#26 - Billy Budd

There are many different reasons for a book to be on the trivia list. Its literary value, time period and age, effect on history as a whole, all are usual causes. But Billy Budd is on there for an entirely different purpose. The traditional set-up of a quizbowl tournament is a "T/B cycle", or tossup/bonus. One longer question is followed by three inter-related shorter questions, to be given to the team who secured the tossup. This three-part question often leads to patterns in question design.

A typical question on Tennessee Williams, for example, would be:

"This play about a faded Southern belle was musically parodied in a Simpsons episode with Marge as the leading lady." (Streetcar Named Desire)

"This American playwright wrote Streetcar Named Desire." (Tennessee Williams)

"This other Williams work features Brick, an alcoholic and his wife Maggie." (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)

So the pattern for authors is traditionally (Most Notable Work), (Author Name), (Secondary Work). This leads to an overblown value being given to knowing the "second-best" book of notable authors. Nowhere is this more apparent then with Herman Melville. The renowned writer of Moby Dick, a book I happen to despise, he mostly focused on poetry for the remainder of his career, except for one unpolished work that was not found until decades after his death - Billy Budd. This being his only other truly notable work, it is frequently used in trivia questions as the final follow-up, thus leading me to have to read not one, but two of Melville's works. My experience with Moby Dick was harrowing, to put it lightly. It still stands as my least favourite of any of my reading list books, and I fully admit to having skipped a few of the obscene number of chapters. So I was pleasantly surprised when Billy Budd managed to dispense with many of the things I hated about it. It no longer had the nautical drivel I despised, it had many fewer tangents - nothing on the colour white or the different kinds of mastheads - and it was a character piece, something I always enjoy. For book report purposes: Billy Budd is an Adam-alike who is just a great guy in every way. This infuriates the pale-skinned, jet-black hair, purple-eyed "serpent" John Claggart, who goes to intellectual Captain "Starry" Vere and claims that Billy is behind an attempted mutiny. When accused, Billy's childhood speech impediment comes back in full, and in a panic he strikes Claggart, who dies with one blow. A martial court is brought to order, and Billy is then put to death, because although they know he is pure and innocent, martial law must not take intent into account. Sad sad sappy boohoo.

Now Billy Budd was unfinished at Melville's death, or at least unpolished. It was put into a box and left there for decades until the "Melville Revival" in the 1920's renewed interest in his works. A biographer found the manuscript, and piecing together various illegible scraps and different numbering schemes, published the book under the name Billy Budd: Foretopman. This first edition was a best seller for a couple decades, when a scholar went and reworked the manuscripts and came up with a more scholarly, polished work, using the first edition and the original pieces. This edition, by F Barron Freeman, is the edition that I read. It was the accepted edition for another 20 years when two scholars, armed with new technology, rewrote the entire book using the original manuscripts and discovered not a few small discrepancies. For one thing, the title of the book was actually meant to be Billy Budd: Sailor, and the ship's name was supposed to be the Bellipotent, not the Indomitable, as the first two editions stated. So, the edition I read was not the correct one, but still more polished than the original, and the sheer quantity of editor's notes showed just how much work there was left to be done when Melville passed away. But even as an unfinished, incorrect, mangled piece of writing, I still infinitely prefer it to Moby Dick.

5/10

#25 - Candide

If you've bothered to peruse any or all of these entries, you're probably like me in that you are a fan of not only books, but real, old books. Plenty of the books I've had on this list are ones I could have read free-to-use versions of online, or listened to an audiobook. But the feel of holding a book, especially a cool, leatherbound book is just a special thrill. Whoo, getting a little steamy now. Point being, books are great, and THIS one was a highlight for those who agree. The edition of Candide I procured at a wonderful used book store in Stratford, ON called Book Stage (a horrendously incomplete catalogue can be found here: http://www.bookstage.com/index.php). It is a 1931 edition by Grosset and Dunlap for the Universal Library series, and it is gorgeous. Black hardcover with silver and green on the spine and front, thick pages that just smell of book, all for just 10 dollars. Needless to say, I carried this book around as much for the point of having it as for the actual reading value.

But the reading value was very high nonetheless. Candide is arguably the greatest work of French literature ever, showing that while the French can't seem to fight worth a damn, they can be phenomenal sarcastic writers. Voltaire was the king of this, his biting satire of...well apparently everything around him managed to land every blow. The centerpiece of it is the debunking of the theories of Leibniz that our world is "the best of all possible worlds", thus the subtitle of Optimism. The way he goes about debunking it is by putting all of these characters through multiple rounds of hell and back, experiencing every kind of strife and misfortune until finally the sunshiny optimism is cracked. A rather vicious way to make a point, but it's an amusing ride throughout. Along the way, we're treated to further satires of church, state, French society, British society, the stigmas of the New World, the romance and adventure genres as a whole, military rigour, modern art, individual philosophers and entire schools of thought, and the idea of monarchy. Being Voltaire, the smug bastard he is, he manages to do this with a wink and a smile, ending with a finishing flourish by disagreeing with Leibniz' theory and replacing it with his own that we must "cultivate our own garden", a much more pragmatic philosophy.

The read is a very quick and snappy one, with 30 short chapters totalling 118 pages (in my edition) of bittersweet delight. For those who are looking for a plot, here it goes: Candide loves Cunegonde, daughter of a baron in a German province. They both are taught by Pangloss the philosopher (Leibniz in disguise) that everything is grand and good. They kiss and Candide is thrown out by the baron, where all hell begins to break loose. He's roped into the army, whipped by everyone with something resembling a whip, gets on a boat to the New World, finds Pangloss and Cunegonde (all having their own misadventures) at various points, finds El Dorado - the ACTUAL best of all possible worlds - and then leaves again, gains fortunes, loses them, eventually gets back together with everyone in time to finally lose hope, get a farm and become regular schmoes. Voltaire's humour really makes this book what it is - the points he makes are simple ones, but the way he throws them is what makes this novella such a classic. So there it is - a vicious satire of everything by a fantastically bitter Frenchman, all wrapped up in a sexy 80-year old hardcover edition.

