Duddy Kravitz is the first book I've read that has not been on the list. It was a pick for an English project on a "Canadian author". I first jumped for Margaret Atwood, the Reach for the Top staple (and the fill-in answer for any unknown guess), but she was snagged by a wily Grade 10. So I went with my second pick of Mordecai Richler.
If you're one of those people who are "in the know" (and by in the know, I mean you still watch Disney Channel daily), Mordecai Richler is well known for his series of children's literature, the Jacob Two-Two books. It turns out he also writes real literature, with a distinctly differeny slant. And that slant is...
Jewish. Oy gevalt, is this book seeping with Semitism. The dialogue runs just like a Saturday Night Live sketch featuring two old Jewish men, except that counts for every last character in the book! The rhetorial questions (What is this, an inquisition? Would it hurt to be more relaxed?), the random bursts of Yiddish, and the money grubbing - OH the money grubbing. Every stereotype you can imagine is reinforced and reproven.
Duddy Kravitz is a wonderful character. Having a look at my list, the first 6 books are all character studies. Oedipus "The King", "Call Me" Ishmael, Jay Gatsby, Duddy Kravitz, Don Quixote, and Jane Eyre. The two most similar are Gatsby and Kravitz. They're both seemingly "BTO"s, they have some dangerous amounts of hubris, and they both (almost) have a noble goal in mind. But Kravitz does it in a way that can only be seen as a workhorse idealism. Gatsby sits and imagines the world where you can have the good life. Kravitz is out there bustling around to make it happen. You root for him every time he gets an impossible deadline, have that sense of "will he, will he?" and every time he does.
Which is what makes his fall from grace so much harder to bear. For although he is making this dream happen, and in perspective it's an amazing feat, he just slowly loses focus and drifts down. Even in his final success it is bitter-sweet beyond belief, and even the faint hope given back to us is no respite.
The book was a modern one (finally) with a rapid plot and a lovely theme. Each character WAS a character, and although he didn't have the imagery and precision of Melville or Fitzgerald, he rings true just the same.
9/10
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
#3 - The Great Gatsby
This was my first side-trip from the direct list. I had originally planned to go straight through the list in order, as a way of appeasing my obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Alas, this was not to be and I have taken on multiple side projects as a result.
First, there is the OCDSB's request that I be educated. To satisfy them, I must read and report on some books of their choosing. Luckily, theirs are mostly on the list as it is. This year it was Great Gatsby (and possibly another), next year might be Heart of Darkness or another of the teacher's choosing. The next book I am reading, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordechai Richler, is also for school.
The second distraction (yes, I'm calling it a distraction) from the appointed task is my friend Amy. Upon telling her about the idea she looked over the list and decided that it was missing things. She also thought that if I were to start reading "real books" as she called them, then I should be reading her favourites. So once every 8 books off of the main list, I will depart to read one of hers. These will have a poetry and a modern slant, but we all love her anyways. The first is actually on the list: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Now, Great Gatsby. In class we watched a documentary on Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, the writer. They tried their best to portray him as a loving husband, a workhorse of a man. I saw things slightly differently. He was so engrossed with the idea of fame, of making a legacy, that he was driven to madness at various times. Incessant revision of his work, frantic drinking, these are all signs of a truly disturbed man. The only things positive I can see stemming from his writing is that it took him away from starting a dictatorship, and this book The Great Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby is the polar opposite of Moby Dick. It reads quickly, keeps to the plot and leaves no unneccessary words. If Moby Dick was a sumo wrestler, Great Gatsby was a sprinter. The book is just what it needs to make the point, and nothing more. You had to read every word, because every word was important. Therein lies one of my few problems with it. Everything had a meaning. The green light, the pink clouds, Dr. Ecklesburg in the sky! Some of the things really don't make sense at first glance. I'm thankful for once to have some English class guidance to explain the symbolism, because a couple of the bits seem like absolute nonsense, even though you know they aren't.
The book is interesting on a different level. People talk of Gatsby defining the Jazz Age. But he seems to be unsure whether or not to glorify it or tear it down. His glittering descriptions of the parties are tainted with the faintest bit of ennui, and you're left feeling not excited for the participants, but a little bit sad for them. I make the connection to the frat parties at today's universities. It may LOOK like they are having fun, but eventually the hangover will hit. And a decade-long hangover seems a bit painful to deal with.
The book was fun though, and it won't be a pain to go back and look over the book time and again for class, as each page greets you with a gentle "old sport" pat on the back.
8/10
First, there is the OCDSB's request that I be educated. To satisfy them, I must read and report on some books of their choosing. Luckily, theirs are mostly on the list as it is. This year it was Great Gatsby (and possibly another), next year might be Heart of Darkness or another of the teacher's choosing. The next book I am reading, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordechai Richler, is also for school.
