Awful in every way. The whole book is centered on lame, even deplorable ideas. First, it divides people into the wizardly and the non-wizardly in a class system. That’s a fairly lame idea already, but other than deriding some of the snobby elitists among the wizardly class, it is itself ridiculously elitist, presenting its only non-wizardly people as an overblown, idiotic parody of middle class small-mindedness, conformity, and materialism, and making the elevation into the wizard class an unequivocally good thing. Second, it makes the magical into the mundane. Otherworldly and magical things, things beyond the everyday, are trivialized by transposing them into a world of magic shops and wizard schools essentially no different from non-magic shops and non-wizard schools. (It doesn’t help that all the magical things are stock elements, with absolutely no originality or imagination.)

Outside its center of lameness, the book fails in all its basic storytelling elements. It’s written in a completely standardized kids-book style, full of simplistic exaggerations, stock phrases, and twee comments from the narrator. Even if that style didn’t irritate me with its obviousness and simplification, it’s utterly indistinct here: the words have no verve. It does nothing of note to create suspense, excitement, pathos, vivid imagery, or anything else. And the dialogue is flat and unnatural, lacking any distinct voices.

Similarly, all its characters are cliches—the know-it-all girl, the goofy, good-hearted guy, the classist snob, etc.—that are given no definition or nuance beyond their stereotypes. Actually, they’re so vague that they lack even the definiteness of their stereotypes. The villains are given still less: Snape is mean and punishes kids unfairly, Voldemort is evil and kills people, and that’s it. And the characters’ personality and feelings are related in the most simplistic ways. Harry Potter himself is just a cliched cipher of wish-fulfillment, the mistreated kid with no friends who’s really the most special of all kids and destined for greatness.

The overarching narrative is still another cliche: a journey away from home, in which kids learn and grow, and a move into an upper-class world full of possibilities and glamor and excitement. Within that, everything is just more lame cliches of school life and childhood friendships. There’s also the kids being tested, doing some of that learning and growing, by foiling an evil plot. But the evil plot is painfully contrived (especially the ridiculous bit where all the characters conveniently get to show what they’re good at—blech), so undeveloped that it barely registers, and carrying no weight. It also revolves around the ultimate cliche of misdirection: the person you least expect did it! And he’s a non-character, defined only by being nervous and stuttering enough to be the person you’d least expect.

Finally, Quidditch is the stupidest sport ever.

Quote: “Where’s the cannon?” he said stupidly.

The actual diary of a noblewoman of Heian Japan who lives painfully defined by her role as a second wife. She perpetually feels unloved and alone and spends year after year in deepening depression, sadly bemoaning her fate, being ignored by her husband while dragging herself on. It’s a strange era: everybody writes allusive poetry to each other all the time, people may only travel in certain directions each day, and they have to stay alone in their houses for days during periods of cleansing. It’s all social strictures, ceremony and surface. Nobody seems very happy.

Quote: The autumn cicadas took up their humming. “Noisy insects, singing in the grass”—I thought of the well-known verse—”what sorrow makes you cry out when so when I bear mine in silence?” This was a strange and sad time for me. The month before, I had had a sign that I was to die this month, and I wondered whether the time might be approaching.

116. As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a Woman in 11th-Century Japan (Sarashina, trans. Morris, 1059)
Genre: nikki bungaku
Rating: 6.5

Another actual diary, this time that of a meek young girl in Heian Japan who loves to do nothing but read stories, but is sent by her father to live in a palace to improve her station in life. She feels alone and ill-equipped for the rigid social structures and ceremony of the nobility’s lifestyle. She and her father weep painfully at their parting. She weeps at her loneliness. She weeps at the memory of cold weather. Catastrophic weeping abounds. It’s told in much livelier, ingenuous style than Gossamer Years, though, with a sense of innocence and wonder.

Quote: Now I really began to regret having wasted so much time on my silly fancies, and I bitterly reproached myself for not having accompanied Mother and Father on their pilgrimages.

