David’s Comments (group member since Aug 23, 2012)

David’s comments from the Read a Classic Challenge group.

JoJo wrote: "Title: Carrie
Author: Stephen King
Year of (initial) Publication: 1974
Number of Pages: 253"

Are you reading all the Stephen King books in order? Be sure to check out my blog project "Under the Tome"! (google it)

Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, 1948. 316 pages. Print.

I actually read this in January. I put down some thoughts in a blog post written a couple months back which fairly well summarizes my thoughts with no spoilers.

http://dkkriegh.blogspot.com/2015/01/...

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Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866, 564 pages (translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)

For some reason I never experienced the Russian novel in high school, so here we have, just 20 years later, my first taste of Dostoevsky. Thanks to War and Peace (and Leo Tolstoy in general), Russian literature may seem like a collection of large, impenetrable works. While Crime and Punishment is hardly a short story, it isn't endless and it's setting is quite confined, not an epic sweep. Most of the action happens in small apartments, taverns, and, on occasion, the streets of St. Petersburg. Although not something to speed read, the translation is modern, fresh, and clear.

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The Awakening & Selected Stories by Kate Chopin, 1899, 354 pages.

This book was very scandalous back in 1899, so much so that Chopin's career was ended and she was all but erased from literary history. However, twentieth century readers rediscovered Chopin and found her less scandalous and more of a prophetess of role of women in American society.

I can't say I was quite as blown away and thought the whole book to be a bit too melodramatic for my tastes. However The Awakening, I will agree, was her masterpiece. The other stories included here don't even touch it. I also learned I still remember a lot of French words. This helps when reading Chopin, but get ready for the "dialogue in dialect" that is very thick in the short stories (if you elect to read those).

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As promised, here's my take on the book, lightly edited from by blog post:

First off, I want to say the original cover, which graced my copy as obtained from the Menlo Park Public Library, bears an uncanny resemblance to the logo for the recently-cancelled TV show "Community". Anyway, moving right along... Most people may have heard the title because this book serves as about 3/4 of the basis for the holiday classic movie "A Christmas Story". I don't need to rehash those parts since the movie serves them quite well, particularly the Red Rider BB Gun and the Leg Lamp stories. There are two excellent stories that don't get featured in the movie. One is about how ridiculous fishing culture is, complete with fish-story levels of hyperbole and exaggeration. Another is the all-too-familiar fiasco of learning to drive a manual transmission car and the inevitable torrent of agony it places on his father.
The structure of the book is not revealed by the movie. The movie largely goes after three of the stories here and a few snippets of the others and puts them all in the context of Christmas hijinks. I think the script (which was co-authored by Shepherd) also cleverly embellished some of the stories (little things like "Fragile? Must be Italian!") that aren't in the text of the book. The book itself interweaves the stories of childhood in Depression-era Indiana into an ongoing discussion between Ralph (Ralphie), visiting from New York City, and Flick, his childhood friend who never left and now tends the bar. Although as adults they are worlds apart, they are able to while away most the afternoon and evening reminiscing about growing up. The "adult" chapters, the odd numbered ones, have a certain bittersweet quality to them. The even chapters tend to be more warm and funny.

One flaw in the book, which is actually fairly common for these types of books, is the problem with repetitiveness because the "childhood" chapters were mostly published in magazines prior to the release of the book. So the readers of Playboy (the ones that were really reading it for the articles!) needed some context as they worked into the story, something the book readers probably didn't need. But at the same time, Shepherd is so hostile to the dirty-industry culture of Indiana, it is actually enjoyable to read him attacking it from all directions in each story.
While Shepherd isn't quite as ridiculous as those he inspired, like David Sedaris or Augustin Burroughs, his style is warm and funny enough that I will be seeking out the other part of the Christmas Story experience, a book released five years later called "Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories".

Hi Rachel, I felt the same way about Anathem. In many ways it was a slog, but I'm really glad I stuck with it. You will find the Sparrow is a much brisker read. It also has a sequel called Children of God, which was just a little less bold than its predecessor.

RachelvlehcaR wrote: "David wrote: "A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., 1959, 338 pages, print.

The intersection of science fiction and theology is rich with potential, and Walter M. Miller, Jr. was one ..."

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, 1985, 148 pages, print.

Annie John is a plucky 150 pages and is a spiritual sister of sorts to an earlier book I read, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, both in length and topic though Mango was a little more poetic in style. Both are coming of age stories, and both introduce the readers to something that is different (Puerto Ricans in New York and growing up in Antigua, respectively), yet also exploring common truths across cultures (family ties).

