If you are like me, you have typed this initial post a million times. I have started and stopped a dozen blogs over my life and this one feels like the rest. The first few actions you take are full of confidence and zeal, but then you come finally to the first post. The same white screen presents itself in front of you and you think, this is never going to work. What do I have to say that is of any worth or note, who knows. But I did something recently that I thought was interesting and I wanted to create a space to keep these notes. I don't really know who any of this is for, but if you found this place then I encourage you to follow along.
I have been an avid reader since I was a kid. I am currently an adjunct English Professor at Kankakee Community College where I teach composition to undergrads. In my spare time, I write a weekly column about craft beer for a local paper, and I co-host a podcast about Nintendo games with a friend of mine, Josiah Black. These are humble pursuits, but they give me a steady flow of things to be doing while I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing. Before all of these events have come to pass, I did a long term blog with a friend of mine, Drew Moody, where we read all of the books that have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. That prize has been awarded almost every year since 1918, so we read a considerable amount of books together. That blog and project took almost 10 years. All of my literary thoughts that happened during that time came from that project. I am glad we did it, but I am also glad that it is over. I still have 4 of these books to read all since 2016 because that is when I overtook the past list, and ran out a little of steam.
I am currently reading The Sympathizer which is incredible, and that post will exist here when it is done, and on the Pulitzer blog as a sort of coda to the furious interest we put into that space then.
This project is going to be different. I have a young daughter, Penelope, who is 5. I gave her that name because of one of the main characters in The Odyssey, wife of Odysseus, Penelope. The Odyssey was the first serious book that I read as a young person, and at the ripe old age of 15, I dedicated to the gods above that I would name my first born daughter Penelope. We call her Penny for short. Literature has been with me for some time now. I wanted to do something to prepare a systematized way to present the world of literature to my daughter. The program seems very ad hoc to me. You buy the books that are on the shelves at Barnes and Noble in the kids section. Some of them are good, some of them are not so good, but the curating of that experience seems befuddling to me. I want something that I can get my hands around. I am not sure at what age she will click into this process with me, but what I have in front of me is a spreadsheet that I have compiled, mostly from works that I have not read yet, of the great works of literature from around the world. I have tried to pull together some of the significant works lists from around the internet along with some of my training in undergraduate and master's degrees in English, the Pulitzer list, the Booker Prize, the National Book award list, the Nobel Prize list, and then the Penguin classics books list and the Norton Anthology volumes like English, American, Women, African American, and World Literature. I will continue to add and refine this list along the way, and I am always open to suggestions. I have a Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube channel connected to this project.
Every so often, this will not be a regular feature though the Youtube channel may be a series of quick hits about my progress through the list while trying to capture certain moments along the way. I will draw from the list of both longer works and shorter works whether that be essays, poems, or short stories. It is hard to say because the nature of the works that I am reading are so diverse also a part of the list is that I gathered from these sources not the works themselves but simply the names. I may get wrong what is essential to read of a particular entry on this list. This is where a community of readers will be helpful, and I would like to have on guests to explain certain works to me if I can. I will put out calls for people to come on the Youtube channel to talk with me about what I am reading, what I might be missing as well, and what I should add along the way. This list is immense, over 1000 longer works and plenty more shorter works and poems. I don't read very quickly, but I read deeply and I research as well. The shorter works simply list the author's name, I choose from there what I think is a representative smattering of things for that author from some very minor research into that person. I hope not to be reductive of a person's work, but I want to work quickly, and having read one or two poems of a certain person may not capture their entirety or canon, but the fact that I have briefly interacted with them and share them in this way, I think is significant. I want to collect them all.
Before I started typing this blog, I began this project already. So far, I have read in my random number generating time frame:
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - I didn't randomly select this work. I was reading Jeannette Winterson's Frankisstein because my other pet hobby is researching AI which has been fun and her work came up on Kara Swisher's podcast Recode Decode which I listen to sometimes. I started reading Winterson's work and realized that I did not know nearly as much as I thought I did about the original. The original work Frankenstein is a magical journey of a book. This did something to rekindle of imagination for what lies hidden inside the dusty old covers of ancient, classic books.
