Category: 1001 books

#76 – Enduring Love

I remember reading an interview with Ann Patchett this past year (and please don’t ask me to find the reference; I have no idea where I found it) where she said something about each of her novels being somewhat the same in terms of their plot and premise. In a sense, she said, she keeps writing the same books over and over again. When it comes to writers as skilled as Patchett, exploring the same themes, working through similar plots, doesn’t detract from the quality of her prose, and I feel like this is the same with Ian McEwan.

So many of his novels begin with an event that forever impacts the lives of his characters, and you can see that pattern in Saturday, On Chesil Beach, and Atonement. The set-up for Enduring Love would fit as well: Joe Rose steps out of his everyday life to jump into action (a balloon accident; a boy hovering towards death; a helpless tragedy) and this act of altruism ends up changing the course of his life forever. It was a happy moment, a reunion, Joe’s lover, Clarissa, had just returned from a trip to the US and the two were in the park for a picnic. They were about to pop the cork on the champagne when the pair noticed the trouble with the giant helium balloon. The novel starts: “The beginning is simple to mark.” And it’s true: a hulking, and at times literal, metaphor dropped into the beginning, middle and end of the novel in the form of this balloon, meant to symbolize the tenuous state of life’s expectations: they’re blown off course, trumped by tragedy and then chased by a slightly insane man.

As the balloon teeters away, Joe loses hold of it, and runs to help the one man left hanging on (who soon falls to his death), but before he gets there, he’s faced with the odd character Jed Parry. Joe’s life, up until this point, was happy with the usual adult disappointments (his career isn’t what he expected). But the moment Jed becomes fixated upon him, the constructs that kept Joe tethered to his reality, his relationship with Clarissa, his work, his own grasp on his particular existence, fall apart. The further obsessed Jed becomes with Joe, the more Joe copes in ways that feel unnatural to his personality.

One of the blurbs on the cover of my edition says, “Utterly thrilling… as riveting at the finish as it is at the start,” The Globe and Mail, and I’d have to agree. I read the novel in about three hours and simply couldn’t put it down. I loved Joe’s work as a science writer, found Clarissa’s work with Keats reminiscent of one of my favourite good/bad movies of all time, Possession, and didn’t once feel at all like the action was either forced and/or contrived. McEwan, one of the English language’s most skilled novelists, has a way with these dramatic situations, he can use an almost clinical eye to pull them apart from every direction, exploring the impact upon his characters like a coroner would do a cadaver. Enduring Love wholly deserves its place on the 1001 Books list. I’m not sure every single one of McEwan’s novels should be there (I do question Amsterdam but only because I think it’s an utterly forgettable book) but I’m glad this one is, if only because it gave me the chance to read it.

READING CHALLENGES: Another of my “lost” 1001 Books from the master list for 2009. We’re still 12 hours away from the new year and I’m already two books into my 66 book challenge. The odds are looking good for me to make quite a dent in it over the year! Fingers crossed, indeed.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I’m about to clean out the last upstairs closet (finished the one in the bedroom yesterday) where boxes and boxes of books are hidden. I want to go through these ones too for 1001 Books that I know I have an haven’t finished (Moby-Dick, I’m looking at you) so that I can put them all on the right shelf and update the online list. God, I am LOVING this week off.

#75 – In The Heart Of The Country

There are a few authors I turn to, in a sense, innately. Writers that I know so intently that I might mistake them for old family friends. People I’ve known all my life. Uncles that sit to my right at the holiday table and make intellectual conversation. J.M. Coetzee remains one such author, as does Peter Carey and Jack Kerouac (albeit the latter two are never related to me in my mind, for, ahem, complex and quite strange reasons of an overactive, um, “romantic,” imagination).

Annnywaaay, as I feel I’ll be alive for many, many years (wishful thinking and anti-disease positivity), I tend to stagger books by my favourite authors so I’ll don’t run out, so that I’ve always got something to read during weeks like this one, rare time that’s not jam-packed with everyday life, days I like to spend with people who put words together in the best possible ways.

