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.