Random Number Lit

  I picked Treasure Island much like I picked The Nickel Boys because the two books I have with me right now, Kadambari and Lanark do not have audiobook versions that I can engage with easily. Both of them, as I get into these books more in-depth, would be impossible to process while listening to because they are intensely complex documents. That being said, I have two situations in which I have an unreal amount of time to process audio content, I have a long drive once a week and two days a week of low impact manual labor (because my life is strange) and so I needed something to listen to. In order to continue the prospect of this challenge, I decided to pull up Audible and in the spirit of how this project started, I let the fine folks of Audible “Included in Membership” team pick for me what would be the next book I listened to.   The first title in that section of free, well produced audio classics was a dramatic reading of Treasure Island . I started listening to this text in t

I decided to read or listen to Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys because the two books that I am supposed to be reading right now are Alasdair Gray’s Lanark and Bana’s Kadambari , neither of which have audiobooks that I can find. I pulled up Whitehead’s text because it is the final entry in the previous project that I started many, many years ago with my friend Drew Moody to read all of the books that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I needed something to listen to and found that The Nickel Boys was less than 7 hours and I thought I could do that in a day as I am outside painting. I didn’t finish it in one day but had a little bit left over for the start of the next day.   I loved this book. I loved The Underground Railroad which I read in grad school. Both of these books have similar interacts with reality which I love. I love their tense moments that deliver on the stark realities faced by the characters but that he does not linger too long on the traumas experienced by th

 I am chiming in here to say that I really messed up when I jumped into Voltaire. A story in three parts. First, I pulled Voltaire from the Small Works List because, you know...why not? So, I wasn't sure what I was going to do here because I have read Candide before and it seemed to me that Candide is the document that you are supposed to read when you read Voltaire. So, I pulled the name and I thought, surely there will be something else that I should read to make myself understand this human being better. As I have mentioned elsewhere in this pursuit I have been reading classic literature since high school and have had an on again off again relationship with the canon as most traditionally expressed. What I find now is that I still have this sort of semi-fraught relationship with specific characters of the canon and I can think whatever I like about these people. I read Voltaire in high school and did not really understand what was going on then, I read it again recently and real

I pulled Thomas Hughes' name from the Small Works List in the traditional fashion. I finished my quick interaction with Isaac Newton knowing that I would not be able to read Newton's Principia and then below that chief interaction there is a titanic body of work for which I would not have the lifetime of energy needed to apprehend it, I decided to read some background material, a quick interaction with the principle text, and I read one contained essay that my professor friend who is familiar with physics told me to read. The next name was a slightly more contemporary British author, Thomas Hughes. Knowing nothing of this human being, I set about to find something important about them. As is often times the case, there is one chief work that they are known for and set about tracking down a copy of this book. It sometimes is the case itself that I may not know anything about the author but the work that they are famous for is familiar to me. Like Isaac Newton, it is sometimes th

A good friend of mine, Ken West, decided to binge listen to Robinson Crusoe on a long road trip he just took. His PhD dissertation will center around Rousseau’s Emile in which Defoe’s work figures prominently. He loved the book and asked that I also read it. I decided right before the end of the month, over Memorial Day weekend to finish this book. I have binged listened to/read significant portions and I also love this book. This book raises, like Huckleberry Finn, some big issues of racism in classic literature which I will deal with as I go throughout this work. Defoe’s description of Friday is pretty terrible, but it seems that the world has not thrown away this text despite some very grievous errors in this regard. Defoe’s work is a deeply Christian work as well which I was caught off guard by. G.K. Chesterton once was asked what book he would bring to a desert island, and without batting an eye (instead of saying the Bible as he was a devout Christian) he said, The P

 I saac Newton (Small Works List) Let me tell you something from the jump here, I am not a scientist. I pulled the name Isaac Newton from the Small Works List because, you know, whatever and I called an astronomer that I know, Stephen Case, and asked him what do I have to read to get to know Isaac Newton. Newton wrote prolifically in his life, but the main thing he wrote was the Principia which is a 400 page ancient math text book. I thought I might read this. He said no. He gave me an abridged version that breaks it down into his physics stuff which was 70 pages. I read 20 pages of this and stopped. I am not a physics person. I then found a copy of the Principia whose whole edition is 900 pages long with 400 of which the manuscript itself. I looked at every page of this text for longer bits of prose in between the math stuff. This was still impenetrable. I found two sections worth reading, one the Scholium in between Book 2 Section 6 and 7. Here he talks about how he se

  A call the section on the Big Book List that are full of Anonymous authored texts largely derived from the Penguin classics list - the Anonymous Forest! Other pulls from that second on the list, Njal’s Saga (before I started doing the newsletter).   Going into this text, I have read The Life of Anthony in seminary so I counted that text completed here, and so I had some texts from Jerome to read and a few others. These writings were leaps and bounds more interesting to read than Voragine, sorry for the hate old guy - but Jerome is a much better writer. I will keep this section short as well, I enjoyed reading these biographies rather than hagiographies. The story of Anthony’s coat comes back in Jerome account of the life of Paul of Thebes. Apparently, Anthony thought that he was the first hermit, but someone tells Anthony of Paul of Thebes, so Anthony (in Paul’s story) sets off to find him.  A Centaur in the desert gives Anthony directions. Anthony finds Paul of Thebes

  I pulled Willa Cather’s name from the Small Works List probably because a short story most have been featured in one of the anthologies I scavenged for names. This is one reason why I love to have the Small Works List as a part of this project, but it gives me at least two cracks at an author of the stature of Willa Cather. I asked a friend of mine who is an American Lit professor which book to read from Cather because her writing is just inside that which he knows a great deal about. From this time period, he is probably more familiar with Faulkner and was the person who recommended that I read Go Down, Moses when I got to that text earlier in the year. I was glad for that and so I asked him what to read again. He said that he had read My Antonia recently but had always wanted to read Death Comes for the Archbishop . I decided to read My Antonia because I had read One of Ours for the Pulitzer project years ago, and I have Death Comes for the Archbishop on the Big

  This is on the Big Book List which is apt in this case because it is a very big book, coming at almost 700 pages. So, get this, a 700 page Victorian gothic romance novel - not my cup of tea I might imagine, but surprise surprise, I loved this book. I am going to keep this section short because I have a lot to talk about this week but the love story between Emily St. Aubert and Valancourt was entrancing. I was all the way at one particular moment, when Montoni takes Emily and her aunt with him to Udolpho though we don’t know what to expect there, Radcliffe writes this very honest moment about the aunt’s regret at this endeavor as sort of a humility and self-awareness that the aunt had planned to con Montoni because she wasn’t as wealthy as he had hoped and also the aunt knowing that Montoni was also a scoundrel and they they sort of deserved each other but Emily did not deserve either of them was a breath-taking turn of writing and logic and pathos. I was hooked for