I finished In the Heart of the Country a couple of days ago. It’s an older novel, first published in 1977, about a lonely spinster named Magda who lives in the heart of the South African veld on a farm with her aging father and a black sheep-herding servant named Hendrik. When Hendrik brings home a beautiful young woman to be his bride, the divisions of race and class rear up and bring to a head the psychological and even psychotic nature of poor Magda. The novel is written from her point of view. The short, diary-style entries waver back and forth between truth and fiction. Magda makes up as much of her life as exists in reality, driven to this madness by desire, by the lack of intensely human experience, and a strange, stilted relationship with a father from whom she desires inappropriate emotions.

When her father takes up with Hendrik’s wife, Magda’s life goes off the rails. A desperate and violent act pushes her further into insanity but it’s never clear what actually happened and what Magda makes up. The fanciful way of creating a life on paper that she could never lead in life. As with all of Coetzee’s novels, the writing is sparse, the violence unexpected and bloody, and the conflict coloured by the unique and systematic effects of colonialism. Of all the Coetzee books I’ve read in the last little while, I have to admit that this is the one that I enjoyed the most. In tone and texture, it’s a lot like Waiting for the Barbarians and a lot less like Elizabeth Costello, thankfully, as I still remember how frustrated I was when reading that book.

There were so many narrative aspects to the novel that intrigued me — how Coetzee has a talent for ensuring that the landscape matches and even mimics the vast, lonely nature of Magda’s own mind. But at the same time, nature mocks her — coupling all around makes the cold, dry experience of her her lack of sexuality utterly apparent. And when race and class fall apart, when the world turns itself on its head, she clings to her gender, to her reedy sexuality as a way of at least trying to stay a conscious member of the world, even if her society soon becomes a population of just one. For such a short book (my copy runs 149 pages), In the Heart of the Country demands attention and reflection. I’m glad I waited a couple of days to blog about it so I could set my thoughts somewhat straight. Magda’s the ultimate unreliable narrator and I have to say sometimes that I really enjoy novels with such protagonists.

READING CHALLENGES: This was one of the 1001 Books titles that was lost on my bookshelves and I didn’t even realize it was there. So it’s on my master list for 2009, and I guess this puts me a little ahead of my reading for next year. I can already cross off two of the titles from that massive list of 66 (review of Enduring Love coming up next!).

STRANGE ASIDES: After finishing up the abysmal The Almost Moon a few days ago about a slightly crazy woman who commits matricide, it’s funny that one of the next books I should pick up is about a seemingly nutty woman who commits unspeakable acts of violence against her father.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: More book lists and more closets to be cleaned out before I’ll really make this decision.

#71 – Middlemarch

What more can I possibly add to decades upon decades of criticism about George Eliot’s masterwork, Middlemarch, one of the best novels ever written? Nothing original, I’d have to say. All I think I can do is comment upon why I enjoyed the novel so very much. Set against the “provincial community” of Middlemarch, England, a group of intertwining stories create a pastoral-like landscape peopled by the (somewhat) upper classes. This isn’t the territory of The Duchess per se, but more an extension of Austen’s kind, good, solid people from good, solid backgrounds trying to better their lives.

Eliot’s broad strokes and epic storylines hold all the characters in check. There’s Dorothea, a beautiful girl with a mind of her own who marries poorly and is then trapped into a terrible codicil by her ridiculous husband, Casaubon. Dorothea’s somewhat silly sister Celia, their Uncle Brooke, a landowner, and his “pet project,” Will Ladislaw, a young man of great curls and not much else, who is a cousin of Dorothea’s husband. There’s the doctor, Lydgate, his wife Rosamund (silly, silly girl), her brother Fred and his beloved, Mary (will she ever accept his hand in marriage; will he ever stop being foolish?). And then all the parents and rectors and other doctors and clergymen and their mothers and aunts and so on and so on. Goodness, their stories intertwine almost as much as their bloodlines, indeed. And it’s amazing to me how the author kept it all straight. The ways in which the novel progresses, the scope of the story, and her consistent and unwavering narrative voice all combine for an utterly delightful (there’s really no other way of putting it) reading experience.

But what I enjoyed most about the book is Eliot’s heightened, almost philosophical prose. Her pages of snappish, witty dialogue, the lovely way she has of creating a character by broad, sweeping strokes and then allows the reader to get to know them even better as the 800+ pages trundle on like a good walk through the countryside. Happiness finds some people, but not all of the characters. Distressing, even traumatic events happen, but it all works out in a way as it ultimately should, with grand love stories and well-intentioned elders making way for the next generation to carry on. Leave many hours in front of you if you want to tackle this book — it’s perfect for long days with nothing to do except read so your imagination can picture the dresses, the landscape, Ladislaw’s curls, the horses, Raffles, and everything else in Eliot’s world. It’s a book for the dreamers among us, that’s for sure.

