very simple

I haven’t posted that much this year on the books that I’ve read, and that’s in large part because I’ve started about 20 or so books and not finished any of them, other than the His Dark Materials trilogy and Harry Potter (although, to be fair, I did manage to re-read the first six HP books in anticipation of number 7).  My latest attempt?  Love in the Time of Cholera.  I thought I’d finally dig into it before the movie, but then I found out the movie was terrible, so I lost interest in hurrying up and finishing the novel in time.  So that’s sitting on my desk now, only 1/3rd read.  Of course, none of this stops me from actually buying new books, and I just picked up Persepolis (which is now available as a one-volume book in time for the film’s release).  Since this film is supposed to be awesome, maybe it’ll actually incentivize me to read the whole thing.

Plus, it’s a comic!  (or graphic novel, or whatever you want to call it).  So…vastly fewer words per page for me to actually have to get through…

With the TV writers strike, I was actually thinking that it might be a boon for things like theater, since folks will be more actively looking for things entertainment-related to do.  Unless, of course, all of the Broadway stagehands also go on strike. 

Maybe this would be a good time to recommit myself to reading the giant pile of books that only ever seems to get bigger. 

Saw this meme over at big brass blog, and couldn’t help myself.  Take the list below, bold the books that you’ve completely read, and italicize the books that you’ve partially read.  I’m going to add an extra option and asterisk the books that I own but haven’t cracked yet.  If you’re wondering about the eclectic nature of the list, it’s apparently been put together from a list at librarything.com of the most common books that people own but haven’t read.  Since it’s also hard to distinguish on my site between "plain" and "bold", I’ve made those books a little bigger as well.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillon
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote (I read this in spanish)
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner*
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Miserables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things*
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I was looking over the serious lack of these books that I had actually read, and realized that a large part of it was that I had a bunch of English teachers in high school who refused to teach the "classics" (like Moby Dick) – I also ended up in the more "language and writing" oriented English classes, which is why I ended up taking the AP in English Language rather than the AP in English Literature when I was in high school. 

That being said, I’ve now got a new list of books that I’m going to have to get around to reading.  As soon as I finish the pile of about 50-60 books sitting on my shelf in the "to read" pile. 

After finishing the final Harry Potter book (and before I decide to read it again), I thought I’d take a crack at another well-recommended series of "children’s" books.  Both younger and yet more mature than the Potter books, these books tell the story of Lyra, Will and many others who are trying to piece the world back together again (and to wrench it from the control of the church), while others are simultaneously tearing it apart "for its own good".  I know from interviews with Nicole Kidman that they’ve apparently toned down the anti-church sentiment for the films, and while I can see that being done fairly easily for the adaptation of the first book, given it’s plot, I’m having a hard time figuring out how they would go about it for the second two.  Of course, it could just be a matter of semantics – no longer referring to it as the "church" and instead just making it an institution of some sort.  But the second and third books play very heavily into the idea of what sin and atonement mean. 

Anyway, this was an excellent series, it kept me on the edge of my seat, and now I have six weeks of back issues of The New Yorker because I kept bringing these with me on the bus to work instead of my usual magazines.

By the way. Harry Potter arrived at 2:30 yesterday afternoon. I finished reading it at 12:30 last night. As I’ve said elsewhere, given that Rowling couldn’t include 17 choose-your-own-adventure endings to satisfy everyone, I think she did a pretty good job. I certainly cried a few times, and felt my heart racing at others. Once a little more time has passed (and I, perhaps, read it again to get the full flavor of all of the scenes), I’ll let y’all know which of my previously unspoiled predictions were correct (if any!).

I finished re-reading the first six books on Saturday (and saw “OOTP” on Saturday morning), and now I’m waiting obsessively for book 7 to show up at my apartment on Saturday. I pre-ordered it back in May, and am now just dying to find out how it all ends. But I’ve also been studiously avoiding all spoilers, simply because (a) at least half of them are going to be bunk/misinformation and (b) I genuinely want to be surprised. I’ll probably have to impose a media blackout on myself until I finish reading it.But, that’s not going to stop me from throwing out some of my own speculation pre-release. Again, I’m completely non-spoiled, so these are purely guesses (spoilers for the first six books though)…

Dumbledore, living or dead? I think he did die, but that he’ll resurrect somehow. The phoenix imagery is so strongly connected to his character all the way back to the first book, that I think it’s got to have some point other than coincidence. I think he died and will resurrect, rather than some sort of faking death thing, because of (a) his portrait in the headmasters’ office and (b) the release of his spell on Harry at that moment. Oh, and Rowling has said definitively that he died. Still doesn’t mean he can’t come back. This leads to…

Snape, good or evil? If Dumbledore can come back from the dead, this lends more weight to the theory that he and Snape planned that final confrontation as a way to keep Malfoy from truly being evil. Remember that it turned out that Malfoy didn’t want to kill Dumbledore, and that he was afraid his family would be killed if he didn’t (not exactly the motivation of a truly evil person). So Malfoy’s just your garden-variety prat raised by evil parents, but if he had killed Dumbledore, it would have pushed him over a line. Snape not being evil is also argued by the fact that he didn’t kill Harry when he had the chance. Of course, about 10% of me thinks all of this is actually too obvious and Snape is actually the deathiest of all death eaters.

