Bleak House

Charles Dickens

A long, interminable, mindnumbingly infuriating, suicide-inducing court case screws up a family and leaves everyone's lives in ruin. That's pretty much Bleak House. The only good thing that happens for the first 4/5s of the book is the reunion of a minor character and his mother. Everything else is, well, bleak. Esther is the main character. She's the right hand lady of Ada. Ada and Richard are involved in the lawsuit of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. They are introduced to each other and the suit by the benevolent John Jarndyce. John tries to shield them from the fools gold of a court victory. Guess how well that plan works.

Bad stuff starts happening after Richard and Ada fall in love. Richard is a slacker, Esther gets sick, some philanthropists are jerks, Richard obsesses about Jarndyce, a kid dies, Esther is disfigured because of her illness, not great times. There are some notable minor characters in the novel. The Mrs. Jellyby, who care more about saving Africa than her own family, Miss Flight who's attended Jarndyce sessions forever.

This thing really takes a long time to get its legs. Once it does, though, there's a lot of good stuff. Esther and her mom, Richard's descent into obsession, John and Esther's relationship, all interesting and the theme of the injustice of the justice system is everywhere.

Rating: 6/10 Too long, conflict and drama not all that dramatic.

Herzog

Saul Bellow (1915-1905)

Reading this book made me feel like I was back in grad school. There were times when I'd sit in a small classroom with seven or eight other students and a professor and feel profoundly dumb. I'm not talking about how I felt in math class where I didn't care whether I knew what was going on, I was legitimately interested in the subject matter and tried to understand it and still had no clue what other people were talking about. Saul Bellow's command of language and a turn of phrase is something at which to marvel. His knowledge base is vast. He delves into psychology, history, sociology, literature, all in telling the tale of Moses E. Herzog. The narrator is omniscient, but has the voice of someone who could have been friends with Moses or perhaps even Moses looking at his own life. Much of the story is told through Moses's letters that he writes to just about everyone but never sends.

We meet Moses after his second wife, Maddy, has left him for former friend Valentine Gersbach. Moses is an academic with lots of knowledge, a relatively impressive career but he's fallen on hard times. His letters touch on his personal relationships, the direction of the country and society as a whole and most notably his nostalgia for the his upbringing in Montreal and Chicago. It's a tribute to Bellow that there really isn't any action in the entire novel. Moses, in his darkest hour, a time where he finds clarity in his life, nearly rocks the boat, but he backs off. Most of what the reader gets is up in Moses's head. There are a ton of real show stopping lines, the kind of phrase that makes you think, "I could have never thought of that in 100 years."

RATING: 7.5/10 Not much action but lots of good writing.

The Way We Live Now

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

Financial crisis, celebrity maneuverings, wild parties, suspicious deaths: is it 2009? nope it's "The Way We Live Now," a book way ahead of its time. Does that make it great? no, not really. There are a bunch of characters, Melmotte, his wife and daughter, Lady Carbury, Felix Carbury, Hetta Carbury and on and on. None of these characters are very likable. Those who are wise seem to be conniving cheats, and those who are innocent seem to be naive and dumb. Melmotte plays the market and inflates stocks by his guile. The stodgy English gents don't perceive Melmotte's financial genius and anticipate huge gains no matter what the real situation is.

There are many interpersonal relationships, Hurtle/Montague etc. but this book is about society and the perception of wealth. When finances get screwed up everything goes wrong. A good book for out times, but not particularly entertaining.

Book Ratings: 5/10

Update

Just went through the list and I've read 161 of the more than 1400 Penguin Classics. I also have only reviewed about 40 of them. That's pretty lame of me. Granted I read many of the classics before I started this blog. Over the next week I'm going to pound out some reviews of stuff that I read a long time ago. They're going to be more my impressions of the works more than detailed summaries, but maybe that will be better.

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoyevski (1821-1881)

A grating religious fanatic, an ultrasnobby intellectual, and a prick army officer: these are the Brothers Karamazov. This is said to be one of the greatest examinations of psychology in literature, well I'll do some psychology right here, if you like this book you need some serious meds.

