Reading Challenge 2013 Part 1: Preamble + 48-41

So it’s that time of year again, when I indulge in that hopelessly self-aggrandising exercise of spouting off my opinions on the various hobbies in which I engaged myself throughout the year. In other words, it’s ‘end of year list’ time. And, true to form, I will be continuing my long tradition of writing up my end of year lists not in chronological or any other arbitrary form but, in my favourite of all forms, the epic countdown.

Which brings me to the subject of our first end of year list: my reading challenge 2013. As you know, because since you’re reading this, you’re either me or my mother, my reading challenge for 2012 was to ‘get myself through’ half of TIME Magazine’s Top 100 books published in English since 1925 list:

http://entertainment.time.com/2005/10/16/all-time-100-novels/

On New Year’s Eve, 2013, I set myself what I thought was a far more ambitious challenge (since I gave myself a head-start of about 18 books last year): read the remainder of the list. I allowed myself two exceptions: Alan Moore (et al)’s graphic novel Watchmen, for reasons unclear to me now but too late to retract, and Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, simply because reading that particular twelve-volume Proustian reminiscence could be a year-long reading challenge in itself.

So last week I found myself having made my way through the 48 books I’d set myself this year, almost a month ahead of schedule. The idea of reading practically a book a week had seemed at the start of the year a ridiculous notion, but with 70 minutes’ commuting time every day and the fact that a sufficient number of the list aren’t 900 pages of stream-of-consciousness gibberish, it actually became very manageable.

Without much further ado then, let’s move on to my countdown. Three more pieces of housekeeping before I begin, however:

- I will not be merging this list with last year’s at this stage, simply because I might want to rejig some of the rankings and hence rewrite some of my assessments of last year’s books, which I’m too lazy to do;

- This year I will be writing these up (or down) in order, from 48 to number 1, and none of that fancy ‘in the order that makes it increasingly interesting to me’ stuff I did last year. I’m hoping to rely largely on discipline to get me through this write-up.

- Most importantly, for anyone who has read anything on this list at all: remember that I rank and assess these works purely from a personal perspective: there are many books of undoubted quality that just didn’t do anything for me, and just as many works of questionable quality that I just jolly well enjoyed. So it’s OK that we disagree, and there’s no need to take offense. You’re just wrong.

So we start with:

48) An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser

And right away I’m faced with a bit of explaining to do. Not that I think this book is particularly well-read or well-liked by my blog audience (hi, Mother), but its spot at the bottom of this list is not really due to an inherent lack of quality and far more to do with a strong, personal negative reaction I had to it.

To begin with, this book is long. But not long in the sense that Gravity’s Rainbow or Infinite Jest (astute readers will recognise these as, respectively, #3 and #1 on last year’s list) are long, with eclectic casts of characters and sweeping, convoluted plots that absorb and dictate the human experience, this is really quite a small-scale story told in episodic form, which after a while began to feel rather plodding.

It’s split into three parts in the life of young Clyde Griffiths, son of a poor, puritanical religious mother & father and aspirant to the higher echelons of wealthy society. The events that take place across the second and third parts of the book are the meat of this book and, as I thought to myself only about halfway through part 2, only on a basic level related to the events that unfold in part one. So I quite frankly found it unnecessarily long, and in particular part one could happily have been dispensed with altogether and/or condensed into a couple of chapters explaining the boy’s background and character.

But, dubious narrative choices aside, this book still wouldn’t warrant the bottom ranking. What gave it this honour (and, to be honest, I was quite surprised that this came out bottom; when I ran the sorting program it just fared worse in every single match-up) is its utter sanctimonious falsehood.

In the first instance, I found the character of Clyde to be, in the worst possible sense, pathetic. He was a ridiculous excuse for a human being: a youth of naïve guilelessness at the best of times and a contemptible moral coward at the worst. Part three of this book, in particular, had reminiscences of similar ‘crime and retribution’ type stories like Richard Wright’s Native Son (which will come up later) or, if you will, the Sean Penn  film Dead Man Walking, in which the principal character(s) are brought to some higher level of understanding, or empathy, towards themselves and their victims. Clyde showed nothing of the sort.

