalent, too, and puts a callous question mark at the end of a very chaotic sentence. I remember reading the end of this book in bed one night, and I was up for another hour after it just pondering it in my mind. If truth be told, it haunts me still. 

I would happily read three times over the rest of Updike’s sometimes plodding narrative, if a finale as explosively dramatic as this were waiting every time.

6) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark

I offer now exhibit B.

Now this was a surprise. If you’d told me before going into this challenge that one of my absolute favourite books would be the story of a group of schoolgirls growing up in Edinburgh in the 1930s, I probably would have given you a good hard slap and called the mental hospital you’d escaped from, and probably put a coat on you and wondered why you were wandering around Kings Cross naked at that time of night, giving me predictions on my reading challenge.

I obtained this book for the pure and simple reason that my local library had it on the shelves, and I read it for the pure and simple reason that it was remarkably short.

But what Muriel Spark manages to do with the hundred or so pages is so pointedly witty, sharp and thought-provoking that I was an instant fan. I feel like there’s quite probably some influence from this book on Margaret Atwood’s writing, because a lot of her works follow a similar structure: at the heart of this novel is a mystery, namely on what grounds was Miss Brodie ‘betrayed’ to the school authorities, and which of the ‘Brodie set’ as they come to be known was it who betrayed her. Through its leaping backwards and forwards in time, the unravelling of the mystery forms the trail of the story.

There isn’t a wasted sentence in this book. Everything is on purpose, and so the short tale rewards those who pay attention. The ambiguity of Miss Brodie’s character as she explores her love of education, the joy of being ‘in her prime’ and couples this with her admiration for fascist dictators is marvellously drawn by the narrator, Sandy, whose own character is also one of great interest.

While this isn’t much of an introspective on the female sphere, it is an admirable cross-section of female life – with an eye to coming-of-age and the enjoyment of life as one transitions through the stages – into ‘ones prime’ and then out again – in pre-Women’s lib times, and is just a truly entertaining read.

5) The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

An old favourite, this, and an inevitability near the top of my list.

Franzen’s desperately funny and poignant portrayal of a family of Midwestern misfits who are trying to reunite for one last Christmas is more a story about the lengths we go to to try and make something praiseworthy out of ourselves.

The aged and ageing parents, Enid and Alfred, and their three kids Gary, Denise and Chip, are all in turn put through their paces by Franzen’s hacksaw of pathos, and while at times it’s very sitcom-like, the wit is undeniable and he manages in his easy-to-read style to really cut to the core of the everyday struggle in our lives.

The truth at the heart of this book was most keenly felt when I found myself relating most to the character of Gary, the priggish and self-righteous elder son, in spite of the fact that I recoiled from his pathetic and feeble male ego trips. His ‘fetishisation’ of the noble is something that I uncomfortably have to recognise in myself.

But every character's story is drawn out with incredible colour, and Franzen is admirable in his adoption of heteroglossia, in painting each story with each character's own unique brush. This is a mosaic of heartfelt and vivid character portraits that also just happens to be one of the most enjoyable books in the world.

4) Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

So I mentioned a while back that there were still a handful of ‘plight of black people in society today’ stories. This was by far and away the best of the lot.

Ellison’s story of a young man from the south who, after being suspended from his promising college, wanders from trial to trial trying to make something of himself in New York, is a scintillating portrait of the dividing line in society.

His pointedly-unnamed narrator is at times bullied like a slave, at most other times exploited by more powerful figures who want to use him to further their own causes, and at other times is the unbeknownst catalyst in fates far beyond his reckoning. At the start of the book we are introduced to the term ‘invisible man’, as our narrator explores the fact that while most people ignore him, those that see him do so without really seeing.

While the rest of the book explains how he came to this realisation, the writing moves from strength to strength as the recognition dawns on him, and he begins to see it as an advantage in some ways.

It’s a fascinating look at racial inequality, and it really made me ponder why ‘racism’ per se has become so easily vilified as a four-letter word, when it’s just as ignorant to pretend or act that inherent differences and societal unbalance don’t exist.

Of all the books on this list, too, this is the one I’m most likely to revisit in the future. I powered through my first reading because it was so interesting, but it will most definitely provide richer rewards from a more careful read through.

3) Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon

So I deliberately left my write-up of The Crying of Lot 49 short, because what I wanted to say about Pynchon in particular is more relevant to this book, and it would have completely stolen the thunder otherwise.

The way I feel when I read Pynchon is that I’ve been seated at a dinner party with the most urbane, witty and erudite companion, who spends the entire two hours I’m in his company regaling me with the most fascinating, unbelievably intricate and entertaining stories, then at the close of the evening I’m never to see him again.

Gravity’s Rainbow is undoubtedly in my mind the greatest and most complete example of that feeling. The story takes us comprehensively around the world, into vast armies, seedy underbellies and even seedier experimental research facilities, with all the characters of high and low character searching for the elusive supersonic rocket that they hope to obtain to achieve various unpleasant ends.

The funny thing is, though, that there’s very little that’s universal, didactic or even, dare I say it, relatable, in any of Pynchon’s flights of fancy. Difficult as his prose is, the story is by and large pure escapism, but it’s pure escapism of the highest and most unbelievably intelligent quality. If ever there was a novel that embodied the non-stop-thrill vibe of a Christopher Nolan blockbuster without resorting to prosaic reformulations of action movie clichés, this is it.

