On the Road

I just finished reading Jack Kerouac's famous novel about young people on the road in search of meaning and excitement. I'd heard a lot about this book; it always seems to be on lists of top 100 American novels. I suppose part of this is not just due to actual content of the book, but to the historical significance it possess. That being said, I'll say that although I enjoyed parts of it, I didn't particularly care for the book as a whole.
The book chronicles the travels of Sal Paradise, (commonly thought of as Kerouac himself), as he travels across the US throughout several years. Before I read the book, I thought everything in it took place during one trip, but it is actually a few different trips which Kerouac made over several years of his life.
In the book, he often has little money or way of transportation and has to make his way as he goes. Although some people, like myself, would not enjoy this, Sal flourishes in this type of lifestyle.
He frequently travels with his friend Dean Moriarty. Sal has an intense respect and love for Dean. Dean, perhaps more than anyone else in the story, is just looking for a good time. Though he is portrayed as kind, he is also irresponsible, and, I thought, a bad husband and father, a fact which he himself acknowledges at one point. I think one of the book's themes was the pull that life on the road exerts over these men, even managing to lure them away from their families and responsibility. By the end of the book, I was somewhat frustrated with Dean because he often comes across as selfish.
However, I also enjoyed this book in some ways. Despite what I've said about Dean, I liked his excitement for life and humanity. One can't be too negative or critical of him because he's so positive about everything life has to offer. I guess he's the type of guy that's hard to really dislike for a long time. This definitely seems to be the case with Sal, who always finds himself back with Dean.
This book can take some time to get through. Although it's only around 300 pages, most of those pages are dense with words and Kerouac's detailed descriptions of nearly everything he encounters. Overall, pretty good book but not exactly my thing.

Americana

This is the first novel by Don DeLillo. DeLillo is a well-known American writer whose novels often make top 100 lists. Because of his reputation, I was curious as to what his books were like. I read this one for a class this semester and it is the first of his I've read. It centers around a young, successful man named David Bell who works unhappily in advertising. Toward the beginning of the novel, Bell realizes the shallowness of his life and wants to change it. His desire is to escape the world he lives in and create a great work of art. He wants to capture the essence of America in a documentary film. Fair enough, but the reader sees through the course of the novel that David, who represents America in general, cannot really do anything unique. Everything he does is merely a reproduction of images he has already seen. All his attempts to be artistic are plastic reproductions of works by real artists.
Las Vegas is a great example of what DeLillo is getting at. Vegas is filled with buildings that are commercial reproductions of real works of art. Because they are nothing more than copies, they give the buildings a cheap, inauthentic feel. DeLillo argues that this tendency affects Americans on many levels. For example, what Americans see on TV is what they try to emulate and copy in their own lives. For people like Bell, life becomes nothing more than a reproduction of images seen on the screen.
I liked the theme of this book but I don't know that I cared much for the delivery. At the start of the book, I dug the writing style, but by the end I had grown a little tired of it. Interesting, considering this is one of DeLillo's shorter novels. I know that most of his more well-known books came after this one so I'm curious if I would like some of those better. I just felt that this story, though good at times, wandered a bit and went on too long.

Remains of the Day

This is Kazuo Ishiguro's most well-known novel. It is told in the first person by an English butler named Stevens. He works at a mansion in the English countryside called Darlington Hall. His narrative focuses on the events that happened years before when he worked for a man named Darlington, who, as is revealed as the story goes on, had ties with the Nazi party in England. He also spends a lot of time ruminating on what qualities the perfect butler possesses. A lot of his thoughts about this are unintentionally funny.
When I heard the description of this book, I was doubtful that I would enjoy it. But it's actually really good. I would even go so far as to say it's one of the best books I've ever read. Ishiguro has a talent for writing that is hard to match. The pace is slow, but it fits the tone of the book very well and the book is still able to remain interesting.
There are a lot of themes throughout, like how memory works. Stevens is an unreliable narrator who often omits important details. He is shown as someone who remembers events more as he wants them to be than how they actually are.
Stevens also represents English repression. Throughout the novel, he is in love with a woman named Miss Kenton but he refuses to act on or acknowledge it. He acts this way because he believes that the importance of his professionalism as a butler exceeds all other things. He sacrifices any type of personal life for his job.
By the end of the book, Stevens realizes that perhaps his devotion to Darlington was misplaced and that he has wasted many years of his life as a servant. Thus, it is up to him how he will spend the rest of his life, or the remains of the day, as it were.
The novel was adapted into an okay movie version in 1993 with Anthony Hopkins as Stevens.