117. The Crocodile (Dostoevsky, 1865)
Genre: absurdist satire
Rating: 9.5

A man is swallowed by a crocodile and thinks it a perfect opportunity to better mankind and win fame with his genius. A scathing satire of egotism and Utopian thinking. Brilliantly absurd in its matter-of-fact tone and ridiculous, petty yet grandiose characters. Probably the funniest thing I’ve read.

Unfortunately the Constance Garnett translation seems to be the only one widely available, and her translations are always relatively stodgy, flattened and verveless.

Quote: I am constructing now a complete system of my own, and you wouldn’t believe how easy it is! You have only to creep into a secluded corner or into a crocodile, to shut your eyes, and you immediately devise a perfect millennium for mankind.

118. The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck, 1939)
Genre: propaganda of the poor
Rating: 3.5

600 pages preaching that all people are part of a common soul. But not rich people.

Quotes: “‘Maybe,’ I figgered, ‘maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit—the human sperit—the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.’ Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a suddent—I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.”

“If you’re in trouble, or hurt or need—go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help—the only ones.”

119. The Soldier and Death (Arthur Ransome, 1920)
Genre: Russian folk tales
Rating: 8.5

A soldier puts death in a sack. This is how I like my folk tales: overturning the world, unbinding it by replacing order with bizarre happenstance.

Quote: “Do you know what this is?” says he to Death.
“A sack,” says Death.
“Well, if it is a sack, get into it!”

120. Braveheart (Randall Wallace, 1995)
Genre: historical fiction
Rating: 2.5

The author’s last name is Wallace, just like Braveheart himself. I’m descended from Robert the Bruce, which strikes me as a much cooler name. Anyway, the book is high cheese. Needed more Mad Mel.

121. Foe (J.M. Coetzee, 1986)
Genre: postmodern metafiction
Rating: 4

A woman is stranded on a desert island with an old man named Cruso. Later, she wants to write her story but lacks the requisite skills, so she tells it to Daniel Defoe for him to write. But he transforms it into the tale of Robinson Crusoe, and his power to communicate, to craft reality into a story, subtly and then completely destroys her actual reality—her history and sense of her own identity are subsumed by him taking control over her story and eventually removing her from it entirely.

The problem with this is that Coetzee makes Defoe’s story a lot more compelling than hers. So she’s marginalized into nonexistence not by her inability to communicate, but by a better story. In a way, that makes a stronger point: the idea could have been simply that women’s reality is subjugated to patriarchal control of the modes of discourse (or more generally, the marginalized person’s story is replaced by the dominant person’s); instead it becomes that the power of storytelling itself, the power of the person capable of controlling the story, overwhelms the reality of the metaphorically dumb person. But in another way, it just makes me wish I were reading Defoe’s book instead.

Quote: For readers reared on travelers’ tales, the words desert isle may conjure up a place of soft sands and shady trees where brooks run to quench the castaway’s thirst and ripe fruit falls into his hand, where no more is asked of him than to drowse the days away till a ship calls to fetch him home. But the island on which I was cast away was quite another place.

Two sisters love one guy. The younger gives him up so the older can have him. The older gives him up so God can have him. The guy is left understandably crushed and confused.

Unfortunately, I was left even more confused. Both sisters give up life along with the guy, the first settling into a placid, meaningless domestic life, the other believing her act a religious martyrdom and, congruent to that belief, wasting away unto death. The first I could understand, but the second left me baffled, even given excerpts from the girl’s diary. The style is extremely delicate, feeling as if it’s barely touching the surface of its subject; maybe that makes it hard to understand if one doesn’t intuitively grasp what it’s touching on. Or maybe I just read it wrong.

Quote: “Then you think that one can keep a hopeless love in one’s heart for as long as that?…And that life can breathe upon it every day, without extinguishing it?”

