#46 - A Thousand Splendid Suns

This book is so unrelentingly sad. So, so sad. It finds a way though, despite naming every tragedy imaginable, to make the story of Mariam and Laila seem entirely believable, and even common. It's beautiful prose, full of personal touches - I felt just as home in it as I would reading Richler in Montreal. It was a reasoned view on the political front, that purposefully left unanswered the question of what would happen in halls of government next. Absolutely fantastic, and made me feel love despite being crushingly depressing.

9/10

#45 - Bossypants

Tina Fey is an excellent artist and businesswoman, and her memoir does a persistent job of conveying that. I loved the cruise scene in particular, reminding me of my mom. Once she got to her more current resume, it really picked up - she knew exactly what she wanted to share, and what people wanted to hear. I can see every one of her friends and coworkers reading this book and coming away happy - and it honestly seems like that's what Tina would have wanted.

6/10

#44 - The Gun

Simply going to drop shorter thoughts and a final rating on each of these - I'm posting these all together although it's been a few months since I expanded the list.

The Gun was a truly great non-fiction piece to get me back on track. Like Bowling Alone, it had a painfully balanced view of almost everything. However, The Gun has a constantly critical presence - judging mistakes in engineering and humanity alike. His use of both propaganda and critical reviews side by side was especially excellent.

8/10

The Reading List v2.0

What was meant as a way of trimming the deadwood has been an explosion of growth. Huge thanks to everyone who contributed to this list - not that most of you will see it, I don't share this blog about anywhere. I'll be much more open with this list - jumping around the five of them, based on which of them cross my path, come up in conversation, or strike a fancy.

A) Non-Fiction

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

The First World War by John Keegan (also WWII)

Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

On Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrum
Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull

Peter the Great by Massie

Shakespeare, Sex and Love by Stanley Wells

Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

Rabid by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy

The Age of Em by Robin Hanson

Red Queen by Matt Ridley

Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

July 1914: Countdown to War by Sean McKeekin (revisionist)

Haunted Empire: Apple After Jobs by Yukari Kane

Secret History of the Mongol Queens by Jack Weatherford

Battle Cry of Freedom by James MacPherson

When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein

The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

War by Gwynne Dyer

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen

The Right Stuff by Thomas Wolff

Testaments Betrayed by Milan Kundera

Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt
The Gun by CJ Chivers  -  Completed October 2016

B) Philosophy/Ideas

The Idea of Canada by David Johnston

Zealot by Reza Aslan

No God but God by Reza Aslan

Free to Choose by Milton Friedman

The Prince by Niccolo Macchiavelli
The Republic by Plato
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The Discourses by Epictetus

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

The Moral Animal (evolutionary morality)

God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

The People’s Platform by Astra Taylor

The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer

The Presentation of the Self by Erving Goffman

Among the Thugs by Bill Buford

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman

World on Fire by Amy Chua

The Witness Wore Red by Rebecca Musser (Mormon/LDS)

Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt

Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar by Thomas Cathcart

The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell

C) Modern Fiction - post-1900

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The Crow Road by Iain Banks

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

White Noise by Don DeLillo

Madness by Marya Hornbacher

Kafka on the Shore by Murakami
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Shogun by James Clavell

Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Flashman (series)

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Swastika Night by Katherine Burdekin

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard (or Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

The Things We Carry by Tim O’Brien

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

Who Do You Think You Are by Alice Munro

Ragtime by Cory Doctorow

Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip Dick

D) Current Fiction - post-2000

The Girls by Emma Cline

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman

Black Hole by Charles Burns (graphic novel)

E) Reach Reading List

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

Animal Farm by George Orwell

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

My Ántonia by Willa Cather

#43 - A Prayer for Owen Meany

One of Amy's earliest additions to my list, I got to read Owen Meany at the end of my first year in Toronto. I'm glad it came when it did in my life, because Irving's Canada - cold and dry, grey and white, but well lit and secure - completed what is a distinctly North American setting. This novel has one of the most clear-eyed narratives that I've ever read - every line of it contained a healthy dose of truthfulness. Oddly enough, it took me a few hundred pages before I realized I hadn't remembered his name - and I was doubly shocked once I realized he  It also captured such real abstract moments - different living situations growing up, the difference between high school and university - alongside hard factual critiques of politics - though he self-deprecates most of his comments afterwards.

Seeing cultural touchpoints discussed from a recent viewpoint was very exciting - seeing Marilyn Monroe's timeless appeal, Kennedy's changing (percieved) morality and Nixon and Reagan's steady (percieved) villainy. Ronald Reagan is a vapid young drunk - remember that? The humour was sharp, but the themes were spectacular. I've never seen what I suppose I must admit is my own religious background, meticulously profiled and rebuked, but it delivered. Amy's synchronicity was always present, and personally, I was thrilled with his sense of time - day/night, holidays and seasons, and building the dates and years together into their own historical record.

The part of A Prayer for Owen Meany that hit me the hardest was Harriet Wainwright and her belief in the power of reading. She believed that it was something you worked on, that was true exercise. TV (and as John admits, newspapers and magazines) do not satisfy the endurance requirements. This book, not through age but through determination, was a pchallenge of stamina - 90 page chapters, sturdy clauses and introspective paragraphs. For the last 5 years I've been working through classic literature, but I've got a long way to go when it comes to reading. Not long, so much as eternity.

