...

Things I have learned about D.H. Lawrence from reading his autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers:

1. He had a creepy Oedipus complex, and wasn't afraid to write about it in all its creepy Freudian glory.

2. His books are kind of dirty.

3. He is incapable of writing about love except in terms of "irritation" "dislike" "waves of hatred" and just plain "hate." It is not interesting. It is annoying. It is exactly the same thing he did in Women in Love. I understand hate being the flip side of love, but it's not the only way to love. And Lawrence seems to think it is. This must be because it is not his characters who are emotionally stunted, but Lawrence himself.

4. If Lady Chatterly's Lover has the same problem-- if I have to read one more love scene that has hate and irritation and dislike in every paragraph-- I am going to be driven utterly mad.

5. Did I mention the creepy, creepy Oedipus stuff? Did I mention it is pretty fascinating?

Quote: "In the morning it was not the same. They had known, but she could not keep the moment. She wanted it again; she wanted something permanent. This that had been between them might never be again' he night leave her. She had not got him; she was not satisfied. She had been there, but she had not gripped the-- the something-- she knew not what-- which she was made to have." (351)

This is another one of those books that I appreciated intellectually, but not emotionally. I didn't enjoy reading it for the most part (although I am glad I read it, and like it more in retrospect) and I wasn't really engaged with the story until the end. It was hard to get in the mood to read about a rotting corpse, you know? I hated the names of the characters so much, which is such a ridiculous criticism, but it just annoyed me in that way small things can irritate you for no rational reason. I am aware this undermines any credibility I may have as an intellectual. Oh well.

On the other hand! I liked Vardaman's bits a lot, after he stopped bugging the hell out of me in the beginning. I liked his monologues about the buzzards and his brothers and sister-- just their rhythm. I think I liked being inside Vardaman's head, once his initial wild grief passed. I liked Cash. I almost liked Dewey Dell, if she didn't have that name. I certainly felt for her at the end. I liked the impressionistic style, even when people were thinking things that seemed jarring-- the sudden use of sophisticated language and metaphor in the middle of a bunch of colloquial rambling. On the one hand it seems sloppy, and on the other hand I can see how our minds are capable of both types of thought without any transition.

I read some of the criticism, which helped me appreciate the book's importance. The narrative structure is interesting, the symbolism is miles-deep, and the writing style is unique. It's fascinating the way each character is associated with an object and filters his or her grief through it-- I do so love a good symbol. I also like the way Faulkner shows the gulf between interior and exterior reality.

Quote: "He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear." (172)

Completed 7.16.3

So Evelyn is a guy and George is a girl. Got it.

The Catholic theme of this book very much hit home with me, because of my Catholic upbringing. It pissed me off. Throwing away your whole life's happiness for the sake of some stupid religion and its inane rules... I can't stomach it.

I liked the book and the story, but I really don't see why it's considered so phenomenal, except that it rings very true about youthful love and passion, and doesn't shy away from the fact that this passion is so often same-sex. The writing itself is only sporadically great, though, and Charles himself (like so many protagonists) is a cipher. I see the point of doing that, it happens all the time in literature, even wonderful literature, but it still drives me mad every single time.

And Sebastian is insufferable-- but a good character; we've all known a Sebastian or two. And I loved pious Cordelia, paradoxical though it may be. And all the scenes on the ship, from a dramatic POV, were fabulous.

Quote: "These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and a sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning." (right at the beginning of Part II, page unknown)

Completed 5/28/3

I have fallen in love with Henry James. I do barely prefer Wings of the Dove, but only because the language is more complex. I never thought I'd long for those convoluted sentences of his, but it was rather an adventure to decipher them! Anyway, I got halfway through this book before I realized how much I was pulling for Isabel Archer and figuring everything would work out for the best in the end. Then I realized I was reading a Henry James novel and was all, "oh, fuck."

I love the names of the characters in this book. They are all aptronymic! (I just learned that word, aptronym. It means a name well-suited to its owner. Like Goodwood and Archer and Stackpole.) I tore through this book because I couldn't wait to find out what happened. And I read some passages with my heart in my throat, like Gilbert Osmond's speech about how he and Isabel were as close as a candlestick and a snuffer. The whole book was like a noose tightening, tightening. Ominous clouds gathering. I loved it.