But more than just being entertaining, Pynchon simply operates in, and takes us to, a different universe, one that bears a disturbing and uncanny resemblance to our own, yet still remaining detached and elusive.

2) Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

So remember back in the heady days of my 41-50 vile hatefest post, I mentioned in the course of discussing Cormac McCarthy that The Road was one of two books that have ever made me cry? You’re looking here at book number two.

The subject matter alone should be enough in itself to make grown men cry, being a heartbreaking fable about love, friendship, lost innocence, and the regret of missed opportunities, but what makes Never Let Me Go push the boundaries of pathos was through Ishiguro’s transcendentally ethereal writing, which makes this is as ridiculously beautiful as novels will ever get.

So deft and delicate is Ishiguro’s prose that it managed to fool me at every turn, in particular with the dystopian twist to the story. I was swept along by this seemingly normal portrayal of children growing up at boarding school, so when it finally becomes transparent that everything is not quite as it seems, it came as a rude awakening. It suddenly occurred to me that there had never been any mention of the origins of the world being described, or time previous to the setting, and I realised Ishiguro had been essentially playing a wicked game with me all along.

I apologise for perpetuating the vague descriptions that always go hand in hand with write-ups of this book (or the recent film adaptation) but to describe the twist is to ruin the book’s immense power.

Without pushing the boundaries of narrative (structurally it’s a very simple story), this book is as close to sublime as you can get. It was compelling, but at the same time it just brought a big warm feeling out of me and left me pondering the cunning majesty of the story and the celestial beauty of Ishiguro's writing.

The only book that could top it is one that managed to encapsulate the whole human experience together with pushing the boundaries of narrative possibilities. Speaking of which… (do I have a drum roll? No? Well, here’s a gif of Barack Obama laughing and nodding to increase the suspense instead)

http://i.imgur.com/5NKvN.gif

1) Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace

Alright, enough with the suspense. If you’ve spent two minutes conversing with me on any subject in the past two years, you should have known this book was coming. In short I’ve been the most shameless pimp, and it’s finally crunch time now for me to justify it.

Alas, poor David Foster Wallace. It is true that this book is all wrapped up in the tragic mythology and aura surrounding its author, his long battle with depression and his ultimate giving up of the fight in 2008, but having also read what exists of his unfinished memoir The Pale King I can surmise that this is part of how he writes. Everything comes out of personal experience, but all painted with huge flourishes of wild imagination and a sinister, sardonic eye to the darker side of humanity.

Infinite Jest takes place largely in two settings: a junior tennis academy and a nearby halfway house for recovering drug addicts. Yet to say that it is a novel about tennis and drugs is like saying that Plato’s Republic is a book about Greek dudes having a chat.

The novel covers pretty much every topic relevant to twenty-first century Americana, but in particular its themes are about the pursuit of happiness and the unobtainable ideal of unassailable joy (infinite jest, as it were).

The book is full of characters pushing towards that ideal, through the hunger for fame and recognition, the obsessive perfection of their art, or through the abuse of artificial substances to escape from this flawed and fractured universe. The pursuit is typified in the book by the presence of a singular cassette recording of a film called Infinite Jest, whose mysterious subject matter so enthralls any viewer that they will stare endlessly at the screen, neglecting such basic functions as eating, sleeping and, eventually, breathing.

In some ways the novel – or at least that one of its many, many strands – bears a striking resemblance to the plot of Gravity’s Rainbow, as the one copy of the cassette is pursued by various people out of idle curiosity or a nefarious desire to militarise the object’s use. But Infinite Jest to my mind proves that great art builds on whatever came before it; it takes the wild, fantastical and disturbing notes of Pynchon and transplants it into a more recognisable milieu with characters who suffer from all the same flaws and neuroses as we all do.

I’d have a hard time denying that Infinite Jest is a difficult book to get through, not just because of Wallace’s insane use of footnotes and footnotes-within-footnotes, but because it exists firmly in a post-structuralist model where there no longer exist any rules, and he jumps around in time mercilessly, with no key protagonist or clear story arc to grab onto.

That didn’t matter at all to me though, and when I finally put the book down after two months’ spent reading it, I felt a weary kind of depression that I’ve never experienced before or since at the conclusion of any sort of writing.

This is the charming, erudite and wildly intelligent dinner table companion who sticks with you forever, always reminding you of the absurdities of life and always ready with a quick joke to make you smile.

Have a happy new year, y'all.

Reading Challenge Episode 4: 20-11

So after another long hiatus, I've finally managed to put together another ten rants, this time largely loving and offering large cuddles to the authors they represent. There's not much more I can say by way of introduction, so here in no particular order except for numerical, is the first half of my top 20:

20) American Pastoral – Philip Roth

This was the first book I read in this challenge in the sense that it was the first one I read after I had determined this as my challenge. I knew very little about Philip Roth, except that he was always ‘in the way’ back in the day when I did nothing but browse for Rushdie in book shops. And well, here he is, 10 ahead of Rushdie on my list.

This is quite a difficult book in many ways: it starts off with a whole lot of reflective postulating on our unnamed narrator’s home town and gradually, very gradually, turns it into the story of one man from his high school: the sports captain-turned-captain of industry with everything going for him. It takes a long time to work around for this, as Roth introduces us bit by bit to his themes and his philosophy about the American dream.