Annie John may have rung a little hollow for me in that the mother-daughter bond is something I can observe but not experience. Books like these are important though for "outsiders" like me, though, because it reading a vivid account of it is about as close as I can get to experiencing it. Through others (wife, mother-in-law, sister, mother, grandmother) I have seen the mother-daughter relationship, with its stormy ups-and-downs, in action all around me, but as a son, my own connection to my mother is different. So on one hand I found it interesting to read about the moodiness of the mother-daughter relationship, but on the other I almost felt glad that I didn't have to grapple with such as ordeal. The father-son relationship, far more frequently written about in the history of literature, is plenty enough complicated.

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A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., 1959, 338 pages, print.

The intersection of science fiction and theology is rich with potential, and Walter M. Miller, Jr. was one of the first to explore it in his only novel released in his lifetime, A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Classic Western history texts always dutifully explain how the Church guided Europe through the "Dark Ages" following the collapse of the Roman Empire. Although studies have poked an increasing number of holes in this simple explanation, the endurance of the Church through politically turbulent times is one of the more noteworthy success stories in history. Miller, writing during some of the frostiest moments of the Cold War, speculates how the Church would continue in the aftermath of a global nuclear disaster and resultant second "Dark Age". Miller explores matters such as how alien our culture might seem to a future culture that has willingly divorced itself from scientific progress. How do secular and religious thinking work together (or against each other) to restore modernity? Would we been doomed to repeat the Dark Ages again and again and how many of these cycles could institutions such as the Church endure? Furthermore, in all of these big questions, Miller is also able to examine issues such as euthanasia, deformities, and the role of religion in interstellar travel. There is no shortage of debate throughout the book.

Two novels clearly influenced by this book are The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell and Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Each book related to a different aspect of this novel. In the case of the former, it is the concrete notion of the continuation of the Church into the future and the implication of going beyond Earth. Stephenson doesn't use the Church itself in his model, but instead examines the relationship between an educated, cloistered community and the wavering secular society over vast stretches of time. I highly recommend either of these books, especially if you are intrigued by A Canticle for Leibowitz.

A couple quibbles. The first is not Miller's fault, but simply the common problem of speculative fiction, which is not knowing then what we know now. In this case the Second Vatican Council is the key difference here, so we have a Church in (what used to be) North America that functions primarily on Latin. The other issue is more structural in nature. The three sections take place in different time periods, each far removed from the others chronologically, which can be very disorientating to the reader. Generally this strategy is employed in the larger multi-generational type novels, like James Michener's books. This is a shorter work, so Miller doesn't have much luxury to build a world before moving on to the next stage.

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Animal Farm by George Orwell, 1945, 112 pages, print.

This one was nearly in the can a week ago, but I've been swept up in other activities. I've always thought of Animal Farm as for the kids and 1984 for the adults, and therefore 1984 was the better of the two books, but I may have to stand corrected after this most recent reading of Animal Farm. Like I've said a million times before, it's crazy to teach the classics out of context. No book stands out of time and the greatest books are often the product of their times. The brilliant slow reversal of the thrill of Animalism to the return of business as usual at the farm should be a lesson for all of us to be more aware of the world around us, especially those we call our leaders, willingly or not.

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My understanding is that Bradbury used the Martian Chronicles as a type of "realist" response to the Edgar Rice Burroughs type of Mars that dominated the popular imagination of the early/mid 20th century. Therefore, we have chapters like "Way In the Middle of the Air" which makes a point of saying that Mars itself is not going to solve problems like racism and war. Rather, we need to think about how something like the inclusion of a second habitable planet changes our one-planet problems. Interestingly, Bradbury did not consider this book to be science fiction (I think he only conceded that label to Fahrenheit 451).

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, 1968, 672 pages, print.

Years ago, back in my public librarian days, I would walk past this book, one of the thickest in the SF section and say to myself "someday". I duly placed it in my queue and it percolated its way up the charts until, voila! it was sitting on deck.

John Brunner was a prolific writer in the 1950's and early 1960's, cranking out volumes of fairly stock-sounding science fiction and space opera. In 1968 he made a very dramatic transition in both form and content with Stand On Zanzibar. The first in a quartet of dystopias, this novel deals with the cultural impacts of overpopulation in the far future year of 2010. It is written in a non-linear style, with the main plot line (Continuity) weaving among brief portraits of other characters (Tracking With Closeups) and fragments of the cultural world of 2010 (Context and The Happening World). Obviously this book's 2010 bears little resemblance in "past" events, politics and language to our world four years ago, but Brunner is actually not far off the mark as to where we are technologically and it is not unreasonable to think some of these things could come to pass in our own still-unwritten future.