112. The End of the Affair (Graham Greene, 1951)
Genre: how love relates to religion, again
Rating: 8

With a gloriously bitter narrator and brutally intense emotion, Greene analogizes religious faith to love. Like in Strait is the Gate, the core narrative consists of a woman sacrificing her love to save her loved one (there’s even a diary to explain her actions, too). But in this case her sacrifice is born not from some vague martyrdom or a vaguer notion of saving his soul, but from desperate emotion and a deal with God to save his life (a la Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice). In Strait is the Gate, the sacrifice leads only to confusion and misery, and if anything, causes the loved one to lose his faith; in The End of the Affair, the sacrifice is the inception of the narrator’s faith—though he is not gladdened by the gain of it. He struggles against both love and faith, against how they take him beyond himself, make him feel under the power of something else, but he is inexorably entangled by them, and Greene explores the vagaries of these entanglements with searing incisiveness. Although I can understand having faith, I have trouble understanding how one can get it (without being raised into it, that is). But by likening it to love, and by incisively studying the course of both, Greene makes it understandable.

Unfortunately, all the secondary characters are lame caricatures, and there are some half-assed subplots muddying the brilliance. But they’re easily forgotten; in fact, I have forgotten them.

Quote: I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love.

113. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy, 1891)
Genre: contrived miserablism
Rating: 4

Fussy, lame-simile-laden prose endlessly describing countrysides. A rough jackass who forcefully seduces (that is, old-timey date-rapes) the heroine, a poor country lass. A resolutely dopey but ostensibly chivalrous and free-thinking guy who views the heroine not as a person but, befitting his dopiness, as a lame ideal of unsullied country lasses. An absurdly passive heroine whom social norms insist is sullied by having been seduced; though not the lame ideal the dope would have her be, she is presented by the book itself as little more than a symbol of a natural, innocent, unsullied soul. For no apparent reason, she worships (literally) the dope and suffers terribly because of it. This could be explained by love’s propensity for blindness, but every other girl in the dope’s vicinity also falls despairingly in love with him, again for no apparent reason…which really fits pretty well with the book’s unifying style: all things contrived to serve simplistic philosophizing; characters who are more cogs than people. For most of the book, Tess is made to suffer by society’s (and aforementioned dope’s) backward notions of sulliedness; in the end, the book asserts it’s not just society, but Nature and Fate themselves that have made her their plaything. I blame Hardy instead.

Quote: Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess’s being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.

114. The Heart of the Matter (Graham Greene, 1948)
Genre: torment…also love and religion again
Rating: 8

I guess Greene torments his characters almost as much as Hardy does. But Greene does it proper, with hard, wearied prose and a protagonist who destroys himself—just a guy worn down by life, getting himself into an impossible situation by falling in love, dragging himself ever deeper into it the more acutely he’s aware of its suffocating impossibility, oblivious to the realities outside it. He also sacrifices his soul for the sake of his wife, as was the style at the time. Contains one of the most emotionally grueling sequences of scenes in literature, an immensity of Catholic guilt, despair, and terror.

Quote: He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one’s hands altogether by death.

It begins as a surreal vision of sexual obsession, in which the outmoded conceptual dichotomy of form and content is dissolved, and in the resulting mire, the flesh, both of the Self and the Other, is conflated with Being. But it quickly abandons this subject and devolves into insipid free association, sequences of images devoid of emotional or intellectual content, tired mixtures of crudeness and flowery poetics. It’s steeped in a tone of tepid worldliness, a self-awareness that avoids taking anything seriously, glibly reducing everything to superficial cliches (e.g., attraction to an ideal of femininity and sexuality rather than to an actual woman). Abysmal and obnoxious.

Quote: I see God grips the genitals to catch illusionary me stunned down in air of death’s insanity to kiss me off he plays the deepsea catch he reels me in

109. The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles) (Cocteau, 1929)
Genre: tragedy of enchantment
Rating: 7

Two siblings isolate and eventually destroy themselves with their own world of whimsy, dragging a few people in with them. The story operates in a realm of fantasy, of myth that it repeatedly refers to, of spontaneous, unreflective emotions removed from reality. For much of the book’s length, that atmosphere is enchanting, but as the story moves into tragedy, and the characters into manipulation and self-destruction, it’s made somewhat silly by its weightlessness and the wispy unreality of the characters.