It quite seamlessly transitions from reflections on the aura surrounding this high school sports god and local small-town hero to being a retelling of his life; in particular the events leading up to and following a terrorist attack that somehow involved his wayward daughter.

What the ironically-titled American Pastoral gives us is a violent clash of ideologies, where the aspirational American model, the hard-working captain of industry with his beauty-queen wife and loving family in the suburbs comes face to face with the modern Vietnam-war era of counter-culture and unrest. It’s a deeply troubling book, which raises a lot of bleak, cynical questions about the world entering the end of the twentieth century.

As someone who finds himself morphing more and more into that quiet, personally conservative family man from the suburbs, it’s also deeply affecting, and in spite of its – at times – prolix narrative, it’s a masterful piece of writing.

19) Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

Well I’m glad to say that this is the second-last of the ‘books I read ages and ages ago’ on this list, so essentially this is my second-favourite from the heady bygone era before I knew who Bakhtin was and when the idea of finishing a reading challenge like this would take far too much time away from playing Captain Comic 2 and jerking off to Cosmopolitan magazines.

Long-winded introductory paragraph over, I do love this book, but at the same time I’m so wary of how much it’s burrowed its way into the zeitgeist of our time, so there’s nothing particularly new or exciting that I have to say about it.

Suffice to summarise briefly: I love dystopias in literature, and this is without a doubt one of the sterling examples of the genre (one might say, the ‘Big Brother’ of them all, hurrh hurrh hurrh). Orwell’s nightmarish vision has maybe lost a little of its original sting but the brilliance of the book lies in the timeless and almost universal accessibility of its unsettling elements: the feeling of being watched, together with the fear of being muzzled and unable to express what you want to say. Mind control through behaviour control.

I’ve studied this book, too, three different times – in high school and in two different uni courses – and it’s true to say that I receive a renewed appreciation for it each time.

18) The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene

Ah! Everybody breathes a sigh of relief. Finally, after spattering his previous, more bile-filled posts with side-swipes about how every author should write more like Graham Greene, here is Graham Greene finally making an appearance. And the funny thing is, this isn’t my favourite Graham Greene novel. And before you say anything, yes, I am trying to fool Google into ranking my blog higher on searches for Graham Greene, by trying to insert the phrase Graham Green as often as possible into a paraGraham Greenegraph.

Now I don’t actually know a lot about Graham Greene (Graham Greene!), or his background, but it’s fairly obvious from perusing just a couple of his volumes that one of his key meditations in life was on the struggle with faith, and Catholicism in particular. The Power and the Glory is the book that grapples with this dilemma in its most explicit terms.

It tells the story of a Mexican state where Catholicism is outlawed, and the undercover priest who is trying to evade the law, while at the same time evade his past catching up with him. The fascinating thing about the book is the way it weaves what is quite a rich and complex tale together with an intricate meditation on faith. As our priest (who I think is unnamed throughout, I can’t remember) travels from town to town, sheltered by members of the outlawed faith, he begins to grow more and more world-weary, cynical and wavering in his devotion to God.

While Greene’s final message is, albeit ambiguously, one of hope in the steadfastness of the Catholic faith – not a message I believe in, obviously – it makes for a very poignant and bittersweet conclusion. It’s a book that would definitely improve with a re-reading, too, as there’s a lot to take in on the first go.

17) Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

So we move from an English author addressing people grappling with the Catholic faith in the early twentieth century to… errr… yeah, more of the same. Where The Power and the Glory is not particularly English in its focus, Brideshead Revisited strikes me, quite frankly, as the most English book I’ve ever read. It has the quintessence of the mother country bursting from every page, set largely as it is around Oxford, London and various grand architectural marvels of the English countryside during the glory years before WWI.

Characters like Lord and Lady Marchmain, our narrator Charles’ cousin Jasper or the irritatingly stuffy and upright Brideshead himself (played marvellously in the TV adaptation by the great Simon Jones) are all so very vivid, and really get to the heart of the nostalgia that Waugh is evoking throughout the novel.

I used to think that my great hero Stephen Fry’s persona and comportment were basically just taken from Oscar Wilde (with a bit of Wodehouse thrown in) but while reading this it struck me that there is so much more Evelyn Waugh in him. In fact, there’s a quote often attributed to Fry about being able to throw off physical bullies by threatening to get an erection which is basically just a paraphrase of one of the characters in Brideshead.

However, more than just a lush evocation of Englishness and nostalgia, what Brideshead Revisited  is more trenchantly and affectingly is a heartbreaking love story, and a loss of innocence story, from the idylls of early adulthood into the degeneration of middle age which is mirrored by characters and nation alike.

It also presents us with two very thought-provoking manifestations of people wrestling with Catholicism: the younger Flyte sibling of the Brideshead clan, Sebastian, who reacts with accelerating turmoil to his family’s piety and his sister Julia, who so badly wants to rebel and renounce her faith but can’t quite escape her ingrained Catholic guilt. It’s emotionally powerful, affecting, and all captured with a beautifully austere and evocative narrative.

16) The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood

Anyone who knew that there was a Margaret Atwood book on TIME’s list would have to know this one was coming somewhere in the top 20. It’s actually surprisingly low, since I love pretty much everything she writes.