Nice Work

This is the first book I had to read this semester for a contemporary British literature class I'm in. To tell the truth, I haven't been too impressed by anything in the class so far, with one big exception, The Remains of the Day, whose review is coming soon.
In the novel, by David Lodge, a conservative, industrialist man and a liberal literary theory professor woman are forced to work with one another as part of a government-sponsored program encouraging understanding between people from different worlds. It's not a bad idea for a book and the reader gets to see things looked at from two very different view points. Along the way, Lodge satirizes both ends of the spectrum. He's never mean, but he does point out the follies of both parties. On one side we have a man, Victor, who thinks that any thought beyond the practical is a waste of time. He's very pragmatic. Robyn, the woman, on the other hand spends all her time in school theorizing and thinking, but never really generating anything. Either of these extremes can be bad, and that seems to be Lodge's point. Of course, by the end of the book both Victor and Robyn have realized that perhaps a little of both worlds can be good for them.
Like I said, I wasn't terribly impressed with this book, but it's okay.

Life of Pi

All right, its been awhile since I made a post. I've been caught up doing school stuff. The good thing is that most of my school work involves reading books so I've found a lot of good new literature this semester. Eventually I will get it all up here.
You may have heard of Yann Martel's Life of Pi on Oprah or something like that. But believe me, its still worth reading. I read it for a literary theory class I'm in as a perfect example of post-structuralism in novels. Before reading it, I was not too familiar with theory but this book helped me to understand it.
I really like this book. There is all kinds of stuff going on in it. The story is about a boy named Pi who is raised in a zoo. Not in a cage, mind you, his family owns the zoo.
After telling about his childhood there, his family leaves India to go the America and the boat crashes en route. The rest of the book details Pi's survival story as he is shipwrecked and stuck on a lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger. This sounds very far-fetched, and its supposed to.
The awesome thing about this book is it presents itself as a true story. Depending on the reader, this can be believed up to certain points. But eventually, nearly all readers, I would say, catch on to the absurdity of it all and see what Martel is doing. He presents Pi's story as true, but at the end of the book, makes the argument, and I agree with him, that even stories told as truth are always mixed with different interpretations and perspectives. In this way, every story that is ever told becomes fiction in the telling.
I don't want to ruin the ending for anyone that hasn't read it and might. Just keep in mind that on another level, this idea is also Martel's philosophy of religion and belief. When you see how things play out in the end, it is an interesting take on how to view faith and belief. Basically, Martel says, there are certain things that have definitely happened. For instance, we humans know we are here on earth. That's the fact. How we explain this differs from person to person. We can explain it through nothing but cold, hard facts, or as Martel calls it, "dry, yeastless factuality." Or, we can choose, say religion, which explains things in a more creative and uplifting way. Martel contends that to choose just the factuality is to deprive life of its wonder.
This is a great book. Its easy to read and has some very interesting ideas.

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway is often considered one of the century's best writers and while reading his work his immense talent is apparent. My experience with Hemingway started with his short stories. I liked the way that he could use such simple language to describe such grand ideas. Often, his stories have much more meaning than appears on the surface.
Such is the case with The Old Man and the Sea, the book for which he won the Nobel Prize. The book tells the story of a poor fisherman, Santiago, and his long battle with a giant marlin. His struggle to bring the fish in represents the struggle of all mankind against the things that bear against it. Likewise, the way in which Santiago faces this immense challenge exhibits Hemingway's idea of the way men should deal with adversity--they should never give up or complain. Instead, like Santiago, mankind should respect adversity and face it with diligence and courage.
If you've ever wanted to read Hemingway but haven't yet, this is a good place to start. If you already have, then, well, good.

