There’s a conversation to be had here about “reading for pleasure” versus “reading to exercise the mind” or however you want to put it; it’s a long conversation that many people more accredited and more well-paid than I am have been having for much longer than I’ve been alive. I’ll say just this — while I do think that it’s important to read books (fiction and non-fiction) that push your boundaries and challenge you as a reader, I do not personally have enough free time to want to invest it in reading things that I am not enjoying.
literature
The Sun Also Rises
The Sun Also Rises is, in its own way, a story about not much at all, and those are honestly often my favorite stories. Our hero is a journalist ex-pat living in Paris. He and some friends go south to Pamplona to see the bullfights, of which he is a fan. There is a lot of drinking, quite a bit of arguing, some fishing, and a couple bullfights, and then he goes back to Paris. The entirety of the story is about the small-scale social interactions of himself and his group of friends on this trip, not all of whom get along well (or at all). That’s it. That’s all there is.
An American Tragedy
It’s a good book, if you like the inevitability of a soap opera. The story is interesting, and I always enjoy reading period prose. That said, I did spend quite a bit of it wanting to beat Clyde around the head, so if you need a protagonist you can root for, this is not the book for you.
The Trial
I hated it in the way that you hate something that you know is objectively very good, and which you also are just not enjoying on any level at all. I’ve run into this before, though thankfully not often — Requiem For A Dream, which is an incredible movie that I never ever want to see again; a lot of modern instrumental jazz; at least one of the previous “classics” I’ve read (Heart of Darkness). The Trial’s story is well-written, the plot expertly set, the prose beautifully translated (the translator’s note was the highlight of the book for me, and I am not joking even a little bit), and also the whole thing was a completely miserable slog from the very first page.
House of Mirth
Our protagonist is a beautiful but somewhat impoverished young woman, Lily Bart, who is struggling through dint of her own charm to marry well and live in security. Her mother was a beautiful flibbertigibbet and her father a ne’er do well, and now she lives on the begrudging charity of an aunt who she likes not at all, and her only escape is to parlay her looks and charm into catching a wealthy husband, the sooner the better. There are three main problems with this - first, she really doesn’t like most of the men in her set and thus is appalled at the idea of marrying them; second (and possibly relatedly), she is unwilling to commit to one option because she, with a gambler’s taste, worries that if she does, she’s cutting herself off from a potential better option; and finally, staying in the set of people she moves in requires money, more and more of it, and she is running out of it.
War and Peace
Why War and Peace? I honestly don’t know. It was the most impressive option, perhaps. It’s not a novel I’ve ever particularly aspired to reading, and as someone who was relatively out of the habit of reading , it was, on the surface, an absolutely terrible choice. Sure, let’s pick one of the longest books in the Western classic canon to get you back into reading, why not? Irritatingly, it worked like a charm.
Heart of Darkness
I mean, I didn't particularly expect a book dealing with colonialism and race in the Victorian era to be a fun read, per se, but I didn't expect it to be so utterly dreadful, either.
Jude the Obscure
Jude the Obscure is similar to several other books on the list in that it was originally published as a serial; was later revised several times in the process of putting it into book-form; is making un-subtle points about society at the time of writing; and is definitely, absolutely, in no way about the author himself, why would you ever say such a thing?
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I'm on a bit of a tear this year with the Classic Books Reading List of Doom, which feels really good. I was stuck on Karamazov for so long it seemed like I'd never get any further, but once I got past the eponymous Brothers, I hit a little stretch of reasonably short and readable … Continue reading The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Brothers Karamazov
One of my goals for that trashfire of a just-completed year, 2020, was to finally, finally, finish The Brothers Karamazov, which I had been reading to a greater and lesser extent since 2018. Dear reader, I finished. I had expected, having taken a little bit to get stuck into Anna Karenina, that TBK would take … Continue reading The Brothers Karamazov
Idlewilde 