So while this book is a brilliant, deeply probing book about femininity, intellectualism, societal and familial expectations – Atwood explores all of these things with her characteristic aplomb – it falls victim to both the disappointment of expectations that befell Midnight’s Children and the unfavourable comparison to its sibling book that White Noise suffered.

The Blind Assassin certainly didn’t disappoint me on any particular level, but there was a great sense when I picked it up that since this made the list and The Handmaid’s Tale (in my view a landmark book and a pure masterpiece) didn’t, this one had to be something mind-blowingly brilliant.

I would have a hard time denying this book’s brilliance, but it didn’t go so far as to blow my mind. Of course I’m more inclined towards Atwood’s dystopian visions like Oryx and Crake and the afore-mentioned Handmaid’s Tale, and this falls far more in the domestic, socially embedded satirical milieu that she seems to vacillate towards. More than that, though, it suffered a little from seeming more personal, so I was more inclined simply to despise the character of Richard, and Iris’ father for their phallocentric tendencies than I was to ponder on the inherent injustices as a mirror to society as a whole.

It’s a stylistic thing, really, and while it’s a gripping, thought-provoking memoir, it still has that slight arms-length remove from my own personal sphere that prevents me from truly being immersed. I don’t want to pigeonhole myself as a phallocentric reader myself but sometimes even the best books about the female experience can’t quite leap that hurdle for me. And I will offer in defence two books that rank higher on this list and are still to come.

15) To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

No, this isn’t one of those books I’m offering in defence, although thankfully it is another female writer (they are outnumbered, let me be upfront about that). This book was, probably contrary to the experience of most, not something I read a long time ago during my formative years but rather one of the later books I read as part of this challenge. In the same ilk as The Great Gatsby, it fell into ‘books I may as well read since I own them’ but, since I had seen the film adaptation already, I was reluctant.

Ill-founded indeed was that reluctance, as this book is not only a fantastic read, but with such a radically different focus from the film, coming to the book second actually adds to the enjoyment of the experience - or at least it did for me.

In adapting to film of course, they condensed a lot of the more peripheral parts of the story, so the intrigue around Boo Radley and the piece-by-piece attainment of a more worldly understanding that affects Scout throughout the book (which is far more Scout-centric than the film, too) are lessened and Atticus is cast as a more classically heroic figure, rather than the flawed yet laudable curmudgeon he is here.

What surprised me most about the experience of reading this, though, was the fact that even having seen the film and being well aware of where the story was going, I actually found reading this totally absorbing and suspenseful – more suspenseful even than the film. Again it comes down to Lee’s brilliant framing of the book around Scout’s perspective, and the dramatic irony evoked as she looks in her child-like way at the grave and epidemic injustice running through her part of the world.

Having said all that, I can’t deny I was infuriated that the book gave me no useful tips on killing mockingbirds. I vow never to read a book again.

14) Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut

Sorry to disappoint you, Internet, but I won’t be giving you more bait for your Sam murderhook with this one.

This book was on my to-read list for an obscenely long time, being ranked as it is number 1 on every single book list ever made on the Internet, but for some reason every time I encountered it in a book shop, or even in a library, the blurb just didn't sell itself very well. I finally took the time to read it as part of this challenge, because it seemed like a prerequisite for the bare minimum qualification to do a write-up like this.

The funny thing was, as much as I resisted it due to its universally beloved nature (I apparently take after my Father in assuming that anything that everyone loves must be rubbish), I just couldn't hate it. In fact, Reader, I loved it, which after the fact should have been obvious, since I even enjoyed Vonnegut’s universally loathed novel Player Piano.

Slaughterhouse 5 is another of those novels that takes a childlike, playful narrative and uses it to cut to the core of what is quite painful subject matter: war; destruction; death. Our protagonist Billy Pilgrim is not quite all there in the head, and jolts jarringly between different eras of time and space, from his youth in war-stricken Germany to his successful old age as a family man, to his brief sojourn on an extra-terrestrial world after being abducted by aliens.

I’m told that the internet seems to think all of the things told about actually happened, but I’m firmly of the opinion that it’s all part of his traumatic hallucination, and this reading to me gives a far more deeply affecting pathos. It is, though, testament to the book’s quality and Vonnegut’s skill as a writer that the ambiguity exists, and it is certainly a richer book for it.

13) The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing

So, in defence of my not hating all books on female interiority, I present exhibit A.

This could be called, in some ways, the book that launched my reading challenge, as it was while reading this book that I came across TIME’s list, and due to the coincidental reading of books from the list I’d lately been doing, decided to adopt the challenge.

Lessing’s masterpiece is similar in many ways to Saul Bellow’s Herzog which I wrote about above: both deal with people of an academic sensibility approaching the autumn years of life and trying to stave off losing their mind by partaking in writing. Where Moses Herzog  wrote letters which he never sent to dead philosophers, academics and public figures, Lessing’s protagonist Anna Wulf writes in her four (five) different-coloured notebooks, each one representing a different aspect of her life.

What The Golden Notebook also manages to achieve is an amazing kind of distillation of male-female interaction, with seemingly every possible relationship played out somehow in Anna’s parade of male companions. Each one offers her something different, and she in turn reacts differently and offers them something different herself. All of these relationships are set against the yardstick of Anna’s best friend’s ex-husband, the prototypical male Richard (apparently Richard is a good name for misogynistic husbands): successful, ambitious, ego-driven and conservative.