The second distraction (yes, I'm calling it a distraction) from the appointed task is my friend Amy. Upon telling her about the idea she looked over the list and decided that it was missing things. She also thought that if I were to start reading "real books" as she called them, then I should be reading her favourites. So once every 8 books off of the main list, I will depart to read one of hers. These will have a poetry and a modern slant, but we all love her anyways. The first is actually on the list: Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Now, Great Gatsby. In class we watched a documentary on Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, the writer. They tried their best to portray him as a loving husband, a workhorse of a man. I saw things slightly differently. He was so engrossed with the idea of fame, of making a legacy, that he was driven to madness at various times. Incessant revision of his work, frantic drinking, these are all signs of a truly disturbed man. The only things positive I can see stemming from his writing is that it took him away from starting a dictatorship, and this book The Great Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby is the polar opposite of Moby Dick. It reads quickly, keeps to the plot and leaves no unneccessary words. If Moby Dick was a sumo wrestler, Great Gatsby was a sprinter. The book is just what it needs to make the point, and nothing more. You had to read every word, because every word was important. Therein lies one of my few problems with it. Everything had a meaning. The green light, the pink clouds, Dr. Ecklesburg in the sky! Some of the things really don't make sense at first glance. I'm thankful for once to have some English class guidance to explain the symbolism, because a couple of the bits seem like absolute nonsense, even though you know they aren't.
The book is interesting on a different level. People talk of Gatsby defining the Jazz Age. But he seems to be unsure whether or not to glorify it or tear it down. His glittering descriptions of the parties are tainted with the faintest bit of ennui, and you're left feeling not excited for the participants, but a little bit sad for them. I make the connection to the frat parties at today's universities. It may LOOK like they are having fun, but eventually the hangover will hit. And a decade-long hangover seems a bit painful to deal with.
The book was fun though, and it won't be a pain to go back and look over the book time and again for class, as each page greets you with a gentle "old sport" pat on the back.
8/10
#2 - Moby Dick
Well, isn't this one a whole different kettle of fish? (I make no promises as to how many fish/whale puns I make during this post) When I took this one out of the library, it gave me a shiver. This book is spoken of, not with reverence, but with fear and venomous distrust. There are some people who do not like this book.
I am one of those people.
This book is a beautifully written, complex tapestry of words and stories and characters and plots and themes and history and geography and cetology and - IT IS TOO MUCH. This book is simply too large for its meaning. It goes on and on with no goal but to dredge some more imagery out of every last item on the great wide ocean. There is not a thing not addressed, not a stone left unturned. It is boring as all hell. I honestly could care less about the architecture of the awnings in Nantucket. Get on that boat and shoot some whales!
The book weighs in at 469 pages, with 135 chapters. That means that some of the chapters are less than a page, and some of the chapters are of proper length. But this allowed Melville (who, coincidentally, was rumoured to have been paid by the word, which explains his painful verbosity) to turn each chapter into an essay on a completely different topic. If I went back and counted (which I won't, because I do not want to touch the filthy book again), I would assume that barely half of the chapters are actually used to further the plot.
In the interest of full transparency, I skipped a few of the 135 chapters. The first two I skipped were Chapters 9 and 32. Chapter 9 is called The Sermon, and it is exactly that. Father Mapple's 6-page sermon (a friend and I estimated it to be a 25-minute filibuster) on the story of Jonah and the whale. Chapter 32 was Ishmael's personal theory on the taxonomy of whales. Ishmael, in a thrilling conclusion, deems whales to not be mammals, but fish, and then proceeds to define their species in a way that can best be described as...wrong. He creates species, pushes species where they do not belong, and declares such whales as the Blue Whale as "fictional". This again came in at around 6 pages of utter nonsense, which did nothing to advance the plot. I tried my best to read every chapter. I finished the one on the history of mast-heads, in the first low-point of my reading.
As a last point, there was still a good 30 more pages left. What were they used for? Endnotes. A good 500 of them. You see, to make the book OOZE sophistication, Melville name-dropped worse than Kevin Federline. The effect was to make the book thoroughly incomprehensible unless you had bachelor's degrees in History, Geography, Literature, and Religion. Of course, you had to have recieved these degrees in 1850, because half of the references are now out of date entirely.
After slogging through this torture for almost a week, I declared one night that I would not spend another morning waking up to this book. So I started on Chapter 45 that night and pushed all the way through to 2 AM and page 470. Never again.
3/10
I am one of those people.