8/10

#24 - Red Badge of Courage

If there's a difference between high school and university homework, it's not in the difficulty, or even the quantity. It's in the type. In high school, you had assignments, and take-home quizzes, and little reports and posters to do. In university, you have readings. Pages and chapters and books' worth of readings. Though this might make for a less intensive night of homework, it does make the transition from homework to the reading list less relaxing. Whereas before I could turn off the computer, sit on the couch and read, now it's just closing one book and opening the next. Certainly this is leading to some reduced enjoyment - but that is only part of the explanation as to why I didn't enjoy The Red Badge of Courage.

The Red Badge of Courage is considered as one of the best pieces of Civil War literature, or indeed any war literature. It was written by Stephen Crane, who died at the age of 28 from tuberculosis. He wrote this work just four years prior, during which time he had all of his experience with war. Wait, what? This means that when the young Crane wrote his battle epic, entailing all of the emotions and sensations of war, he had not set foot on a battlefield himself. This in part explains why his protagonist was the young soldier, who worries about his first experience in battle. Protip: He runs away the first time, eventually finds his way back, then fights bravely and carries the flag in the final charge. Through all this he feels the pride and despair and suicidal (the "red badge of courage" is a war wound) emotions of war. These emotions ebb and flow much like the battle itself, and mark the steady growth of the young soldier's psyche in quite a simplistic way.

The emotions are not the only thing simplistic in Red Badge - the whole book has been universally used as a school text precisely because it can be used as Intro to Imagery, Intro to Character, Intro to Theme. The colour imagery is liberally spaced throughout, and each character is reduced to a single trait instead of a name to make sketches even easier. It would certainly make it easier for grade-school essays, but it also made it much less fun - think A Man For All Seasons with a less interesting point in history. If any part of it is really well done, it's the psychological side of things - Crane really did put a lot of thought into how one might react on the field of battle. However, he wasn't sure how he himself would act, so he instead opted to have the young soldier react in ALL of the ways possible. He goes from cocky to scared to brave to wise to sombre and everywhere in between, and besides the overall trend RESEMBLING growth, it really seems more nonsensical than anything else. Overall, while I can see it being a good book for middle schools looking to mix in some Americana, it's just not that spectacular.

6/10

#23 - Crime and Punishment

Throughout the early stages of these readings, I've been constantly looking ahead to something. Looking ahead to the first Oldfield Option, looking ahead to On The Road, I've always had a bigger prize on the horizon. But throughout these first two dozen books, this one has been the one that has been taunting me the whole time. Crime and Punishment, the first of the terrifying Russian authors. I don't know what it is about the Russian authors that has seemed to become lore in my brain, but they have. I was equal parts scared and ecstatic to get to this one, and it seemed fitting that I began it upon coming to the University of Western Ontario for the first day of school.

The book centers itself upon Rodion Romanovych Raskolnikov, an impoverished student in St. Petersburg (edit: after writing this post, I looked at the Wikipedia page for C+P and discovered that the wording of the last sentence was almost identical, entirely accidentally) who kills and robs a rich old lady so as to have the funds required to finish school and start doing good deeds to make up for his crime. He then is faced with all of the trauma and emotions that come with a murder, eventually being brought down by the efforts of the investigator Porfiry Petrovich. Raskolnikov has a theory that he continually outlines throughout the book of the difference between the normal masses and great men, who can "step over" the lines of traditional morality in order to achieve greatness - in particular he names Napoleon Bonaparte as his example of greatness. He kills in an attempt to prove his theory, but immediately after the crime finds himself in an emotional turmoil, losing perspective and making what he would call "amateur" mistakes. The book is divided into 6 parts, as the book was serialized in a Russian publication upon its release in 1866. However, unlike many of the serialized works I've read, the plot was much more thought out and connected between the parts, as opposed to hacked together. This was because this was the first of Dostoevsky's great novels, completed after his stay in the Russian "gulag" prison system. An interesting aside is that while Dostoevsky's own theory - or rather Raskolnikov's - is rather revolutionary, he mocks the stirrings of revolution that will eventually become the Russian Revolution.

The book is the definitive example of a psychological thriller. The angle of seeing the book through the murderer's eyes is an interesting perspective that allows us to experience all of the emotions that Raskolnikov does. He goes through actual physical symptoms to angry tirades to debilitating depression in rapid episodes that show the full spectrum of the insanity he himself caused. His long walks through the streets of St. Petersburg and terror-filled dreams and strange encounters all add to these feelings. However, one thing is shockingly missing. Not one bit of imagery is used in the book. No symbolism or extended metaphors. The book hits home precisely because it is exactly what it wants to be. When they want to show terror they show you a terror, not a rubber duck that is supposed to symbolize it. There is no deeper meanings to the colour of the clothing, or even any mention of it. This is perfectly exemplified with his dialogues with Porfiry Petrovich, who is a charmingly calculating investigator, interested in a new field of thinking called "psychology". It is the dialogue, the discussion of the elephant in the room that really brings the book to life. This is such a refreshing change, especially to someone from a theatre background. The words are what matters, and the people.

When I finished reading this book, I had the buzzing feeling again. It was a challenging read, one that was perfectly suited to long nights up in residence. But I didn't know if I could give it a 10/10. While I enjoyed it immensely, it wasn't as challenging as Ulysses, or ground-breaking as Don Quixote, or as close to my own life as On The Road. But neither was it the more "very good" of books like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. The decision wasn't made until about a week later, when I came home from a long weekend home. I had quoted, considered quoting or had the urge to bring up Crime and Punishment dozens of times. It is a book that stays with you, that affects your way of thinking, that sticks. Because of that, I am going to give it my fourth:

10/10

#22 - The Divine Comedy

Most of these posts would not be very helpful to those planning on using the information for a class project. There is no analysis of imagery, no character sketches and hardly any mentions of the plot. But I'm going to depart from my usual modus operandi and try and explain the geography of Dante's Heaven, Purgatory and Heaven in as efficient a way as possible.