 Lessing also finds time in all of this though to draw an anti-war narrative, a heartbreaking mother-son relationship and a highly informative and absorbing feminist treatise. I found the book quite enlightening, but it also just kept me going back by having such a captivating story, even while the structure remained so fractured.

12) Go Tell it on the Mountain – James Baldwin

This book is a slight aberration on this list, basically because it doesn’t fall within any of my particular niches. It’s another book that falls within that examination of black people in society today, coupled with an emphatic religious overtone; but the fact is it’s just a magnificent read.

Semi-autobiographical, it tells the story of John – a stand-in for the author himself – who is raised by his mother and his preacher step-father Gabriel, a strict but hypocritical disciplinarian who exacts severe retribution for the transgressions he sees everywhere. The set-up in itself sounds a little familiar, but where Baldwin takes the book is what sets it well apart.

The odd structure of the book is split into two parts: the first seems to be an ordinary narrative of suburban family life and it seems to be heading in that direction, but the second part, ‘Prayers of the Saints’ takes place all in one evening session of their Pentecostal church as members of the church enter and sit down to meditate on their own private prayers. Baldwin takes us inside each of their heads, exploring their psyches, their past sins and through them their present shortcomings and potential futures.

In the midst of this, there is a catalytic religious event, which leads every person present into a sort of revelation of the about-turn that fate seems to have taken, and the different lives that will be led from then on. I’m being vague for no reason since it wouldn’t be too much of a spoiler to explain what happens, but at the same time, to put in words what happens sort of diminishes the power of Baldwin’s writing.

It’s not a book about things that happen but about the way people interact with themselves and with God, and it’s absolutely mesmerising throughout.

11) The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon

Again, anybody knowing that there was Pynchon on TIME’s list would know it would feature somewhere near the top.

The Crying of Lot 49 I have affectionately referred to as Pynchon-lite: it’s got all the Pynchon trademarks of a central mystery, an eclectic cavalcade of bizarre characters, and an overriding narrative sense that the reader is purely there to enjoy the ride, but all in a convenient, easy-to-digest 100 pages.

This is not to suggest that Crying is easy to read. It’s classic post-modernist stuff, and if you think you’re going to get a tidy story with all the ends neatly tied up at the end, you’re mistaken. But  it’s still quite impressive how Pynchon manages to condense all the craziness that must go on in his brain into such a short package, and still wring a lot of fascinating quirky fun out of it as well.

The one drawback, which lets this drop happily outside the top 10, is that same condensed form; with all the strange cavernous depths and highs that Pynchon drags us through, after 100 pages I just want more.

And if you, too, voluptuous reader, want more, then you're in luck, since there is obviously still one more blog post to go in my reading challenge wrap-up. Hopefully I won't be too busy stuffing my face with Turducken and drinking myself into the silly season this week to complete my write-up and finally get down to the business of my top 10. Since I hate so many great writers and beloved novels, it must surely be a subject of great fascination to discover the 10 books I actually loved the most from this challenge.

Reading Challenge Episode 3: 41-50

So, to confuse everyone who’s been following this countdown, or anyone else who comes across my blog via a google search, particularly if I inexplicably include the phrase “SWEATY RUSSIAN LESBIAN BONDAGE NURSES” in this entry somewhere, I now present the complete inverse of the countdown, the countup. Remember from my FreqAsQuests post that this sequence was done purely to prevent me from getting bored, since if I started my countdown spitting venom at my most-hated of all the books I read, I would then move through my more indifferent titles before finally getting to the ones that I will enjoy mentally serenading and making sweet, sweet, love to during my top 20.

Of course, it seems a bit pointless now that I’ve already fractured the numerical sequence to leap back to number 50 and do the same countdown thing; it’s far more fun for the bottom of the pile to work your way down (or indeed, up, as nonsense dictates). So, we begin with my least-loathed of all the books I loathed in the challenge:

41) Light in August – William Faulkner

Now, loathed is a bit harsh here, Sam. Frankly that was unnecessary. Earlier, when I was discussing The Sound and the Fury, I made a mention of that literary/poetic movement called modernism, and how you would be hearing more about it later. Oh, how naïve you were if you assumed all the other modernist books would be higher on my list! In the same write-up, I mentioned that I quite liked Faulkner because he managed to dick around like all the other obnoxious modernist twats with stylistic themes and structure, while maintaining a coherent narrative and characterisation.

This is still the case with Light in August, and for the most part its story is quite compelling: an old lady in a small town is murdered, and the prime suspect(s) are two loners who lived near her: one a white-trash playboy on the run from his pregnant girlfriend and the other a white-skinned half-negro haunted and stigmatised by his sketchy lineage.

Where the novel fell apart for me, though, is that as an exploration of character, and motivations, and why people become who they are, it was foggy and befuddled all the way down by an overcomplicated plot structure. It starts off telling us the story of one character, then focuses for a long time on the two loners and their time in the town, but then rather than finishing neatly with ‘what happened next’ there’s these pointless diversion into tertiary characters around the town, and the focus is pulled completely from what I saw as the main themes.