This book is a beautifully written, complex tapestry of words and stories and characters and plots and themes and history and geography and cetology and - IT IS TOO MUCH. This book is simply too large for its meaning. It goes on and on with no goal but to dredge some more imagery out of every last item on the great wide ocean. There is not a thing not addressed, not a stone left unturned. It is boring as all hell. I honestly could care less about the architecture of the awnings in Nantucket. Get on that boat and shoot some whales!
The book weighs in at 469 pages, with 135 chapters. That means that some of the chapters are less than a page, and some of the chapters are of proper length. But this allowed Melville (who, coincidentally, was rumoured to have been paid by the word, which explains his painful verbosity) to turn each chapter into an essay on a completely different topic. If I went back and counted (which I won't, because I do not want to touch the filthy book again), I would assume that barely half of the chapters are actually used to further the plot.
In the interest of full transparency, I skipped a few of the 135 chapters. The first two I skipped were Chapters 9 and 32. Chapter 9 is called The Sermon, and it is exactly that. Father Mapple's 6-page sermon (a friend and I estimated it to be a 25-minute filibuster) on the story of Jonah and the whale. Chapter 32 was Ishmael's personal theory on the taxonomy of whales. Ishmael, in a thrilling conclusion, deems whales to not be mammals, but fish, and then proceeds to define their species in a way that can best be described as...wrong. He creates species, pushes species where they do not belong, and declares such whales as the Blue Whale as "fictional". This again came in at around 6 pages of utter nonsense, which did nothing to advance the plot. I tried my best to read every chapter. I finished the one on the history of mast-heads, in the first low-point of my reading.
As a last point, there was still a good 30 more pages left. What were they used for? Endnotes. A good 500 of them. You see, to make the book OOZE sophistication, Melville name-dropped worse than Kevin Federline. The effect was to make the book thoroughly incomprehensible unless you had bachelor's degrees in History, Geography, Literature, and Religion. Of course, you had to have recieved these degrees in 1850, because half of the references are now out of date entirely.
After slogging through this torture for almost a week, I declared one night that I would not spend another morning waking up to this book. So I started on Chapter 45 that night and pushed all the way through to 2 AM and page 470. Never again.
3/10
Friday, April 23, 2010
#1 - Oedipus Rex
First book. Wow. I went to the library for the first time in ages, in a rush after setting my heart on this goal. I grabbed as many of the first 5 books on my list as I could, and hurried back home. The first one was this: Oedipus Rex by Sophocles.
The first blindside came before I even checked the book out. It was a trilogy! Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. Antigone? Hold on a moment. Wasn't Antigone already on my list somewhere else? I scanned ahead and there it was, number 54. It took me until a couple of days after I read it to make the connection to some vague Greek I had in my head - "rex" means king. Oedipus Rex was only referring to the first of the trilogy. Apparently Oedipus at Colonus was the only one undeserving of a place on the list, which I thought rather unfair.
So instead I read them as one solid work, and I believe that was a good idea. They are a complete unit, as many works of the Greek tragedies are. They tell the story of a famous family over multiple generations and multiple time periods. This had to be done because according to the Greek dramatic laws, time had to be real. There was no quantum leaps, no changing of setting.
The next interesting thing was that the book was not subtle. The big plot twist was clean as day. Perhaps it is because I have a CSI-trained mind, but the prophecies seemed so obvious that I was surprised that Oedipus himself did not see it. Then I realized that the entire audience also knew the plot in advance. There was no tricking these wily Greeks. That left Sophocles to just write good words, and that he did. There was humour, irony, flowery language. A nice trick was the way that the chorus simply recaps the events, in more verbose stylings.
The Greeks really knew how to make a tragedy tragic. If they were to make a "Dumbledore dies on page 647" shirt for Oedipus, they would need to use a smaller font. Everyone dies, and the more gruesome the better. However, again as a Greek theatre law, all of the violence is left off-stage. It provides a nice bit of suspense because whenever a messenger comes in, you know that SOMEBODY is about to hear some bad news.
On the whole, this was the perfect start to this adventure. There is nothing more classic than the Greeks, and all in all it was an easy read, with only around 6000 lines of text. I enjoyed the book wholly, and while I doubt I'll read it again, it felt like it took up a little niche in my empty brain-space.
8/10
(Note: While I am loathe to make a marking system for this, I feel like a reviewer, and my opinions may fluctuate from day to day, so I must do as I see fit.)
The first blindside came before I even checked the book out. It was a trilogy! Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. Antigone? Hold on a moment. Wasn't Antigone already on my list somewhere else? I scanned ahead and there it was, number 54. It took me until a couple of days after I read it to make the connection to some vague Greek I had in my head - "rex" means king. Oedipus Rex was only referring to the first of the trilogy. Apparently Oedipus at Colonus was the only one undeserving of a place on the list, which I thought rather unfair.