Quote: The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.

110. The Story of O (Pauline Réage, 1954)
Genre: erotica
Rating: 3

Erotica devoid of sensuality, character, and characters. A bland cataloguing of dominance and submission, with no insight into them.

Quote: “If you do tie her up from time to time, or whip her just a little, and she begins to like it, that’s no good … you have to get past the pleasure stage, until you reach the stage of tears.”

It exemplifies a certain nauseating children’s-book style—cloyingly quaint and dainty, simplistic and sentimental, laced with words like “must” and “mustn’t”, “little” and “big”, “lovely” and “quite”. It presents a world of cotton and sap, of neatly delineated emotions and quaint caricatures. Bad things happen in the story, but it coyly evades them, easily rectifies them, or smothers them in twee romanticism. And passages like this make me bilious:

“Thank you,” said Emily shyly, looking up at him with great grey eyes that looked blue under her long lashes. It was a very effective look which lost nothing of effectiveness from being wholly unconscious. Nobody had as yet told Emily how very winsome that shy, sudden, up-glance of hers was.
“Isn’t he a rip-snorter?” said the boy easily. He thrust his hands into his ragged pockets and stared at Emily so fixedly that she dropped her eyes in confusion—thereby doing further damage with those demure lids and silken fringes.

These two characters are children…Gah. Boo to quaintness. Boo to twee-toned visions of childhood. “Boo!” I says.

107. A High Wind in Jamaica (Richard Hughes, 1929)
Genre: attacks on twee-toned visions of childhood
Rating: 7.5

Like Lord of the Flies, the tale tells of a group of children removed from social structures and thence doing grave wrongs. In this case, they take up with a group of pirates; larks and murders ensue. But while Golding’s novel grimly explores the notion that there is no innocence, that there is an underlying savagery in humanity, in its religious and social foundations, a savagery that exists in all of us down to the level of the youngest children, Hughes’ instead dismisses the notion of innocence altogether. His children wildly misconstrue the meaning of events. They do wrong without knowing what they’re doing. With a lively style, the book mocks the myth of a childhood Eden: innocence isn’t morality, but amorality born of ignorance; one cannot be moral without eating of the apple.

Bonus points for the cover, taken from Henry Darger’s epic tale of heroic hermaphroditic children, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

Quote:
In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.
It is true they look human–but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.

As an attempt to achieve Tolkien’s goal of creating modern ancient English myths, this is probably more successful than Lord of the Rings. While that book starts off in a children’s-storybook style and ends with sentences like “But the white fury of the Northmen burned the hotter, and more skilled was their knighthood with long spears and bitter”, this one is written throughout in a modernized epic tone. And it consistently evokes an atmosphere of darkest Nordic myth: it’s dense with doom and dragons. But like Lord of the Rings, it’s a simulacrum, a copy of something that never existed, a myth suited to modernity. As such, it ends with a scene of existential humiliation worthy of Dostoevsky. Good stuff.

Quote: But Mablung came and looked on the hideous shape of Glaurung lying dead, and looked upon Turin and was grieved, thinking of Hurin as he had seen him in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, and the dreadful doom of his kin.

96. Old Peter’s Russian Tales (Arthur Ransome, 1916)
Genre: fairy tales made mollycoddling
Rating: 3.5

A twee tone and too much description remove what makes fairy tales interesting: the striking randomness, the feeling of a world unbound from norms both physical and social.

Quote: All the time he was doing this Vanya and Maroosia were snuggling together close by the stove, thinking what story they would ask for, and listening to the crashing of the snow as it fell from the trees outside. Now that old Peter was at home, the noise made them feel comfortable and warm. Before, perhaps, it made them feel a little frightened.
“Well, little pigeons, little hawks, little bear cubs, what is it to be?” said old Peter.