There is also no satisfying explication of the divergent motives of the two loners, or of how their characters turned out that way. There are faint hints, and essentially we can decide for ourselves, but I wanted a more rounded wrapping up of the story, and a clearer reason why those side characters took so much of the limelight in the end. It’s an intriguing story, but told with the elephantine ineptness of a modernist too disdainful of audience expectations to worry about stylistic coherence and consistency. I like Faulkner as a rule, but his better work is elsewhere.

42) Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

Don’t worry, OK? There’s more than just rants about modernism in this countup. But you’ll have to indulge me a little while longer. Virginia Woolf, fabulously talented writer though she was, is also the second most bilious pustule on the foot of twentieth-century literature. That is, when she writes this stream-of-consciousness fiction garbage. When she writes reflective, didactic feminist theory (As in A Room of Her Own), she is sharp, insightful, and wryly entertaining. And while she doesn’t have the infuriatingly pointless bluster of James Joyce (who is the uppermost bilious pustule, incidentally), she remains to me one of the worst offenders of the modernism farce.

It’s not so much that her fiction is infinitely worse, but it just exemplifies the arrogance of modernism that what could have been intriguing, insightful reflections on life and society have to be dressed up like novels, when they clearly have no plot structure or real characterisation. The reflections themselves are fine and something I would read, but they just grate against my nerves when they’re misrepresented, and used as a mockery of the novel which I love so much.

With that in mind, Mrs Dalloway is not the worst example of modernist drivel by a long shot, but I may also think that because of the context in which I read it. Like The Sound and the Fury this was part of my second-year uni course on modernism, so I can only assume I was in some sort of modernist headspace when I tackled it. It also followed on from my reading of Ulysses which, if Joyce is the most bilious pustule, is itself the most grotesque feature of said pustule, and so I was receptive to practically anything that wasn’t Ulysses.

This was also 2004, so it was only five years after Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and 2 years after Stephen Daldry’s film adaptation, so there was a bit of renewed interest in Mrs Dalloway  still lingering in the air. But essentially, it’s more of the same.

In spite of my objections to the stream-of-consciousness style, there was more to grab onto emotionally in this book for me, and it somehow seemed more personal, and more reflective, than other modernist works. While I hate Woolf’s fiction, I don’t hate this one as much as I might have. It’s possibly lucky that it was read in the right place at the right time.

43) Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy

Now there’s a story that I think is rather appropriate here and a little bit embarrassing, but given that all 2 readers of mine have seen me either vomitously drunk, or naked and covered in placenta (or both simultaneously, amirite?), I'm sure I've already been well and truly judged.

There have been two books, in my memory, that have made me cry. One I won’t ruin as it’s coming up later in these posts, and the other was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. In fact, the latter work went far, far beyond crying, and the circumstance found Bec walking in on me having just finished it, quite literally blubbering like a big gay baby. (That’s a nod to In Bruges by the way, I’m not being derogatory against big gay babies)

So given the raw emotional power that that book held for me, expectations were high going into this. And of course, anyone who’s read both can tell you how miles apart they are in terms of… well, let’s say, emotional heart.

What Blood Meridian represents is a landmark American novel, essentially raping the American myth of the old west - always such a deep well of heroics and pioneering fables – and drenching it in the murderous and spiteful blood that belongs there. So, first of all, it’s kind of an unpleasant read.

Secondly, the book is so trudgingly episodic and cinematic. When reading this, with its A->B->C->D episode format, coupled with its obsession with blood and killing, made me realise what an inevitable partnership McCarthy and the Coen brothers were prior to 2007’s No Country for Old Men (a novel I haven’t read, incidentally). As I read this I was even picturing it in Coen-esque visuals and cast it in my head to get a better idea of the characters (if it is eventually done, and Tom Hardy doesn’t play the judge, there’s been a serious miscarriage of justice).*

So reading this book is not very different from reading a screenplay, and in spite of the brutal descriptors, I didn’t quite get into it the way I would for a film based on the same material. As a novel I didn’t really get any suspense, or sense that it was building to something. As you probably know, I don’t mind a bit of torture-porn in movies, but in book form it’s kind of just horrible.

*. There is actually an IMDb in-production page for a film adaptation, but no details so far. People on the boards are talking Terrence Malick for director (wrong) and Vincent D’Onofrio for the judge (wrong).

44) Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

Oddly enough, in spite of this book consistently featuring at or near the top of people’s “best books” list, I’m not anticipating a lot of hate in response to its lowly ranking here, largely because I’ve not heard a lot of love for it from quarters close to me. And, apparently, I don’t much care for it either.

Obviously, the subject matter is somewhat unsavoury, but that’s not an issue for me. The issue is that I found absolutely nothing to grab onto while reading, either emotionally or artistically. Lolita is not so much a book about sexual deviancy, but a book about male weakness and obsession - something most of us should be able to identify with - and yet it reads as both alien and flavourless.

Humbert Humbert’s twee, affected narration gives his whole dilemma a histrionic quality, and since I can’t pinpoint the reasons for his obsession by drawing on my own experience, I have only his narrative to draw me in emotionally. What I found myself feeling most strongly was repulsion; not of the nature of his obsession but because of the pity evoked by his pathetic, simpering sufferance.

There is also no redeemable character here. Everybody is vile in their own way. It’s quite possible I may have found more resonance if Dolores had been portrayed as victim here, rather than tormentor, but at the same time that would have made for a far more predictable and conventional novel. I’m aware of Nabokov’s idiosyncrasies and singular vision in writing this, but I didn’t really appreciate that while reading.