That's why in the interest of new challenges, I'm going to trim down my remaining Literature list in order to try and pull together some other lists:

Non-Fiction - Learning about the world around us.
Philosophy - Learning about the world inside us.
Modern* Fiction - Learning about what brought us to today.
Current** Fiction - Learning about where things are going.

Almost forgot - Amy picked another perfect winner:

10/10

* Post-1900

** Post-2000

#42 - The Odyssey

What a long, strange trip it has been. Since starting the list, I've lived in 3 cities, visited 11 countries (do we count Wales?), and read 42 literary classics. Reading the Odyssey makes you think about the journeys in your own life, and I'm just so pleased that this list has managed to keep on growing through it all. I have continued to make an effort to work in books from off the list though. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is an excellent vision of the future in the vein of Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (who warranted a shoutout in RP1), but I do wish that he had focused on the early 90s a little more than the straight 80s fare. Choose Your Own Autobiography by Neil Patrick Harris was hilarious and a quick read over the Christmas holidays, exactly what I would've imagined from him.

With this, I've completed the main Greek cycle - Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid. Couldn't be happier to be done - despite appreciating them, they were such a dry read compared to modern literature. I'm a 21st-century reader, what can I say? That's something that's even more apparent when the Odyssey is compared to Ulysses. Despite both of them being well beyond my full understanding on a first readthrough, I felt myself becoming attuned to the natural flow of Joyce's work much more readily than I did trying to reach back to Homer. The translation of this work certainly didn't help - picked out of the Norton anthologies that Amy has, it had some very strange spellings (Akhilleus instead of Achilles, for example) which always made it feel somewhat more stilted than it had to be.

That said, there were some interesting highlights! The ending was a "false close", much like the 19 Years Later epilogue closing Harry Potter. It may have been bolted on by later creators, and mostly deals with the gods running around settling scores. Wholly unnecessary, but ah well. They killed the dog off in XVII 370-375, so if you're sensitive I suggest avoiding that part. Finally, this raunchy passage made up part of my Valentine's card this year, because it was just that fantastic:

Now Penelope sank down, holding the weapon on her knees, and drew her husband's great bow out, and sobbed and bit her lip and let the salt tears flow. Then she went back to face the crowded hall, tremendous bow in hand, and on her shoulder hung the quiver spiked with coughing death. (XXI, 54-60)

7/10

#41 - The Aeneid

It's been a while. I don't think I've ever felt so fatigued looking at the rest of this list, and yet I can almost physically taste the excitement I first felt when I made it and printed it out on hard copy to take around to trivia practices. I'm living in Toronto now with Amy, who has always been a part of this project, but it just gets harder and harder to justify sitting down and reading thick, heavy books that I don't always enjoy, let alone actually finding the time for them. However, this one is done, and after a couple of lighter non-list reads (Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of American Cities), I'll keep on pushing with Homer's Odyssey.

The Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid are all epic poems dealing with the Trojan War, a semi-fictional event that has been studied more than most real wars. The full cycle has a rich enough body of work that I'm surprised there hasn't been a more earnest effort to create a full television series tying them all together - starting from the beginning of the Trojan siege (Iliad) and moving through the war, fall of Troy and the journeys of Odysseus and Aeneid following the war. It could easily be a five-season story with 1/3 of the storylines dedicated to Trojan, Greek and Olympian plots...but that will be for someone else to write.

What was interesting about the Aeneid was that it was written by the Romans, which I had never had a real experience with. Most of my mythology was focused on the Greek side of things, and so seeing the revisionism in action was a very fascinating part of the reading. While the text still contained long speeches and dry lists of deaths (which would be much more fun in a television series), the action was lively and kept things moving, which improved on the epic poetry format. I'm optimistic that the Odyssey will keep this up. For what it's worth, I did enjoy the writing style of Homer more - or was it the Chapman translation that I appreciated? I guess we won't find out...until next time, on The Epic of Troy!

6/10

#40 - The Waste Land

So it took me 12 hours after the initial reading, but I get it! And it's beautiful, it really is. I enjoy so much of the other work of the era, it's hard not to - although there is some manner of extra intensity added to it through poetry. The Fisher King, fertility and futility, Eastern and Western approaches, all very cool post-war themes that were expertly explored in this surprisingly short poem. 

I read my girlfriend Amy's (still love saying that) version of The Waste Land from the Norton Anthology of Literature. It was annotated, which was great and I later discovered wholly necessary if I were going to get through any of the work and its multiple languages, but it also wasn't typeset to preserve the breaks as designated. This gave me some initial confusion as to the different paragraphs and voices found in the work, something that I found a lot smoother in my subsequent reads.

The thing that aggravated me about The Waste Land wasn't the references or changing voices or the different potential explanations. It was the lack of that accessible - or nearly-accessible - base way of understanding it that gives the reader something to grasp on as they got through it. I found that even after I finished the first read, the core concept of the 'waste land' was somewhat lost to me. My first annotated read with Amy was better, but then I started being faced with denial - why my limited understanding was wrong, why this subverted that - and I was left even more frustrated, because there wasnt that starting frame to try and work higher-level thought off of. Reading more analysis and then rereading it made the poem now digestible, but it still lacked any kind of real resonance for me because I lacked that base plank.