Ethan Frome

In the last few months I've been finding some really good deals on used books at the D.I. Not all the books there are in great condition, but I've been able to find some older classics for cheap that are in great shape. Because of this, I've been reading some books lately that I found there. A lot of them are books I'd always heard of but never actually read. Such was the case with Ethan Frome. Ethan Frome was published in 1911 by Edith Wharton. Wharton is most well-known for her books about upper class society like The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, neither of which I have read. I read somewhere that Ethan Frome is Wharton's least characteristic book, which is too bad because I think it is one of the best books I've ever read. I was really surprised by how much I liked it.
I wouldn't say its a happy story. In fact, its probably one of the sadder books you could read. I suppose there is some humor, as sad books often contain at least a little. In this case, I would say there is some humor in the ending, although its quite bleak also.
I don't want to reveal too much of the story because it would ruin the surprising, ironic ending. But the basic outline is that a narrator, who remains unnamed, comes to a small New England town. He is struck with a local man named Ethan Frome, who everyone in town seems to know but doesn't really want to talk about. Everyone just makes cryptic remarks about how its 'too bad' what happened to him. The narrator gets curious about this man and eventually is able to go his house. Once he enters Frome's house his whole life story begins to make sense and the narrator begins to understand why he has become such a shell of a man, devoid of any joy or hope.
The first and last chapter are told in first person by the narrator. The middle chapters are all third person and tell the story of a younger Ethan Frome and the events that led him to where he is when the narrator meets him.
Throughout the book, Wharton's use of language is masterful. Her descriptions of winter, isolation, love and disappointment are spot-on. Its hard for me to think of a writer who has done these topics better.
Frome is also a short book and can be read in one or two sittings, if you have a little extra time. I started reading it and couldn't put it down, especially toward the end when the tension builds and builds.
I highly recommend this book and I think its made it onto my top ten list of favorite books.

Noli Me Tangere

The jacket of this classic book by Filipino author Jose Rizal says that it 'sparked the Philippine Revolution.' My wife, who is from The Philippines, suggested that I read it. I think the book can help anyone who wants to understand the culture and history of the country more. But I don't think it is exclusive to one country, it can be applicable any country or people that has experienced oppression under the hands of seemingly unstoppable forces.
Written over a hundred years ago, the formidable book introduces and tells the stories of several characters who are all influenced in some way or other by the Spanish presence in their country. A little history lesson: Spanish officials lived in and attempted to colonize The Philippines for over three hundred years. They brought many things with them, not the least of which was the Catholic Church, which is still the predominant religion in The Philippines.
Although the story tells the injustices and cruelties of the Spanish against Filipinos, it deals primarily with two young lovers named Ibarra and Maria Clara. Ibarra is a man from a wealthy upbringing who has just returned from college in Europe. Upon returning, he wants to help his homeland, and if he's lucky, win the heart of his childhood sweetheart, Maria.
For awhile things seem to go okay, but Rizal favors reality instead of fantasy and things go from bad to worse for the doomed lovers. However, their story is but one among many Filipinos who's lives were irrevocably altered, and in most cases ruined, by the omnipresent powers of the Spanish government and leaders.
Rizal picks his targets out in his legendary book and takes merciless aim, exploiting them for all their hypocrisies and sins. He spends much of the book satirizing and demonizing the fathers, priests and friars of the Catholic Church in The Philippines, people who he believed, and as history has shown rightly so, to be the cause of nearly all the suffering.
One example is a story about a woman named Sisa and her two boys, Crispin and Basilio. The boys work at the parish house in town, where they are constantly accused and beaten for crimes which they did not commit. When the priests want to inflict punishment, they don't even need to prove a crime, they need only make something up and in order to continue their inhuman torture. All the while, people continue to laud the priests as holy servants of God.
Rizal seems to have picked out one-by-one the personalities he disliked or found serious fault with and exposed them through his writing. One example is the character Doña Victorina. Victorina is a native Filipina who is married to a European doctor. Because she has married a foreigner, this social climber feels that she is better than her fellow countrymen and has a condescending attitude toward them. Like the Catholic leadership, she refers to them in a derogatory as 'indios.'
Despite her incessant bragging and belittling, the truth is that her husband is a near cripple who has no real money, power or social stature, the main things that she consistently brags to others about possessing. In one humorous scene in the book, she meets another woman similar to her and the two almost get in a fistfight over who is more important in in her respective social circle, both of whom claim to include nothing but 'important' people.
Noli Me Tangere is a powerful lesson in history, political and religious cruelty and injustice and the negative effects of European colonialism.
In the conclusion of the book, the protagonist Ibarra is exiled and forced to leave his true love behind. Things didn't work out much better for the book's author and in the end Rizal's bravery and boldness did not come without a price--he was exiled, only later to be sentenced to death and killed by a firing squad because of the truth he wrote about. Like so many others who speak up against tyrannical governments and institutions, Rizal had to back up his beliefs with his life. In doing so, he became a national hero whose works continue to be studied by university students in The Philippines and scholars around the world.

