Monday, December 7, 2009
Catch-22
My first impressions: it's actually funny! I think it's pretty hard to write a funny book. Terry Pratchett does well at it, but the classics aren't usually known for their giggle factor. I didn't know much about Catch-22 going into the book, but I was pleasantly surprised. For those who don't know, it's a satire about the fictional army of a fictional country circa WWII. The plot is scattered and convoluted, but in a good way... if that makes any sense.
I don't typically enjoy novels that are difficult to follow, but this is an exception. It's cliche, but this is a book that makes you think. Not just about grand themes and morals (maybe I'll get to that part later), but more along the lines of, "What the hell is going on?" In a good way.
If you like historical fiction, funny names, and political (well, military) satire, then I suggest this novel! Also, silly me, I didn't realize that the phrase "catch-22" came from the book, not the other way around. So far, Joseph Heller is an amusing, thought-provoking, and somewhat frustrating author. In a good way. I promise.
Monday, August 10, 2009
The first step is always the hardest
- War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
2. 1984 – George Orwell
3. Ulysses – James Joyce
4. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
6. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
7. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
8. The Illiad and the Odyssey – Homer
9. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
10. Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
11. Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
12. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
13. Middlemarch – George Eliot
14. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
15. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
16. Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
17. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
18. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
19. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
20. Beloved – Toni Morrison
21. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
22. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
23. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
24. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
25. Native Son – Richard Wright
26. Democracy in America – Alexis de Tocqueville
27. On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
28. The Histories – Herodatus
29. The Social Contract – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
30. Das Kapital – Karl Marx
31. The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli
32. Confessions – St. Augustine
33. Leviathan – Thomas Hobbs
34. The Histories of the Peloponnesian War – Thucydides
35. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
36. Winnie-the-Pooh – A.A. Milne
37. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
38. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
39. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
40. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
41. The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Edition
42. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
43. Light in August – William Faulkner
44. The Souls of Black Folk – W.E.B. Du Bois
45. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
46. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
47. Paradise Lost – John Milton
48. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
49. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
50. King Lear – William Shakespeare
51. Othello – William Shakespeare
52. Sonnets – William Shakespeare
53. Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
54. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
55. Kim – Rudyard Kipling
56. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
57. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
58. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
59. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
60. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
61. Animal Farm – George Orwell
62. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
63. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
64. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
65. Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
66. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
67. As I Lay Dying – Willilam Faulkner
68. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
69. I, Claudius – Robert Graves
70. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
71. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
72. All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
73. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin
74. Charlotte’s Webb – E.B. White
75. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
76. Night – Elie Wiesel
77. Rabbit, Run – John Updike
78. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
79. Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
80. An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
81. The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West
82. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
83. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
84. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
85. Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
86. The Interpretation of Dreams – Sigmund Freud
87. The Education of Henry Adams – Henry Adams
88. Quotations from Chairman Mao – Mao Zedong
89. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature – William James
90. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
91. Silent Spring – Rachel Carson
92. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money – John Maynard Keyes
93. Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
94. Goodbye to All That – Robert Graves
95. The Affluent Society – John Kenneth Galbraith
96. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
97. The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Alex Haley and Malcolm X
98. Eminent Victorians – Lytton Strachey
99. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
100. The Second World War (The Gathering Storm; Their Finest Hour; The Grand Alliance; The Hinge of Fate; Triumph and Tragedy) – Winston Churchill
For starters, I'm eliminating two works from this list: Lord of the Flies and Hamlet. The only reason for this is that I've read both of these books within the past two years. I'm more interested in reading new things than revisiting something I read so recently.
Now, to begin! I rolled the dice this evening and the first number up is... 19!
Catch-22 it is!
1
100 of the Greatest Books Ever Written
On August 9, 2009, I decided I'd like to read them.
I like to fancy myself a writer, but to be honest, I've had a horrible case of writer's block for... oh, about three years. With young adult phenomenons like the Harry Potter and Twilight series convincing everyone to start reading again, I figure I might actually have a chance at accomplishing my dream: to become a
Let's be honest here folks, it's a rare person that reads the classics by choice. Most people wade drearily through novels like War and Peace and The Catcher in the Rye. I know that in my high school days, I would rather drown myself than read one more line of Heart of Darkness or Invisible Man. Now that I'm in college, there are fewer Bronte sisters and Hemingways to torture me. They've been replaced by new tormentors like Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.
However, being ever the optimist and forever a believer in positive thinking (imagine your own sarcasm please), perhaps these lengthy and tumultuous works of fiction and non-fiction will be better stomached by a free mind. A mind open to the power of choice and thirsty for new knowledge. Disenchanted by everything from our government to my sparse refrigerator, I'm ready to embark on a journey of wisdom! This time, wrought by my own hand, and not that of overzealous English teachers and jaded literature professors!
I must take care, though. The path will be full of dangers--dark forms seeking to lead me astray, but mostly my own fears at taking on such monsters as William Faulkner and Ulysses. I'm a realist and I know how my mind works. I must be cautious in my methods. Leave myself too much freedom and I'll happily jump into old favorites like The Great Gatsby and new wonders like Wide Sargasso Sea. I need a fool-proof (and cheat-proof) way of deciding the order of these books. I could always start from the very beginning, but what fun is that? Besides, who would want to start such a perilous journey with War and Peace? I could start at the end, but how much more daunting does that make my task seem? Better to use a method of randomness. One that I can't argue with, but one familiar enough to trust in. Being a complete and utter nerd, I always keep dice handy for the unexpected game of D&D. Dice: the perfect companion in my journey. They will surely keep me on my toes.
And so it begins. One average (though somewhat embittered) college student, 100 of the Greatest Books Ever Written (though this is always arguable), and one pair of bright teal dice. Reading is cool again, so let the madness begin!