Books that Love Books

Despite the vibes you may pick up on from this blog, I sometimes read books that aren't classics for fun. Recently I devoured two Cornelia Funke books and both were quite delicious! I also reread some Jasper Fforde books. Both have led me to conclude that I just love books that love books. What makes them so special? It's the exuberance, the excitement, the pure joy that comes from books and their willingness to share it with everyone else. (I got that feeling from giving a presentation to my class on 17th century women writers..shh. Don't tell anyone how nerdy I am.) Plus, referencing and alluding to books you know is like an inside joke between you and the author. It adds flavor to the story and T.S. Eliot would agree that it adds depth.

In Cornelia Funke's Inkheart, a story all about the power to read people out of books, books take precedence. The father is a book binder, the daughter loves books, and the crazy aunt has a library for a house. They make so many references to classic children's/YA lit that part of my childhood came rushing back. There's no way you can mention the fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson, The Lord of the Rings, and Peter Pan without recalling something fond.

Jasper Fforde is a crazy man with a big library and a pen. His Thursday Next series is a playground for English Majors and book lovers. I don't know how much grammatical theory exists, but they would like this too. The series partially takes place in the "Book World" with "Jurisfiction" as the police force. Not only are major literary characters main characters in the books, but fleeting allusions appear just for the fun of it and the workings of the Book World are full of grammasites, feedback loops, and other quirky inventions. You won't understand all of the allusions, but they don't dampen your love of the books.

Really, allusions to other works are very old hat. I mean, who hasn't got hung up on some Greek work or another old work that doesn't mention the pop culture of the time. The 16th and 17th century are awful at it, really. I recently read Don Quixote, and he spends a chapter rating the Romance novels of the day (which back then were knightly adventures, not Nora Roberts). Satirists and "quick wits" in the 17th century ripped apart others in their works...not unlike rap artists today. Now that I think about it, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, Mark Twain and his generation were pretty brutal too. He was especially hard on James Fenimore Cooper. Not to bore anyone, but I've wrote a paper on The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish (17th century again) and half of her novel is a commentary on modern scientific theory...in which she makes fun of Issac Newton and Robert Hooke. Way to go Margo!

I guess this kind of digressed, but books that reference other books are usually amazing, excepting Twilight, but I suppose there must be an exception to every rule. While we're on digression, what is it called when an author mentions himself and/or the book you are reading? For example, Don Quixote does it, and Chaucer is shameless in promoting himself. Is it some kind of breaking the fourth wall? Does it have a name? Does anyone have more examples? It would be nice to know.

Catch 22

War Novel week, apparently. I read Catch-22 this summer, so it's a little fuzzy in my mind. But all I can say, is that it was absurd as all get out and I absolutely loved it. It was like reading M*A*S*H and Hogan's Heroes and a russian novel all at once. One of my bosses walked by and said that it really made war make sense, didn't it? And the odd thing is, that it does. The absurdity and the pointlessness is clear, all at once. It is a story that shows not tells. It is All Quiet on the Western Front with a wallop of humor. All Quiet has just a dry straight man humor while Catch-22 is like Comedy Central. To counter the humor, the actual war scenes are steeped with a crippling fear. The style is jocular and in soldier's language. The kind of language that accompanies whores in Rome and drunk young men escaping camp. It's coarse and apropos. All of the men are obsessed with avoiding active duty and the upper ranks are obsessed with keeping them there. In the end, among the wreckage of Rome, the main character becomes obsessed with finding Nateley's Whore's Kid sister. Not really a character, but a drive towards something...hope. Something real. A purpose. Hope dies when the most absurd and fun character, the really driving factor in the main character's life deserts and disappears, presumed dead. Hope is resurrected at the end when the protagonist finds out that the character never died, he escaped with careful planning. Seeing the true soul of the protagonist is a must in a war novel. Being able to glimpse the soul of another character changes almost everything.

I'm sorry I cannot say more. But you should read it.

Beowulf

Things Fall Apart

A Death in the Family

Pride and Prejudice

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Waiting for Godot

The Adventures of Augie March

Jane Eyre

Wuthering Heights

The Stranger

Death Comes for the Archbishop

The Canterbury Tales

The Cherry Orchard

The Awakening

Heart of Darkness

The Last of the Mohicans

The Red Badge of Courage

Inferno

Don Quixote

Robinson Crusoe

A Tale of Two Cities

Crime and Punishment

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

An American Tragedy

The Three Musketeers

The Mill on the Floss

Invisible Man

Selected Essays

As I Lay Dying

The Sound and the Fury

Tom Jones

The Great Gatsby

Madame Bovary

The Good Soldier

Faust

Lord of the Flies

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

The Scarlet Letter

Catch 22

A Farewell to Arms

The Iliad

The Odyssey

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Brave New World

A Doll's House

The Portrait of a Lady

The Turn of the Screw

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The Metamorphosis

The Woman Warrior

To Kill a Mockingbird

Babbitt

The Call of the Wild

The Magic Mountain

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Bartleby the Scrivener

Moby Dick

The Crucible

Beloved

A Good Man is Hard to Find

Long Day's Journey into Night

Animal Farm

Doctor Zhivago

The Bell Jar

Selected Tales

Swann's Way

The Crying of Lot 49

All Quiet on the Western Front

Call It Sleep

The Catcher in the Rye

Hamlet

Macbeth

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Romeo and Juliet

Pygmalion

Frankenstein

Ceremony

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Antigone

Oedipus Rex

The Grapes of Wrath

Treasure Island

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Gulliver's Travels

Vanity Fair

Walden

War and Peace

Fathers and Sons

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Candide

Slaughterhouse-Five

The Color Purple

The House of Mirth

Collected Stories(Welty)

Leaves of Grass

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Glass Menagerie

To the Lighthouse

Native Son

All Quiet on the Western Front

War novel for the win. I thought I'd hate war novels. And war is bad. But these writers see into the truth. Erich Maria Remarque (who is not in fact a girl - Germans are odd) has a wonderful style that speaks plainly, though not unbeautifully, from the point of view of a German soldier during WWI. It is the style that drew me into Les Miserables as well. Perhaps it is the slight stilt translation gives any novel, but the plainness is apropos and starkly highlights the bleak, trench-sunken front. One moment, a simple smoke will captivate the scene and suddenly, the most beautiful prose is dedicated to the dying of horses. The transition isn't even noted, it seems so natural to speak so passionately of war.