One more thing, the book was originally written in Spanish. I read an English translation.

As I Lay Dying

Before I read this book I had heard a lot about the infamous William Faulkner. Considered to be a quintessential Modernist, Faulkner can sometimes be a bit hard to digest. This book, like several of his others, is written in stream-of-consciousness.
At first, I found the story a bit hard to follow. It is told through the words of several different narrators, seventeen or so as I recall, with every chapter switching from to another. Instead of revealing the plot or characters in a typical, straightforward way, Faulkner gives you bits and pieces through each of their distinct voices.
The story centers around the Bundren family and their journey to bury their dead mother in the place that she had requested. Hence the 'As I Lay Dying' refers to her.
The longstanding problems of the Bundren family are revealed as the family journeys across the Mississippi countryside. The reader comes to like some of the family members and really despise some of the less honorable ones, particularly the father, who step-by-step unveils how selfish he really is.
The voices range from the main family's nosy, self-righteous neighbor to the mother's youngest son who cannot understand that she is really physically gone. In fact, it is his words that comprise the book's most famous chapter: "My mother is a fish."
I would be lying if I said I understood everything in this book, but from what I got, I did like it quite a bit. One thing that helped me was looking at some plot summaries online. This really helps when trying to make sense of the fragmented plot.
I also studied this book with a very good professor at my school. He made the interesting observation that As I Lay Dying is realistic in the sense that it is told in bits and pieces, with time jumping around and the reader never really sure who is telling the truth. Readers have come to expect authors to tell them how things are and how they, as the reader, should feel about the events happening in the book. Faulkner doesn't do this. Instead he presents pieces of the family's life and inner thoughts and lets the reader decide what he or she thinks. This is similar to real life--we hear bits and pieces of conversations all around us, and most of these have their own personal spins and biases. We then take these things in and put our own spin on them and decide what we think.
That Faulkner was able to do this and still produce a meaningful, humorous book is what amazes me. It seems to have impressed a lot of other people as well, as this book is often considered one his finest and often makes lists of the best American novels.
Faulkner can be a little difficult and I think you have to be in the right mood to read it and enjoy it. But when you are, he has a unique way of storytelling that is worth looking into.

Holes

This Louis Sachar novel is one of my favorite books of all time. If you've only seen the movie, don't compare or judge the book by it--the book is way better. (You probably knew I was going to say that.)
The creative plot of this easy read centers around an overweight boy named Stanley Yelnats. Stanley, after having been convicted of a crime that he did not commit, believes himself to be a part of curse that was long ago put on his family. He is sent to Camp Green Lake in Texas to dig a hole every day, which he is told builds character. As the plot unwinds the camp warden's ulterior motives for digging are revealed.
I love the way this book is written. Sachar tells several stories at once, which at first seem to jump around from one to another. But by the end of the book they all come together and we see that they are all part of the same grand story. I really like this aspect of the writing and the way that Sachar is not only able to jump from character to character, but from time period to time period. I wish more books were written this way.
This book won the Newberry Medal in 1999. I think this was a well-deserved award. Holes combines several issues smoothly; things like justice, racism and teenage interaction are just a few.
Like with all of Sachar's books, Holes is written in simple, easy-to-understand language. There are a lot of jokes and most of them are quite dry. I think simplicity this well done is the sign of a great writer.
I try to read this book every so often and I highly recommend it to anyone else. Like I said, it is easily one of my favorite books ever. I think its writing style is creative and unique, its jokes hilarious and its themes important. I hope Sachar continues to put out quality literature like this because this is what the world needs.

