A Handful of Dust (by Evelyn Waugh)

Also on both the MLA and Time lists, and a remarkably quick read, really. To tell the plot would be to give too much away. It starts off as a sort of comedy of manners (British society between the wars) that's very funny, and then ends up... in quite a different place. There's a whole lot of literary allusion going on here, as the central figures form a King Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle, which adds interest and poignancy and depth. The ending is unexpected and yet adds dimension to the whole book.

Still, I'd have preferred the novel to stay as a small social satire, rather than going in that different direction. As I'm typing this I realize I wanted a Henry James or Edith Wharton type of novel, where nothing fantastical has to happen in order for it to be meaningful. At any rate, it's a good book, but as far aw Waugh goes, I prefer Brideshead Revisited. And as far as literature goes, I prefer Age of Innocence and Portrait of a Lady.

Portnoy's Complaint (by Phillip Roth)

Another book that is on both the MLA and the Time Magazine list. God knows where or javascript:void(0)when I read this on my recent travels; I think I was in Colorado. I've been meaning to read this for years, since on the cover of my copy of Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York, it calls it the "feminine rejoinder to Portnoy's Complaint." Finally having read it, I totally get it. The ending is a little "hey-yooooo" and the book in general is a little... I don't know, one note? But it's pretty funny and entertaining. I suppose everyone thinks Roth is so brave for writing about Oedipal stuff and whacking off a lot. I guess I enjoyed it but I'm not necessarily all jazzed up about it. It's probably my penis envy talking.

Under the Volcano (by Malcolm Lowry)

After I finished the Radcliffe list, I peeked at my booklists again. I'm still 41 books short of the MLA list and something like 50 short of the Time Magazine list, so both of those will take a while. But I did make a note of six books that I haven't read that are on both lists, figuring I'd start there. Then I read the list to Ian and asked if he had any of them, and he handed me this one. Which is a really long-winded explanation of how I decided to read this book!

It's very interesting, and I'm surprised it's not on the Radcliffe list. It's a largely autobiographical stream-of-conscious novel about an alcoholic living in Mexico. The introduction to the book (which I went back and read last night) talks about how Lowry is compared to James Joyce a lot, but that Joyce's characters embody the collective unconscious, while Lowry's characters are more specific and in many cases, they represent himself. I don't think that's a bad way to differentiate the two. It's not necessarily praise or criticism, it's just a difference. Lowry's SOC is easier to read than Joyce's or Woolf's, for what it's worth.

I also noticed Lowry's incredible use of metaphor and symbol. Ian told me that there was an article where Lowry said, "I'm going to see how many symbols I can squeeze into this novel!" and once he said that, it all made sense. It does seem overstuffed with them. The elements I most enjoyed were the amazing metaphors and the wonderfully specific description of the experience of extreme drunkenness, which is not a pleasant sensation. The stream of consciousness style worked so well to convey that. Lowry also gets inside the brains of multiple characters, which is also well done. Really, I would recommend this book to any writer of novels, because Lowry does such unique and sophisticated things with point of view.

My biggest complaint was that you didn't get enough of a sense of the relationships--why did Yvonne come back? Why was she so heartbroken by the end of her relationship? What are the details of her relationships with Hugh and Jacques? And why, above all, does she want to be with the Consul in the first place? All we see of him is the alcoholic. We never saw what he used to be, or could have been. It would have added so much depth and poignancy, I think. (It's not like it's totally absent, it's just really subtle, and requires a lot of reading between the lines.)

And finally, my biggest personal failing in reading this novel is that there is a lot, and I mean A LOT, of descriptions of scenery. I had to force myself to re-read sentences over and over and really work on visualizing. The tremendous metaphors really helped; at times I felt like I really understand why descriptions of scenery exist and what they add. But at other times my mind wandered away, as usual, because I couldn't be bothered. It's good, though. It is good. It's not you, Lowry, it's me.

"He watched the clouds: dark swift horses surging up the sky. A black storm breaking out of its season! That was what love was like, he thought; love which came too late. Only no sane calm suceeded it... And let such love strike you dumb, blind, mad, dead--your fate would not be altered by your similie. Tonnerre de dieu... It slaked no thihirst to say what love was like which came too late." (Page 11)

Radcliffe Wrapup

So why did I read Finnegans Wake? Lots of answers to this, really. For bragging rights. For street cred as an English teacher. To finish one huge chunk of my reading list project, which I started years ago. Because it was a challenge, and I love a challenge. So I could speak intelligently about Joyce without dissembling. Because it is a work of genius (and ego, and penis, but also genius). Because it was fun. Because it was there?

Why did I read all the books on the Radcliffe list? Some of the same reasons. Before I started my reading project, I had never read any Hemingway, Faulkner, Woolfe, Cather, Vonnegut, or James, among others. Keep in mind, this is after I graduated from college and was halfway through graduate school. Keep in mind, I read constantly and always have, and consider myself a literate person. Keep in mind that my goal has always been to teach English. You can see that those gaps in my exposure to literature were not small ones.

Here is where it all started in the year 2000. Holy shit, have I really spent seven years on this project so far? Insane. (Well, it's not like I wouldn't have been reading anyway.) Really, it's been fantastic. Although some of the books on this list gave me physical pain (Atlas Shrugged, anyone?) there are so many amazing books and authors on here that I never would have discovered otherwise. Here are some lists of the list for you.

Ten Books I'd Kick Off the List
This is purely based on my own personal taste, not on what I think "should" be on the list. Here are 10 that I simply didn't enjoy.
1. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
2. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
3. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
4. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
5. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
6. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
7. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
8. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
9. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
10. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

Runners up included (as much as I love James and Wharton) both The Bostonians and Ethan Frome, as well as Rabbit, Run, Heart of Darkness, The Wind in the Willows, and The Naked and the Dead. A lot of my issues with these books is that I couldn't get past the misogyny (like Women in Love) or that I don't think they have aged well (like The Jungle). Also, I apparently don't like books about India, as A Passage to India, Kim, and both Rushdie books were on my shortlist. I also don't like allegories much, since I also shortlisted The Old Man and the Sea and The Lord of the Flies. Nice to know these things about myself.

My Personal Top Ten
What are the ten best books on this list? The ten best books in literature. Crap, this is harder than picking the ten worst. I want to include Finnegans Wake just because it is such a genius book, but it's the opposite of accessible, willfully obtuse, and I think that's a strike against it. We'll call it number eleven.

1. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
2. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
3. Beloved by Toni Morrison
4. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
5. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
6. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
7. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
8. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
9. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
10. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Runners up were books I've loved for a really long time (White Noise, A Clockwork Orange, Catch-22) some classics that I'm sure you all know and love that I'm just going to take as read because otherwise this list would be impossible (The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird) and a couple of great American novels (Go Tell It on the Mountain, the Grapes of Wrath). Honorable mentions also go to The Maltese Falcon, A Separate Peace, In Cold Blood, The Wings of the Dove, To the Lighthouse, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Also, it killed me to cut Franny and Zooey, which I love more than Catcher in the Rye, and which you should all read.

Not on the Radcliffe list, but would have made this even harder? The Remains of the Day and, of course, Pale Fire.

So there you go. Feel free to take a gander at the Radcliffe list and let me know what you've read, what you loved, what you hated, and whether you agree with me or not!