Again, which might have been forgiven, if not for the last page or two of this book, which in a one line summary, proclaims its message thusly: “If you stray from the puritanical religious path, you will murder people.”

Of course I’m over-simplifying here (or am I?) but Dreiser’s “wrap-up” of his epic story in the final few pages felt, to me, at once preachy and preposterous. It also drenched the rest of the novel with a wash of high-minded puritanical dogma which in all honesty I hadn’t noticed was there. And that feeling of having been cheated into thinking there was an intriguing moral ambiguity to the story when, in fact, nothing of the sort was intended, ate away at me, to the point where this book emerged as my most detested of the whole year.

47) The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow

So we emerge from the mire of Sam trying to defend his trashing of a beloved book to… the mire of Sam trying to defend his trashing of a beloved book.

OK, I have less of a polarised reaction to Augie March than to the previous entry, and the main reason for its lowly place on this list is far more simple, and far less fair: disappointment.

Those who read my write-up of last year’s reading challenge (hi, Mother*) will know that I quite enjoyed Bellow’s other entry on TIME’s list, Herzog (it was #23 of last year). The trouble with reading the two in this order is that Augie March is a very different style of story, it takes place in a very different ‘life stage’ and consists of far more dense prose.

I would say the themes of Herzog are perhaps more difficult and obtuse, but I think I handle (and enjoy) dense themes far more than dense prose, so the fact is I found Augie March a real hard slog. Further to this – and we will see the following phrase crop up time and time and time again through this countdown – I’m not quite sure what the obsession is with ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ stories. I mean, they can be compelling stories but the fact is there are SO MANY on the TIME list, and so many in particular in the selection of TIME’s list that I read this year.

And as far as ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ I found this one the most directionless, and I didn’t get a strong sense of what it all meant. The Picaresque style didn’t really come through to me – in the way that it did in Candide, for example – as especially witty or satirical, and with the difficulty I had navigating through the prose, I just found myself growing increasingly bored with the characters.

At the end of the day though, I didn’t hate this book that much. But given my enjoyment of Herzog, the greater reputation than Herzog I felt that this book enjoyed, and the fact that people I know have adored this particular book, I really was quite crushingly disappointed by the experience, and hence it finds itself in 47^th place.

46) The Man Who Loved Children – Christina Stead

Ah, a book whose position I don’t feel the need to ‘defend’.

OK, so this quirky little novel relates the story of the atrociously dysfunctional Pollitt family, ineptly ‘led’ by the childish simpleton Sam, and consisting of about a million children and Henny, an irredeemable shrew of a wife who basically spends the entire book doped up on painkillers and yelling loudly about how lovely it would be to slaughter the children in their sleep.

That’s not… exactly… how the book goes, although it’s also not entirely off the mark. The pure and simple reason why this book finds itself in the bottom echelon of this list is because I just disliked all of the characters so much.

I got the sense that Louise, Sam’s eldest daughter from his previous marriage, is meant to be the moral compass of the book. This might work for me if I could relate to that sense of being a young woman trying to make a place for yourself in the world, but even then I just couldn’t even penetrate what it was Louise was supposed to be feeling, towards her father and mother in particular. It was sort of this sense of filial obligation heavily tinged with shame/embarrassment with a dab of loneliness and teenage angst thrown in, but I found her behaviour and reactions made her actually the most confusing to me. Sam and Henny were the least likeable but they were somewhat more fathomable – or at least explicitly handled.

At the same time, as I said it’s a quirky book at least in terms of tone, and that added to my indifference, because the tone seemed to clash a bit with some of the serious human drama that seemed to be going on. I mean Henny is little short of a dangerous sociopath as far as I can see, but the book treads lightly, matter-of-factly, around her blatant mental illness, coyly skirts the fact that here are two people tearing each other apart in front of a captive audience of vulnerable children, and not once manages to explain (satisfactorily) just what Sam and Henny were ever really supposed to have seen in each other.