Quote: "It may be affirmed without delay that Isabel was probably very liable to the sin of self-esteem; she often surveyed with complacency the field of her own nature; she was in the habit of taking for granted, on scanty evidence, that she was right; she treated herself to occasions of homage." (50)

Completed 5.16.3

Well, I am sold on Henry James. I adored this book. When I first started it, I was like, "Uh, so, Henry James. Those sentences. Does he do it on purpose? What's the deal there?" Parsing his sentences is not the world's simplest task, but you do get used to it. And it's worth it, because when James starts to unravel the psychological intricacies of his characters, it's magnificent. I seriously couldn't put this book down. So vivid and rich and haunting and human. I already want to re-read it.

Quote: "It was a conspiracy of silence, as the cliche went, to which no one had made an exception, the great smudge of mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain and horror, finding in no quarter a surface of spirit or of speech that consented to reflect it." (440)

Completed 5/10/3

My question of the day (after spending three months reading this book and all its annotations) is this: Why use Ishmael as a narrator? It works up to a point, and then you have scenes (like the wonderful one where Starbuck considers murdering Ahab) that Ishmael could not possibly have described. It seems clumsy, and it is getting in the way of my respect for the text. I am trying to see a point to it, but alas.

I found a lot in this book to love. Individual chapters, passages, paragraphs, characters, images. It's a little sprawling, maybe slightly too sprawling, but I forgive it that. It's a little choppy as well; while some chapters are shot-through-the-heart wonderful, others seem superfluous. But the wonderful bits eclipse the other considerations, especially when read aloud, so I forgive that too. The language is just too gorgeous.

Beaver's annotations are interesting-- Professor President remembered him as "the guy who found all the homosexual symbolism" and that's certainly true. I wish his notes had been a little more fleshed out (it still bothers me that he didn't even translate the crucial Latin in the harpoon baptism scene-- I mean, I could read it, but that hardly seems something he should assume of his readers). There are a lot of notes that made me roll my eyes-- since Stubb is the inverse of Starbuck, and Stubb is a bass, then Starbuck is a halibut. Huh? But there's a lot of great material in the notes too, and although it did add 400 pages to my reading, it was more interesting than frustrating.

Quote: "All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side." (387)

Completed 4.30.3

Boy, it's been a while since I finished this book. So in retrospect ("all spect is retrospect"), here is my take. I think about this book with fondness. It was really good, then got a little strange, made me terribly sad, and then ended up good again. Some scenes stick out in my head (the Sam/Tracy scenes, the Hitler cover, Joe's magic career), the characters are still vivid and memorable, and I love how the title takes on an entirely new meaning at the end of the book. Wow, this book is even better in retrospect. I keep remembering more and more about it that I loved.

Quote: "As they made their way up through the increasing gloom, Joe seemed to steer only according to the light shed by the action of her palm against his wrist, by the low steady flow of voltage through the conducting medium of their sweat. He stumbled like a drunken man and laughed as she hurried him along. he was vaguely aware of the ache in his hand, but he ignored it. As they turned the landing to the top floor, a strand of her hair caught in the corner of his mouth, and for an instant he crunched it between his teeth." (246)

Completed ?

This book was from the Gay and Lesbian reading list, and I can see why it was so meaningful to the gay community. Based on a story of two women who made a life for themselves as pioneers, it's a lovely little fairy tale. But the quintessential teen-lesbian-love novel, Annie on my Mind moved me much more-- I've carted it around from place to place with me for years. I care more about the characters. One event in this book is that Patience fails Sarah, and then after that, acts annoyingly superior to her. Left a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the book. I don't know. It's a quick read. I appreciate its place on the list, but I would much rather have read the biography of the real-life women instead. The fictional ones are less compelling.

