Random Number Lit

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.

“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 wrote the p

 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

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 that d

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

  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

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

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

 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 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