I was mostly just perplexed by this book, but also a little repulsed, so while a reread may clear some stuff up, I really don’t feel the inclination to pick it up again anytime soon.

45) Neuromancer – William Gibson

Before I begin defensive mode for this one, I just want to say I find it really sad that so much sci-fi finds its way into my bottom ranks come the end of the year. I probably said something similar last year, but given that I love sci-fi in movies, I love speculative dystopias, and moreover I feel like I’ve read some sci-fi that would quite happily rank far more highly than all of the representatives on TIME’s list, it is sad that, following in the footsteps of Snow Crash and Ubik comes this, William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic.

The funny thing is that while Phillip K Dick’s Ubik found itself in the shitty position it did last year (#46 or so I think), it found itself there for the opposite reason that Neuromancer finds itself here, now. Where Ubik suffered from overexposition that slowed it to a tawdry pace, nobody could ever accuse Neuromancer of pausing too often to stop and have a look around. It’s classic, rollicking fast-paced entertainment from start to finish.

The problem, though, is that for 90% of reading it, I had virtually [pun intended] no idea what was going on. Obviously a reread could bump this up the rankings a bit, if I managed to grasp a little more of the imagined world or get my head round its 1980s future shock critique, but it’s on the same playing field as everything else on this list, so if one read through is obfuscating then obfuscating its status will remain.

What’s more, there is a little of that ‘man jizzing into his story’ sense that I reacted badly to in Snow Crash here, where William Gibson is just writing out his fantasies of hot kickass ninja girls and alternative realities where every feat of strength and endurance is possible, so there is also that counting against it. However, Gibson strikes me through the pages as more clever than Neal Stephenson, and a lot less on-the-nose with his fantasising elements, so I think he earned the right to dream a little.

He didn’t earn the right, however, not to explain a little more clearly. One of the things I like in sci-fi is the "sci" aspect, grounding the "fi" in some semblance of reality. I felt this book just took a lot of prior understanding for granted.

44) Are you there, God? It’s Me, Margaret – Judy Blume

So this book, in all honesty, I think is the least deserving of its spot in the bottom 8. It’s a very solid example of what it purports to be – a coming-of-age tale, aimed at coming-of-age people.

The sad truth is, though, that I feel this book can really only really be deep and meaningful to those who read it when they were 13-year-old girls, or can remember back to when they were 13-year-old girls, so unless there’s a time in my future when I’m likely to be a 13-year-old girl, I don’t think it will ever really speak to me.

It was, however, enlightening to learn what a joyous and momentous occasion having your first period is, and I understand now that my wife gets all shitty once a month simply because she’s impatient for this joyous and momentous occasion, so reading this was an educational experience.

Sarcasm aside though, it’s easy reading, it’s well written – as are all Judy Blume books – and it’s not aimed at me. It’s aimed at people so far from me I could launch a Voyager spacecraft at them and die before it reached them. So then, why are you arguing with its spot on this list?

You’re not, I am. The truth is for intrinsic quality as a children’s/young adult book about coming to terms with who you are as a young girl, this could be the best book ever written. But beyond “Hmmm, so that’s what a book about coming to terms with who you are as a young girl is like”, there is no message in this book for me at all.

43) On the Road – Jack Kerouac

OK, folks keeping score, what are we up to now on the ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ tally? Two only, including this one? Oh, dear me, there is plenty more to go on that particular scoreboard.

So while I found the density of The Adventures of Augie March its greatest shortcoming, On The Road is by no means a difficult read. What I found most distasteful in this one was its sheer lack of direction. Yes, I know that’s entirely the point, but its lack of narrative discipline started to get to me, particularly later in the book. Is this going anywhere? Is it building to anything? Oh, no, it’s not. It is genuinely just ‘My friends and I drove around the place, having sex and getting into shenanigoats.”

