EPTDISCLAIMER
Sometimes I'll be reading books by the same author, but not those on the list, simply because my city has a dearth of books in it. Despite it being a large city, it has probably one of the most underfunded public works systems in the country. This amounts to me not being able to get many of the books on the list.
Here are the first 7 books I've read in order, except for Proust who is at the bottom because he defeated me
- If This Is a Man - Primo Levi
- The Blue Lotus - Hergé
- The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar
- The Joke - Milan Kundera
- Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
- In Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Marcel Proust
Here are the first 7 books in order of enjoyment
- Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
- The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
- If This Is a Man - Primo Levi
- The Blue Lotus - Hergé
- Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar
- The Joke - Milan Kundera
- In Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Marcel Proust
I'm going to explain why I ranked these books the way I did. The first thing I'm going to do though, is say something that I think needs to be said. The first seven books I read were all fantastic, this group was not. I was disappointed by a couple of these books, which is something that felt even worse than reading a bad book. Some of these books had such promising starts and magnificent portions where I would get lost in the magnamity of the book's prose, but would come to around 3/4 of the way through to find the author has no idea how to close out the book without pissing off the reader entirely; I don't mean injustice to the protagonist or characters that the reader loves, that's fairly standard fair, I mean writing something entirely irrelelvant to close out what was a great book until the concluding 100 pages.
Two books stood out to me in a negative way. The first was The Joke. The book was just like the main protagonist, Ludvig; He was so promising, but he fell apart. The book had an enthralling beginning. It was nothing short of breathtaking. I was sucked into the pages, I couldn't stop reading, Ludvig's joke letter to his then-girlfriend, Marketa, turned into a kangaroo-court trial against him in the Communist Party of Prague. His fall to the mines after his dubbing as a pessimistic Troskyite - the equivalent of calling somebody a Nazi/Socialist in American politics now - and his elated love with Lucie, all of that was magnificent; I thought this book would be on the order of previous books like L'etranger and One Hundred Years of Solitude, both of which I can't praise enough. It wasn't though. The book's final one hundred pages were appaling. I wasn't just angry that the book tore apart the best characters in the book, quickly tossed away important symbolistic characters like Lucie or the fact that Kundera never deigned to explain the conclusions of half the characters, I was fucking angry at the fact the book ends with Jaroslav dying; it added nothing, and was like some sick joke of an ending considering it made the end abrupt and useless for the reader. The idea of everything in life being a joke gone awry, the ideas of putting on masks, all of that was beautiful, the ending made me want to gouge my eyes out with a communist sickle. I could have stopped at page 246 and been perfectly happy.
The other book that stood out negatively was Memoirs of Hadrian. I'm not gonna rag on this book as much as the former, but the one thing that annoyed me the entire time I was reading, outside of Yourcenar's inability to choose between either an uptight, more regal and antiquated style or a modern fluid style; The beginning was the former, and as the book went on, she vaccilated until she abruptly chose the latter. Near the end, when Hadrian discusses the death of Lucius, this becomes more obvious if one re-reads the intro given by Hadrian explaining why he is writing the "letter" to Marcus Aurelius. That one thing was Yourcenar's lack of discretion. The book was great, I'll freely admit that, I really enjoyed parts of it, and never hated anything but the egregiously boring and uptight intro. Then, around the time Hadrian was discussing the destruction of the Second Temple of the Jews, I realized why the book was so great; Yourcenar was able to put herself into Hadrian's shoes, she wrote as if she were the Roman emperor, as if she had done significant research into Hadrian and channeled his persona into the book. That was until Lucius came up, and she broke down into channeling her own political point of view into the book. Rome did not have a real middle-class, that doesn't begin to be created until the creation of guilds, what Rome had was a proto-middle class, one that encompassed few people; this was partly due to slave labor which made people either extraordinarily rich or dirt poor. Yourcenar begins to describe having a strong middle class, as if she were Hadrian; she, in the style of Plato, uses a great man before, and places her own words in his mouth. I couldn't respect that, she turned a great novel into a political agenda just ninety pages before the book ends. I just couldn't take that, but the book's ending was not bad, and the book itself was a great read. It was not on the same level of disappointment as The Joke.