Quote: "I rolled over to my back, to make whatever she might want easy for her, and looked at her face, and stayed very still and quiet." (188)

Completed 10.26.02

I've tried to read a couple other Woolf books, but they stalled. This one was wonderful from the get-go. It simply travels from one character's mind to another's during this one particular day, seeing how their perceptions meet up and how they differ-- among other things. I was frankly surprised when Clarissa Dalloway was outed at the very beginning as a woman in love with another woman, and how that affected my perspective on Peter, the man who is in love with her and has an incorrect opinion of her. At the same time, it does examine a microcosm of London society-- fun to see which character represents what. A fascinating book, with characters to care about, and her sentences are delightful to unravel. Quite a read.

Quote: "And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one's friends were attached to one's body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of hells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider's thread is blotted with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down." (170)

Completed 11.16.2

My first question is: does he write all his books like this? Because if not, wow. I mean, wow regardless, but the voice is so incredibly powerful, and the way that he structures the narrative, with Padma sort of overseeing everything, a story within a story... really amazing. All that said, I did not adore this book the way so many of my friends did. It didn't flow for me, and I didn't like Saleem-- I know you're not supposed to, but it was difficult for me to get past it. I admired this book, but did not love it.

Quote: "All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity canhope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things..." (161) [I would quote the rest of this sentence, but it goes on and on, as he is wont to do, gloriously.]

Completed 10.26.02

This is a great book, and I love that it is written by a woman. Eliot really knows how to create a vivid character: Dorothea, Casaubon, Bustrode, Rosamond, Lydgate, Mary Garth. Every character is so brilliantly sketched, they just jump to life off the page. I love Dorothea completely, her flawed idealism and her passion... she's up there with Elizabeth Bennet in the pantheon of great female characters. And Eliot gives us this great sense of ironic compassion for her most unappealing characters. I have no idea why it took me so long to read this book; I devoured the last 100 pages. I clearly must read it again.

Quote: "Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best. 'The theatre of all my actions is fallen,' said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best." (236)

Completed 7.30.2

It's interesting that he gave the evil dad guy the same name as himself. His life story is pretty interesting too, and it adds quite a bit to the enjoyment of the novel, I think. I guess it is an interesting book, although a lot of the characters were not likeable. Alyosha, the hero, is interesting, though. Can you tell my brain completely fried on this book? I have no idea what to say. I used "interesting" four times in this paragraph.

Quote (a hallucinated devil is speaking): "My fondest wish is to be able to incarnate myself once and for all into some two-hundred-pound merchant's wife and to believe seriously in all those things that she believes in. My ideal is to go to church, light a candle, and offer up a prayer in utmost sincerity. I swear this is true." (768)

Completed 4.10.02

I get what all the fuss is about now. Vonnegut is incredible. This book left me wanting more at the end (to know how certain things turned out, or hear more about certain scenes.) Of course, the lack of a conclusion is the entire point of the book. This jumping in and out of various scenes in Billy's life is exactly what he sets up at the beginning of the book: it adds up to a life somehow. "It's just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string..." Vonnegut breaks the illusion. And I'm not explaining it very well, but it's fascinating.

Quote: "He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards...When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, seperating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work."

Completed 12.06.02

Finally finished this. I really enjoyed it. The characters of Kitty, Anna, Levin and Vronsky are so vivid and interesting, and the two intertwining stories really contrast well. I like how Anna and Levin are going through the same sort of test, and one of them fails and the other succeeds. I don't know if that was part of the point or not, though.

Quote: "He felt that he could not avert people's hatred from himself, because that hatred was caused not by his being bad (in that case he could have tried to be better), but because he was disgracefully and disgustingly unhappy. He knew that for that, for the very reason that his heart was lacerated, they would be merciless to him. He felt that people would destroy him, as dogs tear the throat out of some crippled dog that is whining with pain." (509)

Completed 2.19.02

I hated A Passage to India when I read it as an undergrad, so I expected to hate this book, but I didn't, I loved it. I loved Margaret, which made all the difference for me (I hated everyone in Passage). Reading it slowly (practically a paragraph at a time) allowed me to savor the profound thoughts on the human condition that are sprinkled throughout. The intrusive narrator is an interesting move as well. I happen to have Passage lying around, and it's on the list, so I'm going to give it another go.

