2 endings!

The Adventures of Caleb Williams is a tough read. The author (William Godwin) is a big Enlightenment guy and truly believed that if everyone followed the principles of reason, we would have a perfect society with no crime, no laws, no government, etc. This thinking comes through in the book – which must have been very trendy at the time. Now it just seems kind of goofy. Anyway, there is a lot of reasoning and “expostulation” that goes on (and on, and on).

The plot is pretty interesting but not that plausible. I found it difficult to believe that the characters would behave the way they do. The characters also are not that complex. It’s kind of a good vs. bad story. I was really glad I read the introduction for this one though because it helped put the book in historical context and helped me figure out some stuff I found confusing.

Finally, the edition of the book that I have has 2 endings! Apparently the author wrote one ending, then changed his mind and wrote a second ending. The second ending was published originally. The book puts the first ending in an appendix – so you can see what the other alternative was. I thought that was pretty cool – though I wonder how the author would have felt about that. If I wrote something, changed my mind, and wrote something else, I’m not sure I’d be all that thrilled if the first thing came to light and were published. (Though, now with everything on the computer, I guess the chances of that are slimmer.)

Next up: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. On the Kindle. It was 25 cents to buy! Now I just have to see if the baby will be too interested in the Kindle to allow me to read it when I’m around her. She does OK with books, but LOOOOVES electronics.

I'm squeamish about violent books.

Thankfully, Marissa doesn’t mind if I discuss a little bit of the plot of Adam Bede in this entry. It would be really hard to write about this book and not reveal any of the plot. (The introduction and the back of the book kind of give it away, anyway.)

When I found out that this book involved a young woman killing her own child, I really was dreading reading it. Ever since I became a mama a little over a year ago, I’ve been SUPER sensitive about - and try to avoid - reading or seeing stuff that involves dead children. How could someone kill their own child. Too awful to contemplate.

So I approached this book with some dread. Thankfully, though, the author develops the plot really softly and subtly. Much of the stuff that goes on is not presented directly and you learn about them because other characters are talking about what happened. So it wasn’t as explicitly awful to read as I had feared. I’m sure this is what the 1850s readership wanted and it’s a really nice contrast from how this topic would probably be covered in a book today!

And the introduction discusses this quite a bit, but this book really IS a beautiful portrait of rural farm life in 1800. I felt like I was living there with the villagers watching Adam build stuff and Mrs. Poyser run her dairy. It’s weird, the contrast between the beautiful writing and the thoughtful portrait of the community and the violent crime that forms the basis of the plot.

I do have one question though. I can’t figure out what happens to Hetty at the very, very end of the book. (I think she’s referred to in the epilogue, pages 537 and 539 of the Penguin Classics edition). It’s just TOO subtle for me, I guess. I even looked it up on Wikipedia to no avail. (Hey Marissa, when you get to this point, help!!!)

Not necessarily simpler times.

I keep starting to write about The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow and deleting everything. Too boring or book report-ish. I’m flummoxed by how good the book is. Anything I say will just muddle it up. So I’ll limit this to a few quick thoughts.

This book is a fascinating look at 1920s-1940s middle America. We idealize the past as Simpler Times but it’s more like different times. Life is not simple for Augie and his family and friends. The challenges they face are quite different than today (for example, they didn’t have the pleasure of the Magical Verizon Time Window, where you sit in your house and wait and wait and wait for a technician to come galloping over the horizon on a unicorn to fix all your tv, phone, and internet problems. But I digress.) The problems Augie and his family and friends face are no less complicated, though. Well, it is the Great Depression and all. Not really the most jolly, carefree time.

Augie doesn’t have a formal college education and holds about 10,000 jobs over the course of the book. (And some of them are crazy! He trains an eagle!) None of these jobs define him. You know when you meet someone for the first time and they ask, “So what do you do?” Augie would have this litany of things. I was struck by how many opportunities there were available to a person without a college education back then. Sadly, that is no longer the case.

Augie frustrates me sometimes because he doesn’t do what I think he should do. Sometimes he is presented with these choices where he would just make his life So.Much.Easier if he did the easy thing, but no. Instead he turns the easy decision down every time. I’m glad that I managed to like the book even though the main character got on my nerves a bit.

This book was absolutely worth reading and it’s one of those books I keep turning over and over in my head thinking about it. I don’t even want to start Adam Bede yet because I want to reflect a while on this one.