READING CHALLENGES: Another one for the 1001 Books challenge, of which I am going to come in woefully incomplete before year’s end…

NOTES ON MY EDITION: The physical edition I read was the Penguin classic, but I also read a great deal on my Sony Reader with files from Project Gutenberg.

#69 – A Christmas Carol

Let me first put it out there that I am not necessarily what you would call a fan of Dickens. In fact, all of the Victorians have been giving me trouble ever since second year university. And then I made the colossal mistake of trying them again in grad school. I still haven’t recovered. They are impossible to avoid, these Victorians. Their influence is everywhere. There are a pile of them on the 1001 Books list. They are classics. What can you do except keep trying? Right?

So, “A Christmas Carol.” I know it’s not technically a full book but it’s on the 1001 Books list and I’m trying to at least part-way finish that challenge before the end of the year. The story is so well known, so ingrained in our society, that it’s impossible not to have seen at least one version of it in your lifetime (at least that’s what I think). Of my favourites, I remember watching a very old movie (made in the 50s, I think?) when I was a teenager and adoring it. It’s hard to read the original when it’s been interpreted so many different ways over the years. No matter that you haven’t actually read the story before, you know it so well that when each of the Ghosts show up, I wasn’t really surprised. Except, it’s also interesting to note the differences between the original, classic story and how it’s been interpreted over the years.

The parts that I enjoyed the most were obviously the bits and pieces attributed to the time — the colloquial sayings, the references that firmly represent the day and age that Dickens was writing from. In particular, I thought it interesting how Scrooge kept referring to the prevalent fears of overpopulation. All in all, it’s a delightful, entertaining, lovely story. And not bad at all to be at 158 classics read from the 1001 Books list. Now only 12 more to go until I reach my goals for this year. Ha! As if I’m even going to get there.

#67 – Choke

What a crazy week. I actually finished reading Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke on Monday and haven’t had a single spare moment to post about it book until now. The novel opens with a very young Victor Mancini on the run in a stolen school bus with his mother who suffers from mental instability. Every now and again she “saves” Victor from his foster homes, from his temporary shelters, and takes him on the run with her until the cops catch up to them.

Along the way “The Mommy” might be conducting a mail scam (not to benefit herself, of course) to encourage havoc (people receiving coupons for a free dinner in the mail — hundreds of them to besiege one poor restaurant where she may have worked). Interspersed with the stories of his childhood, parts of Victor’s story take place in the few weeks leading up to his mother’s death. Now in a long-term care facility, Ida Mancini is wasting away, refusing to eat, and has no idea who Victor is when he comes to visit. So Victor pretends to be people from their past, and branches out to pretending to be many other people for the many other patients in the hospital.

In order to afford the stay, Victor works at a theme park (of sorts) that depicts early Colonial America. His best friend, Denny, works with him, and the two are both fighting their own sexual addictions. He also fakes choking at various restaurants around town, picking up cheques along the way from the various people who have “saved” his life. The closer his mother gets to death, and the more he’s propositioned by the very strange and somewhat awkward Dr. Paige Marshall, the more Victor examines his own life, the more he falls into patterns of bad, almost destructive behaviour.

On more than one occasion, this book, which is included in the 1001 Books list, felt so much like Fight Club (thematically) that I wondered how close they were published to one another. The voices, the characters, even the predilection towards mining support groups, felt tired, but maybe because we’ve spent years with Palahniuk’s characters being enmeshed in the the pop culture ether that I didn’t find this novel particularly original. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy it overall, more that I just felt that in a way he was continuing with many of the same themes and same type of character that he wrote in his 1996 book.

The cover for my trade paperback is quite amazing though, the human anatomy stripped away from the skin, maybe metaphorical, even a little bit literal as Victor attended medical school before his life started to fall apart. And I didn’t dislike the book, it’s easy to read, flows well, has great characterization and the observations of Victor are quite poignant at times: “You don’t see fish agonized by mood swings. Sponges never have a bad day.” But I did feel it suffered maybe a little from the cult of Palahniuk, but that’s just me — I do have to admit that I’m not necessarily his target audience.