Ulysses, in the end, after all of the form and structural changes, can be about an average day in Dublin, if you TRULY insist. There is the second reachable version of the Odyssey, bringing a thorough second set of meanings to every piece of the book. Then there are the thousands of references and allusions and things which add colour and interpretation and connection to other art, which make it magical, but only as something to look out at beyond the piece.

Instead, this felt like hanging from the monkey bars. My feet had nothing to stand on, so I couldn't appreciate the bars I was reaching desperately for, and I certainly couldn't enjoy the sights and stars around me. 

It is a great work, and I know it's only because I haven't given it time to open itself up to me, but this just wasn't impressive for me.

6/10

#39 - A Tale of Two Cities

This is my second crack at Dickens, having read and not enjoyed Oliver Twist when I was younger. His was actually my first experience with 'serial writing', something that I've now had a lot more experience with through the list. With Tale of Two Cities, Dickens manages to hit both the good and the bad of serial writing. The format allows, even indulges you to riff on something without real purpose. In the case of Melville, that means pointless chapters on colours and pseudoscience and architecture. But in the best cases, like Tolstoy, key moments of the story can be given their due. Dickens does both, with some fluff and some excellent diatribes.

Some of his best extended passages were in the settings and characterization. The book was really cinematic - not beautiful necessarily, just specifically very logical to film. There have already been 7 movies produced based on the book, as well as all other manner of adaptation. In part this speaks to the thoroughness of Dickens' descriptions, but also to what he doesn't show. Many of the characters were two-dimensional and created to represent one trait or archetype. While there was some ambiguity on it in the early stages, by the end of the story there was a clear delineation of good and evil, with only a couple of exceptions (Jerry) to prove the rule. For a refreshing change, it wasn't only the women - though Lucie was the innocent angel on a pedestal, and Madame Defarge was a bloodthirsty monster, they also had the incorrigibly stuffy Mr Lorry, and Charles as too-noble-to-be-noble. The only two characters that showed any change showed it as a direct reaction to the extent of their characters - the Doctor's shoemaking and Carton's final decision show what happens when their archetypes get pushed to breaking.

Because of the richness of the visuals, as well as the predictability of the characters, the whole story had something like a sense of fate to it. I know that the point Dickens wanted to make about the French Revolution was one of chaos, but it didn't come across that way to me. When things happened, they may not have made sense, but they all had a certain sense of divine fate around them. Whether they were factually innocent or guilty, what must be, will be. Darnay's acquittal in the first trial seems just as predestined as his guilt in the second. That's what makes the ending so much more satisfying - it's really the first example of a character in the book taking charge and breaking the natural flow of history. Even the Defarges eventual rise was dependent on waiting for the time to be right - but Carton's actions were something truly special.

Based almost solely on the ending, I'm going to give Dickens a solid grade on this one.

8/10

#38 - Lolita

Lo lee ta. I have some trouble placing this cleanly into a category. The author is Russian, writing in English, about a European protagonist living in America. It's got heavy elements of dark comedy, but the core is still tragic. It's not pornography, as many people thought when it came out. And it's not paedophilic, either, just so you know. It's actually hebephilic, the equivalent term for adolescents. In any case, it's a controversial novel, for pretty understandable reasons.

The story is told as a confession from Humbert Humbert, the brooding, supposedly-attractive older man with a Freudian penchant for young girls, or specifically "nymphets", the girls he describes as "the little deadly demon among the wholesome children". Humbert reminds me a lot of Raskolnikov, an egoist who is so assured of his own intelligence that he can't help but to try and manipulate those around him. In this case, Humbert continually twists his story, making him one of the least reliable narrators I've had on my list. He changed perspective - mostly in the early, more predatory chapters - from first to third person whenever he wanted to distance himself from the action. He confides in the reader how he hoodwinked his psychoanalysts - a group of crackpots, according to him, even though he is well-versed in their literature - with tales of impotence, then tells the same stories to the reader later on. He insists on his innocence, then gives excuses, then pleads remorse, all for the same acts.

Which brings us to Haze, Dolores, aka Lolita. After all of the cultural references and homages and song lyrics (I had Lana Del Ray playing as my background music for this, I felt it fitting), I expected her to be more...well, more like a nymph. There were elements of it there - she was knowledgeable about sex, she too knew how to manipulate others to get what she wanted - but very soon it became clear that there was nothing special about her, that she was just a little girl. Then again, it's very difficult for anyone to know what Lolita thought of the whole thing, and how it affected her growth, because Humbert's story has the very thorough effect of removing all personality from her. She is objectified in the clearest sense of the term, used as the actualization of his desires and removed from any personal context. It didn't matter who she was, it mattered what she was, and that realization is what removed the (impressively lingering) doubt I had about Humbert's virtue. The story is about love, but about the vicious, damaging obsessive love that ruins lives. It's creepy, yes, but only in that he continually manages to have you so close to believing every word he says. I thought it was powerful, I thought it captured a twisted mind, and I need to go take a shower and look at buxom women.