Heaven is topped by the Empyrean, which is where He resides as three concentric circles. Following that is the Primium Mobile, home of angels. Then the Fixed Stars, containing the Church Triumphant (any popes and saints that were just all that). The next 7 parts of Paradise are divided by the 4 cardinal virtues (math isn't the Holy One's strong suit) - Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude. Circles 4-7 are for those who exemplified all four of the virtues, but excelled particularly in one of them. From highest to lowest, the virtues are Temperance, Justice, Fortitude and Prudence. The remaining three circles are for those who were good enough, but were lacking in one. The 3rd was for those lacking in Temperance (Lovers), the 2nd for those lacking Justice (Ambitious), and the first for those lacking Fortitude (Inconstant). Why Prudence isn't another circle I can't seem to figure out, but I digress, there's much more to get to. These circles are all planets and stars and pretty things, they ascend to each "as if shot by an arrow", accompanied by much fanfare.

Purgatory is for those who are still above damnation, but have to work off their sins. There are 10 rings making up a mountain, descending from the summit, the Garden of Eden. The next 7 are for the 7 Deadly Sins (in descending order) - Lustful, Gluttonous, Covetous, Slothful, Wrathful, Envious, and Proud. Dante further divides these, claiming that all of these 7 (as opposed to their counterparts in Hell) stem from love. The highest three are from an excessive love of things, Sloth is for a deficiency of love, and the lowest three are for perverted love. Below those there are two circles of Ante-Purgatory for the excommunicated and late repentant. Once their "sentence" has been served by things such as the slothful running incessantly, they can then ascend.

Hell is a descent into a pit, still in a spiraling pattern going down into the center of the Earth, consisting of 9 Circles. The first is Limbo, which is for those who simply weren't Christian. Then we go through the same sorts of sins - Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger. Then there is the city walls of Dis, which divides upper and lower Hell. The 6th circle for Heretics is the last of the simple circles. At this point, the circles begin splitting and subdividing like Harry Potter movies. The 7th is the Violent, divided into 3 - against People and Property, against Self, and against God and nature. The 8th is then chopped up into 10 "pockets", all for different types of fraud and treachery - Seducers, Flatterers, Simonists, Sorcerers/Astrologers, Lawyers/Politicians, Hypocrites, Theives, False Advisers, Gossips (Sowers of Discord), and Falsifiers. Finally, we reach the final circle - Treachery. This is divided into 4 - the traitors of family, community, guests, and lords. After this final circle, we reach the centre of Hell, which is made specially for Satan. Here he is encased in ice from the chest down, with three faces chewing on the still-living bodies of Brutus, Cassius and Judas Iscariot.

Now that that has all been explained, the speedy plot summary is: When Dante was 35, he got lost, had the spirit of Virgil (an ancient poet) come to him and say "I have a shortcut!" and then lead him down through Hell, then up Purgatory, and then give him to Beatrice, who leads him through Paradise. Then he returns to Earth and the living to tell all of what he has seen. Besides this core plot, the only other interesting thing in the Divine Comedy is the roll call of friends, enemies and famous faces that Dante calls to account for their sins - some of them before they've even died. The book follows a formula that, while not concise, allows for the sometimes complex theological messages to be transmitted quite clearly. The terza rima format was nice, although my translation (Mandelbaum) didn't retain nearly enough of the rhyming. I did enjoy the book, but I can't help but thinking that epic poems are, in general, just an unnecessarily grandiose format for any literature.

6/10

#21 - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

After this one, I am hitting the pause button. After 21 books, 5 of which were in the past two weeks, and the last 6 of which are about Americana, I am taking a breather. Not going on hiatus, or any other more indefinite time span, but a break. The Snooze button, if you will. After going on a reading spree followed by a writing spree like that, I am not going to go after the next work, The Divine Comedy, without at least somewhat of a recuperated mindset. These reviews have been shorter, partly because it's been 2 weeks since I've read the earlier ones, and partly because there wasn't all that much to say. There were some neat parts of books like Scarlet Letter and Our Town, sure, but in the end, nothing stood out. They didn't have the author or edition intrigue that books like Ulysses and On The Road had, and some of them just weren't that phenomenal. I will get back to everything soon, and I certainly hope to complete a pile more vlog entries, but as for reading and reviewing, if I complete two more for the summer, I will be contented.

Now, for the final book of my camp and my Americana readings, we return to Mark Twain and his other classic, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tom Sawyer was the first to Huck Finn as the sequel, and the characters are shared between the two. However, both look at different themes and view things in different lights. Huck Finn was a legitimate adventure story, travelling through states and finding gunmen and all sorts of real escapades. Tom Sawyer, on the other hand, was a boy having fun in his town. While there were hijinks, they were on a smaller scale. The criminals became hooligans instead of cold-blooded killers (although Injun Joe comes close), and the whole thing read like a Hardy Boys novel instead of a adventure story. But in that Tom Sawyer brought a different flair. It was light, and fun, and playful. His pranks, like the whitewashed fence, are some of the best-remembered in American lore. The entire book presents itself as an ode to the joys of being young, the American Dream for kids - to be free and free-spirited.

Mark Twain inserted his politics into both Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. In Huck Finn, he deals with racism and prejudice, using Jim as the focal point. In Tom Sawyer, he throws in arguments for a bunch of different ideals. One of those was the idea that "People want what they cannot have", which is the moral of the whitewashing scene. He also deals with the idea of young love, in what was one of the most consistently amusing subplots of the novel. Becky Thatcher and Tom Sawyer see each other once at Sunday school, and once when Tom is walking by her house, and those instances alone result in Tom falling madly in love with her (and incidentally forgetting about his PRIOR fiancee and love in the process). This followed by their engagement, first kiss and fights (in that order) are equal parts hilarious and painfully true. As a summertime read, Tom Sawyer was wonderfully light and frothy. To sit in a hammock with bare feet in the grass reading it felt so right that I couldn't help but smile. However, the childishness of it made it rank below Huck Finn in my estimation, but as an excellent book, it still receives:

8/10

#20 - Our Town

Lights to orange, play intro music. After the excellence that was On The Road, I expected Our Town to be a bit of fluff in comparison. Not so. Our Town is by Thornton Wilder, whose other work includes Merchant of Yonkers, which he readapted into The Matchmaker, which was then further adapted into Hello, Dolly! and was a happy, sunshiny musical. Our Town is known for being the second-most performed play in schools after Romeo and Juliet, and so I assumed it would be a simple, straightforward work. The plot of the play certainly contributed to that - the life and times of the small town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, in particular the marriage of Emily Webb and George Gibbs - but the result was something much more powerful. The play goes from Daily Life, describing the town's usual goings-on, to Love and Marriage, which shows the wedding day of George and Emily, and finally to Death and Eternity, which shows Emily's funeral and her experience in the afterlife.