READING CHALLENGES: It’s on the 1001 Books list, so it’s one of my challenge books for the year. As you can probably tell, I’m reading like a maniac to try and at least finish the ones that I’ve picked for this year (or others I’ll substitute).

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I finished a book for work (#68 Wings) that I can’t blog about because it’s months away from publication, and have a book stack for the rest of the year that contains: A Christmas Carol, The Other Queen, The Given Day, The Plot Against America, Lush Life, Through Black Spruce, The Origin of Species, The Boys in the Trees, The Double, The Almost Moon and Middlemarch. Fingers crossed, eh? And if I add all of the Harlequins to my reading tally for the year, I’d probably be up around 80 (but I’m going to keep those separate).

#66 – Brideshead Revisited

Sometimes, just sometimes, I fall so hard for a book that I would even consider myself a bit strange. It happened with Theft. It happened with Hunger. And now it’s happened again with Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited. I love this book so much that I want to sleep with it under my pillow for weeks. I love this book so much that I wish it was alive so that I could kiss it.

Subtitled, “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder,” the novel opens up in the midst of the Second World War, as the book’s protagonist (he of the subtitle) pauses before his company departs the position they’ve held for the last three months. As he says, “Here love had died between me and the army,” setting up the aesthetic nature of his character, Charles Ryder is presented as a thinking man’s soldier, from the upper classes, a man who fights more so because of the excitement than perhaps the duty. The new position his company takes up is at Brideshead, a castle that belongs to the Flyte family, a group of people who made an impossible impact on Charles’s life.

As the novel moves backwards to tell the story of how he first came to Brideshead, Charles recounts his own glory days at Oxford with one of the sons, Sebastian. Charles falls hard for Sebastian, for his strange ways (and odd teddy bear) and falls equally hard for his family, his sister Julia in particular. As the novel progresses and the friendship is tested again and again because of Sebastian’s drinking, their lives grow in different directions. Then, ten years pass, Charles is married, Julia is married, and yet they seem to pick up naturally where they left off, and it’s this love affair that defines the rest of their lives.

I don’t even really have the words to describe how lovely the prose remains throughout. How well-crafted the story is, how ingenious Waugh is when it comes to creating voice and character. The novel doesn’t drag (it was better than TV this week, hands down) and it makes you want to dive into the imaginary pages and wear the clothes, live the unhappy lives and experience the world as these people for just a moment. Kate sent me a note this morning about how I shouldn’t watch the movie version that recently came out — instead, she said, I HAVE to watch the miniseries (which I just ordered as a treat to myself from Amazon). For so many, the most important theme in the novel is faith, and I won’t argue that it is, the Flyte’s are Catholic and the struggle to balance the idea of religion in a world that finds it increasingly irrelevant remains consistent throughout the novel. But, of course, being the incurable romantic, it was the love story, both the idea of the glorious friendships of youth and the affairs that forever change your life, that really held my attention. Just glorious.

READING CHALLENGES: Of course this book’s on the 1001 Books list so I’m counting it as one of the books for that challenge.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: I started reading Choke this morning on the subway. We’ll see how that goes.

#63 – Hunger

In my last post about the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list, I was full of resentment over having slogged my way through American Pastoral. With Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, I’ve now forgiven the list. As the unnamed protagonist wanders around Christiania (Oslo) starving and half-mad, he narrates the decline of both his physical and mental states. Hunger is a striking, captivating novel that feels utterly modern in its conception with echoes of the stream of conscious-type narratives that I am ever-so fond of reading.

Originally published in 1890, the struggles of the writer to simply live, to find a warm, dry place to sleep, to keep his body protected, to find food to satiate the most basic of the body’s expectations, seem beyond him for many reasons. He has no money because he hasn’t sold an article (he has sold many articles to the pawnbroker, though). He’s been evicted because he can’t pay the rent. His appearance deteriorates as the novel continues leaving bits and pieces of his hair all over the city (it’s always falling out!). While respite comes throughout the book in various different places, the overall suffering and consistent starvation of the narrator, his awful living conditions, and the fact that at one point he resorts to sucking on wood chips ensures that he never really comes through the other side.

