Random Number Lit

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...

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 ...

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...

  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 tex...

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...