Death is the first sign of war. Remarque tosses it off casually, the way war does. In the first several pages, a childhood friend dies. In a hollywood movie, this would have been the climax. The tears would have followed. But in the novel, after consolation in the form of joking reassurances, the childhood friend died and a fellow soldier took his boots. It's life. Remarque showed the brutality and coldness of war in the first few pages to break the reader to the reality. And many people died. That doesn't exactly follow that insensitivity ruled all. Though one by one the narrator's friends died, the last one to go was saved by the narrator and crushed in his arms after carrying him on a broken leg before someone pointed out that he was already dead. Loyalty existed, hidden under death. Remarque shows theme through actions, pointedly placed throughout the story.

Remarque is also a huge fan of repetition. How many times was an account of war, death, camaraderie, smoking, girls, and alcohol followed up by a reminder that every soldier was only 19 or 20 years old? The narrator himself was only 19, recruited by the schoolmaster in his village. 19. 19. So young. I suppose I'm only 19.

Though much is a patchwork of experiences, purposefully blurred to give the impression of sameness, oneness, and meaningless repetition, two scenes stand out.

The first is an example of the dryness in the face of war, especially among the comrades. All the men are standing around talking and smoking, and discussing war. Why? Why are they forced to fight and die? One man plays dumb while one tries to overexplain and jokingly shows the absurdity of war.

The second is a scene with the narrator and a French soldier trapped in a pit together. Out of self defense, the narrator stabs him and has to spend a night and a day with a dying soldier that he killed. He tries everything to fix the man. He swears to find the man's family and apologize, though he knows he'll never follow through. He finds that when it's hand to hand combat, killing is different. And war is cowardly in that way.

Please read it.

I almost cried at the end.

Quote

"To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must write dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfume and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories--science fiction or otherwise. Which means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
— Ray Bradbury

Something Interesting

I promise whoever reads this that I have read a book this summer. I just haven't logged any of them into my blog. Bad me. Baaad. I've actually been reading and acquiring books like nobody's business. I'm pretty sure book shopping (especially antique book shopping) should be a Class I addiction. I've read books on and off the book list. And one play. More are coming. I even had a book dropped on my lap (well, desk) that I didn't know existed. These are the best kind. It's an account of a psychologist imprisoned at Auschwitz and Dachau during the Holocaust. If it weren't written in such matter-of-fact language and I didn't read this rather short novel in small spurts, I would probably cry. Which is bad in a work setting. The book is focused on the effect of true suffering on the human behavior. It's magnificent. Not just the account, the conclusions pulled from it. It's called Man's Search for Meaning. You can look it up, buy it, or borrow it from me, since I'm keeping the copy that was given to me.

But. The reason that I am blogging today was because I stumbled upon an article that confused me at first. It's about Brave New World and the approach threw me. It is an in-depth article that proves that the novel is not purposed as a defense to bioengineering. In other words, it's a dystopia not a utopia and Huxley was, in fact, proving that the aspects of the society he created are bad. This confused me because I thought "Duh. Who doesn't know that?" In fact, some don't. They fail to see the irony. Sigh. I personally don't want a post-atheistic, pleasure seeking society that makes the pleasures in life devoid of meaning and intellect useless and pain distasteful and love gone. Anyhow, draw your own conclusions:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2uQ2Ne/www.hedweb.com/huxley/bnw.htm

*note: I didn't actually read the article in its entirety. If my conclusions about the article are incorrect, feel free to inform me. Politely.

My Book List

My summer list is narrowing! Ok, I haven't read much yet, don't judge. When I'm not unpacking and catching up on Doctor Who, I'm reading Easy to Kill by (guess who) Agatha Christie. Starting a familiar book is like slipping into a warm bath. I knew I was home as soon as started reading it. I just reorganized my bookshelf and I'm here to tell you that it's more good looking than ever. And one my dear friends at college gave me an American must-read book list to make me get over my aversion to American Literature. The irony is getting too much for me. Here is her list! :

1. To Kill a Mockingbird
2. Catcher in the Rye
3. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
4. Fahrenheit 451
5. Invisible Man
6. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
7. The House on Mango Street
8. The Sound and the Fury
9. Catch-22
10. Call of the Wild (okay, this is not really in my top 10, but I'm shocked at how many people haven't read it!)

I of course have read Mockingbird, 451, Huck Finn, Mango Street and Call of the Wild, but the rest are yet to be read. And at least 3 or 4 of them are on my big list. Score! So here is my list forming for the summer.

1. Oedipus Rex

2. Cuckoo's Nest

3. Invisible Man

4. Sound and the Fury

5. Catcher in the Rye

6. Catch 22

7. Shakespeare

Not that anyone reading this will really care, but it makes me feel better to make a list now and then. And I've decided to add to my repertoire of memorized Shakespearean monologues/soliloquies. Suggestions welcome. :)