On 10 Years of Reading

llibreria,
originally uploaded by Mor (bcnbits).

My literature project has been in full swing for ten years now. It
started when I took a year out between school and university, and I
was brow-beaten by a co-worker who looked down at me for watching so
much television. That year was one of the best years of my life for
reading - I covered a great many of the classics, like Moby
Dick, and a lot of H.G. Wells. It marked the beginning, and over on librarything I'm keeping track of everything I've read since that year. What came before, I've hurriedly buried in the depths of my memory. Sure, I read before I was eighteen, but what did I read? Star Trek and Star Wars novels mostly. They weren't a waste of time - Peter David (Star Trek) and Timothy Zahn (Star Wars) are two excellent writers, and I thank them for helping me stick with reading in the first place. But as much as I read, my father would never say that I was 'well-read,' and with the added motivation of showing my co-worker I was no dullard, I set about my task.

Ten years later, I'm about to finish reading book number 300. This
happens to be "The House of Mirth" by Edith Wharton, which I am very much enjoying. But as much as I'm enjoying reading new books, I think it's high time I revisited some of those that charmed me, perplexed me, or informed me over the last ten years.

I spent a very enjoyable hour earlier this afternoon working through my librarything catalogue, adding the tag 'to_reread' to those books which fell into one of those categories, and came up with a list of 55 that I want to return to with the benefit of age. 55 is a lot of books, mind you, and I wouldn't be surprised if it takes me two or more years to work through all of them - keeping in mind, of course, that I will often be tempted by the new, by the unread, and will want to add to my tally and work towards my lifetime target (currently the rather random 2000).

Here they are, then: the books I'll be reading between now and when I turn 30, more or less, along with reasons for wanting to read them again.

Personal Favourites

One of the most wonderful friendships I currently enjoy began thanks to Somerset Maugham's "The Moon and Sixpence," and the conversations we had together after this introduction. Now I want to read again those books that had the greatest impression on me personally, and that I hold closest to my heart and my sensibilities. It's one thing to say, for instance, that "The Razor's Edge" is my favourite book - but it's quite a shameful thing to admit to having read it only once.

1. 1984 (George Orwell)


2. Animal Farm (George Orwell)


3. The Beach (Alex Garland)


4. The Tesseract (Alex Garland)


5. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)


6. Contact (Carl Sagan)


7. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)


8. For Whom The Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway)


9. Generation X (Douglas Coupland)


10. London Fields (Martin Amis)


11. The New York Trilogy (Paul Auster)


12. The Notebook (Agota Kristof)


13. The Razor's Edge (Somerset Maugham)


14. Samarkand (Amin Maalouf)


15. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)

Potential Favourites

I read these too quickly; I didn't pay enough attention; I've since changed and would now enjoy these books more, or less; simply put, I haven't decided. These books I want to read again so that I can really decide if I loved them or simply liked them.

1. Boredom(Alberto Moravia)


2. A Confederate General from Big Sur(Richard Brautigan)


3. Crime and Punishment(Fyodor Dostoyevsky)


4. Ethan Frome(Edith Wharton)


5. I Am Legend(Richard Matheson)


6. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea(Yukio Mishima)


7. Tallien(Frederic Tuten)

Thank you Stamford Library

Back in the day, my local library used to have a carousel devoted to European fiction, and it was one of the greatest collections of exotic literature I have ever known. To a young man making his first tentative steps into the world of serious reading, it was like a fire in the night, luring him closer and closer. I have read a lot since, and I'd love to return to where it all started. Sadly, the days of the carousel have long since come to an end, and a lot of the books have been sold off. But I will find them again, and hopefully experience for a second time the magic of the unfamiliar and esoteric.

1. The Left-Handed Woman(Peter Handke)


2. In The Dutch Mountains(Cees Nooteboom)


3. Closely Observed Trains(Bohumil Hrabal)


4. The Hourglass(Danilo Kis)


5. The Outsider(Albert Camus)


6. Rebellion(Joseph Roth)


7. The Castle(Franz Kafka)


8. The Trial(Franz Kafka)

Polish Science Fiction

I discovered Stanislaw Lem on that carousel too, but I'm listing his books separately here. I fell deeply in love with his own special brand of humanised science fiction, but in the intervening years I have moved to distance myself from the genre. I can't say precisely why that is - it isn't fair to the s-f classics that are as good as mainstream literature to call them 'genre fiction.' I want to achieve two things by this particular revisit: firstly, I want to see if my love for Lem's writing still resides in my heart; second, I hope to use this opportunity to rebuild my enthusiasm for science fiction generally.