9/10

#37 - The Grapes of Wrath

Steinbeck said that his goal was "to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible" for the Great Depression, and boy howdy, he achieved that. At odds with all of my business-school learning, The Grapes of Wrath brought with it a thundering condemnation of big industry, preaching liberal, even communist economics in the face of wealth disparity. In fact, it really started to get under my skin just how much of the message of the book applied to the things I was learning about today's business world - from the rise of temp agencies doing piecework manual labour to sub-prime mortgages to commercials I'm watching right now about individual farmers growing from 160 acres to 20,000 acres, it seems as though nothing has changed.

It's also why I think that The Grapes of Wrath is an absolutely fantastic book for teaching in schools, both in the US and Canada. It gives a clear picture of the Great Depression in every conceivable way. The book talks about how they slaughtered animals and managed early cars, how the typical work-day happened, the way that the Okies spoke. It also talks about how the incumbent population responds to an influx of poor immigrants, regardless of how similar they are otherwise. It talks about how companies and banks respond to times of crisis by pushing against the middle and lower classes, and how the middle and lower classes find their opportunities limited to starving, becoming migrants or helping to force their fellows to make the same choice. It has lessons for history, economics, geography, science, any of the social studies.

But it isn't necessarily a great book for an English class. It has some wonderful passages, and indeed some beautiful chapters. Steinbeck used an alternating chapter format where he wrote a short chapter describing a facet of Depression-era life in a broad, imagery-filled way, using no real characters or plot. Then he'd go back to the Joad family and follow them as they ran into the same sorts of problems covered in the "artsy" chapter. The themes were there and clearly visible, but there weren't many, and they weren't complex. Finally, it had the weirdest little ending I've seen so far, and I'm still not sure what was going on with it, and I've showed it to a few people and reread it with them to no avail. It was nice, it was excellent to read, but it wasn't artistically challenging.

8/10

#36 - The English Patient

I don't know if I have ever read a book that is so intricately crafted in every way. Fitzgerald edited, sure, and others made deliberate decisions and worked sentences and paragraphs, but never have I seen something that was such a clear display of work as The English Patient. It had short, clipped phrases - Sinners in a holy city. - that, unlike Hemingway's natural quick patter, were used to trip the reader. But it also had long passages and internal monologues, the un-punctuated her hair her shoulder her vaccine scar on her right arm rambling of Kerouac. It leapt between raw and stiff, between flowery and precise, and every one of those changes had a deliberate rationale behind it that I could spend days thinking about. And the writing is good, really - I completely agree with his accolades and everything else that has been bestowed upon him. But midway through the book, I realized I wasn't going to give it 10/10, and I still don't know why. Maybe it's that he felt like more of a craftsman than an artist, or maybe I feel like you need to be subversive in some way, or maybe I just read it while I was near my family. But I just didn't feel like it got there, somehow.

There were many awesome things I wanted to point to. The big "plot" reveal was brilliant - I'll be nice this time, or mean depending on if you came here looking for a synopsis. It is apparently a work of Historical Metafiction, which is just...do the Dear Canada books count for that as well? Speaking of Canada, this is one of the greatest Canadian novels ever written - by a Sri Lankan-born author, featuring an "Englishman" who explored North Africa, a Sikh from India trained in Britain, and is set in a villa in Italy. Which, upon further reflection, probably makes it one of the most Canadian great novels, as well as a great Canadian novel. We can't all be Alice Munro talking about the prairies. The book is mind-blowingly researched, and the fact that the largest influence on the novel was from Herodotus should show just how academic the book can be. But I don't consider that a mark against, either - I'm glad that one of the rules Ondaatje followed was to "write what you know".

There is a phrase that I've heard used to describe loads of books, and I've never quite believed in the comparison, until now. The English Patient truly is a rich tapestry of a book, and yet again, the Oldfield Option scores big.

9/10

#35 - For Whom The Bell Tolls

So after a 6-month break to mission through Vanity Fair, I got to return to Mr. Ernest Hemingway, with For Whom The Bell Tolls. Coming 11 years after A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway's writing style had definitely shifted from the beige prose I wrote about before. While the language is still dry, the sentences and paragraphs grew longer and more complex, with fewer clipped phrases. There were more digressions and asides, and more attention was paid to the inner monologues of not only Robert Jordan, our protagonist, but also a number of the other soldiers. (Right, plot summary: Robert Jordan is an American professor helping Spanish Communist guerrillas to fight the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, by blowing up a bridge that is to be important in an upcoming battle. Hilarity ensues.) The broader writing was helped by the use of Old Castilian language for much of the dialogue - translated into English, it read as if they were speaking to each other extremely formally, with thee, thou and doest being scattered across a page. Expletives were also used quite well, with the foul-mouthed soldiers having their words tempered through translation and angry tirades seeming even stronger without the actual words being used. My personal favourite was "I obscenity in the milk of your mother", but that's just because I like how many different options it leaves. But other things were very much the same - the beginning and endings were both crafted to an exact goal, with one building the world and tones and the other bringing the pace down to a final still moment - and I'm glad they were, because in both books, they were beautifully done.