The last play I read was Streetcar Named Desire, and I said that it felt too commercial, that it didn't seem like art. Our Town is an artistic play, a truly meaningful work. It gives a strong existentialist argument, saying that humans don't and can't appreciate the things they have in life until after death. The character of the Stage Manager was beautifully written, allowing him to cross in between the story and the audience seamlessly, even throwing a wink in to drive the point home. The Stage Manager also helps to make the other interesting part of Our Town work - the technical notes on it are the most intricate I've seen in a play. Every pantomime, every bit of blocking and every change of lighting is painstakingly noted. Wilder had such a vision in mind when he wrote the work, and he went out of his way to make sure that it wouldn't be betrayed by foreign hands. The back of the script had over 20 pages of notes on how to set up the lighting grid, which props must be supplied and which ones must be pantomimed, and even director's notes on how scenes should be run and what emotion characters are supposed to strive for. The result is something that truly makes daily life into something powerful and meaningful.

8/10

#19 - On The Road

Oldfield Option #2! After breezing through the previous two books in as many days, I got to On The Road, the pinnacle of Beat literature. The Beat Generation was a counter-culture movement that preceded the Hippies of the 60s. They were disillusioned after World War II, and the core group of writers - Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs - roamed America in search of revelation, hitchhiking and partying everywhere on the way. They were the literary equivalent of the more experimental jazz of the era, bringing in less structured styles and more personal work than seen before in writing. The Big Three of Beat literature are Ginsberg's Howl, Burroughs' Naked Lunch, and finally, On The Road by Jack Kerouac. My edition of On The Road was the 50th anniversary "Original Scroll" released by Viking Press, and so many people who have read the book before might have different names or different memories of some scenes. The Original Scroll was the first draft of the book, which was written in a three-week burst of energy on 6 long pieces of printer paper, resulting in a typed scroll that was hundreds of feet long. This version has more of the sexuality, more of the memoirs, and a rougher feel than the finished product that was released 6 years after the first draft was created. While I loved having the actual names of the people that Jack was referring to, I could definitely tell that there was work left to be done on some sections. Comparing sections like the "mad to live" passage show just how much tweaking went into Kerouac's "natural flow".

The Beats are also considered as the first hipsters - although they usually used the term to refer to white middle-class people who tried to emulate the lifestyles of the black jazz musicians they adored. Because of this, many of the literary critics who focus on the Beats today are, in fact, painfully hipster, this time in the contemporary sense. In the beginning of my edition of On The Road there were a series of essays written by Beat Generation scholars. They discussed the history of the writing, Kerouac's feelings towards minorities, his relationship with Neal Cassady, and the structure of the text in the broader scope of literary history. These essays were unneccessarily jargon-filled, smacked of sentimentality and generally made me angry at this entire portion of academia. An excerpt: "Critics have rightly problematized the primitivist racial sentimentality expressed in this passage, which romanticizes the suffering of people of color during this period and risks obfuscating their actual lived experiences." I'm sorry, but "problematized"? This entire sentence could be rewritten with 40% fewer words, 60% more clarity and 85% less douchinositizing. "Interiority" and "Sensorial" were both used, and the aforementionablizored "problematize" was used by three of the "scholars" that were chosen by the publisher to help readers to understand the work. If this is understanding, I want more gibberish.

On The Road was written entirely in stream-of-consciousness, a style I am enjoying more and more as I read more. The final version contained paragraph and chapter breaks in it to help the reader understand, but in the scroll, the entire work was in one continuous paragraph, where Kerouac continues spouting out whatever comes to mind. The result is storytelling in its purest form. Instead of following constructs and patterns of conversation, Kerouac just writes down whatever he feels is important to tell about it right then - flashbacks happen without being announced, sudden distractions are described in detail. The effect grows on you the longer you read in one sitting. The longer you read a stream-of-consciousness work, the more involved you get with the author's story, and the stronger the connection you have with the text. I finished the last 100 pages or so in one sitting, and just like with Ulysses' Penelope chapter, I sat afterwards and simply felt my head buzz. The ending of the scroll edition was a lot more abrupt than the polished copy - after spending pages on each trip to Denver, I expected more than the last 15 or so to be dedicated to the whole of the Mexico expedition. But regardless, the work as a whole managed to draw me in entirely, and make me almost want to go out and start hitchhiking - not to go somewhere, but just to go see what I can find. Luckily, I'm too lazy, and people don't pick up hitchhikers anymore. But I can now understand just why so many people become fanatical about the Beat Generation - whatever they did, they were doing it damn well. That's why On The Road will become my third:

10/10

#18 - Streetcar Named Desire

Continuing this July reading blitz we come to A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams. This is the second Williams worth I've partaken in. A couple of years ago I watched a performance of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Kanata Theatre, my local community stage. In both I was struck by one thing above all else. Williams pours such energy into every one of his characters. Their movements are frantic, their dialogue is fast paced. Everyone is up and jumping and rushing and their sheer passion for everything is one of the most dominant things you will take away from it, whether you watch it or read it. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, we deal with Brick, a former football star who is just past his prime and verging on alcoholism. In Streetcar Named Desire, however, we deal with Blanche DuBois, a former Southern Belle who is...just past her prime and verging on alcoholism. Both deal with nervous breakdowns, undertones of sexuality both hetero- and homo-sexual, and some powerful themes. In Cat, it is suicide, whereas in Streetcar, it is rape. In Streetcar's climactic scene, the increasingly-crazed Blanche is confronted by the crude Stanley for her falsehoods. This leads to Stanley raping Blanche - though I'm not sure how the two are connected. This rape goes by without a word from Stanley's wife and Blanche's sister Stella, who instead corroborates with Stanley to send Blanche to an asylum - I don't argue that that's where she belonged - as opposed to, I don't know, getting mad at him for it.