John Milton's Paradise Lost - I chose this next because it was available on Audible at the time for free and their version was only 8 hours long. I had the text in my hand while listening to it and it was fantastic to start with but I did not finish this work so - back on the list you go.
Jack London's Call of the Wild - Along with Recode Decode, I listen to The Flophouse bad movie podcast. They latest episode at the time was the new movie version of Call of the Wild, with Harrison Ford. I thought that before I listen to that podcast, I should read the book itself as it is not very long. I found this one for free on Audible and listened to it while I played an NES game for my other podcast. It was incredible, but something that I don't think I totally understand where it is coming from in canon of Western Literature. I wanted to know more about this text and reached out to some other English prof's I know and have put that chat on hold until such a time as I can come back to it.
Then I came to my mountain top experience of this early journey, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Obviously, born in America and being intimately acquainted with American literature I was very familiar with this story but I had never read it in earnest. So, this wasn't randomly selected but was the first book I selected to read based on compiling this list. I love this book and a more fulsome post will be forthcoming about this work. It is wonderful.
After this, I randomly selected W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. This was the first book that I 'RNG'-ed for the list. I had a much shorter list then of simply top 100 lists from around the internet which all skewed deeply white and deeply male and from the pocket in Western Civilization that found the wide distribution of literature helpful and productive, and so we think of these works as the defining works of literature probably more to do with the ease and economy of printing books. I will have a more in-depth post on Maugham as well. It is a brilliant work of fiction that lives inside of me still.
The next RNG book I pulled was Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter which shocked and scandalized me into loving it deeply. This pick came from the list of works that come from the Nobel prize winners which are much more world oriented though skew towards European authors as well. Oe's book is a tiny little, deeply challenging masterpiece. I will have a more full response to this text in the future as well.
From here, I selected Theodore Dreiser's book An American Tragedy but due to political circumstances around the time that I selected this book, I shelved that pick until I am ready to undertake such a pick. I 'RNG' it from the what is now mostly complete list, but I don't know how I will deal with this pick. As I said before I am reading through The Sympathizer which is fantastic and a part of a different list that I think can supplant this current endeavor when I find it convenient.
Inside of the list that is the longer works that are now over 1000, I have the anthologies list that include poets, short stories, essays, and sort of the ephemera of classic writing that you might find in a literature textbook. I have them broken into several subcategories so that they are more easily searchable and I will draw a random number to pick which book I draw them out of and I will then select another random number that will put forward the author I am meant to look at directly. These can be almost anything recorded to paper over the history of humanity. Some of them could be Hindu, Buddhist, or Islamic features. I have weeded out of the Anthology the Christian bible selections as I have a master's degree in Christian theology and I am deeply familiar with that text. This random selection process will be what takes up the majority of the things I may post about daily while the longer works take time to develop. I hope to post those responses almost daily if I can. This will give me a nice repository of my reading progress.
The first author that I pulled from this differently oriented list was Paul Valery, again from the Nobel prize side of the list. I chose to read La Jeune Parque which was brilliant and insightful but difficult to parse. This is another place that I would love to have on the Youtube channel someone who is familiar with this piece and talk about what I may be missing there. I will come back to this pick. The journey to selecting the copy that I would read from this work was also a little difficult.
The next poet that I selected in this haphazard way was Barbara Guest which was a much easier person to interact with in their canon of poetry. This came from the Norton Anthology of Poetry that I fused with the American, World, and other anthologies to give me my current most expansive list. I read 4 poems of Guest's that are mentioned as being of note on her Wikipedia page. I really enjoyed "Roses" and have sat with its observation for a few days now.
I have not pulled another number yet as I was waiting to set up the Youtube channel for this next selection. I will do this live, screen share with you my RNG and the Spreadsheet so you can see what I find, and my initial reaction to that list. I hope you follow along, keep track, read along with me, and let me know what you think along the way. I will post to Twitter and Instagram when I will be pulling next and then links to the Youtube channel when I end up publishing. If you want a copy of the spreadsheet that I am working from, but that I may change over time depending on my responses, please reach out to my email address for the project, random number lit (at) gmail dot com, and I can send you the list and what I am currently working on at the moment.
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