Random Number Lit

I decided to read Paradise Lost (as a randomized big book list entry) because a professor friend of mine has to read this text for his dissertation and so I decided to jump in here and read along with him. A history professor friend of ours also decided to read it with us and so I decided that is random enough for me, and jumped in.    I actually began reading Paradise Lost in the sort of ‘proto-list’ phase during the first Covid summer I thought that I would try to engage with some classic literature because Audible had a bunch of books for free then and we all needed something to do. I powered through Frankenstein , loved that, and the next book on the list for free then was Paradise Lost , I tried then but I just couldn’t get my head around it, and left it undone. This time we had a deadline and I thought I would really try to sink my teeth into it, and I am glad I did. I loved it. I went back to the audiobook but I took a different approach this time. I would listen to sections o

 I typing these initial comments on Matthew Lewis’ The Monk on September 13 because I am very far behind this month. To date, I have only finished 1 book and my aim is usually for 4 books a month. I may not make it this month. I loved Matthew Lewis’ The Monk but I do not think I would read this book again. This book genuinely troubled me at times that made me have this crazy sort of feeling of simultaneously not wanting to continue reading because the subject matter was so troubling but then wanting to continue reading so as to be quit of this horrendously troubling text.  This book is astonishingly modern in its explicit depictions of horror that I am amazed that it has not had a famously popular horror movie adaptation. It would be difficult to adapt because of the nature of the crimes committed but it would be a riveting film if handled well. Throughout the text, though, I was confused often because the names and the placement of the stories seemed to run together. I had to read a s

I don’t have a ton to say at the moment about Edmund Burke. I would like to avoid making this publication tinged with the concerns of today. I will be writing this document for perhaps the next 35 years, if I live until I am 70 and so there will be several different epochs of the context that surrounds this document. When I first pulled Edmund Burke’s name, many recent texts popped up that deal with his writing. Most of these texts include Burke in the current debate about conservative politics in America. This may be true, but this is not going to be the focus of my interest in Burke. Because I would not characterize myself as a conservative, there is a certain bit of intrigue that wants to really dig in here and see where that vein goes, but I chose instead to refocus on something directly of interest.   I began reading Burke’s Reflections on the Revolutions in France because it was the first thing that popped up on Audible and I listened to perhaps the first 2 or 3 hours of that d

There is some part of this process where I truly love the random nature of this project. I did not want to considered very much how these books came to be on this list. I took my time at first figuring out how I wanted to find the books, but once I had a few trust worthy things in place I just started adding stuff to get to 1000. Lanark must have been in that push. I don’t know if it was a Goodreads list or some random one on the internet but Lanark came to me, and I read this book. Anthony Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange – which I am not sure is on my list at all, claimed this book should be in the top 100 works of the 20 th century. I was game for a challenge.  At this point, I will say that I am versed in the Scottish culture. Well, two of my best friends were born and live in Scotland. The introduction to Lanark was written by Janice Galloway who wants to convince the reader that the highest possible value expressed by the Scottish culture is to not show off. I will let th

  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 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

  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

I finished Browne's Religio Medici some time ago now, right at the start of the year. I pulled it due to a little controversy as I found that I had started working through the Anonymous Forest for some of those more obscure titles and trying configure how they might fit into my lists. I will continuously find little errors in this list compilation, and I don't want a repeat of the Philip Sidney issue so I thougth how am I going to address these concerns. With Thomas Browne, I thought I wanted to find the document that I should read from him before I got there as his name was tied up with a collection of sorts I think. However it happened, I pulled the name on the Big Book list and was forced to confront Religio Medici  which was fantastic.  The story of how Religio Medici came to be is fascinating in and of itself. It seems from my very minor research on these topics, that Thomas Browne was a well thought of writer and thinker of his time, but he had decided after university to