Another thing that remained the same was his treatment of women, and this is where I'm going to have to bring in some outside discussion. This article was posted: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/12/09/in_no_regrets_women_writers_talk_about_what_it_was_like_to_read_literature.html on my news feed, and being a good enlightened modern feminist man, I read and nodded along to the propagation of gender roles and inequality, but something still felt wrong. It specifically called out Hemingway, as well as Kerouac's On The Road, so it had clearly targeted a lot of books that I felt strongly about. So while I read this one, I wanted to try and see how it made me feel - towards women, and everything else. Lots of it was there - the love interest of the book, Maria, only lived to serve Robert, falling head over heels for him and seeming to exist only to let Robert examine his feelings on having a woman close to the battlefield. She wasn't treated as a person, and her rich back story was used as a starting point for more investigation of Robert. Unlike inner monologues from Robert, Anselmo, El Sordo, and more, there was no attempt to have her voice (or the voice of Pilar, the strong-willed older woman) drive the narrative. This was also the case with the creepy romance found in A Farewell to Arms, so I looked at some more of the similarities between the women. They were both women who were damaged by traumatic experiences (a lost husband and sexual abuse), they were both in vulnerable positions near a war front, and they both were obsessed with saying and doing whatever it took to please men that they loved, which they did within the first couple of meetings. Hemingway, very clearly, didn't understand these women - he says as much in A Farewell to Arms - but he was fascinated by them, and so incorporated them into his story as they affected him, as objects that influenced without being seen as equal, and as stories that were told to him by them. To have tried to create some sort of equal narrative between men and women in the book would have detracted from the single most important point of not only Hemingway's, but arguably any writer - to describe the "truth" as they see it, as purely and as clearly as possible. If women today feel excluded from the literary canon, it's because they were excluded. Hemingway didn't understand the women in his life, just as many female writers today don't seem to understand the men in theirs.

I'm already running over my optimal length for one of these, so I'll just skip to the ending - literally. The 43rd and last chapter of the book runs some 40 pages, a sizable chunk of the total length of 471. It runs continuously through the battle, and (SPOILERS aw who gives a crap if you're this far in you've probably read it and if not I've given you more than enough time to click away from the page go on click click away!) as it comes to the finish, I have never felt so immersed, in a cinematic sense, with the scene. It certainly helped that as I read about the horses galloping across the road, and the tearful goodbye, my sister was playing Let It Be on a tiny music box from her stocking. It got even more perfect as the family left the car and walked up to my grandmother's, leaving me sitting in the cold car as I read the last four pages, my body getting chilled as he waited for the end. And as I read about the standoff, I saw my breath hang in the air, listened to the stillness of a Canadian winter, and then closed the book. Dammit Hemingway, you did it again. Merry Christmas 2013, you son of the great whore.

10/10

#34 - Vanity Fair

Right off the bat, let's settle some things. Vanity Fair is a magazine currently in its fifth iteration as a magazine, with 2 British editions and 2 American editions coming before the current American edition, which started in 1983. The 4th iteration, the 2nd American edition, actually merged with and was absorbed by what remains today as Vogue. Before the first magazine was produced, there was this book, Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray. But the origin of all of these Vanity Fairs is the original, a setting in the John Bunyan book Pilgrim's Progress (#44 on my list), in which travelers are distracted by a never-ending festival of all of the worldly enjoyments of life, keeping them from moving further along the moral road. Thackeray's Vanity Fair is set in Napoleonic Britain, providing a very interesting contrast with Tolstoy's War and Peace, approaching from the East. The upper-crust society that Thackeray describes is filled with nepotism, alcoholics, superficiality and hypocrisy, all as part of his scathing social critique on the nobility of the time. With this, Thackeray established himself as one of the most popular writers of the era, matched only by Charles Dickens, whose fame has lasted significantly better.

Speaking of Dickens, this novel suffers from the same tragic flaw as both Dickensian works and War and Peace - it was published in serial form. Now, Tolstoy used the opportunity to expand the world he was writing in to epic proportions, but Thackeray instead used it to recite his favourite moral lectures and toss asides to friends and readers into the main thrust of the story. I've always disliked the style forced by the serial format, but here is the first place where I've truly wondered if it could remove artistic quality from the piece, and I think is does. Vanity Fair could have been one of my top books ever, but it should not be 951 pages (in my Wordsworth Classics edition, published 1992), not even close. With a team of good editors and a machete, this manuscript could have been easily reduced to 400, maybe as low as 250 pages, and the effects would have been so much purer. I'm not advocating Fitzgerald-like wordsmithing, but I am being convinced more and more that every word needs to have a purpose to belong on the page (I know, this is one of my wordiest and sloppiest reviews, but it's been a long semester).