Quote: "'Yes, I see, dear; it's about halfway between,' Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous exertions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility."

Completed 12.06.01

Beautiful set of books-- although I prefered LOTR to The Hobbit. Sam made me cry at the end of Two Towers and again all through Return of the King. I love Sam, and his relationship with Frodo, and when he sees the "oliphaunt." I have to say that fantasy is not exactly my favorite genre, but I did like these books. Aragorn is a great character. I am glad I have read them before the movie, because now I have an image of Frodo and Bilbo and Sam that the movie can't take away!

Quote: "'Then what shall we do now?' said Gimli. 'We cannot pursue them through the whole fastness of Fangorn... If we do not find them soon, we shall be of no use to them, except to sit down beside them and show our friendship by starving together.'

'If that is indeed all we can do, then we must do that,' said Aragorn. 'Let us go on.'" (480)

Completed 9.15.01

I thought I had updated this page way back when I finished this book, but I guess not. And I've already taken it back to the library! Anyway, I haven't read "House of Mirth" but I've seen the film, and it seems like this is basically the same storyline. Except without Wharton's amazing prose. (This is really unfair, because Flaubert apparently agonized over the musicality of each and every line he wrote-- but I don't read French, so it's lost in the translation.) I like having read this-- it's one of the first "realistic" or "modern" novels ever written and it is therefore important. But ultimately, the story is just depressing.

Quote: None.

Completed 6.29.01

A nun that I had for a teacher every year in high school tried to get us to read this book. I hated that nun, and I always held it against Willa Cather and My Antonia. I'm such a twit. I didn't love this the way I loved Death Comes for the Archbishop, but I did love it. I was really slow on the uptake about Cather being a lesbian, but it makes for some interesting contemplation of the book when one finally reads the introduction (at the end-- I hate when they spoil the story) and reads between the lines of her "longtime friendship" with a woman, and her perpetually unmarried state. (I knew Archbishop was on a gay literature list, but I thought this was because of the homoerotic subtext, not because, duh, Cather was gay.) The story of a pioneer girl with whom the protagonist, Jim Burden, grows up, is largely autobiographical. But I guess Cather couldn't really write about the way she loved this girl without making her stand-in a male. I was impressed with her ability to write as a man-- I was totally immersed in the book and believed the voice utterly, like with Memoirs of a Geisha. It was only afterwards that I was able to view it as a literary accomplishment.

Quote: "I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great." (14) (I didn't know it when I chose this quote, but Willa Cather has that last sentence etched on her tombstone.)

Completed 7.30.01

I've read this book before, but it's on the list, so I re-read it. It's absolutely a beautiful, powerful, quietly uplifting, moving story. I've never seen the movie, but I really need to. And it only took me a few hours to read. And that's all I have to say about that.

Quote: "I love children, say Sofia. But all the colored women that say they love yours is lying. They don't love Reynolds Stanley any more than I do. But if you so badly raised as to ast 'em, what you expect them to say? Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin." (272)

Completed 6.29.01

A little over 500 pages, this book still took me an inordinately long time to read, it seems. I could never really get into it-- although the flashback format is a logical way to structure the story and has the advantage of breaking up long stretches of horrifying Auschwitz stories, it still breaks up the narrative flow over and over again. It is hard to get into reading it, because he keeps juxtaposing modern-day life with concentration camp horrors-- I get the point, of course, but it's a slow read nonetheless. That said, it's a haunting, arresting story. It's easy to see why Sophie, tormented by guilt, would be drawn to the abusive Nathan. Stingo isn't always sympathetic (he frequently acts like an idiot) but he's interesting, and his status as a frustrated virgin is a neat counterpoint to Sophie's lustful abandon. I guess it's hard to focus on one aspect of this book because it's so rich and dense.

Quote: "I mean it when I say that no chaste and famished grail-tormented Christian knight could have gazed with more slack-jawed admiration at the object of his quest than I did at the first glimpse of Sophie's bouncing behind-- a delectable upside-down valentine." (338)

Completed 7.23.01

Powerful, painful, intense, honest. A portrayal of an abused child in a Carolina family. Not as good as The Liar's Club though, which is in a similar vein. Just not as well written.