In a life where a few pennies (øres?) would make a world of difference, the writer clings to a sense of his own morality. He refuses to steal any food for survival. He pays back his debts (even if it means he’ll starve once again). He believes entirely in the value of his written words if only he could get his mind to work. He simply never asks for help. Then, driven to the brink of madness, the writer finally sacrifices his freedom for survival, and it’s a bittersweet moment.

Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920, and from what I can discern from the biography in the back of the book, his own struggles to make a living from his work inspired aspects of Hunger. The author’s strength of character comes through (sitting atop a train after being diagnosed with tuberculosis and breathing in as much air as humanly possible) both in terms of the power within this novel but also in his personal story. Balancing out the basic needs of life with the kind of hard work the narrator resigns himself to just in order to survive, the entire book feels like a testament to the kind of men who value ideals of strength in character above all else. All in all, it’s a magnificent book. One that I would have never discovered had I not embarked upon the whole 1001 Books Challenge in the first place.

READING CHALLENGES: Killing two challenges with one book: Norway for Around the World in 52 Books and another 1001 Books title.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: My second-hand copy underneath my 1001 text, which has a far superior jacket image.

#61 – American Pastoral

Sometimes I really resent the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die list. Like when you slog through umpteen pages of books like Philip Roth’s bloated and self-indulgent masterpiece American Pastoral. I’m honestly shocked that a book that so clearly needed an editor won the Pulitzer Prize. I liken Roth’s writing in ways to Canadian David Adams Richards, who remains highly regarded by many people in the literary world (and is ever-acclaimed and never-endingly nominated). It’s just not the book for me. Honestly, I’m barely surprised that I finished.

In theory, and at the beginning of my reading experience, I couldn’t put the book down. I was fascinated by Seymour “The Swede” Levov, the golden-blond, all-American, football-playing, Riggins-reminding main character. The novel does an excellent job of exploring how his Jewish roots somewhat sit in opposition to his golden boy lifestyle thus setting up this ideal of the American pastoral. In a world where a man, who has worked incredibly hard (he took over his father’s glove business) and married a woman he adores (and is a beautiful Irish-American beauty queen), can’t even succeed, what hope is there for the rest of us? The Swede’s more than a character: he’s an archetype, one that Roth’s narrator, the bachelor-slash-writer Nathan “Skip” Zuckerman explores in tireless detail.

After a chance meeting at a baseball game when they’re both well advanced into middle age, The Swede approaches Skip and asks if he’d like to write a book about his father, Lou Levov. This becomes the premise behind telling the Swede’s story. And then retelling it. And then retelling it a little more. And then a little more. Like a record that skips, the book plods along in ceaseless and sometimes utterly unnecessary detail about every aspect of the Swede’s life, his relationship with his first wife, Dawn, and their troublesome daughter, Merry.

When Merry’s (as described on the jacket) “savage act of political terrorism” destroys the family, much of the novel is dedicated to trying to understand the reasons behind why she did it. The breakdown of the family is never explored in detail, only hinted at, as we discover at the beginning of the book that the Swede has remarried and has three teenage sons. For the majority of the novel, he tries to keep his life on course despite it’s consistent derailing. As the nature of tragedy in and of itself is cyclical, I can see why Roth spent so much time writing around and around the events; but it took a sheer force of will for me to finish this book.

I am not, however, giving up. Anyone who can write sentences like Roth deserves a second chance:

Marcia was all talk — always had been: senseless, ostentatious talk, words with the sole purpose of scandalously exhibiting themselves, uncompromising, quarrelsome words expressing little more than Marcia’s intellectual vanity and her odd belief that all her posturing added up to an independent mind.

I started The Plot Against America this morning and am already enjoying it. Also, let’s make note that I read the majority of this book during my own tedious and utterly frustrating moments: waiting for the doctor; waiting for the ferry; riding on the ferry; sitting in the car and waiting for the ferry…and so on. Maybe that had something to do with my frustration?

READING CHALLENGES: Yes! A title in my woefully underrepresented 1001 Books Challenge and if I were actually still doing the Around the World in 52 Books I might have counted this title for the United States.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The book. My lap. The ferry. Boredom.