Books about exciting subjects, like the murder of a hated father and the rivalry between sons culminating in a dramatic trial, should not be boring (See Dick, Moby). The book opens with Alyosha (the religious guy) and his mentor Zosima. We get their philosophy for about 300 pages. It's very boring. Nothing happens. Dosty tells us about God, man's morality etc. when he could have easily shown us these things with the characters' actions.

Dmitri is the jerk soldier who fights people and is trying to get with a whore named Grushenka. He's an ahole like his father who is also trying to get with Grushenka.

Honestly I don't really want to review this book it was so bad. Philosophy is great in a philosophy book. When you try and jam it down my throat and ruin a decent story it doesn't work. Brothers Karamazov has seized last place in the Classics I've read so far. Congrats Wizard of Oz, you are off the hook!

Rating 1/10. Barely got through this one. The bad news is that this book was horrible. The worse news is that there are 6 more Dostoyevsky titles on the list.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

L Frank Baum (1856-1919)

Let me start this post by saying that I love kids' books. Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time, all great reads. You want to know what's not a great read? The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The characters are shallow, the action is frequent but glossed over, the lessons are nowhere to be found. This is the rare occasion when the film is better than the book, and not just because of the effects or the music. The story itself is superior in every way. There is little setup in the book before the tornado lifts Dorothy and Toto out of drab Kansas (this part of the story is accurate, Kansas is incredibly boring) and deposits them in Oz. Uncle Henry is kind of a dick and Aunt Em is a broken woman. There are no smiling farm helpers who become the trio of fellow travelers in Oz.
Next Munchkin Land is crappy compared to the '39 film version. The wicked witch of the west doesn't present herself until 100 pages in. Baum's hope that readers will suspend their belief on the lifelike characteristics given to the scarecrow (he could see once his eyes were painted on) didn't work with me. The tinman and his enchanted ax which kept chopping off his legs just made me think that he was really dumb in human form. The lion was actually the only thing cooler in the book version. He roars and is actually a lion.
Let me take that back, the flying monkeys are also pretty rad. They had to obey the golden cap because of some really lame story dealing with a princess and dropping a guy in a river. But they fly around and pretty much kick whoever's ass needs kicking. But when you have a lame story that feel patched together and then you supplement that with lame side stories, something is wrong.
Once the wizard is defrocked it turns out he's just some clown from Omaha and he has no real powers, he'd fit right in living in 2009 Omaha. After many travails and more miles of walking it turns out Dorothy could have just tapped her silver slippers any time to be sent home. Pretty weak that the first good witch decided to keep that fact to herself. Dorothy is sent back to her Kansas home, a house rebuilt, and a happy Auntie Em. Oz was not the result of a concussion, it was a real place.
As for the theory that the book is a metaphor for the silver coining crisis of the late 1800s, if it is so it's very shabbily done. Maybe every character has a parallel in the political fray, but what lesson do we learn?

Rating 1/10: This book should be immediately stricken from the classics.

The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

It seems like a bad idea to write a book about thoroughly unlikable people and make it boring until the last fifty pages. Well, it isn't the best strategy but the end of The House of Mirth is so redemptive that Edith Wharton manages to salvage a classic out of a social book of manners. Lily Bart is the socialite who is always the belle of the ball. She isn't rich, but she is cultured, mannered, desirable, and beautiful. She is nearing thirty, but retains her youthful charm and is still useful to the movers and shakers of turn of the century New York. Herein lies Lily's dilemma. She wants, needs, to keep her place in the circle of the rich. She wants to exceed the wealth of those around her. She has a few chances to make this leap, but she sabotages them for two reasons. First, she is in love with Larry Seldon, a relatively poor lawyer of middling means who lampoons high society and the desire for riches. Lily can't bring herself to commit to a life of upper middle class drudgery so she turns him down. This relationship ruins her chances with the uber rich Percy Gryce. Second, Lily always thinks there will be another man around the corner because of her manifold charms. She gets over Percy, she screws up a chance with a European prince. Well, these chances run out.

The problems start when she gets in debt to the douchey Gus Treanor. She thinks he's investing some cash for her, he thinks he's cutting checks to her for some extramarital hanky panky. This scandalous relationship with no scandal starts Lily into a string of messy relationships that, through machinations of a richer, more devious woman, gets her booted from her beloved society. Finally, things get interesting. It is during Lily's torturous fall from grace that we get to see more than the "It Girl" persona that we got before. Her decisions are more complicated, and they tell us more about what she truly values. She becomes a drug addict, fails to support herself at a hat shop, moves to increasingly seedy lodgings, and finally comes to a moment of decision.