Quote: "Daddy Glen woulod take me into the bathroom again, crying that it hurt him more than it could ever hurt me. But his face would tell the truth, his hands on my body... when he beat me, we would both know why." (125)

Completed 6.29.01

An interesting examination of class aspiration. One web site I read to said that one of the points is, no matter what upper-class manques might say, in a crisis, the rich always stick together. I don't know if I agree, but I think Fitzgerald may well have been going for this in his implosion of the American Dream. Anyway, a breezy and interesting re-read. Piece of cake, after reading Lolita let me tell you. Plus, Gatsby is a fascinating, flawed embodiment of Fitzgerald's theme.

Quote: Gatsby's smile "understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had preceisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."

Completed 6.25.01

Wow. I cannot believe the things this man could do with language-- and English wasn't even his native tongue! There were some pages on which I had to look up two or three words-- words like nacreous (mother-of-pearl) or incarnadine (having the pinkish color of flesh). I was often stunned with the way he found words perfectly suited to his meaning. The story is, of course, sordid. But the prose is exquisite. What a transfixing chiaroscuro!

Quote: "Naked, except for one sock and her charm bracelet, spread-eagled on the bed where my philter had felled her-- so I foreglimpsed her..." (125)

Completed 6.22.01

How do you not love Molly Bolt, the heroine of Rubyfruit Jungle? I doubt it's possible. She's so preternaturally self assured about her own sexuality, so non judgmental, so in-your-face fuck you, that you want to be just a little more like her. I love the ending, too. It's not a romantic fairy tale ending, but it's exactly the kind of ending you need from Molly. You have faith in her, and maybe a little more faith in yourself as well.

Quote: "When I make love to women I think of their genitals as a, as a ruby fruit jungle... women are thick and rich and full of hidden treasures and besides that, they taste good."

Completed 5.13.01

Wow, it's been a while since I completed a book on the list. This is a good one, though, since it is on three of the four lists.  There are some passages of this book that are achingly beautiful.  But the characters are all horrible to each other and extremely difficult to like at first: I hated them all when I started.  But as of now I think Ursula and Birkin are fairly likeable, and Gudrun and Gerald both get better with time, but I still hate Hermione.  It's dovetailing for me with Eros the Bittersweet.  When I read the first chapter of Eros it clicked for me that the reason they all hate each other is because it is the flip side to love.  So really, all the abrupt shifting from "I love him" to "I hate him" is not as annoying.  They are just different ways to say the same thing.

Quote: The entire chapter about Birkin throwing stones at the moon's reflection is stunning.  I also marked this one: "Ah, her hands were eager, greedy for knowledge.  But for the present it was enough, enough, as much as her soul could bear.  Too much, and she would shatter herself, she would fill the fine vial of her soul too quickly and it would break."

Completed 5.11.01

Interesting.  It doesn't spoon feed you any conclusions, and it doesn't wrap up the ending with John and his father in a neat package.  I can only imagine that Baldwin is extremely devout, and does believe that "Jesus Saves" as John discovers.  It made me want to be saved.  That's a powerful book.  I thought he was going to end up gay for the longest time.  (John, I mean.)  Even at the end, there's a total homoerotic subtext between he and Elisha.  I like the fact that Gabe doesn't get his comeuppance.  The blurb on the back is right: it is honest.  It's not "oh, the oppressed black man" it's, "yeah, life is unfair, and we really don't get the breaks, but sometimes, things turn out okay."   And "Jesus Saves" of course.

Completed 11.15.00

Thought this would be a "snoozer" (and the prologue is boring and I think extraneous-- except that it shows the machinations of Rome, and how far removed they are from the interests of the New Mexican people.  Oh, maybe it's not extraneous.  Sets up a nice parallel for the Bishop and Vaillant.)  but it was riveting.  Wonderful stories, wonderful characters, and AMAZING writing.  Also worth reading slowly for the perfect descriptions.

Completed 11.11.00