97. The Painted Bird (Jerzy Kosiński, 1965)
Genre: historical fiction/dwelling in depravity
Rating: 5.5

A tour of absurdly cruel and superstitious country folk in the villages of Eastern Europe during World War II. The protagonist learns amorality from this tour. There’s little depth, lots of repetitive cruelty and superstition. Viewed as a (very fictionalized) version of history, it’s fairly ridiculous, lacking any nuance; viewed as a parable, it suffers from insufficient succinctness.

Quote: The world seemed to be pretty much the same everywhere, and even though people differed from one another, just as animals and trees did, one should know fairly well what they looked like after seeing them for years. I had lived only seven years, but I remembered a lot of things.

98. Billy Bathgate (E.L. Doctorow, 1989)
Genre: mobster crime/coming of age
Rating: 4

A kind of airy tale of growing up poor and becoming gofer for a gangster. All I really remember is the titular character having slimy sex with a mob boss’s wife in the woods, and said mob boss slitting someone’s throat at a barbershop.

Quote: He had to have planned it because when we drove onto the dock the boat was there and the engine was running and you could see the water churning up phosphorescence in the river, which was the only light there was because there was no moon, nor no electric light either in the shack where the dockmaster should have been sitting, nor on the boat itself, and certainly not from the car, yet everyone knew where everything was, and when the big Packard came down the ramp Mickey the driver braked it so that the wheels hardly rattled the boards, and when he pulled up alongside the gangway the doors were already open and they hustled Bo and the girl upside before they even made a shadow in all that darkness.

99. Swiss Family Robinson (Johann David Wyss, 1812)
Genre: family adventure
Rating: 2

A family is stranded on a tropical island, where they hope to drink wine but end up with vinegar, train animals by biting their ears, and learn that father knows best. It would have benefited from a coconut battle with pirates.

Quote: Already the tempest had continued six days; on the seventh its fury seemed still increasing; and the morning dawned upon us without a prospect of hope, for we had wandered so far from the right track, and were so forcibly driven toward the southeast, that none on board knew where we were.

100. Peter Pan (J.M. Barrie, 1911)
Genre: children’s fantasy
Rating: 3

A banal slog of goofy villains and romanticized childhood, in which a bunch of little boys have adventures and get mothered by a little girl. Mostly I remember the jealous fairy returning from an orgy.

Quote: Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.

101. Beginning Logic (Lemmon, 1978)
Genre: textbook
Rating: 7

I wish more people had a working understanding of basic logic. Consequences would never be the same.

Quote: Corollary I: All theorems of the propositional calculus are tautologous.

102. The Cenci (Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819)
Genre: Romantic play
Rating: 4

A girl is driven mad in Romantic style by being raped by her father. Could’ve used a lot more madness.

Quote: “Hell’s most abandoned fiend did never, in the drunkenness of guilt, speak to his heart as now you speak to me.”

103. The Scarecrow of Oz (L. Frank Baum, 1915)
Genre: children’s fantasy
Rating: 2

I remember almost nothing of this, but I do remember a crippling lack of anything interesting…flying monkeys especially.

104. Pippi Longstocking (Astrid Lindgren, 1945)
Genre: children’s literature, the crazy kind
Rating: 7.5

My favorite kind of kids’ book: minimal, wild with verve, and disregarding sense.

Quote: “No Fridolf, bother all this learning. I can’t study anymore because I must climb the mast to see what kind of weather we’re going to have tomorrow.”

105. Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery (Deborah & James Howe, 1979)
Genre: children’s literature, the blandly silly kind
Rating: 2

A vampire rabbit lives on the blood of vegetables. Wallace and Gromit are nowhere to be found.