1. Fiasco


2. Memoirs of a Space Traveller


3. Microworlds


4. More Tales of Pirx the Pilot


5. Solaris

Back to the Beginning

I have a special place in my heart for those books I first turned to as a young adult, and then as my renaissance began, and these I would like to see once more, like old friends only half-remembered.

1. Around the World in 80 Days(Jules Verne)


2. Candide(Voltaire)


3. The Great Gatsby(F. Scott Fitzgerald)


4. Tender is the Night(F. Scott Fitzgerald)


5. Kim(Rudyard Kipling)


6. The Never-Ending Story(Michael Ende)


7. The Prince(Machiavelli)


8. A Tale of Two Cities(Charles Dickens)

Books that Educated more Literally

I've read a number of books now that really taught me something concrete, about the world, about science, or about myself. These books I need to read again, not simply because they deserve a second reading, but because I want to be able to quote from them more confidently. Don't worry though, I always give credit where credit is due, and you won't find me passing off Sven Lindqvist's ideas as my own.

1. The Selfish Gene(Richard Dawkins)


2. Lost Japan(Alex Kerr)


3. The Long Emergency(James Howard Kunstler)


4. A Little History of the World(Ernst Gombrich)


5. Exterminate All The Brutes(Sven Lindqvist)


6. A Brief History of Time(Stephen Hawking)

And Finally...

There are very few books in my collection that I read to the end and still disliked. If you look at my librarything catalogue closely, you'll see that most books have garnered three or more stars, and it is a rare thing for me to give a book a score of only one out of five - or less. But then the books that I've completed are the books that I've enjoyed enough to complete, unless I read that book as a favour to somebody: for instance, I've read more than enough Forsyth to know that I don't favour his style, but he was one of my father's favourite authors, so I thought it best to read more than just one of his novels. This last list contains those books that I have mixed, or incomplete, feelings about. Perhaps I thought they were wonderful, and now I'm not so sure; or I didn't understand them at all, and now want to go back see if there's something I missed during my initial read.

Fortunately, this is a short list, of mostly short books; if I decide having started any of them for the second time that I don't actually like them, it won't take me long to reach the last page.

1. The Bridges of Madison County(Robert James Waller)


2. The Catcher in the Rye(J.D. Salinger)


3. Heart of Darkness(Joseph Conrad)


4. Mao II(Don DeLillo)


5. Pedro Paramo(Juan Rulfo)


6. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(James Joyce)

On Reading 1001 Books

I myself am a long way from this target, though it is a good one. I've been keeping a count for a while now and I'm only a handful of books away from the 300 mark - and that's forgetting all the old Star Trek and Star Wars books that filled my youth.

No, this is a reference to 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, a crazy compendium of literature that one perhaps should think twice about trying to compete with. I doubt I'll ever read all that has been suggested - and looking at some of the titles I doubt I'd want to. But here are the ones I've read so far, so I can get an idea of how much work would be left ahead of me:

1. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro


2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon


3. The Body Artist, Don DeLillo


4. Life of Pi, Yann Martel


5. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje


6. American Psycho, Brett Easton Ellis


7. Mao II, Don DeLillo


8. Regeneration, Pat Barker


9. London Fields, Martin Amis


10. Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey


11. The Afternoon of a Writer, Peter Handke


12. The Pigeon, Patrick Suskind


13. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe


14. The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster


15. Contact, Carl Sagan


16. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood


17. White Noise, Don DeLillo


18. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks


19. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera


20. Money, A Suicide Note


21. The Cement Garden, Ian McEwan


22. The Shining, Stephen King


23. Dispatches, Michael Herr


24. The Left-Handed Woman, Peter Handke


25. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson


26. Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.


27. Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth


28. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke


29. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick


30. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys


31. The Graduate, Charles Webb


32. The Girls of Slender Means, Muriel Spark


33. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, Alexander Solzhenitsyn


34. The Collector, John Fowles


35. Solaris, Stanislaw Lem


36. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark


37. Catch-22, Joseph Heller


38. Memento Mori, Muriel Spark


39. Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote


40. The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham


41. On The Road, Jack Kerouac


42. The Quiet American, Graham Greene


43. Casino Royale, Ian Fleming


44. The Old Man And The Sea, Ernest Hemingway


45. Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham


46. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger


47. 1984, George Orwell


48. The Plague, Albert Camus


49. Animal Farm, George Orwell


50. The Razor's Edge, W. Somerset Maugham


51. The Outsider, Albert Camus


52. For Whom The Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway


53. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck


54. To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemingway


55. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald


56. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley


57. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway


58. Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett


59. Amerika, Franz Kafka


60. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway


61. The Castle, Franz Kafka


62. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald


63. The Trial, Franz Kafka


64. We, Yevgeny Zamyatin


65. Siddhartha, Herman Hesse


66. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce


67. Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham


68. The 39 Steps, John Buchan


69. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton


70. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad


71. The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells


72. The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells


73. Dracula, Bram Stoker


74. The Time Machine, H.G. Wells


75. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde


76. King Solomon's Mines, H. Rider Haggard


77. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy


78. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy


79. Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne


80. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy


81. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky


82. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens


83. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens


84. Moby Dick, Herman Melville


85. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte


86. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas


87. Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper


88. Candide, Voltaire


89. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift


90. Don Quixote, Cervantes

Which brings me to a grand total of 90 books so far; so roughly a third of the books I've read are actually on the list - a very neat coincidence. I'd concentrate on reading more to suit the list if my library wasn't more scattered - I've a lot to get through if I'm ever to read what I've bought.

On A Day Spent Reading

It's been a good day so far, and it hasn't finished yet. I spent a couple of hours polishing off Mark Brandon Read's "Chopper," his autobiography; rubbish book (though I've read worse) though the film with Eric Bana's worth a look.

Having finished that, I went into town to browse the various booksellers, and then came home via the pub and a glass of raspberry beer. Ah, Frambozen. It's expensive and arguably a little gay but for a mid-afternoon beer there's nothing finer. Whilst I was at the pub, I started reading my next book (I know, I know, I haven't finished Sophie's World yet), this one by Janet Malcolm, called Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession. It's not bad so far, and with my previous post On Relationships in mind, I'd like to quote from the first chapter:

The phenomenon of transference - how we all invent each other according to early blueprints - was Freud's most original and radical discovery. The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can be accepted with a good deal more equanimity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities - personal relations - is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems. Even (or especially) romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has at its core a profound impersonality. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: we cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain. A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form. "Only connect," E. M. Forster proposed. "Only we can't," the psychoanalyst knows. (Emphasis mine)

On Relationships

A very good friend of mine, Ola, recently sent a book to me: Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder. I'm working slowly through it; slowly, because it's really a brief history of philosophy more than a fictional story, and I've always had to read philosophy slowly to make sure I understood it. At the start of the story, a mysterious philosopher sends Sophie little envelopes with riddles written inside, like "Why is Lego the perfect toy?" and so forth. These questions prepare Sophie for what follows; in this example, the philosopher then introduces her (and us) to Democritus and the atomic theory.

Well, now I feel a lot like Sophie myself. At the end of a recent email, Ola wrote

"Do you believe in a once-in-a-lifetime love or do you rather think that a happy relationship is a matter of goodwill?"

Email has taken the place of the envelope, but the theory is the same, and I've been stuck on this question all day. I'm going to try and answer it now, but since I've been brought up to believe in the power and necessity of empirical evidence, I'm not simply going to give you my gut reaction.

On Love
I would love to believe in the power of love, and that for every single one of us, there is a matching partner in the world; all that we have to do is find this one special person, our soulmate, and then the rest of our lives will be spent in perpetual bliss. It is a reassuring story we tell ourselves, much like we tell children that there's an Easter Bunny and Father Christmas. As we grow older, we find that the chances of finding this special person have diminished greatly. But some people do genuinely seem very happy in their relationships. When both partners in a couple can honestly say that they love the other, then that is exactly what Ola's talking about. So how does it happen? Can it last, and can it overcome all difficulties?

One theory doing the rounds is the idea that love is an addiction. Two scientists at UCL scanned the brains of people in love, and found that the areas most active didn't correspond to the areas active during other emotions, such as anger and fear. In fact, the closest similarity is to a person doing drugs. In her book, Why We Love, Helen Fisher concludes that

"[R]omantic passion is... hardwired into our brains by millions of years of evolution. It is not an emotion; it is a drive as powerful as hunger."

Scientific research, then, would seem to suggest that this once-in-a-lifetime kind of love does exist, and exists for a reason. Fisher goes into more detail than I can here, obviously, and also talks about the different forms that 'love' can take. The original article linked to above is well worth reading; it is, I think, reprinted from The Economist magazine.

On the happy relationship
I'm sure that science can go a long way towards explaining why love is possible in the first place - how it happens, and why - but human beings are far too complex for a simple chemical analysis to determine what will happen for the rest of the relationship. For those of us who, in the first place, don't find that special someone, and perhaps decide to settle for a person we merely 'like', then how likely is the relationship to succeed?