Tennessee Williams is lauded as one of the best playwrights of the 20th century - his Big Three of Hot Tin Roof, Streetcar, and The Glass Menagerie are one of the greatest sets in American theatre - but I had a bitter taste in my mouth throughout this reading. Maybe it was the edition I had - the re-release from the 1982 TV movie starring Ann-Margret and Treat Williams - or its being placed after Scarlet Letter, a serious text, but it seemed as if it were much too commercial to be considered artistic. Williams did try to include imagery and symbolism, but it always felt heavy-handed. Blanche DuBois, "White of the Woods", being dressed in white and being a symbol of purity, and dressing in more colours as she goes more and more off-kilter. Their family home Belle Reve, or "Beautiful Dream". Perhaps I've just been reading too much literature lately, but it feels like it should take more than a bit of French naming to make something meaningful and deep. In the end, rape plots be-damned, the play read as a fairly quick and light work, and while I did love it as a story, I just wasn't impressed with it as being on the top 100 works of literature. It wasn't art, but it was a damn cool show.

7/10

#17 - The Scarlet Letter

Ignomy. Ignonimoose? Ignoninomy. Ignominy! Hawthorne loved this word more than the Puritans loved public displays of shame. It was used so much that I feel as though the letter should have been a big red "I" instead of the "A"-dultress the book actually refers to. The Scarlet Letter is either one of the best or one of the worst romances ever written, depending on your definition. This is a romance without sex, without humour or happiness or any of the things associated with romcoms today - not even a sassy gay friend! The two go from somber to stricken, and readers are even deprived of and account of or even a not to the act that consummated their forbidden love. In its place is some of the most powerful emotional writing I've seen. The passion, suffering (real suffering, and not angst) and sadness perpetuated through everything from trees to brooks to items of clothing were compelling enough to force you to care for the two of them.

The Scarlet Letter begins with a short story-cum-introduction, The Custom House. As well as introducing us to the story of Hester Prynne, it gives the reader a taste of Hawthorne's desciptivist style. The story consists of multipage sketches of each of his coworkers and the buildings they inhabit. But read collectively, it explains his view about how true artists cannot work in mundane surroundings - a distinctly author-to-author story. These sketches were so unflattering that the city of Salem demanded Hawthorne retract the story of his hometown. He refused. Scarlet Letter might be on minds recently because of a LOOSE adaptation, Easy A. The reason that they could take so many liberties in modernizing the plot is because the book works on two levels. First there is the Puritanical religious element, with God putting out signs and Hell and sin weighing on everyone's minds. But there is also the social element, with the public's rebukes and varied reactions often being more chilling than the religious fire and brimstone. The double standards in terms of treatment of women, the use of shame as the greatest punishment all still ring true today - especially in our high schools. Finally on an unconnected note, Pearl, the daughter of sin. is one of the coolest child characters ever.

This, as well as the next four books, were all read over the last two weeks of July whilst I was at Red Pine Camp. Collectively, they were a very interesting spread of American writing, going from the Puritans to the Beats. Out of the five, however, Scarlet landed at the bottom for me, scoring a:

6/10

#16 - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

America has found its place on my list. The next 6 books are entirely comprised of some of American classics, book-ended (you see what I did there?) by the two twin pillars of the American childhood, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Strangely enough, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but it ranked higher on the list, so I'm breaking all the rules today. In each of these books, the other is featured as a supporting character, joining them on adventures. In Tom Sawyer, Huck is portrayed as a boy who simply follows, a willing sidekick to Tom Sawyer. In Huckleberry Finn, however, Tom is shifted into a caricature of his former self, playing up the adventure-seeking side of him and making Huck seem a much more level-headed character. That being said, there was hardly any way for a reader to notice that this was a sequel, unless they were otherwise told. Everything was introduced and wrapped up as its own story, and the arcs were very well-handled.

The trick with American classics is that they seem to have trouble dealing with their past lives. Huckleberry Finn is both lauded as a picturesque imagining of the joys of childhood (running away from home on a raft and falling in with various crooks and violent characters notwithstanding) and reviled for containing racist overtones. The latter voice seems to stem mainly from the southern States, many of whom ban the book from schools and libraries. Their main argument stems from their use of the word "nigger". A nigger here, a nigger there, oh look at that pumpkin-heded nigger, niggerniggerdenigger n-i-double guh-err. The book is filled with them, over 200 mentions at least, by both black and white characters alike. There are also mentions of dirty A-rabs, but oddly enough, the South hasn't complained about that yet. The problem is, it's not racist. Huck sits there and struggles with the idea that he is helping a "runaway nigger" escape, deciding that he will tell the first man he sees and give him up. The moment he does, he begins to feel a heavy feeling, which he then tries to pray to God to get rid of. When he can't find the words to pray, he eventually decides that he'll go to Hell if he must, he is going to help his friend. While the book never explicitly advocates abolitionism, as Twain was still living in an era where that was a sensitive subject, the text seems like it was written almost to mock the characters who believed in slavery, doing it to expose the flaws in the thinking.

Aside from that, the book was damn funny. Aside from the brief forays into nautical pontificating, it went from one madcap adventure to the next. Here again, the racist angle was played for laughs. Jim and Huck discuss everything from the French language to the story of Solomon, with Jim's common sense crashing against Huck's Sunday school teachings. But the real laughs were saved for the pair of con men, the King and the Dauphin. A couple of swindlers bonded together by chance, they travel with Huck and Jim for a while, pulling stunt after stunt along the way. Just as every character in the book though, they get the ending they deserve. On the whole the Adventures managed to cast everything in a warm light, from murderous family feuds to alcoholism (which, admittedly, is played for laughs consistently). Some people argue that this book is a parable for childhood innocence against the world (by people, I mean the back of my edition of the book). But I say that any message that is taken out of it is purely invented. Just as Twain says in the opening, persons trying to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted, persons trying to find a moral in it will be banished, and persons trying to find a plot in it will be shot. And really, what could be more American than that?