Who is R.A.B.? When Dumbledore and Harry find the replacement locket instead of the true horcrux, there’s a note swearing revenge by R.A.B. Hermione tracks down some names, but not what I think is the most obvious possibility – Regulus Black, Sirius’s brother (some folks on Wikipedia apparently agree with this possibility). Now, Regulus was a Death Eater who supposedly had a change of heart and was killed, but, things are often not what they seem in the HP lexicon, so I think it’s at least as good a theory as anything else.

Speaking of Horcruxes, what is the sixth (or seventh) Horcrux? Dumbledore was largely guessing as to the final few Horcruxes, and as to whether there were six or seven remaining. Remembering that a Horcrux could be a living thing, I think that Harry is actually the final Horcrux. That the reason Voldemort “died” the first time around was that he had split his soul into so many pieces that when he went to kill Harry, he (perhaps accidentally) split his soul too many times.

This of course leads to the final and most important question, will Harry die? Part of me hopes he doesn’t, but I think the best way to create a situation where Harry has to die in order to actually fulfill his destiny to kill Voldemort is precisely that he’s a Horcrux. So long as he lives, a piece of Voldemort lives, and as such, he has to sacrifice himself in order to actually win. Actually, if Rowling is going to kill of Harry, this is probably one of the only ways to do it while still having “good” ultimately triumph.

Anyhoo. I’m looking forward to being proven utterly, irredeemably wrong on Saturday!

In addition to my apparent and completely unintentional blogging lull, I’ve also fallen into a reading lull. Oh, I’ve started at least 8 books since the beginning of the year, but I’ve trailed off reading each and every one of them about a third of the way in. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been busy at work, or suffering from sensory overload at being back in NY (with easy access to things like english language magazines again…), but nothing’s been holding my interest for very long.

So I decided, in anticipation of the last Harry Potter book coming out in a little over a month, that I would try to reread the entire series to date. I started on book one the other day, and I’m a good chunk of the way through. I have to say, although the story has gotten seriously more complex since the first novel, it still holds together really well. And there’s some really interesting foreshadowing to later books that, if you’ve never gone back and re-read the first one, you would totally miss the first time around. So that’s fun. hopefully I’ll finish the first two by next week (they were always the easiest to get through, if only because they’re the shortest), and then I’m on vacation for two weeks. And I’m not going anywhere, so I’ll have plenty of time to read…

From keeping up with my RSS reading, I saw that Doppleganger over at 50 Books had posted another of her famous lists, this time in connection with Freedom to Read week in Canada. It’s similar to Banned Books Week in the US, except that it’s occurring now, instead of the last week of September. Since I didn’t feel like waiting until September to see how many books I had read, I thought I’d add them up now. The list is derived from a variety of banned book sites, including those cited at 50 Books, the ALA and Wikipedia. My list is only at 70, but I’m sure that I’ve read other banned books that just weren’t listed.

Andrews, V.C.: Flowers in the Attic
Angelou, Maya: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid’s Tale
Blume, Judy: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Blume, Judy: Blubber
Blume, Judy: Superfudge
Blume, Judy: Tiger Eyes
Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451
Capote, Truman: In Cold Blood
Carroll, Lewis: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Carroll, Lewis: Through the Looking Glass
Dahl, Roald: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Dahl, Roald: James and the Giant Peach
The Daily Show with John Stewart: America (The Book)
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby
Frank, Anne: The Diary of a Young Girl
Haddon, Mark: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Handford, Martin: Where’s Waldo?
Golding, William: Lord of the Flies
Grimm Brothers, Little Red Riding Hood
Hinton, S.E.: The Outsiders
Huxley, Aldous: Brave New World
King, Stephen: Carrie
King, Stephen: Christine
King, Stephen: Cujo
King, Stephen: The Dead Zone
King, Stephen: Different Seasons
King, Stephen: Firestarter
King, Stephen: It
King, Stephen: Pet Sematary
King, Stephen: The Shining
King, Stephen: The Talisman
Lawrence, D.H.: Lady Chatterly’s Lover
Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird
L’Engle, Madeleine: A Wrinkle in Time
Lewis, C.S.: Chronicles of Narnia (series)
London, Jack: The Call of the Wild
Miller, Arthur: The Crucible
Miller, Arthur: Death of a Salesman
Mitchell, Margaret: Gone With the Wind
Moore, Michael: Stupid White Men
Morrison, Toni: The Bluest Eye
Orwell, George: Animal Farm
Orwell, George: 1984
Proulx, Annie: Brokeback Mountain
Rowling, J.K.: Harry Potter (the series)
Salinger, J.D.: The Catcher in the Rye
Sebold, Alice: The Lovely Bones
Shakespeare, William: Hamlet
Shakespeare, William: Romeo and Juliet
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein
Silverstein, Shel: A Light in the Attic
Silverstein, Shel: Where the Sidewalk Ends
Steinbeck, John: Of Mice and Men
Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Various: The Bible
Vonnegut, Kurt: Slaughterhouse Five
Walker, Alice: The Color Purple