My reading suggests that a good relationship, perhaps one based on goodwill as much as love, has as much of a chance to succeed as one based on romantic love, going on Dr Fisher's definition. My search for information led me to The Gottman Institute.

Dr John Gottman has been studying human relationships for longer than I have been alive, and he's now quite good at it. The website describes his means of operation:

"By examining partners’ heart rates, facial expressions, and how they talk about their relationship to each other and to other people, Dr. Gottman is able to predict with more than 90% accuracy which couples will make it, and which will not."

If a relationship can be studied, it makes sense to say that a relationship can be managed and made to work.

On the answer to Ola's question

I don't think I've answered Ola's question here at all. I've looked at some of the evidence that suggests that romantic love is primarily all about chemistry, and how all relationships need management to survive, whether they are based on love or not. But I think Ola is also asking another pair of questions that need to be answered before any of this other discussion can take place: is it possible to find and fall in love with someone who also falls in love with you? If not, is it possible to find someone you can imagine managing a relationship with, to the general benefit of both partners?

For the latter situation, I really can't say. I'm hoping that it is possible, because I don't want to spend the rest of my life alone. I am looking for someone to share my life with, but I have very few expectations about falling in love and having that love returned to me. I have fallen in love before (I think romantically, but I'll have to re-examine my feelings in light of today's reading), but only a handful of women have found me attractive, and part of falling in love is, chemically and from an evolutionary standpoint, concerned with attractiveness.

We'll have to see. I'm very glad that Ola has put this question to me. I've had to think very hard about my reaction, and I've had a reason to do some reading outside of my usual interests; plus, it's been a while since I wrote anything that was actually meant to make sense.

Further Reading
If you're interested, here's a review of Helen Fisher's book. For more about Dr Gottman in the context I originally discovered him, read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink

On Buying Cool Things

I'm trying to find a book that I saw on a website somewhere. I was sure it was on neatorama but I've trawled through and not found it. Basically it's a book about sex, but it's not pervy (much) and it seemed interesting enough for it to be blogged about. It covers every facet of sex and the sex industry, but it's written in almost an encyclopedia-comic format. I don't think it's on taschen. In the meantime, I'm going to take a look around thinkgeek for some shopping inspiration.

Don Quixote, Cervantes

Drunk man salutes his dog
Originally uploaded by soylentgreen23.

Finally, after two and a half months (more or less - I wasn't counting), I've come to the end of Don Quixote.

I'm really pleased I stuck it through. It wasn't a hard book by any means, but at 760 densely printed pages it was a major commitment, and I've not been willing or able to take on such a load many times in the past. Sure, I've read Moby Dick and Crime and Punishment but this is probably the longest book I've ever gotten through. Considering that the typeface was quite tiny, the dialogue compressed onto as few lines as possible, and the pages themselves physically large, 760 pages of this would seem like nearly twice the same in any other book.

The story itself is excellent. I got through the adventure of the windmills very early on - I think that because a lot of people are familiar with this tale, there aren't that many who have read the piece to its end. The windmill adventure only lasts a page or two, and is quite minor next to the whole. Still, it was good. I liked Sancho Panca a lot more than I thought I would, and Cervantes has a mind full of proverbs ready to use and abuse when it comes to his squire.

Also, I'd never known before that the book was really split in two - the second published years after the first; in the meantime, a false history of Don Quixote's adventures was published, and Cervantes takes a lot of time to rip this piece to shreds. It's one of the earliest inter-literal books I've found, wherein one author makes so direct a reference to another, and involves his characters in the discovery of this other book, rather than simply mentioning it in passing. The creation of Cid Hamet Benengeli also works a nice trick, leading the reader, as it were, to imagine Cervantes as no more than a middleman in relaying the history. One wonders if he was mindful of his own skin when he decided on this ploy, or if it was simply another example of his intertextualising.

EUR05: Country Four, Sweden

bridge to skeppsholmen, stockholm
Originally uploaded by craiggthomson.

The ferry trip was pretty fine, with not much to do but read. I managed to get through the whole of "The Three Musketeers" in three days between leaving Tallinn and leaving Helsinki. Now I'm reading "On The Road" which is a lot better than I thought it would be.

Stockholm is a beautiful city, make no mistake. I have spent the last four hours wandering its streets and every which way I turn I stumble across another something beautiful worth photographing. That being said, I still think deep down that Kiev has spoilt me quite majorly - everything elsewhere seems so tourist-laden and expensive and all I want to do is find someone selling cheap beer where I can sit and read for an hour and not feel like there are people queueing to take my seat.