That all said, there was true genius in the book, and that was in the clarity of his character work. The foibles, so important to his satire, were just realistic enough to keep the pressure on the message behind it. The subtitle of Vanity Fair is A Novel Without A Hero, but readers have since argued that that statement is purposefully gendered - implying that the Hero-ine is one of the two main female leads, Amelia Osborne (nee Sedley) or Rebecca "Becky" Crawley (nee Sharp). The pair are wonderful opposites, and both are enviable roles, which may be why there have been half a dozen adaptations of the book. Amelia is sweet and innocent and gentle, while Becky is clever and talented and determined. Becky's skills at satire, seduction and society mask a deeper, almost psychopathic disregard for other people. In fact, some interpretations go so far as to suggest she may have murdered another character in the close of the book. But many of the adaptations go out of their way to justify Becky's actions as a child of poverty whose drive for financial stability is understandable, even laudable. Personally, while I find Becky a compellingly twisted villainess, I wouldn't go as far as describing her as evil - were she born into luxury, she'd be no worse than a Daisy Buchanan. Amelia, on the other hand, I find more challenging. Her naivete and lack of subtext appears as warm and genuine, but in the end is entirely weak, vapid and simply...not worth the time. Dobbin, who longs for her as a "girl-on-pedestal" for much of the book, says as much in one of the book's best passages, of which there were many.

And there were many, and there was plenty of other great stuff too. But because Thackeray had to fill 20 issues of a magazine, he surrounded it with loads of filler, and because of that, what could have been a back-to-back 10/10 is instead receiving a -2 mark for being written in a stupid era/format, giving it:

8/10

#33 - A Farewell to Arms

When it comes to recommending real literature for a guy who doesn't love the subject for itself - who won't sit and gush over the layers of the themes and the structure of the dialogue - there aren't many big names. For women you have your Austens and Brontes and plenty in between. For men, there are a couple of newer ones - Chuck Palahniuk springs to mind - but most of the older books don't immediately spring to mind as "dude lit". Three Musketeers discusses jewelry and clothing an awful lot - Don Quixote has sappy poetic love stories - but hiding just on the verge of modern is the patron saint of manly literature, Ernest Hemingway.

There is no other way to describe Hemingway that doesn't involve his testosterone. He is, by every definition, a bad-ass motherfucker. Dude fought things, had sex with things, grew beards, hunted, drank, gambled, and managed to still appreciate the beauty of things before he stomped on them with his dirty black boots. This generally manliness transferred entirely to his writing - he speaks in short, gruff sentences, describing things simply and callously. It also extends to the dialogue - mono-syllabic discussions on war and religion. For a while, it seemed to me to be a weakness - there were no passionate speeches, or witty banter. Then came a passage right near the end, where Count Greffi plays billiards. On an old man, the wisdom of the short phrase suddenly became clear - the lines were sharp, and the point was made. Hemingway still found the time to be an imagist, but instead of flowery purple prose, it was a dingy beige.

The back of my edition of A Farewell To Arms speaks of a wonderful romance between Tenente Henry and Catherine Barkley. So when I got into their first romantic sections, I had to read the back again. THIS was romantic? Barkley and Henry exchange false <3's as they both use each other as something to lean on - the mood swings on both parties are signs of not only damaged people, but near schizophrenia. For people who have read it, I'm not just referring to the opening closed-eyes kiss. The entire relationship is a series of fantasies, without any real moments between them. In the end, I suppose, that's not the question. If their relationship disturbs me, that's one thing - but is it real, and is it well-written? And again, I have to say yes. The final stream-of-consciousness passage, as he sits and waits for Catherine's labour to end, was written by Hemingway as he waited for his own child to be born. That kind of raw connection to the text is what makes Hemingway's stiff, coarse language work, and work it did. I enjoyed all of it - I wanted to keep reading, I wanted to see Henry go more places, and meet more people. I don't know if A Farewell to Arms will end up being my favourite Hemingway novel, but it was my first, and because of it, it certainly won't be my last. So now joining Don Quixote, On The Road, Ulysses and Crime and Punishment as the 10/10 books on my list is...A Farewell to Arms.

10/10

#32 - The Three Musketeers

It was a dark and stormy night, I am too young to die, and all for one and one for all. These three cliches were all penned by one Alexandre Dumas...pere. You see, there happens to be two Dumas writers in the family, and these Frenchman wasted all of the aliases on their characters, and so had to settle for Sr. and Jr. But while Dumas (fils) was busy scribbling out plays, the elder was creating the modern version of the swashbuckler. Thinking back to the pacing of Don Quixote, I was unsure how I was going to take to a full action novel, but The Three Musketeers blew me away. The rhythm of the text kept me interested - from descriptions of setting to fight scenes to banter and dialogue the reading was thoroughly lively. The result was the most cinematic book I think I can recall - not only could I see why there have been over a half-dozen films (animated and live action), plays and other adaptations, I saw the potential for more. My personal pick would be for a movie version focused on the imprisonment and escape of Lady de Winter - a psychological thriller with a femme fatale. Alas, I am both lazy and incompetent, and so it will never come to be.

Another reason the book translates so well to movie form is the clarity of the characters. Aramis the religious scholar, Porthos the proud glutton, Athos the quiet and moody leader, d'Artagnan the young excitable upstart. All of the lesser characters, from the other nobles and leaders to their servants, are equally well-drawn - but none more so than Lady de Winter. The cat-like villainness steals all of her scenes, all of the time, forever. Dumas managed to write her as powerful, yet still entirely within the confines of the gender views of the time - both the men and the women discuss how the females are the weaker gender, and how surprising it is that a woman could possess such ferocity and strength of character. The comparison to Lady Macbeth is made not once, but twice, however I would easily give the win to de Winter - when given the option, she always tried to take matters into her own hands, often with impressive results.