9/10

#15 - The Canterbury Tales

Literature and storytelling are intertwined. The format may be different, but the meaning is the same. The Iliad was originally an epic poem to be recited, not read off of a page. Oedipus Rex is a play, or rather a trilogy of plays to be performed for an audience. The oldest of the books on the list, ones like Beowulf, are oral tradition stories that have been spoken for centuries before finally being committed to paper. This is being brought to mind as I finish the Canterbury Tales, a story about storytelling, as I contemplate making the move to oral storytelling as opposed to the written word. I am speaking, of course, of vlogging. In the next weeks I will be trying to create video versions of these first 16 posts, and then creating both a written and video version for each subsequent one. They will be painfully similar, if not identical to each other. Every time I've written these I've debated whether or not I wanted to keep the blog private - simply a storage place for my opinions - or something to be shared. With vlogs being posted on Youtube (on my account NortonFord), the choice will no longer lie with me. If they are to be seen, they shall be. I take solace in the fact that the vast majority of Youtube videos rest in piece, being seen only by people who mistype their search queries. On the other hand, I'm excited to get to return to and reflect on my past reads, and to get to do a bit of talking along with it.

With that said, let us turn to today's fare - The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer. The edition I have before me is the Bantam Classic, the same series that produced my copy of Jane Eyre. Here again I stumble upon ink blots (sadly no good Rorschach ones) and awful type. Here too I hit one of the most painful concessions I have made thus far - this edition contained only 9 of the 24 of the 120 stories that the Canterbury Tales were to hold. If that seemed nonsensical to some, please bear with me. The Canterbury Tales says in its preamble that the pilgrims (one of which being Chaucer himself) were each to tell 4 stories - 2 on the way to Canterbury and 2 on the way back. At his death Chaucer had only completed 24 (not even one for every pilgrim), with a couple of those not being entirely cleaned up or tied together. These 24 are not found to be in any true order, as the fragments of manuscripts that have been found have provided only some semblance of order, such as the Knight being followed by the Miller. Of these 24, some are more important than others in a critical light. The 9 that are in my edition (Prologue, Knight, Miller, Wife of Bath, Merchant, Franklin, Pardoner, Prioress, Nun's Preist) are arguably the best selection of them. With that in mind, I begrudgingly stuck to the 9 in my book, rather than reading the other 15 online or going out and buying another copy.

One of the biggest arguments I had for doing so was that the actual content was not the reason that the Canterbury Tales was so remarkable. The Tales are notable because of the time, place, and fashion in which they were written. Written in the decades before 1400, Chaucer - who was fluent in German, Italian, French, Latin, and Greek - decided that the Tales were going to be written in Middle English, the language of the commoners. In so doing, he created what stands today as one of the purest and best examples of the language we have today. It shows the differences in syntax, vocabulary, and grammar, even being credited for the creation of some words in our modern vernacular (laxative, jingle, fart and vomit for starters). The edition I had, despite its faults, had one fantastic feature - unlike other versions with either the original Middle English with footnotes or the Modern English, it had a double-page format with the Middle English on the left and the equivalent Modern English on the right. This allowed for me to read in Middle English as much as I liked, with the Modern English there as a confirmation, update and safe haven in times of mental suffering.

The content, while not the reason for reading, was certainly still amusing. My selection of Tales didn't include most of the corrupt-Church stories (with the very notable exception of the Pardoner, whose actual job was being the Church corrupter), instead focusing on the other main thread - marriage and why it is awful. The stories included love triangles, cheating and misbehaving wives, and unrequited courtly love. Sometimes they were played straight, and sometimes they were parodied, but the message was fairly consistent that love and marriages were difficult to get right and awful if you got them wrong. Divorce, it must be noted, was not mentioned even indirectly. It was either death or cheating, and it was a difficult decision for some of the parties involved. Let it be said here and now that any significant other of mine has my permission to cheat if it will spare them death. Honest, I won't be mad, not even a little.

Now, gode men, I praye yow to be glad. Thus endeth here my tale.

7/10

#14 - Paradise Lost

This self-imposed assault on my free time has now passed its first anniversary. With 13 books finished in the first year, that should have me completing my original list of 91 books (including the spaces reserved for Oldfield Options) in approximately April 2017. This will of course be slowed by school reading lists, employment, social interactions and otherwise real life. It will also be slowed by books like Paradise Lost, by the second blind author on my list, John Milton. Following Ulysses, it resulted in a 5 month span of only two books consumed. This is because, like Ulysses, it was designed to stimulate conversation and analysis.

In this case, the assault is on religion, Christianity specifically. It is in the style of the Greek and Roman epics like Homer's Iliad, with free verse poetry in a 12-book arc. But instead of detailing the story of a quest or a war, it tells the story of the fall of mankind. The story is this: Satan was God's right-hand man, feels betrayed when God creates his Son and declares him higher than all others, goes rogue and gathers one third of the angels to try and usurp God (never a wise plan), and is then kicked out "This is HEAVEN!" style into Chaos, where they fall for nine days through nothing until they land in Hell. Then Satan and his fallen angels-cum-devils get up, dust themselves off, and decide what to do. One says that they should get right back to fighting, one says that Hell isn't so bad and they could make it nice, and finally Beelzebub steps in and says that he has heard tell of God creating a new realm and a new race to replace the fallen angels, mankind. Satan then puts forward the idea that he can go in and trick mankind into turning to evil, thus sabotaging God's creation and getting petty revenge. They agree, and Satan runs up to Paradise, sneaks in, and on his second attempt gets first Eve, then Adam to bite the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, making all Hell break loose in the most literal fashion imaginable, leading to the fall of mankind from God's good graces. Adam and Eve repent, and the Son lays down himself as a sacrifice, allowing for the deal that if Adam and Eve's children (re: all of us) behave PERFECTLY, they can rejoin Heaven upon their death.

