Random Number Lit

 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

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

 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

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

Just after pulling William Faulkner's name for the Small Works List, I pulled John Adams. Obviously the reason this name appears on this list is probably because (though I am never sure) is probably because some letter of his or some address of his was featured in an early American Literature volume of the Norton Anthology took a snippet from him. I get these names cold, unknown and without context. Here is what I knew of John Adams before pulling his name. He was a president, probably the second. His son was also president, maybe the fourth? John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were friends and wrote a lot of letters to each other. I have heard that the died on the same day, July 4th but I don't remember if it was in the same year. Abigail Adams, the second first lady, was a significant figure in the history of the country, she may have saved some paintings and it was clear that they loved it each other very much in the old timey way of expressing it through letters. I do not Other

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

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

Lady Mary Wroth – first reflection on this author – the first image I find on Wikipedia is one of her holding a lyre that looks a lot like a modern day guitar which is awesome. Also, she knew Ben Jonson quite well and Jonson wrote one of his famous poems about her castle in London which is fascinating. Here are some selections of the of the longer work that I enjoyed as I read them.  from Song 1:   The Barke my Booke shall bee, Where dayly I will write, This tale of haples mee, True slaue to Fortunes spite. The roote shall be my bedd, Where nightly I will lye Wailing [inconstancy], Since all true loue is dead   from Sonnet 42:   I am that heartlesse Trunck of hearts depart;   from  Song 7:   Nor let me euer cease from lasting griefe, But endlesse let it be without reliefe; To winn againe of Loue, The fauour I did prooue, And with my end please him, since dying, I Haue him offended, yet vnwillingly.   Sonnet 3 from Part 4:   Then did the God {33} , whose

  I just finished Kafka’s   The Trial . I have not read Kafka since high school when I read   The Metamorphosis   and realized that there may be some aspect of literature that was outside of my grasp. I put Kafka on the shelf in my brain like that of Camus or Voltaire or Nietzsche as well. There are some things in the world that my brain was not meant for and these sort of fellows are it. Serious, dark, and deeply intellectual in a way that I find off putting. It is find to think very serious things, but you must tell a captivating and entertaining story while you do it. Because of this challenge, I drew Kafka here in the early days of this challenge and thought for a moment that it may well be this work that derails me. I thought it would be torture to read this book and that it might blow the wind out of my sails. I thought this about the book just before the Trial as well, Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans because other than deeply religious texts, I thought I mig

Alfred Corn: A Call from the Midst of the Crowd   This post comes from finishing one of the works from the Shorter List, like my post on O'Neill. There is a whole raft of authors, poets, essayists, historians that would appear on the longer list because their works do no rise the occassion of a significant work on their own. I am thinking here largely of poets that some of their individual poems may have stood the test of time, but not a longer, contained collection of these poems, I am thinking here of Coleridge or Pope that the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" or "The Rape of the Lock", respectively, would not make it onto 100 books you have to read before you die, but are significant enough to be considered.  For this time out, I pulled the name Alfred Corn of which I was wholly ignorant of. Corn is an American poet who is still with us. During this phase of the investigation, I will read the Wikipedia page and the Poetry Foundation page and any pertinent and r