I admired it more than I liked it. Mostly I liked the way it uses its prose to evoke and reify its core understanding of life. It presents life as a struggle under an immense weight of information, but information in a large sense: not just facts, concepts, and so on, but events, perceptions, objects, relationships, habits, memories, and thoughts. Its style is well suited to this, a ceaseless mass of details, information atop information, endnotes to endnotes, stories upon stories, convoluted sentences of purposefully awkward prose, technical jargon and slang. Its characters are burdened by this mass, some more than others. Its first chapter is about a character unable to talk, unable to control his engagement with the world at all, because he’s broken and swarmed by this mass. The rest of the book gives the impression that it will lead back to that scene, but it never quite gets there, because there always remains an uncountable infinity of stuff in the way—life is the infinite jest. Most of the characters try to escape it through drugs, and the book dwells at length on the extreme limits of their misery, the crushing weight of the world around them, the grotesque tales that make up their worst experiences. Other characters adopt an ironic stance, distancing themselves from life by making light of it, treating the information only as information, as something to be played with. Some characters do both. Likewise, the prose is simultaneously deeply ironic and even more deeply earnest; there’s a sad futility to its ironic humor, to its convoluted sentences and awkwardness (e.g., its recurrent use of multiple contiguous conjunctions such as “and but though”).

But for me, this whole approach, the mass of ceaseless details, made the book extremely tedious at times—it’s 483,994 words, and I felt every one of them. I loved portions of it, primarily those detailing the addicts’ tales of despair, where the emotional weight of the details is made palpable. But a lot of the scenes just keep going and going with little to maintain my interest. That’s especially true of many scenes at the tennis academy, where the endless details felt less purposeful, less emotional, more inclined toward an irony I often found dull, and detailing teen male interactions and sports, which aren’t subjects I care to read endless details about. (But conversely, a lot of the scenes with the addicts are dull, and a lot of the scenes at the academy are great, especially the interactions between Hal and his brothers, most especially his grotesquely—the book really is big on grotesques—disabled brother Mario, who, unlike everybody else, takes life as it comes, but who’s never made into a caricature of acceptance.) And the whole subplot dealing with Quebecois wheelchair assassins felt extraneous; perhaps because it had relatively little emotion and its humor fell flat for me, every scene in that subplot felt like a slog. Actually, all the political stuff I could have done without.

So, in short, I appreciated a lot of what it does, but it didn’t really work as well for me as I would have liked.

Quote: The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in who Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. The terror of falling from a great height is still as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and “Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling

A bloodsoaked vision of the Old West and Manifest Destiny, it carves from historical movements a mythical American prehistory. In this, Faulkner’s vision of the South is its obvious forebear; There Will Be Blood, its descendant. Again reminiscent of Faulkner in his Absalom, Absalom! mode, it’s all long sentences of headlong rhythms and abstruse words. The prose and the hazy, grotesque, brutally violent world it presents are singular and entrancing…for a while. But it is monotonous, relentlessly one-note. If it were half its length, it might be a favorite.

It gets bonus points for the ending, one of the greatest pieces of prose I’ve ever read, with a rhythm varying between halting and frantically headlong, a hypnotic use of repetition, and perfect, small descriptions in the midst of it. It describes an indelible image: a Satanic figure, the Judge, naked and pale and hairless, dancing and fiddling. It’s deliriously orgiastic, otherworldly, repulsive and compelling:

And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletimes and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favourite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favourite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

89. Breakfast of Champions (Vonnegut, 1973)
Genre: silliness and self-referentialia
Rating: 3

I just can’t get behind Vonnegut’s silliness. I want books that are explosive, or books like tar, thick and dense and inescapable. I want edification. Vonnegut’s writing is small, casual, and glibly iconoclastic. This book, especially, irritates me. Its central idea is that the world is just too damn complicated to make sense of, so one may as well talk randomly about penis size. While that is a reasonable conclusion, Vonnegut doesn’t put much effort into making sense of things, or showing how they are too damn complicated, before giving up and moving onto the penises.

Quote (referring to the founding fathers of the US): The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless education, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.

90. Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh, 1945)
Genre: traditional Victorian style novel
Rating: 3.5

This kind of book is extremely dull to me: heavy on narrative, light on everything else. Its mannered prose and cast of even more mannered rich English people don’t help. Its overarching themes—nostalgia for youth, as emblematized by the passing of the country manor lifestyle, and fraternal love as a precursor to romantic love as a precursor to religious faith—are simply tacked on at the end, delayed by a bland narrative that does very little to develop them or set the stage for them. At least the first half centers on colourful and in some cases entertaining characters, my favourite being a sleepily cruel father; the second half instead centers on a completely uninteresting, emotionally stagnant, blithely amoral romance between two undeveloped, bland characters, dragging the novel through much tedium of little meaning before reaching the climactic theme-tacking moment.