What really amazes me is that I’m fairly certain that at least 80% of these books were read for school. I’m also kind of amazed that the bulk of the list consists of books that I read when I was younger – I suppose as I’ve gotten older, the books I’m interested in aren’t targeted to kids in the first place, making them less likely to be the target of wrath by bizarre closed-minded parents. And I don’t even mean that as a dig against right-wingers. Huck Finn gets banned regularly for the use of the N-word, even though it’s clearly literary irony, since Jim is by far the best individual in the book (and it’s Huck’s recognition of that throughout their journey). Gone with the Wind was banned for depicting slavery in a positive light. Now, I’m obviously sympathetic to the sentiments of the people who don’t like the book for that reason, but banning books is never the answer. The answer, first and foremost, is to read the book and try to understand it. Not to agree with it, but to understand it.

In college, I took a core class in american studies. Since it was taught by a literature professor, we basically read a variety of books (most of which are on this list) throughout the semester. I was apalled at reading the Great Gatsby’s intensely anti-semitic characterizations of jews in the book, but that didn’t mean that the book should be burned. It meant that we had some really deep discussions about Fitzgerald’s anti-semitism and the society at the time the book was written.

Then, of course, there were the bannings that can only be described as ironic. Anne Frank? sure, let’s supress a book by a girl that was murdered by one of the most oppressive governments in history. 1984 and Brave New World? Let’s control and limit peoples’ access to books about future dystopias where every thought and action is controlled! And of course, the granddaddy of all ironic book banning, Fahrenheit 451. I know it’s pretty much a cliche at this point, but banning a book about…banning books! That’s how we teach our children that we live in a free and open society!!

And then there’s just the silly stuff. Judy Blume is one of the most banned authors in history. I read her by the truckload as a kid, and somehow I didn’t end up entirely warped. Shel Silverstein gets banned because he apparently teaches kids to misbehave. in a book. I agree that books can be powerful and life altering, but come on!

So. When I get home next week, there’s clearly going to be another trip to the bookstore to pick up a few suggestions off of one of the lists. I’ve never read Lolita. or Heart of Darkness. Those may have to get added to the “to read” pile shortly.

Sometimes, when you’re reading a really good book, a little bell goes off in your head that says, hey, maybe you should have waited until you got home to finish this. But no. There you are, sitting on the bus on your way home from work, surrounded by a bunch of other commuters, and all you’re really thinking is…maybe if I turn and stare out the window, no one will notice the tears streaming down my face.

Warning – there’s no way to review this book without spoiling a few things. I’ll try to be good, but I can’t say that I’ll keep everything a secret. The day before I left New York two weeks ago, a friend and I made a quick pit stop at the Barnes & Noble. I certainly needed to restock a bit after traipsing through those first 13 books discussed below. So, we were browsing, and she said that I should really read this book. So I threw it on the pile (I ended up buying, like, seven books that day). In some ways I was disappointed, but only because I had become so invested in Kath and Tommy that I wanted them to run away together. I wanted them to be even less resigned to their fate. Sure, they had pushed the boundaries pretty far, but I wondered why they weren’t capable of taking that little last step of climbing into Kath’s car and just…driving away. It broke my heart a little bit. The book also does gloss over some of the (pretty major) moral implications of the underlying plotline, but for these characters, in this world, I suppose the situation is a given – not something hidden, or illegal, or necessarily needing to be exposed (although there are clearly at least some people, even within this world, who find the situation…uncomfortable). I suppose that now I have to go read Remains of the Day.

So I did manage to read another book which I completely forgot to list in the last entry. I actually finished this one on the plane on the way home.

I have to say that I didn’t nearly enjoy this book as I have the other Bryson books that I’ve read to date. Maybe because it was one of his earlier efforts (written all the way back in 1989), and I get that part of Bryson’s schtick is that he’s a curmudgeon – he makes fun of himself as much as he makes fun of others, but 90 percent of the observations in this book consisted of how fat, ugly and dumb everyone (and, in particular, the women) he encounters are. Broad generalizations about just how disgusting a bunch of people who are probably spending a lot more time working a lot harder than some guy who makes a living driving around making broad generalizations about the american population just doesn’t pique my interest. Very few attempts to actually ingratiate himself occur – if someone looks at him funny, he just assumes they’re a backwards rube and doesn’t even try to communicate. Oh, and did you know that people down south had unintelligible accents? Isn’t that just the height of social commentary and wit?

Oy. I’m glad I read some of Bryson’s later work first, if only because if this had been the first book that I had read, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have bothered to even pick up those far superior samples.