Random Number Lit

 I felt the snake bite here of wandering to far afield from the original intention of this project. I had a very underdeveloped list of ancient writings in one of the segments of the Small Works List. Because of this, I thought that I should find some way of coming to terms with this lacking in the list and find a way to fold in a more robust catalog of the literature of the ancient world. I have studied Christian theology and Church history at the graduate level and so I thought I might have some sense of what might be hiding behind this veil but I was woefully mistaken at my purchase into this arena. I was confronted by this with the issue of simply getting my hands on a readable copy of this text.  I am not sure where I went to flesh out these category, but I had a smattering of readings especially from Ancient Egypt on the same list as the Greeks. The time frame that these things exist in are as far away as modern American writings are from early Christian writings and so I don'

  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 young man simply be

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 hope that this project does not totally spin out of control with the endless introductions of new lists. I don't know how The Lamentation of the Destruction of Ur got on my list. I imagine at one point I was skimming through the Norton Anthology of World Literature and there is some slight reference to it which may have been enough to prompt me to add it to an Ancient Literature list. I have no idea but I thought to add it as an Anonymous entry and leave it for 35 years from now. Now that I am a year into this project, many books and research questions have been asked I pull this strange text out of the ether and I confront it head on.  One of the challenges of selecting books based off of their titles alone is that many times there is not a collected, singular volume of a text available that I can simply buy online, listen to an audiobook version of and move along. This text was written somewhere between 2112 B.C. and 2004 B.C. according to Wikipedia (which seems younger than I

The next entry I pulled from the Small Works List was from what feels like the most popular list on that spreadsheet, the World Literature List 1000 to 1600. I have only pulled one other name at this point on the list but I have consistently been involved with World Lit from around this time period pretty consistently. Kadambari was on the list just before this one as well as Ki No Tsurayuki. The crazy thing is the connection between this text and Guaman Poma.    The Huarochiri Manuscript represents a strange node in the make up of this history of this time period, and also happens to be the second indigenous authored text from the same region and the exact same time period. So, let me lay this out for a second. Guaman Poma is one of the only native Incan authors in the historical record. Guaman Poma’s 1200 page letter to King Phillip III was lost for hundreds of years as it was accidentally stored in the Royal Danish Library. Guaman Poma would have written his “letter” in 1615-1616.

 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

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 the Odyssey for

  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 well. Transl

  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