There were two books that I enjoyed almost equally, and those were The Great Gatsby and If This Is a Man. The two were small reads but, their length did not dictate their power. The books were a bit slow to start, but they picked up almost immediately. The former was just amazing. I loved the book almost all the way through. It was magical, and the fact that Fitzgerald actually does more to explain the nuances of Gatsby at the end with Nick's conversation with the Jewish Mafioso made me appreciate him thinking of the reader; most writers would be content to leave his beginnings a mystery outside of what Gatsby said, a story the reader can tell is going to be embellished, but Fitzgerald presents the reader a retrospective, one I appreciated. The latter was the most powerful holocaust description I've ever read. Unlike authors like Weisel, who attempt to overwhelm the reader with descriptions of the camp in a physical way, and who tell their story in that physical description - I'm not going bash Night or Weisel or any holocaust authors, I'm just going to say that most elderly Jews have significantly worse stories than those written, the ones I've heard from my grandparents experiences make Night look like a cakewalk, but those stories are for another time - Levi gives a psychological description. Levi describes the breaking of men in such a foundational way, that they don't become men at all. He describes the types of men who survive the camp, and those that just die there. It wasn't stunning, it wasn't horrifying, it just was, and that was exactly what he intended of it.
The final book I want to discuss is Kafka on the Shore. The book has been one of my favorites so far, I'd put it as tied for #2 with L'etranger. While the book contains some of the magical surrealism that I love, not Marquez-esque in style though, it also has such a complex and interelated plot that not only can I read the book for its prose, I can read it and learn how to structure a book in a creative and effective way. The book doesn't just tell a story, it makes the reader feel like he is a detective in the story. While I'm not a big fan of the lasciviousness of the book, the amount of times I read the word, "cock," and the descriptions of Hoshino in the bath, - we get it Murakami, we get it a girl can use her mouth in various ways, I don't really want to know that the philosophy undergrad in all her voluptuousness licked a small bit of semen off the tip, it doesn't add anything to the story but the fact that now I'm really curious about prostituting girls in my selected major - I can get past it easily. I'm not big for Oedipal story lines, I did enjoy the trilogy of plays though by Sophocles, but this book makes it work. The descriptions of sex and sexiness where needed, the awkward homo-erotic tendencies between Oshima and Kafka, and the parallel with Nakata who is a consumate virgin makes the book have this hot and cold feel. The descriptions of sadism, the allusions to Japanese literature, and especially the unique feel of each character makes reading the book more than easy, it makes it fun, a descriptor I don't usually attribute to books.
This time I wouldn't recommend all the books, but I would recommend 1-4. I didn't know what to think of The Blue Lotus which is a Tin Tin comic, at least at first, but then, about halfway through, I realized I was reading fast and was enjoying it quite a bit. Even cooler was the description at the back of all the little nuances Hergè put into the book that I didn't catch. It was really cool. The last 3 book on the list weren't awful, but they left something to be desired. The last book is one I'm going to come back to later, I will conquer it, and when I do, I'll give a better description of my feelings for it.
I don't know what the next seven books are going to be, but so far here is what I'm looking at reading.
- Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
- Taipei - Tao Lin
- I Am a Cat - Natsume Soseki (Kafka on the Shore made me want to read this)
- Tristes Tropiques - Claude Levi-Strauss
- Alcools - Guillame Appolinaire
- The Bald Soprano - Eugene Lonseco
- Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
*This list is temporary, and not at all stagnant, it is subject to change.
Thanks for reading guys. Once again, here is the book list if you want to read some of them. I'm adding and taking away capriciously, but I'm enjoying my ride so far
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