Creation stories are some of the most controversial parts of religions, because the neverending question remains "Why?". Milton was a very religious person, holding very firm beliefs in the time of Galileo, the Reformation, and one of the Church's most corrupt periods. However, the remarkable part of Paradise Lost is his attempt to make it as ambivalent as possible. Every point of view and question is brought up, and for the most part, none of them are fully answered. The idea was to create the discussion and bring forth the questions that he felt needed to be asked. Even Satan is portrayed as a sort of anti-hero (some argue the first anti-hero found in literature), with the heroic references in the first three chapters mirroring those of Paris and Achilles in the Iliad. Paradise Lost was also intriguing in its use of dynamic characters - Satan descends into greater and greater agony, Adam and Eve fall and regain their belief - in a story that was originally only a one-dimensional warning. This leads them to be matching the questions of the reader at each step - Adam says "who asked you to create me?" just as I thought of that same argument. The reason that Paradise Lost continues to stand as a readable, critically reviewable text is because it stands as a work that can be argued from all sides equally well. With few exceptions, Milton steps back and allows for his own views to be portrayed equal to those fighting against it (one of those exceptions being chauvinism, with Eve being the unintelligent, selfish, less-pure in comparison to Adam).

Paradise Lost is a necessary text whether religious or atheist. If not to read it, to at least understand it and understand its arguments. The quality of the debate it creates is second to none, and for essay writing and complexity it is both too easy and a fantastic challenge. It was a slog, and a brutal one at that. Those first few lines began to feel like a death sentence every time I opened the book. Just like the Iliad, the free verse format allows for authors to get distracted by their own pretty writing. But once I dug in and really felt the text, this was an experience that gave me lots of food for thought.

7/10

#13 - Ulysses

This reading list is generally supposed to be a casual thing, a pastime to go before video games, but after homework. With time and my usual flair for obsessions however, it has quickly gained a stranglehold on my free time. Ulysses is a notable example. Upon cleaning up the previous couple of books in rapid succession, I found myself hungering for more. The problem was that Ulysses decided to be almost impossible to find. The Ottawa Public Library, my beloved OPL, allowed me to put one on hold, claiming a week's delay at most. A fortnight later I was still bookless. Old hobbies, from geocaching to speaking to my family, were swiftly being considered as viable alternatives. Thankfully, a miracle occurred. Sitting in the Bell High School library, which while a lovely building faces a misguided sense of direction, I decided to look for the Joyce classic. Having tried 3 times previously for reading list books, and this being a much less common find, I was stunned not only to find Ulysses among a Joyce box set, but the exact edition that I was hoping for (with an orange binding, no less).

With Ulysses, the question of edition matters more than most. Originally published in 1922, it had over 2000 spelling and grammar errors in its original form, adding to its already renowned incomprehensibility. However, because of its sheer girth, no attempt at revision was made until 1960, when Random House and the Bodley Head both published the same updated and reset edition, including a copy of the landmark decision in which Ulysses was deemed not obscene by the United States Supreme Court. This edition was accepted until 1984 when a team of German literary scientists (you heard me) led by a Mr. Gabler released a critical and synoptic edition, pieced together from firm copies and manuscripts. This was lauded until its credibility was called into question by John Kidd, who claimed that the Gabler edition corrupted intent, destroyed art, etc. The next decade was the Joyce Wars, in which the 1922 original, the reset 1961 Random House, and the synoptic 1984 Gabler all competed for supremacy. In the fray a simplified "Reader's Edition" was released and has been thoroughly mocked.

It was mocked because, by all intents and purposes, Ulysses is designed not to be understood. The plot is simple. Follow Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly Bloom on this average Dublin day of June 16th, 1904. This date has since become known as Bloomsday, and has annual festivals associated with it. However, James Joyce wrote this book with the express intent to keep scholar's attentions for over a century. At this point, that certainly seems within his reach. So far, we know that from one perspective the entire novel correlates to the Odyssey, with each character being matched and each episode (the chapters) relating stories in many formats. These formats include: a 200-page play called Circe, chronicling a series of nightmarish delusions; Wandering Rocks, a collection of 19 vignettes of the same bit of time and space through various characters; and Penelope, the final 50 page stream-of-consciousness rant that is comprised of 8-10 sentences...and only 2 punctuation marks. In addition, Joyce manages to stutter, cough and sneeze his way into inventing new words, contributing to the staggering total of 30,030 unique words in the novel, the most of any in the English language. Finally, the book is just too damn smart. You would need a minimum of a Bachelor's degree in multiple forms of literature, classical music, ancient and modern history, some science and math, political sciences, psychology and of course multiple Ph.D's in English to catch all of the references Joyce has to offer. Every character, from the student Stephen to the average bum at the bar, can hold their own in a conversation on any topic. Let me rephrase that. Every male character is able to. The women, particularly Molly Bloom, are instead shown as wild, carnal creatures. Gerty McDowell, the object of Bloom's affections in Nausicaa, the famously "obscene" episode, even disdains intellectualism, wanting instead to simply be taken into some wild man's arms.

Through all of this though, reading Ulysses was a pleasure, an honour. Although at times I've felt masochistic for saying so, I enjoyed every bit of its struggle. In other books I have mentioned feeling a light buzz in my head, a feeling of fullness. Ulysses took that and amplified it. It wasn't just a steak, it was a thick, marbled Kobe beef ribeye. It wasn't read, it was absorbed. I couldn't read it in class or at odd intervals like others. Ulysses demanded time and respect. I eventually took to sitting in the basement listening to jazz music to tune out background noise while I read. It thoroughly exhausted me to read it too long, my eyes actually closing as I kept pushing onwards. When March Break rolled around, I begged and pleaded my way until I was finally allowed to bring it. Even on vacation, it took until Thursday afternoon, sitting in some breezy nook, to read and enjoy the last three episodes. After I finished Penelope, I sat with my head ringing for a full 10 minutes before opening up my notebook and writing all this down. It is a powerful, all-encompassing book. Ulysses is a book I hope to read over and over again. Basically, I have a helluva crush on Ulysses. Because of that, I am proud to put Ulysses next to Don Quixote as my second:

10/10

#12 - 1984

Keeping up the rapid pace, I breezed through 1984. I have been hearing about this one for ages. The archetypal dystopia novel, bringer of a whole pile of tropes, and a little bit of a nerd anthem. Needless to say, I have a lot of friends who have read it and propound its virtues to me endlessly. Not that I wasn't excited for it, it was just... extremely hyped. Luckily, it delivered.