Impressive results seems to be my overarching opinion of The Three Musketeers. I enjoyed the plot and its twists (though many of them would have to be updated to have any hope of working in a modern sense), the sharply defined characters, and the wordy but lively prose. I find it very hard to suggest anything that could be termed as a weakness, and it was an excellent book to get ready for the summer spree, but I simply didn't have the passion for it that I have for others.

9/10

#31 - War and Peace

First off, War and Peace isn't even necessarily the name. War, certainly. But the Peace could also be World, or The Rest. War and the Rest. War and Everything Else. Everything. Else. Tolstoy argues that War and Peace is not a novel, and I would have to agree with him. Novels have a plot, a central theme, a sense of focus or at least a prescribed direction. What War and Peace does is play with focus - from the tiniest minutiae to the grandest frontiers of Europe - in order to encapsulate, in a mere 1444 pages (in my Penguin Classics, Rosemary Edmonds-translated edition), the entirety of Russia, in mind, body and spirit.

The largest portion of the book ranges from 1805-1812, the Napoleonic Wars. It has over 500 named characters, but centers around a few wealthy noble families - the Rostovs, the Bolkonskys, the Bezuhovs, and the Kuragins - and their lives, both in War, and Peace. There are births, deaths, marriages, affairs, dances, pranks, drinking, farming, shooting, stabbing, talking, yelling, singing, sitting, standing, lying in both word and act, and more. To quote Mark Twain, "Tolstoy carelessly neglects to include a boat race". The only exceptions are sex (none of that naughty stuff) and swearing , which doesn't pop up at all until later on in the depths of the biggest bummer part of the war. I really truly cannot give a plot summary for this book, there is not one to be found. And that's because this book is REAL.

Russian realism had already had me really impressed. Between Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment, the understanding of the human psyche that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky showed was jaw-dropping, and War and Peace raised the bar still further. Every minute detail of action and reaction, of inner dialogues and public repartee was effortlessly perfect. The breadth added to the effect - by the end, the childhood memories of the Rostovs were just as foggy and nostalgic for me as my own were. War and Peace is a novel with big ideas, but a reserved way of showing them. Characters have earth-shaking realizations and epiphanies, their world-view changing dramatically (particularly in Pierre and Andrei, Tolstoy's avatars). But even in these wise and intelligent characters, there are beautiful contradictions. These metaphorical theories are mocked and lampooned just chapters later, showing, in its turn, the ongoing contradictions of men.

One of the reasons that War and Peace shouldn't be called a novel is the multiple branching diatribes that Tolstoy left in it. Religion, from the Masonic lodge to entire schools of metaphysics, are examined by piles upon piles of the characters, culminating in a resoundingly  devout argument that had me engrossed, if not convinced. He was less roundabout with his examination of the Great Man Theory of History, in vogue at the time but absolutely despised by Tolstoy. While I agree firmly that the GMT is too enthusiastic in its hero worship, I didn't need 300 pages and an epilogue to expound upon it.

War and Peace is beyond description. To those who argue that you cannot truly appreciate a work of literature unless it is in the original language, I laugh. True genius in art will transcend, and War and Peace is proof of that. The ONLY, and I mean the only reason why this is not getting a 10 out of 10 and joining my pantheon of heroes is because it was not, as all great Russian things should be, distilled to a purer form.

9/10

#30 - Pygmalion

One of the starkest differences between writing a novel and writing a play is the amount of control the artist has over the result. A novel is crafted, more or less, by a single person. Plays go through layers of adaptation and reshaping before even the original work hits the stage. Actors, directors, workers of all kinds immediately get their hands into it, and some writers cannot deal with this sort of sharing. There are ways around it - Our Town goes into obscenely detailed stage directions, lighting and set instructions, and emotive cues - but for many, it's a struggle that starts after the first changes are already underway. In Pygmalion's case, Shaw wrestled with the ending. Theatregoers wanted a happy ending to walk away with, while Shaw's original work demanded a bittersweet one. So as director after director, producer after producer changed the ending to suit their audience, Shaw fought back harder and harder. He inserted a lengthy epilogue explaining his thinking and showing why the happy ending was false, which was attached to all subsequent publications. There are now some productions using the original text, but the most famous examples - from the original production to the musical adaption My Fair Lady - still have the cloying, optimistic take. Shaw's reason for disliking the happy ending make perfect sense. The play is a critique of many of the values of the London of the day - elitism, misogyny, egotism - and rewarding Henry Higgins, the most callous one of all, for this completely ruins any message Shaw was trying to send. Certainly the corrupted version still allows for Eliza to make her stand, have her "bit back", but it dampens the vindictiveness that was so essential to the morality of the work. 