Like the themes, the emotions of the romance and the nostalgia seem unearned and barren—the narration insists on them but never evokes them or provides proper foundations for them. In particular, the country manor doesn’t do much to invite the nostalgia that the novel bestows upon it. Instead, there’s just lifeless narrative.

However, it’s not all narrative: Waugh occasionally takes a break for wispy musings (see below) and tedious descriptions.

Mostly notable for the seas of semicolons.

Quote:
Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.

91. Analects (Confucius et al., 5th Century BC)
Genre: instructions for upstanding living
Rating: 4

How to philosophize with a crochet hook.

Quote: Being good as a son and obedient as a young man is, perhaps, the root of a man’s character.

92. Satyricon (Petronius, 1st century)
Genre: Roman social satire/misadventures of man-boy love
Rating: 5.5

Ribald.

Quote: A boy gorged on a diet like this can no more acquire real taste than a cook can stop stinking.

93. Le Grand Meaulnes (Alain-Fournier, 1913)
Genre: romance/inverted magic realism
Rating: 8.5

An elegy to lost love, an evocation of the sad inevitability of time, in the form of a modern chivalric romance: a questing youth stumbles upon an engagement party that seems an enchanted otherworld, falls in love therein, tries forever to return, but is foiled by the slow, dread entanglements of the everyday world and his own failings—he finds the woman, but never again the enchanted moment. The tale is told with an almost minimalist delicacy. Magical and melancholy.

Quote: Weeks went by, then months. I am speaking of a far-away time—a vanished happiness. It fell to me to befriend, to console with whatever words I could find, one who had been the fairy, the princess, the mysterious love-dream of our adolescence—and it fell to me because my companion had fled. Of that period…what can I say? I’ve kept a single image of that time, and it is already fading: the image of a lovely face grown thin and of two eyes whose lids slowly droop as they glance at me, as if her gaze was unable to dwell on anything but an inner world.

A model of good manhood goes insane (or experiences a religious revelation, or is tricked by a sinister ventriloquist, or some combination of the above) and murders his family at the behest of religious visions (and/or said sinister ventriloquist), hearkening to and making ambiguous and dreadful the tale of Abraham.

Things of note:

• It is apparently considered the first great American novel.
• It focuses on the instability of the human mind, implicitly questioning Christianity’s insistence on a human soul (i.e., a constant Self) and the Enlightenment’s belief in a rational basis of society, and explicitly questioning how this instability affects bonds of friendship and love.
• It bespeaks the era’s concern with the reconciliation of religious revelation, empirical science, and sense-based psychology.
• It has a compelling, horrifying mood.
• It was probably a major influence on Hawthorne and Melville in its concerns with the mysteries, ambiguities, and instabilities underlying personal and social reality.

Quote: Thou art gone! murmuring and reluctant! And now my repose is coming—my work is done!

87. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself. With a detail of curious traditionary facts and other evidence by the editor (James Hogg, 1824)
Genre: Gothic horror/religious satire
Rating: 9

Satan leads a man to blasphemy and murder by preaching an extreme version of the Calvinist doctrine of salvation by grace. That being the following: good people, regardless of what they do, are guaranteed salvation.

Things of note:

• It was ignored for a century until Gide wrote of it, “It is long since I can remember being so taken hold of, so voluptuously tormented by any book.”
• It focuses on the consequences of perverting Christian theology.
• It’s primarily satirical, and quite humorous as such, unlike the wrought seriousness of Wieland.
• It uses a lot more literary pyrotechnics than does Wieland: e.g., an unreliable narrator, multiple versions of events, and a structure consisting of a “found” diary within a framing narrative within a framing narrative (i.e., levels of ambiguity at least two deep, a text within a text within a text, an everyday man getting a glimpse of a possible glimpse of something possibly beyond the world of the everyday).
• It offers a grueling portrait of a man ruined by his self-involvement, proud disdain, misogyny, and misbegotten ideals (and Satan), and thence slowly sinking into the utmost depths of desperation.