Set in the future of last Thursday, Orwell's 1984 follow a guy who has arguably the coolest job in the Ministry of Truth (the propagandists, it all makes painful sense within five minutes of reading it), rewriting the papers to recreate history. I would love to have this sort of job. I mean, if we all have to be cogs in a giant evil machine with no way to fight or revolt, you might as well have a really awesome job. Now again, the Ministry of Love deals with torture, Truth with propaganda, etc. All of the instances of "doublethink" in the book are that simple, and even if you don't pick it up immediately, it is explained succinctly in order to allow the story to move forward. I was so happy with this. Orwell managed to toe the line perfectly between being enigmatic with his message and beating you over the head with it. In reading it, there was room to discover, and levels to find, but there was still a handrail if you fell away from the beaten path.

Those messages were not spectacular from today's perspective, but most of the blame for that has to do with the fact that the book has been out for, you know, a while. The vast majority of its real deep messages have already permeated our culture. Doublethink? We've seen it. Big Brother? We're about 20 seasons in. But there are some other elements of it that were so well-done as to continue to thrill even after hearing about it for decades. I was particularly intrigued by his take on the secret tryst. The budding romance had so much of a teenager's feel to it, the meeting in forests, playing house, the pure carnal nature of the physical part - it seemed so immature and yet wild. My favourite quote from it was to the vixen Julia: "You're only a rebel from the waist down". Who doesn't know at least one person from their high school life like that?

Stunningly, 1984 lived up to all of its hype. It was a good rhythm, excepting the painful "book" chapter. It had all of the angst and psychological drama and intellectualisms to keep me entertained, but didn't drown me with rhyming verse. It was direct, to the point and powerful in its simplicity. It had storylines and characters and drama and romance, all combined into a setting that makes you think and reminds you of both history and the future. Of course, those are often the same thing, if you listen to the book.

9/10

#11 - Slaughterhouse Five

This one was one that I was truly excited to read. Since the inception of the idea, this quest, I had been harangued to read the books that a Miss Amy Oldfield wanted me to read. We bartered over how much influence - every 5 books, every 10 books - and eventually settled upon every 8 books being an Oldfield Option. The first was from the original list, albeit from somewhere in the 50s. It was a book she loved by an auther she loved written in a style she loved and I was going to love it dammit. Luckily, I did.

Slaughterhouse Five, of The Children's Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, is certainly not as complex as an Iliad or a Moby Dick. In some ways it is more complicated. The plot is disjointed, there are characters introduced just to disappear and the entire premise seems to not make sense. However, I bulldozed through it in the course of a day. The language is simple, and the font was large and spread out on the page. But even after I finished, my head was buzzing softly. Not too badly, it certainly wasn't going to explode. But there was that contented fullness in my brain, and for that I can thank Vonnegut.

Now how can I explain this plot? Billy Pilgrim is a loony who has become unstuck from time. So he jumps between his early and late life from Ilium, his time as a POW in the war...and his time with the Tralfamadorians, an alien race that lives in four dimensions. These storylines jump and blend, leaving the main character of Billy Pilgrim as one of the strangest, most complete characters I have ever seen yet. A neat bit of double narration is done, as Vonnegut throws in his own input on what Billy sees, which reminds me of Conrad's techniques in Heart of Darkness.

There were lots of funny little bits. The literary references were nice and not overdone, showing where he came from and perhaps where Billy's insane ideas stemmed from. The repetitions of "and so it goes" were sometimes funny, sometimes poignant. I was always able to follow along, I was always interested and entertained. There was never a boring section, and even if there was, they were always short enough to get me to keep reading until it jumped away again. So thank you Amy, I bow to your prowess in book determining. I eagerly await your next Oldfield Option.

8/10

#10 - The Iliad

It's the freaking Iliad. Let's get that straight right away. Homer's epic poem about the Trojan War, and the hero Achilles and the rape (read: kidnapping) of Helen, and those thousand or so ships she launched. It's that Iliad. Beyond that, it's the freaking Chapman Iliad. George Chapman spent 11 years of his life dedicated to not only translating this into modern English, but retaining the rhyme and rhythm of the original. What results is a novel that has driving language and a beating movement to go along with the classical storyline.

That classical storyline is one that, even if you aren't wholly familiar with it, some elements should be familiar. The Greeks are furious with the Trojans for the rape of Helen, and so they launch their ships and begin kicking Trojan ass. However, their side is weakened because their single most powerful warrior, Achilles of the wussy heel, is throwing a hissy fit because of something that the bossman of the Greeks Agamemnon did to him. But the battle rages on regardless, with the gods interfering as they see fit, pushing the Greeks to the brink of disaster until, with a last wipe of a tear, Achilles stands up and decides to kick ass, wiping the Trojans up and down the beach.

Now, this sums up the entire storyline. Besides one or two books (chapters) chronicling the home lives of the two sides, that's it. Battle after battle, sort of dragging like the half-hour Lord of the Rings battle scenes, it loops endlessly through the same short motifs. Minor characters are introduced and killed in the same pattern. First, they are introduced and described by their father and homeland. Then they try to smite the major hero, who laughs, brushes the blow off, then proceeds to shank them, usually with a spear just under the nipple. Sometimes they even take the time to mock them for their pathetic attempts, and explain to them why they will burn in the afterlife. Another constant loop are the sacrifices of so many cows, goats and other hooved creatures that the book is banned from all Indian schools.

Essentially, it starts to smack of filler, much in the same way as Moby Dick. The proof is in the Arguments. Each chapter is summed up in an "Argument", about 16 lines of rhyming verse. This covers the entire content of the book. Then below that, there is "Another Argument", summing up that argument in a simple couplet. So right there, the entire novel is summed up in 48 lines. And yet we keep reading. Why? It's the freaking Iliad. Renowned for millenia, the pinnacle of everything schmancy for generations. So, I'm glad I finished it.

Interestingly, my pattern in reading it is much the same way as Chapman wrote it. You see, he wrote the first 12 books over 10 years, then powered through the last 12 in 15 weeks. I read the first 12 over 4 months, then nailed the second half in a night. So, just as Chapman did, I embraced the classic literature. I absorbed the flow and rhythms of the ancients. Finally, halfway through, I got fed up and blitzed through the entire thing.

5/10