Many of the things I enjoyed about Pygmalion were the way in which Shaw made his criticism. Henry Higgins, it should be understood, is a villain, and each character's interactions with him show that in a slightly different light, but unlike most villains he actually gets to say his piece about WHY he is the way he is. In one of, in my opinion, one of the strongest passages, he explains his theory of interpersonal communication, and for a split second it makes sense and he's actually a heroic example of standing by principles and then just as quickly the gaps in the explanation become apparent and then he is again a bully and a brute. Another highlight of the work was Mr. Doolittle's rise and fall - more amusing than anything, it held a lot of sincere quips about the joys of poverty, something that reminded me of Anna Karenina and the ode to the rural life.

9/10

#29 - Little Women

First off, the obligatory explanation as to my delays in posting. After finishing Anna Karenina, I was well into the final exam season of my first year at Western, and so I laid off on starting Pygmalion until later. Later stretched to the distant future when I registered for Children's Literature for the summer term, giving me a whole new list to deal with before I could return to the challenge. The list itself is quite a good one, ranging from fairy tales and nonsense verse to boys' adventure novels to the "domestic novel" for young ladies to the more modern fantasy genre. However, only a single book was to be found on both lists, and that is this bastion of women's literature, Little Women.

Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women as a favour to a publisher friend of hers, and its success was soon followed by a second part, Good Wives, and two sequels, Little Men and Jo's Boys. However the original two-volume set is the part that everyone gads on about, and it is not immediately evident why. Alcott was not predisposed to write a novel about the domestic life, as she herself lived a surprisingly modern and urban life. She moans in her diaries about how she plods away, mirroring my thoughts exactly. The book is SLOW, in a way I haven't found before. Usually when a book reads slowly its because it is interminably thick and I need a large block of time to get into it. Little Women managed to come along when I had nothing but reading time, but its bland, repetitive language made me want to fall asleep at all hours of the day. I'm putting this in front of the actual analysis of the plot and book itself because regardless of the book's qualities, the ability of this novel to cause narcolepsy should be noted as a warning label at all times.

Little Women is based on the lives of Louisa and her three sisters, captured in the book as Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. It follows them through their late childhood and budding womanhood, showing the different paths that each of them took. Meg is the model of a submissive housewife figure, and she marries early and raises twins through the second part. Beth is a sickly child who is entirely selfless and honest, and passes on at the age of 18 through an unknown ailment. Jo is the headstrong tomboy of the family (and Alcott's avatar in the story), refusing the neighbour Laurie's proposal, and realizing a budding writing career before marrying the older German professor Bhaer in the close of the second part. After Laurie's rejection he goes off to brood in Europe where he encounters a newly flowering Amy, now the shining star of the family, and the two come home married after some predictable angst through the second part.

The majority of the action happens after the original Little Women ends. If read as only the first part, the majority is taken up by a repetitive looping moralizing in which one precocious daughter longs for some frivolity or trinket, seeks to obtain it or act the part to some failure, returns crying to mother, who gives consolation tied in with Biblical commands which the daughters thank her most genuinely for. This comprises most of the first 20 chapters, and had me pulling at my lymph nodes. But the plot did pick up in the second half, the characters were extremely well-formed (because they were based on her own family) and the concept of free-thinking women choosing between careers and husbands was actually a marked leap forward for young women's literature. However, narcolepsy.

5/10

#28 - Anna Karenina

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The first line of Anna Karenina may be its most well-known part, but it's also probably one of the only parts I truly loved. Before my first Russian book Crime and Punishment, I was concerned about how heavy and dreary it was going to be, and was instead happily surprised by an excellent psychological thriller. However, after my second Russian book, Anna Karenina, the score stands tied at one apiece. While C + P was about Russians killing and dealing with the ramifications of that, Anna Karenina is about Russians cheating and dealing with the ramifications of THAT. The result is a much thicker, slower read, filled with Austen-esque inner monologues on the thoughts behind the words during the dance with that boy at the ball last week at this princess' house. The writing still carries the same realist style of the other Russians, something that I'm coming more and more to terms with as I move forward. It's amazing how out of the driest language they can still create a vivid picture, like the pointillism of writing.

There's something in how all of the old books were written - every author takes the opportunity to fill their empty spaces with essays on whatever tickles their fancy. When I thought it was just Melville in Moby Dick I shrugged, figuring him to just be pretentious. But then long novel after long novel started containing passages and entire chapters on philosophy, economics, religion, history and all manner of academic topics. Discussions amongst people at parties are indepth analyses of artists, authors and plays - with the winner of the argument always furthering the agenda of the author himself. This sort of philandering is, I suppose, acceptable when you consider that these were published in serial magazines, and these magazines were often one of the only sources of new media available for consumption, and so had to try and cater to all audiences.

That said, to talk about the actual book. This was phenomenally slow going from the start, and unlike so many of the other books on the list, it didn't pick up as it went on. Only through sheer force of will did I pull myself through the books - procrastinating by studying and then forcing myself to go for another round. The book revolved around a group of noble Russian families and their various liaisons, and climaxed with the violent suicide of the title Anna Arkadyevna Karenina. It was a fine plot, strong and passionate characters, and showed all of the stages of infatuation, love and loss that happen in real life. I simply did not enjoy it throughout, and while many parts were well written, it was lost upon me as an entire work. On the other hand, it got me to learn my Russified name, Nikolay Iosefovitch - Kolya for short.

6/10