Random Number Lit

Henri Michaux represents a particular type of problem that is woven into the fabric of this project. What is essentially at stake here in a project like this is that I will have a passing understanding of a lot of things and try as hard as I can to bring within myself the ability to know very little about a lot of things. This works for Abelard's letters which are as they state themselves to be. This works for the Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong which is a straight forward retelling of the history of her country from a very speciifc experience. This approach does not work for Faulkner or what we have in front us now, Henri Michaux.  First the problem was what to read. As I may state often in this project, the effort itself took and continues to take a great deal of forethought to make sure what I am doing is even remotely worthwhile. So far I think that it is, but that isn't to say that there are no wrinkles in the rug so to speak. When I put together the big book list, I realized tha...

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 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...