45) The Bridge of San Luis Rey – Thornton Wilder

I’m actually a little in the dark as to why this book is as low as it is. It’s really, really low, considering the two books flanking it on either side, and the strongly negative reactions they both gave me. But, as Elie Wiesel once said, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference (and yes, of course I’m familiar with the work of Elie Wiesel. How dare you accuse me of googling that quote to find out who the fuck said it). That’s the best explanation I can give for The Bridge of San Luis Rey slipping so far down the list: there’s no strongly negative reaction, but I found it remarkably unremarkable.

The story of a remote bridge that collapses in remote South America and a monk who witnesses the tragic accident and goes in search of a higher meaning sounds intriguing. It even felt intriguing when I was reading it, but when it came time to rank these books I couldn’t remember a couple of crucial elements of the story: namely how it ended up, and most of the rest of it.

What I do remember is that in spite of the ostensibly deep, spiritual quest at the heart of the tale, the novel was really quite easy to read, and although I remember the ending being left pleasingly ambiguous, it didn’t produce any profound, lasting impression. I think I expect such challenging subject matter to be harder to deal with and more tortuous in looking back on.

The main word that comes to mind in recollection of this book is ‘light’, and so although I don’t hate it nearly as much as I hate Lolita or the book I’m about to rip to shreds with indiscriminately-spewed acidic venom, its finer points just aren’t memorable enough for me to note.

46) The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Here we are. Anyone who’s ever spoken to me about books would know that this one was coming. If anything is surprising about this, it’s how highly it’s ranked; yes, I’m afraid there are four books I disliked more than this overrated sack of vapidity.

And yes, in spite of my loathing of the term ‘overrated’, I think it’s never been more appropriate than here. I actually feel like a radical, a pioneer, in decrying this book, because for some reason everybody, to a man, proclaims this book as a masterpiece and unflinchingly bows down to its pedestal. I can’t help but feel like it’s some kind of inert automatism at the heart of this problem: it stays at the top because it’s always been at the top, so everybody just assumes it still belongs there.

If you are one of these people, I’m here to open your eyes to a whole new world! (Take you wonder by wonder...) The Great Gatsby is all of the following things and more: boring, empty, posturing, insubstantial, heartless and cynical, utterly lacking in panache. Just because T.S. Eliot had a moment of madness one day and wrote to Fitzgerald telling him he was excited by the book doesn’t mean that you have to follow him over that precipice into delusion.

But, I hear you protesting (obviously you’re still under the influence of that Fitzgerald brain slug), you’re not actually making any specific case against the book, it’s clearly just personal venom spewing out of you. True; I tried reading this book twice and gave up both times out of sheer tedium. I finally sat down and forced myself to complete it as part of this challenge, and it never really held my interest. 

It’s been a bugbear of mine for a long time that something so utterly dull could provoke such effusive love from all quarters. And, inevitably, when you find yourself arguing to an effective tsunami of counter-opinion, you find yourself just spraying and ranting rather than putting forward an actual case; moreover you find yourself attacking everybody who disagrees with you, rather than the book itself. But actually, I’m pretty OK with that, since I’m not that anti the book per se, it’s just mind-boggling that it is so beloved.

 So the only case I’m going to put forward is: if you are one of those who believes this is a great book; leaving aside the fact that The Great Gatsby is a book of its time, and captures admirably the mood of the jazz age, what is the point of it?

If you have an answer to that question, you are wrong.

47) Ubik – Philip K Dick

It grieves me, it positively grieves me, to announce that a mind like Philip K Dick (henceforth referred to as ‘Phil’ because Not-Dick) occupies a lowlier place in my rankings than F Scott Fitzgerald. What’s more, it confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am indeed that genre-snob I’ve always known I am, because the two most sci-fi-ey books on TIME’s list are either being discussed now, or still to come in this post.

I have to say, though, that Ubik left me utterly befuddled, and disappointed. Aside from the fact that it was my first of Phil’s works to tackle and it failed to live up to expectations, it actually doesn’t stand to me as a commendable example of the sci-fi genre.

It started promisingly enough: the head of a prominent company is assassinated, but is he really dead? There’s a mystery element there. Next, isolated pockets of reality start inexplicably to ‘regress’ in time, and our characters find themselves buffeted between the present (ie. The future) and increasingly distant periods of the past. What is real? How can they stabilise? What is this mysterious ‘Ubik’ substance that seems to hold the key to the mystery?

All of those questions are what would have made the book interesting if they, and the mystery, had remained elusive throughout the book. Instead, Phil takes a halt to the action, and our protagonist sits there and ponders all of those questions, summarising the key points and verbalising his next steps. I can’t remember, but when I was reading this bit, I may have actually said “ouch” out loud. It felt like a chest-punch to the narrative fluidity and effectiveness.

If it was just a one-off, too, it could be forgiven, but each time some new part of the story is unravelled, the main character explains, imparts and reminds us of everything that’s just happened. There’s nothing more dulling to the impact of a narrative than a complete lack of ambiguity. That is the crime that Ubik commits that drops it below my sentiments than The Great Gatsby.

