Random Number Lit

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 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 project evolved over time and it is my hope to try to capture the length an breadth of this project even some of this work started before I formalized this whole thing.  Some portion of why this project started was the pandemic, as is with everything now. Right before the Pandemic, and I mention this in my post about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , that I was reading Jeanette Winterston's latest novel, Frankisstein, which is a retelling of the famous story featuring a trans character. It was riveting stuff. As I read it though, I found out that I did not know nearly enough about the original story to be conversant in the retelling's version. This is when the pandemic hit last spring and so I decided to listen to an audiobook version of the original. Audible had just given access to free audiobooks during this time because of the stay-at-home order and I decided then to embark on something that was leading towards this journey.  From Frankenstein, I decided to try my hand

I pulled this book after some time and fatigue in this project. I am not very far in now, but I have pulled some real wild works so far but then I get a book like Augustine’s Confessions and it really puts my mind and attention in a bad place. Faulkner was truly a delight to say that I have read but at times it felt like a chore to get through at times. Then a breath of fresh air arrives in Robinson, and I am fully recharged. What I think is significant about Robinson’s writing is to read it in reverse. The two tent poles of her writing stand distinct from one another between 25 years of history. Housekeeping is published in 1980, Gilead is published in 2005. The first book is the story of a family of women, with each iteration of that which is traditionally understood to be the roles of women with each other, there is the Grandmother, the absent mother, the carefree Aunt, the busy body Great Aunts, and the sisters. The grandfather is gone from the very first pages of the book. The f

 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 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

What a book. I listened to it all the way through in almost one day. It is 8 hours long. I spent Tuesday December 1, 2020 with Andrew Sean Greer. His story of Arthur Less will live with me forever probably. It is nearly a perfect work. Not just because I read it all in one day, but it felt like this book arrived to him fully formed. It was so quick, so effortlessly told, that it seems sort of like I was constantly waiting from him to begin the difficult portion of the book, but it never came. The love that he lost in the beginning of the book, the echoes of the former love that sort of lived in the way of the other one, all seemed to keep him sort of lost in between the two poles that everything else sort of just drifted through in an alluring way. There is some of the sort of cleverness of the work that I want to overlook because there is the essential portions of the book when Greer is talking about genius or literature or art that in an older novel would just sort of straightforward