Lily has love letters from the devious married woman who screwed her over, Berth Dorsett. Lily could use them for blackmail, which she has justified to herself, problem is the letters are to her love, Larry Seldon. At her most desperate moment she returns to Seldon, intent on extorting the cash needed to pay off her debt to Treanor and reestablish her in more favorable circles. After a heart to heart she chucks the letters into the fire and leaves, believing a reboot of her relationship with Seldon is impossible and perhaps undesirable. On her way home through Manhattan she bumps into Nettie, a girl she helped get healthy years ago by paying for her trip out west. Nettie idolizes Lily and lets her rest in her apartment and hold her baby. This act seems to ground Lily and make her happy for the first time in months.

When she returns to her crappy boarding house she gets a long awaited inheritance check for $10K. She debates whether to keep the money and remain under the cloud debt or to pay everything off and live in poverty, her nightmare. She cuts checks to her debtors and goes to bed. Although exhausted her mind races and she can't make it stop. She takes a big shot of her sleeping drug and drifts away, her last thought about a word that would make everything right between her and Seldon.

The next morning Seldon heads over to Lily's, ready to reconcile after the change he saw in her the night before. When he arrives he finds a crowd and Lily dead. As Seldon and his cousin Gerty sit in the room with Lily's body they examine the remnants of her life. He finds that she chose to pay off her debts and realizes that she was much more than a money hunter. As he embraces her he thinks of the word that would make everything alright between them.

Rating 6.5/10: I was really bored at many points in the novel. I didn't like the characters or Wharton's writing. When Lily was finally forced to confront her future things really turned around.

PS Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart? Casting director must have been high.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

Anybody who uses "Uncle Tom" as a disparaging remark should be immediately required to read this novel. I know he doesn't revolt and lead a Nat Turner-esque ass-kicking rampage against even the cruelest slaveholder. But look at his life, his devotion to his family and faith and what they caused. George becomes an abolitionist, Legree pretty much kills himself, and an entire nation of readers were forced to think about how awful slavery was. Uncle Tom's Cabin was the second best selling book on the 19th Century. It spawned an outrageously popular stage play and was hotly debated all over the United States.  

What Stowe gives us is a heart-wrenchingly, quick moving, dual narrative which follows George and his wife Eliza and Tom. George and Eliza flee north when it becomes apparent that their owners are going to sell their son. Tom decides to stay. 

Many of the stereotypes of African Americans grew out of the novel and plays. But what we see is enslaved people who are people. They are good, they are bad, they are immature, they are heros, they are faithful, they are atheists, they are smart, they are dumb. They are very human. Stowe also gives them agency. The enslaved and the owners are in a constant struggle for power. Tom's power resides in his extraordinary Christianity and it's affect on lazy, basically good owners, and evil owners. And that's Stowe's message: Christianity and love will end slavery. She might have been partially right. Her book galvanized the North in such a way that they had the courage to stand up to the Fugitive Slave Law and Southern bullying. 

Besides George, Eva is the other youth in whom Stowe invests higher powers of observation and a sense of justice. Her death is heart wrenching. Stowe endows George and Eva with the power to change things. I think she gave up on the current generation of slaveholders and abolitionists, the future depended on which way the youngest would break.

Rating 10/10: Great great read. Exciting, engaging, and a look into daily life during slavery. What every historian of the era tries to elucidate comes through in touching humanity here. 

Moby Dick

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

Alright, I read this a while ago so the plot details are not as fresh in my mind as I like. I do know one thing, there's a lot about whales. A whole lot. Whatever you want to call them: whales, leviathans, the great fish or any other of the numerous names Melville gives the big sea creatures, you'll learn about them in Moby Dick. And this is the problem. The story is awesome.  Ishmael is a great narrator. He's funny, he can spin a great action scene, he's a great relator of character and scene, he gets himself into dramatic situations, and he's got pretty much every different conflict you could want. His buddy Queequeg is maybe the coolest guy we've encountered in the classics so far. So Moby Dick is a masterpiece, right? A work of "can't put it down" literature to rival anything else I've ever read? Nope.