So instead I read them as one solid work, and I believe that was a good idea. They are a complete unit, as many works of the Greek tragedies are. They tell the story of a famous family over multiple generations and multiple time periods. This had to be done because according to the Greek dramatic laws, time had to be real. There was no quantum leaps, no changing of setting.
The next interesting thing was that the book was not subtle. The big plot twist was clean as day. Perhaps it is because I have a CSI-trained mind, but the prophecies seemed so obvious that I was surprised that Oedipus himself did not see it. Then I realized that the entire audience also knew the plot in advance. There was no tricking these wily Greeks. That left Sophocles to just write good words, and that he did. There was humour, irony, flowery language. A nice trick was the way that the chorus simply recaps the events, in more verbose stylings.
The Greeks really knew how to make a tragedy tragic. If they were to make a "Dumbledore dies on page 647" shirt for Oedipus, they would need to use a smaller font. Everyone dies, and the more gruesome the better. However, again as a Greek theatre law, all of the violence is left off-stage. It provides a nice bit of suspense because whenever a messenger comes in, you know that SOMEBODY is about to hear some bad news.
On the whole, this was the perfect start to this adventure. There is nothing more classic than the Greeks, and all in all it was an easy read, with only around 6000 lines of text. I enjoyed the book wholly, and while I doubt I'll read it again, it felt like it took up a little niche in my empty brain-space.
8/10
(Note: While I am loathe to make a marking system for this, I feel like a reviewer, and my opinions may fluctuate from day to day, so I must do as I see fit.)
"Can't You Just Read The Wikipedia Article?"
I cannot believe how many times I have heard those words. It has been a fortnight since I started this project, and it has to have been said by at least as many people as there have been days. To sum up, yes. I could read the Cliffs Notes, SparkNotes, Wikipedia page, get a lecture, read the graphic novel, watch the movie, or do something else. But to do that would miss half the point of everything.
The reason I started on this is because I wanted to improve my abilities for my high school trivia team. We are sorely lacking anybody on the team with, how would you say, culture. I, being the one who does theatre, seems to be the only one in the general vicinity. So, I decided to start on a quest. Read the top 100 most-used books for trivia questions, top to bottom, through and through.
This appeals to me in a number of ways. First, I'm an avid fan of books by A.J. Jacobs, who has been making a career out of stunts like following the Bible to the letter, reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica A-Z and outsourcing his life to India. Second, I have always wanted to read more literature. I have a solid range of pop culture knowledge, stemming from my parents. I know Dirty Dancing from Breakfast Club, and I can connect a quote to a movie better than many. But real books, real literature, had started to fade away.
So this seemed like the perfect solution. I have a reason to do it: help the team, get better at trivia. It also builds me as a person: learn something, become more cultured. And it's because of that that just reading the Wikipedia article simply will not do. If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it to its fullest extent. No abrdiged versions, no pop-up books. I'm not going to read Crime and Punishment in the original Russian, but as much as possible I am going to try and get the books straight from the source.
Here is where I am going to log my thoughts on each book. My preliminary list is 80 books long, and it should continue growing all the time. I would hate to forget a single thing I've dredged out of this, so I'm going to pour it all out here. Wish me luck.
The reason I started on this is because I wanted to improve my abilities for my high school trivia team. We are sorely lacking anybody on the team with, how would you say, culture. I, being the one who does theatre, seems to be the only one in the general vicinity. So, I decided to start on a quest. Read the top 100 most-used books for trivia questions, top to bottom, through and through.
This appeals to me in a number of ways. First, I'm an avid fan of books by A.J. Jacobs, who has been making a career out of stunts like following the Bible to the letter, reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica A-Z and outsourcing his life to India. Second, I have always wanted to read more literature. I have a solid range of pop culture knowledge, stemming from my parents. I know Dirty Dancing from Breakfast Club, and I can connect a quote to a movie better than many. But real books, real literature, had started to fade away.
So this seemed like the perfect solution. I have a reason to do it: help the team, get better at trivia. It also builds me as a person: learn something, become more cultured. And it's because of that that just reading the Wikipedia article simply will not do. If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it to its fullest extent. No abrdiged versions, no pop-up books. I'm not going to read Crime and Punishment in the original Russian, but as much as possible I am going to try and get the books straight from the source.
Here is where I am going to log my thoughts on each book. My preliminary list is 80 books long, and it should continue growing all the time. I would hate to forget a single thing I've dredged out of this, so I'm going to pour it all out here. Wish me luck.
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