Quotes:
With regard to the work itself, I dare not venture a judgment, for I do not understand it.

That I was a great, a transcendent sinner, I confess. But still I had hopes of forgiveness, because I never sinned from principle, but accident; and then I always tried to repent of these sins by the slump, for individually it was impossible; and though not always successful in my endeavours, I could not help that; the grace of repentance being withheld from me, I regarded myself as in no degree accountable for the failure.

I like children’s books whimsical to the point of nonsense, and preferably mordantly humorous. I don’t like them genteel, simplistically moralizing, and overtly explanatory; nor do I care for tales of children “growing up” by learning cheap moral lessons. Anyway, I remember very little of the Narnia books, but I remember them falling into the latter category. When I was in my early teens, I reread The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I thought the Christian symbolism was awkward, obnoxious, and exemplified the aforementioned aspects I dislike. When I was a kid, I wasn’t a big fan of the series, but I did love The Horse and His Boy, which I thought was hilarious, and to a lesser extent, The Magician’s Nephew, which I thought was the most genuinely magical. Now, all I remember of the former is some dialogue about the boxing of ears; of the latter, a chase on a cobblestone street lined with lampposts. And the best image in the series is undoubtedly a lone lamppost in snowy woods. Old-timey lampposts are awesome.

Quote: “It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.”

79. The Book of Three (Lloyd Alexander, 1964)
80. The Black Cauldron (Lloyd Alexander, 1965)
81. The Castle of Llyr (Lloyd Alexander, 1966)
82. Taran Wanderer (Lloyd Alexander, 1967)
83. The High King (Lloyd Alexander, 1968)
Genre: children’s fantasy
Rating: 3-6

When I was a kid, for a time Lloyd Alexander was tied with Dickens as my favourite author. He’s best known for this series, The Chronicles of Prydain, which is a children’s high-fantasy, epic-quest, boys’ adventure kind of thing. In retrospect, that sounds really dull. I say meh to boys’ adventures; and high fantasy seems ill-suited to children’s stories, because the world-building ends up too slight and sanitary. Anyway, even when I was a kid, I preferred a different Alexander series: the Westmark Trilogy.

Quote: “Long ago I yearned to be a hero without knowing, in truth, what a hero was. Now, perhaps, I understand it a little better. A grower of turnips or a shaper of clay, a Commot farmer or a king—every man is a hero if he strives more for others than for himself alone.”

84. Westmark (Lloyd Alexander, 1981)
85. The Kestrel (Lloyd Alexander, 1982)
86. The Beggar Queen (Lloyd Alexander, 1984)
Genre: young adult fantasy
Rating: 6

Here’s the Westmark Trilogy. It’s all about subterfuge and bloody war. I remember it being a lot more understated, gripping, nuanced, and meaningful than The Chronicles of Prydain, but maybe my youthful mind was just beguiled by its grittiness and violence. In The Kestrel, the protagonist, who’s become frenzied in the midst of war, notices that he has other people’s blood caked under his nails. Now that’s a boys’ adventure story.

Quote: “He was a good poet, he could have been better. That’s the real loss don’t you see?”

84. Winnie-the-Pooh (A. A. Milne, 1926)
85. The House at Pooh Corner (A. A. Milne, 1928)
Genre: children’s literature
Rating: 8–9

Guileless prose, deftly captured characters (my favourite being, of course, Eeyore, though I love Pooh himself too), small and wonderful non-adventures, and the mood of a drifting cloud. The Hundred Acre Wood is a serene Faerie land—enchanting and outside of time.

The books get bonus points for inspiring the crazy-singing Russian animated version:

Quotes:
And by-and-by Christopher Robin came to an end of the things, and was silent, and he sat there looking out over the world, and wishing it wouldn’t stop.

“If the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.”