#36 – The Secret History

Donna Tartt’s epic The Secret History feels at times over-wrought, over-written and perhaps many, many pages too long. That said, holy crap did this novel grab me by the toes and pull me in from beginning to end. To summarize: it’s the story of a young, unhappy man from Plano, California who finds himself embroiled in a murderous plot at an exclusive college (called Hampden) in Vermont. But the book is also so much more than that — it’s the dramatic coming of age for a young man who searches for something exciting and finds himself deeply embroiled in events that will change his life forever.

The narrator, Richard Papen, has had an ugly childhood: his parents are typically unhappy, he’s poor, an only child, and longs for a world far different from the one he grew up within. Enter Hampden College. And even better, enter his acceptance into a small fraternity of students, six including Richard, that study Greek under an epic teacher named Julian Morrow.

The group’s leader, Henry, a wickedly smart (he speaks six languages or something crazy like that), embarrassingly rich fellow who controls the group. Besides Richard and Henry, there’s Charles and Camilla (twins), Francis, and Bunny (real name Edmund). All five were reared at prep or private school, and all five both accept and reject Richard at the same time. The secret history of the novel’s title revolves around the events that fall out of a weekend where the core five, Richard excluded, attempt to create a true bacchanal in the woods around Francis’s property. It’s impossible for any of them to move forward beyond the events that happened over those few days and the book meditates on those moments in your life that impact where you’ll end up, the idea of a ruinous youth, and the consequences to thoughtless actions.

Tartt unravels the novel like a mystery with masterful suspense. Richard slowly goes through the motions of telling the story, which has become ‘the only one he’ll ever be able to tell,’ to the reader and in part finally letting the history consume him once again if only to finally let it all go. Elements of Highsmith and other solid British writers (Tartt’s an American) sneak into her prose and characterization (Henry is a solid Ripley-esque fellow, right down to his glasses), and I found the most frustrating part of the narrative never knowing exactly when the novel is set. But in the end, it’s a terrific book that sucks you right in and would be perfect for summer reading up at the cottage when it’s cold (like today) and raining (like today) and all you’re looking to do is curl up by the fire with a good, hair-raising story.

READING CHALLENGES: Believe it or not, The Secret History is on the 1001 Books list, and so it was on my particular challenge list for this year. I think I might be slightly behind the whole 1001 Books challenge for now, having given up Huck for the present time.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Saints of Big Harbour, a nonfiction book that I started while waiting for the osteopath this afternoon called High Crimes, and whatever I’m going to take to Paris (probably the two IMPAC books I actually have and anything else that’ll fit in my suitcase and, of course, a Jane Austen because I always love to read her on a plane).

#23 – The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton’s classic might have just moved onto my “best books I’ve ever read in my life” list. I’ve been quoting from the novel for days. The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer in 1921, and it’s easy to see how and why the book is included in the 1001 Books list.

Newland Archer, our hero, devotee of upper class New York society in the age following the Civil War, finds himself torn between the life he imagined, the proper life, the expected life, and his passion, which comes in the form of his fiance May’s cousin, the mysterious Countess Olenska. Already standing outside society, the Countess has left her brute of a European husband and returned to the bosom of her family. Archer, a lawyer and all-round saviour of a man, becomes enlisted in the cause to resurrect her standing, and falls in love with her along the way.

Wharton’s tone is pitch perfect, and her narrative shows no signs of age, but it’s still as if the book is frozen in time, the descriptions are vivid, the characters redolent of the period, and the story heartbreaking. It’s great storytelling told by a master of the form.

Two more quotes, and then I’ll spoil no more of the book for you:

“…[F]or a moment they continued to hold each other’s eyes, and he that saw her face, which had grown very pale, was flooded with a deep inner radiance. His heart beat with awe: he felt that he had never before beheld love visible.”

“Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in the lottery.”

Ah, if only the goal of self-satisfaction was so still utterly admired as unachievable in our post-post modern thoughts.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The book on top of its 1001 Books entry on my desk.

READING CHALLENGES: The first of the two 1001 Books Challenge titles I’m supposed to read in April, which brings my score to 154. Yee-haw!

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Consolation by Michael Redhill and The Ravine by Paul Quarrington. And maybe I’ll get back to War and Peace. But really? Who am I kidding? Anyone have recommendations for Summer reading?