Random Number Lit

  It is hard to say how deeply I was drawn into this text. It is also odd that I read   Peter Pan   during this month as the beginnings of both books want to establish that there is something else going on in these pages than meets the eye. Turgenev is doing something very different in his book, and he sets each element up like Bazarov’s laboratory in the Petrovich’s house. Turgenev asks the question, what do your own thoughts mean to others? Are we indebted to one another in a way that simply changing your mind can fracture a relationship? But ultimately, this book asks the question, what if you loved someone and they didn’t love you back? This is a deep concern of this book and one that I don’t think finds the positive resolution you might imagine an embarked upon theme like this would attempt.   I have tried to read this little book many times throughout my life, probably over the last 20 years I have picked it up and put it down. I set out to read this book as a ...

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 s...

“Japanese poetry has the human heart as seed and myriads of words as leaves. It comes into being when men use the seen and the heard to give voice to feelings aroused by the innumerable events in their lives” (Tsurayuki 3).   I don’t usually include long quotes in this newsletter but I really love this quote and think about it often as I reflect on reading this text. It is not often the case that when I pull a work a name off the Small Works list that someone I know has intimate knowledge of their work. I know someone through a friend who grew up in Japan, and interacted with Ki No Tsurayuki in their education in high school. I have still connect at a deeper level about this work but they pointed me in the right direction with this author, and I set out to read some of the Kokin Wakashu which Tsurayuki was responsible for compiling. In addition to beginning the work of compiling all of the requisite Japanese poetry at the time, in the ‘waka’ style of poetry, Tsurayuki also wr...

 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...

Knut Hamsun sprung off the list like a loaded gun. I can’t tell you just how electric this text is and how much of a change of pace this novel is from the works that I have been reading lately. The difference between a Tolstoy or a Burke is from a Hamsun is like a Cadillac and a Ferrari. Both are cars, but one does a lot of different things than the other. Hamsun’s writing is deeply engrossing but in a way that is disorienting and alarming at once. Similar to Huxley’s writing, the chaos of the moment with the use of soma and the sanctioned time of the group sex, the pressure just builds and builds but there is a kindness in that text that feels like it is going somewhere that you know that the brakes aren’t on now but will be clamping down soon. Hamsun did not have that same level of assurance. The momentum of this novel just builds and builds and builds until the moment of the crisis hits, and you are not sure you are in calm hands until the very, very end. Like reading Kafka, there i...

  Fresh off the reading of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World a 20 th century dystopian future that is all about pleasure and infantilizing the populace so that they never question the developments of society, I read the ancient thing, Aeschylus’ Oresteia . Couldn’t have been any more perfectly arranged.  Aeschylus, apparently, is the oldest of the Greek playwrights. The Oresteia is the crowning achievement for this period. The Oresteia is written in a trilogy of short plays, the first being Agamemnon, the second being The Libation Bearers , and the last The Furies . I bought a copy of this text so that I could see it on the page.   Translator’s Corner – I was first introduced to classic literature at the young age of 15 when I was challenged by an English teacher to read The Odyssey over the summer. I did so and fell in love with classic literature since then. The translation that I picked up at the time was Robert Fagles. I may end up rereading th...

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 th...

 This book is not what I expected. I talked with an administrator at my college about this book recently, and he told me that it was the first book he was assigned to teach when he started teaching high school English. He may have said he had to teach it to freshman. That seems remarkable to me. There is so much sex in this book. While there is no sex depicted explicitly on the page – this entire society revolves around sexual gratification for sex sake because it is no longer tied to reproduction. There is a deeply conservative heart beating behind the pages of this book. I don’t often do this but I found an interview with Huxley from the 60s after I finished this book because I wanted to get a sense of the man as I was mulling over his ideas in the book.   I will say this first, the whole book leads to a final conversation between the Savage and the regional World Controller which is delightful and sort of the glorious "accuse your gods" moment that a certain subset of ...

  Banabhata – Kadambari   I pulled this one from the Small Works List (World 300 – 1000 AD). The only note that I had there was a 4 letter name, Bana. I went to the Google, and found out that Bana was one of the most celebrated authors of this era of Indian writing. He wrote two famous works, the Harshacharita (Deeds of Harsha - a history of his era of India), and Kadambari (a Hindu romance). For whatever reason, it did not seem possible to find a way to engage with the Harshacharita whether I couldn’t find a readable copy or whatever, so I chose Kadambari . I will say here that I loved the first half of this book. I have never encountered a text like Kadambari . I am not sure if this is common for Sanskrit or Hindu based texts, but the whole thing felt like a dream. The lyrical descriptions of very minimal activities was magical to follow. It was difficult to parse at times what was happening as I was reading something written in English and translated very wel...

 Look this might be a cheat pick here. At the time I pulled this book I had two other books in my pocket so to speak. I was in the middle of reading Lanark and Kadambari both of which did not have an audiobook available for me to read. Because they did not have an audiobook, and I found myself with some unrestrained audiobook listening time over the summer, I went back to the well and pulled randomly this time. (Different from the Colson Whitehead and Robert Louis Stevenson approaches) I opened up the Big Book List and fired off another random pull, and I kid you not like the reading gods knew what dark materials I was up to and grabbed for me out the Scylla whirlpool the name that shall not be spake, War and Peace , the juggernaut of books, the challenge the metal of mere mortals book and grim I loosely shook my head in horror, cast my eyes befallen on a fickle god and resigned to my fate.  Here, before lofty climes, I stood humbled, embarrassed, ashamed of my secret machin...

  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 ...

 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...

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...