Random Number Lit

 Look this might be a cheat pick here. At the time I pulled this book I had two other books in my pocket so to speak. I was in the middle of reading Lanark and Kadambari both of which did not have an audiobook available for me to read. Because they did not have an audiobook, and I found myself with some unrestrained audiobook listening time over the summer, I went back to the well and pulled randomly this time. (Different from the Colson Whitehead and Robert Louis Stevenson approaches) I opened up the Big Book List and fired off another random pull, and I kid you not like the reading gods knew what dark materials I was up to and grabbed for me out the Scylla whirlpool the name that shall not be spake, War and Peace , the juggernaut of books, the challenge the metal of mere mortals book and grim I loosely shook my head in horror, cast my eyes befallen on a fickle god and resigned to my fate.  Here, before lofty climes, I stood humbled, embarrassed, ashamed of my secret machinations to

BONUS ENTRY  There are times when in life that you fall so deeply and madly in love with something that when you come away from it a bit, you may think that your love for that thing was misaligned or that you misremembered it somehow. You may have found that you were too naïve or too young to really know a thing enough to love it. These doubts persist especially into middle age and you thought that did had not experienced enough to love so much and that the young are often given to exaggeration or infatuation so that the thing itself could be fine enough sure but then when reencountered you may not feel the same for it. It is a rare thing indeed to happen upon this put away thing that the same sense of joy and elation return to you as you experience something long forgotten anew. These are very rare things indeed. I had the experience to find two well forgotten things simply this, that I have loved them well in my youth and undergraduate days, but put those things away as I had not the

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

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

I started this project sort of out of the blue during the first part of the pandemic disturbances. I realized that a lot of what I do is out of the house work, lecture, grading and student conferences in my office on campus, and the craft beer related stuff all bring me away from my house and so when it was just us in the house as many people experienced, I had the time to reflect on what it was that I wanted to be doing, that question for almost my entire life has been that I would rather be reading. As is the case with this project, this blog, the Youtube videos and the like, I would rather be reading. I saw someone post something some where that let people know that Amazon was allowing access to some audiobooks online, and I thought to look it up. I was reading Jeanette Winterson's book Frankisstein  which is fantastic at the time in my AI research sort of momentum, and I realized that I did not not know nearly enough about the original source material for that book so that coup

The next longer book that the random number generator selected was James Baldwin’s   If Beale Street Could Talk , which I checked out from the Kankakee Public Library through their curbside pick up program. I will do this again today that we will bring two of the books that we selected yesterday. I hope that this will be a consistent activity for Penny and I. We will select a book from one of the libraries, read it cover to cover here at home and then bring it back to rent out another one the next day. There is a bit more planning involved in this now because of COVID but we will make it work. This reminds me of the movements people have to make in order to visit someone in prison as is depicted in the book I am reading.     “But, at the same time, and even on the self-same day – and that is what is hard to explain – you see people like you never saw them before. They shine as bright as a razor. Maybe it’s because you see people differently than you saw them before your trouble started

Just finished Long Days Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill which was a deeply challenging text. I watched the 1987 version featuring Jack Lemmon, Peter Gallagher, and Kevin Spacey. There is some moments in this text that ring a little false, the relationship between the brothers when it works is good, but this idea of molding the younger brother seems very odd to me. I am not sure that stands up, but the mother’s preoccupation with becoming a nun or a concert pianist rather than taking up with the likes of the actor is a compelling story. The Irish dad that fights with his two sons that accuse him of being cheap is also fascinating. I didn’t know my dad who is 100% Irish, but the only time that I met him as an adult, I knew that I would have hated him. Oddly, he thought that the reason I came to see him was because I wanted money which I thought was odd. The one thing we did discuss while I was there was the books that we had read. I thought that he was lying to me the literature he

I read Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer as one of the first longer works of the Random Number Lit project. This book was not selected by a random number generator, or at least not in the traditional sense. I began this project a few months ago but I was not chronicling it then. I have a Word Document that I have kept a running log of my responses, reactions, reveries about these texts that I have selected sort of through the process, sort of not, and thought I should do something with this writing more than stash it on my computer for my daughter to find ages from now. Here is that undertaking, but you will have to forgive me of some of the ways I honor this project but also someway that I will diverge from it from time to time. I made mention of the works that I have read before the start of this project in the previous post, so I wont rehash that here, but in my preparation for, in the waiting for the delivery of certain works to come in the mail or through I-Share, I still ha