Mostly, I was confused while reading this why this is somehow held up by TIME as the key work by Phil (see how horrible would that sentence have been if I’d said ‘key dick work’?). I can only assume they felt Phil, his visionary oeuvre and his influence on this most popular of genres warranted some kind of representation on the list, and maybe all of his more iconic works were too short to be considered ‘novels’. But having read no other, I can only ask, why this?

48) The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles

I guess this book is more in the Bridge of San Luis Rey (i.e. indifference) school than the Great Gatsby (i.e. actively hate it) school, although aside from there being nothing in it for me to grab onto at all, I also disliked it.

How I would describe this book, to those unfamiliar with it, is like a great English post-colonial novel, but written by a loud, brash American. It has all the thematic hallmarks of that sub-genre: clash of cultures, feelings of isolation and alienation, journeys of inner discovery; but handles them all with the deftness of a drunken hoard of rednecks. That’s not a comment on the writing, but about the story itself. In fact this is one of the few instances on this bottom 10 where I actually have no problem with the writing.

The problem I have with the story though is that it sort of took familiar themes that have been handled with far more gravitas elsewhere and splattered across the page a story that was uncontained, overblown, self-indulgent, full of histrionics and fairly repulsively exploitative as well.

Moreover, I found it confusing. It starts out telling a story of a small group of ‘friends’ travelling through Africa, and then as the journey itself gets hopelessly, irrevocably derailed, so too does the story, and I lost at this point where my sympathies were supposed to lie, or where the stakes were.

As much as I recoiled from the characters in this book, as well, I didn’t end up recoiling from the book, but I just really didn’t care about where it was going, so when it came time to rank these it just slipped off the ladder and crash landed. Speaking of crash landings...

49) Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson

Ouch. And to think I anticipated hate when I put Lord of the Rings at 24. Now I’m holding this sweetheart of internet nerddom up to the crackling inferno of my most vicious criticism. Well, this is the way the world works. We can all take solace in the fact that our taking different views of the same book is part of what makes us human. If you are one of the many fans out there of Stephenson’s future-punk novel, you can only really take solace, because you are in other discernible ways completely wrong and devoid of taste.

Speaking personally, my main problem with this novel is jizz. Now, I have no particular problem with jizz; it can be quite handy in the right circumstances, but what I’m referring to specifically here is that works like this positively reek of the author’s own. They’re trumped-up, superficial geeky idylls, so transparently a personal fantasy of their makers made flesh that you can spot the points in the writing where they must have taken a break to go and jerk off for a while, because the following pages hold a slightly different tone and are inexplicably stuck together. My view is that people who form attachments to works such as these find a kinship with these sort of fantasies, but if you’re left on the outside it’s a very awkward and hollow experience.

It can be entertaining, of course, but once the more kinetic action sequences die down and you’re left with story, or exposition, it is so easy to find it superficial and flabby. The sci-fi elements here were innovative when it came out (this book basically ‘anticipates’ Second Life) but outside the logistics of making it actually happen, the whole meta-universe idea is pedestrian at best as a fantastical notion, and it doesn’t compensate for the book’s utter lack of interest in its characters or in suspending disbelief. Most of its structure revolves around the perpetuation of tired comic-book stereotypes, and it only has anything interesting to say if you’re already deeply immersed in that mythology.

The funny thing is, I would probably recommend this book more than anything else on this bottom 10, for the simple reason that I know many people who would find a lot to like in it. To me, though, it runs completely perpendicular to everything I want in a book.

50) To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf

Well, here we are. It’s such a shame, in many ways, that I don’t really have anything new or exciting to say about this book, or why it’s at the bottom of the pile, since everything that’s wrong with this book was covered in my write-up of Mrs Dalloway above. But, for the benefit of those who haven’t had the appalling misfortune to have been tired enough of life to read this rubbish, here is a summary of the exhilarating plot of this page-turner:

Part 1: Some dudes prepare for a dinner party but don’t actually have the dinner party.

Part 2: Years later, some of them die.

Part 3: Those that didn’t die go to a lighthouse.

Oh, and of course, all of the characters feel ways about stuff.

If there are those out there who are big fans of modernism and/or Woolf’s modernism – and there’s no accounting for taste – power to you, but everything about this book rubbed me the wrong way. It’s loquacious, incoherent and empty, with a smattering of interesting points about life and relationships hidden in a giant haystack of waffling drivel.

And when there’s no university context to soften the blow of the modernism, there is nothing redeemable in this book for me. I felt quite simply like it wasted my time.

To The Lighthouse should feel a little bit hard done-by, though, since it’s sheer good fortune that Ulysses was published a year before TIME magazine’s inception, because otherwise it would certainly have made TIME’s list and would consequently have born the full brunt of my fiery modernism hate in these write-ups. But something has to be put at the bottom and luck of the draw or not, Woolf is the only obnoxious, gas-bagging modernist here and she’s at her worst in these pages.

PS: I’m not afraid of Virginia Woolf.

And with that, the rampant negativity oozing out of my veins has dried up; we have reached the end of my critical rants, and the only thing that remains is for me to heap increasingly effusive levels of ass-kissing praise on the twenty books I loved the most. All complaints are done with, all sins are pardoned. If you have really started to think I’m a whining, nit-picking grouch who’s impossible to please, you’ll have to think again in our next exciting instalment: SAM COUNTS DOWN HIS TOP TWENTY.