Random Number Lit

 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 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

 I went on a roller coaster ride with this pick. As it is often said about the Small Works List, I have no idea where this name came from or in what context it was meant to be read. I imagine if I went back to find where I found this name it would be from the Norton World Literature Anthology and it would be a short clipping of the incident that this whole text swirls around. What I find enchanting about this idea is that it sort of places as the fulcrum of Korean history this family drama and from the locus of this event there is a father and son struggling to understand their humanity together, the nature of good and evil is being wrestled with and the hope of a family and a nation hang in the balance of one simple act. Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong   When I pulled this name in the Henri Michaux  Youtube Video , I was a 0% knowledge of who this person was, I didn’t even know how to pronounce the name and did not try in that recording. I watched a few Youtube videos to get a sense of it. I

Henri Michaux represents a particular type of problem that is woven into the fabric of this project. What is essentially at stake here in a project like this is that I will have a passing understanding of a lot of things and try as hard as I can to bring within myself the ability to know very little about a lot of things. This works for Abelard's letters which are as they state themselves to be. This works for the Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong which is a straight forward retelling of the history of her country from a very speciifc experience. This approach does not work for Faulkner or what we have in front us now, Henri Michaux.  First the problem was what to read. As I may state often in this project, the effort itself took and continues to take a great deal of forethought to make sure what I am doing is even remotely worthwhile. So far I think that it is, but that isn't to say that there are no wrinkles in the rug so to speak. When I put together the big book list, I realized tha

 Ok, so here's the thing, I spent a number of years in graduate school at a mainline Protestant Seminary. I am a Christian, but I do not like this book. One of the early draft ideas for a name for this project was, "Books I Should Have Read by Now," but the name didn't roll off the tongue. Also, I didn't like the way it put the responsibility of the necessity of reading on myself or on the reader to assume, you should have read these books too, so I changed it to random number lit. One of the main motivations of reading books in this fashion is to thwart the "Netflix effect" of a To Be Read (TBR) pile. There is a pressure of the vastness of time and space to select something constantly for yourself. Broadcast and Radio programming of old solved this problem for you. They picked what they thought you should like. Sometimes you did, sometimes you didn't like the thing they picked for you and you developed preferences in a human led cycle of content gen

I wanted start this blog post with just some quotes from the book that jumped out at me as I was reading them. With no apparent context, these simply just grabbed me at the time. How better to begin a post about Faulkner than to let his words speak for themselves.    “not against the wilderness but against the land, not in pursuit and lust but in relinquishment, and in the commissary as it should have been, not the heart perhaps but certainly the solar-plexus of the repudiated and relinquished: the square, galleried, wooden building squatting like a portent above the fields whose laborers it still held in thrall ’65 or no and placarded over with advertisements for snuff and cures for chills and slaves and potions manufactured and sold by white men to bleach the pigment and straighten the hair of negroes that they might resemble the very race which for two hundred years had held them in bondage and from which for another hundred years not even a bloody civil war would set them completel

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

 I could write forever about this book, as I assume many have. Joyce is a significant personage to undertake it seems, and I have not dealt with Joyce properly in my time in the my life of letters and I am glad that this project put this book squarely in my path. I tried reading this book a long time ago for the same sense of duty to classic literature that similarly gives its inspiration and lifeblood to this project as well. I couldn't get very far into the book at all, and left it undone. I probably resorted to reading Dubliners instead because it was a much more approachable text than either Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake. I hadn't realized how similar my life has been, strictly in a personal sense to that of Joyce's. I have had many, many jobs as he struggled with employment early in his life.  He also contemplated joining the priesthood as I spent several years in seminary as well. It seems that after some time, Joyce rejected his faith outright which is not true fo

I hope that every book in this project will be as fascinating a item to think about as have been in the course of this project so far. Certainly, there are a few that have not revolutionized my life as have some in this project, but some have been a revelation to me that will sit with me for a long time. The Book of the Courtier is a book that may be with me awhile, almost despite itself at times, but fascinating. Baldassare Castiglione was a courtier in the northern Italian court of Urbino and seemed to have had a transformative experience during this time and that he brought with him throughout his life. He, then, goes onto serve in other courts and accumulates the accolades due to someone in his station in life through grit and a good nature, and ends up in Spain where he writes this book. Castiglione yearns for his life in in his home court, even his home court, Urbino and drafts this work shortly before his death in Spain which would serve as a handbook of sorts for courtly life h

Amy Lowell represents a sort of strange character in the fabric of Modern Poetry. Of 20th Century Poetry, I am most familiar with the modernist movement like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot which I assume most Americans my age who read poetry would be. In Amy Lowell's Wikipedia page which isn't her official biography but it is usually the place I start just to get a sense of a person. Apparently, Ezra Pound had some unkind words about Lowell during her life. I took this at face value, but thought to bring an open mind to the collection of poetry that I found most readily available. There seem to be two significant works that jump out from this poet, her early collection A Dome of Many Colored Glass  and What's O'Clock  which I think was from later in her life. I chose to read A Dome of Many Colored Glass because it seemed easier to secure in my channels of resources. Again, for this volume of poetry, I listened to an audiobook version through the Libravox app and looked at an

I selected Njal's Saga because I had reached the 100th follower on Instagram just as I finished Kafk'a The Trial. At that point it was my choice to either go on with hitting the Random Number Generator again or doing a different thing, and so I chose to find out what the 100th entry on the ol' Spreadsheet was and go with that. That landed me squarely inside of the Anonymous Forest (the area of the Big Book List that all have anonymous authors), and I pulled up Njal's Saga. I got a library version from I-Share while I waiting for a used copy to come in from Better World Books, and got to reading. I thought initially that I would listen to this text, but found that it was difficult to keep place names and character names straight and so I wanted to take my time with it. This 310 page read took me 12 days which is about average for me. There is some lag time in getting started reading a book because I have to find a copy first. There was a Kindle version which was free and