It struck the right tone and the right time. The book would go on to win the Hugo Award in 1969 as well as a few other prestigious awards internationally, assuring its status as a classic. Brunner's health took a turn for the worse in the 1970's, so his output declined, but he continued to explore various dystopias in works such as The Sheep Look Up (pollution), The Jagged Orbit (racial discord) and The Shockwave Rider (computers in control). I would like to check these out in the future!

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Names on the Land by George R. Stewart. Published in 1944, revised in 1958, 527 pages, print.

Most folks will recognize the author from other works like Earth Abides and Ordeal By Hunger, about a fictional global pandemic and the Donner party respectively. This book is nonfiction, a classic study of how various places in the United States came into their names. There is so much interesting information in the book I cannot begin to do it justice in this short review, so here are just a couple observations. One is the fascinating Dutch heritage behind many of the street and town names in and around New York City. Another interesting exploration is on how towns end up with suffixes like -ville, -burg(h), -to(w)n, or -boro(ugh). Even though the book is fairly old (the second edition gets us caught up with the soon-to-be admitted Alaska and Hawaii) it is filled with amazing insights that will make you the life of the party, if nothing else.

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The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. Published in 1532. 128 pages (my edition anyway), print.

I had this on my to-read list for a while, I think after reading Thomas Cahill's Mysteries of the Middle Ages in which Machiavelli is frequently referenced. I particularly enjoyed his classical-era examples of the use of power, but my medieval Italian history is poor at best so I think I missed some of his points. Although not a guidebook for life in the 21st century, well worth reading just for getting a little extra insight on human nature.

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I think John is right. Unfortunately with the classics you often need to sift through 1000 or more editions of some titles to find the right one. However they do allow you to limit by format, which (esp. with Kindle eds) should help a great deal. One annoyance I have is that it seems the consensus of the Goodreads librarians is to add every last page of a book regardless of pagination (which flies in the face of proper bibliographical description). So all the roman numeral stuff is rolled into the total pagination. Also, for nonfiction readers, if your book has a ton of endnotes, all of that gets counted. This causes your "total pages read" number to inflate, so I usually take that number with a big grain of salt.

Hey all, it's one of your other moderators - David here in sunny (but painfully dry) California (SF Bay Area).

John thanks for starting the thread here. There is very little you can do that would be bad for the group, so thanks for taking the initiative.

As far as logging your books, Goodreads does the job very well for me. You can click on your profile, then click on "stats" and you will see a bar chart showing how many books you read for each year. You can click on any year and see a pie chart showing what type of books you've read based on your bookshelves. It works well as long as you are including the completion date when you mark a book as "read" - you can also see page numbers, which I think is another great feature. I hope that kinda-sorta answered your question.

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, 1847, 416 pages, print.

"Wuthering Heights" is basically a very good book about truly awful people. They are either born awful or simply turned awful by being in the presence of other awful people. Some people think the the romance between Heathcliff and Catherine was something deep and profound. I think "obsessive-compulsive" is a more apt term, so much so that it drove them to hurt and/or kill everyone around them thanks to their single-mindedness. And I haven't even mentioned the part about graves.

Did I like the book? Actually, I did! Most reactions I got to "hey, I'm reading Wuthering Heights!" included "Ugh!", "Why??", "Don't!!!" and "Heathcliff is a stalker" (thanks, Mom). It's a dark one and should not be confused with works such as "Jane Eyre" or anything by Jane Austen (which is actually a poor comparison as this came much later). There is a lot of lit-crit about this book, but the opening essay was all I really needed to understand the background of the book and where much of the nastiness comes from. Also, this book was quite a bit easier a read for me than Pride and Prejudice, which I took on a couple years back, I think because the language of the Victorian era is a bit closer to our own than that of the Romantic era. I'm not an English major; I'm just throwing that out there!

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Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein, 1959, 390 pages, print.

