Random Number Lit

 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 wanted start this blog post with just some quotes from the book that jumped out at me as I was reading them. With no apparent context, these simply just grabbed me at the time. How better to begin a post about Faulkner than to let his words speak for themselves.    “not against the wilderness but against the land, not in pursuit and lust but in relinquishment, and in the commissary as it should have been, not the heart perhaps but certainly the solar-plexus of the repudiated and relinquished: the square, galleried, wooden building squatting like a portent above the fields whose laborers it still held in thrall ’65 or no and placarded over with advertisements for snuff and cures for chills and slaves and potions manufactured and sold by white men to bleach the pigment and straighten the hair of negroes that they might resemble the very race which for two hundred years had held them in bondage and from which for another hundred years not even a bloody civil war would set them ...

I finished Browne's Religio Medici some time ago now, right at the start of the year. I pulled it due to a little controversy as I found that I had started working through the Anonymous Forest for some of those more obscure titles and trying configure how they might fit into my lists. I will continuously find little errors in this list compilation, and I don't want a repeat of the Philip Sidney issue so I thougth how am I going to address these concerns. With Thomas Browne, I thought I wanted to find the document that I should read from him before I got there as his name was tied up with a collection of sorts I think. However it happened, I pulled the name on the Big Book list and was forced to confront Religio Medici  which was fantastic.  The story of how Religio Medici came to be is fascinating in and of itself. It seems from my very minor research on these topics, that Thomas Browne was a well thought of writer and thinker of his time, but he had decided after university t...

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...

 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 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...