Where we are, and where we are going.

I just moved, and my copy of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is still packed in a box. Since I'm sitting here with Marissa (yay!) I decided to borrow her copy and post a list of the first 20 or so books that we will be reading. So that we can refer back to it. (And so I can stop texting Marissa at random times to ask what books are next on the list.)

Where we are - the first 10 books:

1. Aaron's Rod by D.H. Lawrence

2. The Abbot C by Georges Bataille

3. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

4. The Absentee by Maria Edgeworth

5. Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes

6. Ada by Vladimir Nabokov

7. Adam Bede by George Eliot

8. Adjunct: An Undigest by Peter Manson

9. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

10. The Adventures of Caleb Williams by William Godwin

Where we are going - the next 10 books:

11. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

12. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

13. Aesop's Fables by Aesopus

14. After the Death of Don Juan by Sylvia Townsend Warner

15. After the Quake by Haruki Murakami

16. The Afternoon of a Writer by Peter Handke

17. Against the Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans

18. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

19. Agnes Gray by Anne Bronte

20. Aithiopika by Heliodorus

I'm pretty excited about some of the books that we have coming up. There are some classics that I've never read, and some that are really, really old!

Also, Marissa got Mike and me the most awesome Christmas present this year - a Kindle! I can't wait to start using it. It seems like a great way to read some of these books - I love how portable it is.

Merry Christmas!

Wait, what?

I just finished L'Abbe C.

I'm confused.

So here's what I gathered: Charles was sleeping with Eponine, but Eponine wanted to get with Charles' twin brother Robert who was a priest, and Robert didn't want to, but he secretly did. Then somebody pooped outside Eponine's window, and Robert was faking sick in the rectory, and they thought the butcher was going to kill Charles. Then Robert decided he'd have two whores at once, neither of which was Eponine, then he got arrested by the Gestapo and died, and Eponine did too.

Toward the end of the book, Charles makes the following statement that is basically how I feel about the book. From page 152: "All of this depresses me."

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006 version) summarizes all of the books, and the summary for L'Abbe C is quite interesting and good. Treachery!

Monsieur Bataille: Je suis désolé, je croyais que votre livre a été la merde.

Marissa

Goddamn it.

Emily texted me yesterday to ask what book came after Adam Bede. I was at work and didn't have 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die at hand, so I thought, "Hey, the internet!" and went poking around. Turns out there is a website for the 1001 series. Great, right? It even has the list right on there!

NOT.

The list is there, to be sure, but it has been updated. No Aaron's Rod, no L'Abbe C, no The Absentee, et cetera. Basically, nothing that we've read so far! D'oh! I propose we keep going with the list we started with (by gum, it took me forever to read Aaron's Rod and I want credit for it!). So we're working from the list put out in 2006. Why, oh why does such a long list need to be updated almost four years later? Ridiculous.

Marissa

Incest. I just can’t get behind it.

I just finished Ada by Vladimir Nabokov.  Perhaps I am a bit of a Puritan in my reading preferences.  So although the author really attempts to present Ada and Van as sympathetic characters, for me the author’s efforts were in vain.  I just can’t get behind incest.  (That sounds like a really off the wall bumper sticker.)

I appreciated how richly the characters were drawn.  In fact, that’s one of the things I liked best about the book.  However, the intensity of the characters didn’t mean I liked them a whole lot.  I found Van too navel gazing and slimy, especially how he goes after women, and Ada is way too uptight.

Here comes the embarrassing part where I admit what I didn’t understand.  I didn’t get the whole Terra/Antiterra business.  I don’t understand where the novel took place.  And those 20ish pages toward the end reflecting on time (or Time, as the author calls it)?  Yeah, I really just skimmed those pages.  (Hey, if you’re going to write a 589 page novel and stick in that many pages of stuff that totally doesn't advance the plot at the very end, don’t expect me to read them in detail!  I have 1001 books to get through!)

This all seems kind of negative, but I am glad I read it. The first part of the book that takes place at Ardis is beautifully written.  (I almost wish he had stopped there.)  The alliteration throughout the book is cool too.  It’s definitely an interesting book and I certainly wouldn’t have found or read it on my own without the 1001 books list!

Next up:  Marissa has Adam Bede which I will try to get through when I visit next week (yay!) and I’m about to try to hunt down Adjunct: An Undigest.