Quite simply about 45% of Moby Dick is really really boring. Our boy Ishmael decides he needs to prove he knows about whales and boy does he ever. We learn about every kind of whale, where they live, how to hunt them, their anatomy, and on and on and on. It just gets to be way too much. The character studies of Captain Ahab, Queequag, and the rest of the crew are brilliant and engrossing, but when they're separated by fifty pages about whale blubber you tend to get bogged down. But there is a lot of good.

Through the relationship between Queequag and Ishmael we get a look at mid-19th Century race and class relations. The book is genuinely funny at some points. Ahab is a fascinating (if over the top) character. The sea and the whale are front and center characters. Ahab's quest for the whale is all consuming and consumes the reader. I read the novel as a narrative about a guy chasing a whale at the expense of everything and everyone in his life, not as some metaphor for our desperate chase of the unattainable. Why do I not delve into these philosophical questions? Because Melville tells me not to!!

"So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory."

So maybe this is why we get so much info on whales, because otherwise people wouldn't believe a word of it. I also appreciate Melville saying this is NOT an allegory, it's about a guy chasing down an asshole whale. If you're a good enough writer (Melville is) then you don't have to shoehorn metaphors and symbolism into a novel, they just happen because we can relate to the experience of the characters. 

Rating 6.5/10: Too much whale talk = too boring for me. Let me edit this thing down to a tight 400 pages and we can talk. I like Melville's short stories better. 

This Side of Paradise

F. Scott Fitzgerald. (1896-1940)

Francis wrote Paradise in 1919 during a summer spent drinking in Minnesota, he was 22. That makes me want to go suck on an exhaust pipe. Seriously, this guy breaks up with Zelda, heads to St. Paul, gets Christmas Hammed on Martinis every night and he churns out a masterpiece which sets him on a path for literary greatness. Maybe the oppressive Nebraska humidity melted made me sweat all my potential away. Whatever the case, Paradise is pretty damn interesting.

Amory Blaine is our main character and by all accounts he's a doppleganger of Francis himself. Amory is spoiled from birth by a mother who wants him to be a societal charmer rather than a normal kid. He heads to Princeton and finds his way to fit in with all the preppy kids who generally go to Princeton. They carouse and live a privileged life on their campus and during their jaunts to Manhattan and other regional locales. One such drunken excursion ends in the death of a revered classmate on dark country roads. This incident haunts Amory for years. Our protagonist meets Isabelle and falls in love, but is rejected as the US enters WWI.

The war is treated as interlude, that is very lightly. The aftermath of the carnage is plain to see in the characters. Fitz may have cobbled together Paradise from previous shorter works. But the change in tone in the second half works beautifully. Instead of the smooth prose of the first book we get a dramatic form, just character lines to start book two. It is here we meet Amory's second love, Rosalind. Ros is pretty much a clone of Amory with one difference, she is rich and his fortune is pretty much shot. They fall for each other but she won't marry him (Can you plagiarize your own life? This is FSF and Zelda (Also who knew that's how you spell "plagiarize"?)). She ends up dumping him and marrying some rich guy. In the meantime Amory is looking for something to bring meaning to his life. There is discussion of religion, friendship, and loyalty. This is most prominent during a mess he got into with one of his buddies and a drunken floozie at a hotel. Instead of letting his friend take the fall for crossing state lines for immoral purposes with a girl, Amory takes the blame and is written up in the papers. 

As the novel ends we have a steadily increasing flow of Amory's poems and a feeling of his despondence. The war and the materialistic yearnings of Rosalind have disillusioned the poor kid. Amory leaves us with this sad line, "I know myself, but that is all-". 

Rating 8/10: I'm a sucker for anything in the 1910s. Here we see the makings of the preppie northeastern culture that has taken over today. If they made a film as a modern take on Paradise Vampire Weekend has to be the soundtrack. This is only the second FSF book I've read. I've also read four short stories (B. Button, The Ice Palace, Bernice Bobs Her Hair, and The Offshore Pirate). Gatsby is my least favorite of all these. I found that novel relatively bland and joyless compared to Paradise and the stories which pop with life.