Other than a few familiar elements, it bears almost no resemblance to the movie. Since Heinlein was moving out of his juveniles period, I didn't expect the writing to be very flowery and it isn't. While the movie really played up the satirical elements, I couldn't find anything in the book to support any claims of satire. In some ways I would have almost preferred satire to the glorification of militarization so evident in these pages. In was clear in a few places, notably in his teacher Mr. Dubois's lectures and well as protagonist Johnny Rico's own monologue, that Heinlein was using the science fiction story as a construct for expounding his own libertarian platform. But was it really libertarian? He describes a future where modern society (for Heinlein, the Cold War era 1950's) is brought down by brats who were never brought to heel because corporal punishment was outlawed by pesky "social workers". That sounds libertarian. However, the resulting society, where enlistment in the Federal Service is made mandatory in order to be able to be a voting citizen, definitely smacks of socialist thinking and militarism. In the end I'm not really sure what Heinlein was getting at and the story was fairly routine science fiction. I'm glad I read the book, but it was nothing special.

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Hi folks - if you didn't see it yet, the themes for the year and suggested January reads have been posted in the appropriate forum. Have fun!!

Suggested reading for January:

Disclaimer: There is *no way* to comprehensively list all the fables, fairy tales and legends of the world, so do not consider this to be the end-all be-all for the topic. In fact, I encourage everyone to bring any title recommendations to the group’s attention or suggest subtopics explored by websites and other resources (like books!).

For this list, I attempted, whenever possible, to use either original texts (usually in translation) or classic compilations. However, as is the joy of oral tradition, there are far more versions of varying quality out there to explore.

Fables

Classic:
Aesop’s Fables (many editions)
Jataka Tales [India]
One Thousand and One (Arabian) Nights
Complete Fables of Jean Le Fontaine
Modern:
Fables (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Fables For Our Time (James Thurber)

Fairy Tales

Collected Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
Les Contes des Fees (Madame d’Aulnoy)
The Complete Fairy Tales (Hans Christian Andersen)
Complete Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales (Jakob & Wilhelm Grimm)
Norwegian Folktales (Asbjornsen & Moe)
American Fairy Tales (Frank L. Baum)

Myths/Legends

Gilgamesh
Theogony (Hesiod)
Odyssey/Iliad (Homer)
The Aeneid (Virgil)
The Metamorphoses (Ovid)
Beowulf
The Song of Roland
La Morte d’Arthur (Thomas Mallory)
The Edda (prose or poetic) [Norse]
African Myths of Origin (ed. Stephen Belcher)
The Children of Odin: The Book of Northern Myths (Padraic Colum)

Classic Re-Tellings and Re-Imaginings

A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court (Mark Twain)
Crystal Cave (Mary Stewart)
The Once and Future King (T. H. White)
The Silmarillion (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Grendel (John Gardner)
Wicked (Gregory Maguire) – too soon? :)

Classic Books On The Theme (for our classics of nonfiction readers!)

The Golden Bough (Sir James George Frazer)
Mythology (Edith Hamilton)
The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell)

Websites with more suggestions and texts:

Aesop’s Fables
http://www.umass.edu/aesop
An interesting project demonstrating the relevance of these fables in the creation of art. There are some book recommendations under the History link.

American Folklore
http://www.americanfolklore.net/
Well organized collection of homegrown American stories, with a useful A-Z story index.

FolkTexts
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html
No-frills, highly detailed site that explores shared themes in folk tales.

Canongate Myth Series
http://www.themyths.co.uk/
Many current authors have participated in the series of adapting classic mythological motifs.

Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library List (via LibraryThing)
http://www.librarything.com/publisher...
Many of these volumes are out of print, but it is a classic and globally-inclusive series that will give you plenty of ideas.

Sur La Lune Fairy Tales
http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/
Annotated fairy tales that explore themes across cultures.

Encyclopedia Mythica
http://www.pantheon.org/areas/mythology/
Online encyclopedic resource with a global scope. No texts here, but contains over 7000 entries related to myths and folktales worldwide.

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, 1960, 323 pages, print.

And so continues my ad hoc mission to re-read required books from my high school days. It's fairly trendy to slag the books you had to read in high school, but for some reason many/most seem to grant an exception to this book. I can see a number of reasons for this. The protagonist is easy to relate to, especially for female readers. The foreshadowing of changes in the race relations (both from the time the book was written, during the early civil rights period, but also early signs of changing attitudes among children in the 1930's) is something we can all nod our heads to in the age of Obama. And of course some feisty courtroom drama and outright action scenes near the end don't hurt. I noticed the n-word gets tossed around quite a bit in the book, but it never seems to get the same scrutiny that Huck Finn gets when it comes to book challenges. Perhaps it owes something to context. All this said, I'm glad I gave this one a second read and I would encourage others to do the same, especially if they didn't see what the big deal was when they read it the first time.

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