The funny thing is I went into this book really not expecting to like it, so I wondered throughout if I was perhaps being unfairly prejudiced. But I can name a number of books I went in with similarly low expectations, and the trouble with this book is it turned out to be exactly what I’d expected.

I know there are many people who adore this book for its unbridled look at Americana, and I can appreciate the ‘beat generation’ free-flowing nature of the book, but obviously I just didn’t like it. It was also the point in my challenge where I really became conscious of the inordinately high proportion of ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ in TIME’s list.

42) The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway

And straight away tally up number 3 on the ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ scoreboard. If I found On The Road directionless, I’d say the best word to describe this one would be pointless.

I was hugely disappointed with this effort which, incidentally, was my first Hemingway novel. To encounter one of the giants of literature for the first time and find this messy narrative about some tenuously-connected guys who I don’t know and don’t care about wandering around Spain… I don’t know, there seems to be an unrequited love story in there somewhere as well? I just didn’t get anything out of this book.

In truth I probably disliked this just a little bit more than On the Road, but apparently people find some great truth or meaning in this when they revisit, so in doing my sort I was inclined to be a little bit more forgiving of this. OK I got absolutely nothing out of it, but it’s still Hemingway, right? There simply must be more to it than there seems to be (Kerouac’s themes, by contrast, I found relatable through the narrative, but it didn’t connect with me).

This was easy enough to read and there were times when I felt myself starting to care about some of the characters, but it didn’t seem to go anywhere and by the time it didn’t go anywhere I’d given up caring. I’m still a bit confused by this book’s reputation, as I actually felt it to be quite superficial. But that’s the thing: is it? Or did I just not get Hemingway’s elusive brilliance?

One final editorial-related note about this book: it was originally published under the title it now possesses – The Sun Also Rises, although it was also published in an early edition under the far less-poetic title Fiesta. So for some reason the geniuses at Vintage Books are now peddling it under the clumsy double-barrelled title “Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises” which sounds like an advertising slogan for a passionfruit-flavoured soft drink. I hated that far more than the book itself.

41) The Sportswriter – Richard Ford

This one doesn’t really fit into the ‘young people wandering around aimlessly trying to find themselves’ niche, as it’s more of a ‘middle-aged person wandering around a bit having already lost himself’ story.

I may not have done this book full justice, as I read it in e-book form on my phone. I’d bought four reading-challenge books and finished them all far more quickly than I’d anticipated, so I found myself desperate, with nothing to read in book form, and grasped at the only method at my disposal to read this on the train.

At the same time, I found this book in all honesty to be probably the least-deserving of a spot on TIME’s list. I feel it could only possibly make a top 100 list made in America, because its social critique, its exploration of grief and the mid-life crisis all have a distinctly ‘American’ lens on them, and it doesn’t have a lot of depth beyond exploring notions of the American dream.

I did find it an interesting-enough read, but it was also a very easy read, in the bad sense, that it sort of kept chugging along its storyline without ever really producing anything surprising or challenging. There are some downplayed explorations of faith, as well, but ultimately it got absorbed far more easily than it maybe should have, given what it seemed to be attempting. I started to wonder if I wasn’t ‘getting’ this book because there was some sort of implication from the term ‘sportswriter’ that I wasn’t getting – similarly to the whole mythologised notion of the ‘postman’ in David Brin’s novel of the same name.

Anyway, it’s a decent enough read, but I think it would struggle to make even a top 200 list anywhere outside the US.

So the shortest (hence easiest) ‘chunk’ of my countdown 50 is done. In the next exciting instalment, I contend with the first of many “I’d already seen the movie adaptation” books, I get into an awkward situation with a goat and some handcuffs, and I lie about at least one thing that will happen in the next instalment.

*. Incidentally, I’m making a lot of “hi, mother” jokes this year. I’d just like to point out the fact that my mother is, in fact, not one of the people who reads my blog as far as I know.