The Pearl

This is one of John Steinbeck's shorter novels, perhaps you could consider it a novella. It is about a poor fisherman named Kino who finds The Pearl of the World, a jewel that he believes will bring his young family great wealth and prestige. Nothing goes right for Kino, however, and the pearl that he thought was a great blessing ends up destroying his family.
One thing that I've noticed in a lot of Steinbeck's work, which is also present here, is the tendency for things to go badly. While reading Steinbeck, you can always assume that when things are good, they're about to go badly, and when they're bad, they will continue to get worse. I think this is funny.
The themes in this book are timeless--greed, wealth (and lack of), humility, corruption and good vs. evil. These can be good themes, but I don't think this particular story and its use of them was too great. Perhaps the tale seemed a little too familiar to me, I'm not sure.
I didn't think the characters in here were too interesting or compelling either, maybe they were a little too one-dimensional. I suppose in some ways that The Pearl is an allegory, thus its characters are representations of things and are not actual people. If this were the case, I guess it would make sense that the characters are this way.
Anyway, The Pearl is okay, and its not so long that you'll regret reading it. I just feel like Steinbeck has done better work and would recommend some of his other books before this one.

The Call of the Wild

Ever since I read his awesome short story "To Build a Fire" I wanted to read Jack London's classic The Call of the Wild. Sometimes written off as an adolescent book, it is actually a searching, philosophical masterpiece. It helped to establish London's reputation as one of the great writers of Naturalism, a literary movement that dealt heavily with man's relationship to nature.
The book tells the story a pampered wolf dog, Buck, who is sold into captivity in the Yukon to work in the gold rush. Taken from his rich lifestyle, Buck quickly adapts to his new life and the natural feelings he inherited from his primal ancestors are awakened within him for the first time. London tells the story through Buck's eyes and attempts to show the thoughts and reasoning behind a dog's actions.
Buck eventually escapes from captivity and is faced with the choice to go back home or stay in the wild. Buck opts to go back to his natural roots and take his place in a pack of wild wolves. Once here, Buck feels truly at home.
I found this book very moving and convincing in its effort to encourage man, like Buck, to leave behind all the worldly distractions we have created for ourselves and return to who we really are. As technology advances and things become more and more convenient, London's book is just as important as it ever was.

The Grapes of Wrath

I took a John Steinbeck class last semester and really grew to love this renowned American author. I will start with Grapes of Wrath because it stands out as my favorite book of his. It is also probably his most well known, and for good reason.
Grapes of Wrath details the struggles of the Joad family as they are forced off their land in Oklahoma due to problems caused by the great dust bowls of the 1930's. The story of the Joad family, although fictional, is representative of reality for hundreds of thousands of poor migrant worker families of the time. Steinbeck had done his homework on them--before writing the book, he had spent time with the displaced farmers, traveling with them down Route 66 toward California, eating what they ate and participating in group storytelling and singing.
Although critics of the book claim that Steinbeck had a communist agenda, I could not find proof of this. Granted, Steinbeck is critical of mass consumerism and the negative effects of capitalism. He also encourages a society which watches out for its fellowman; however, more than any type of communism, his argument promotes brotherly love, charity and other simple traditional Christian values that many of his critics would likely profess to believe in.
I also enjoyed Steinbeck's animosity toward authority in the book. In it, government workers like police officers are the cause, not the solution, to many of the problems.
But Grapes of Wrath is more than just a social protest novel. It deals primarily with the interworkings of the Joad family. Almost all the members of the family are strong characters that leave lasting impressions on the reader. Through the family, Steinbeck shows how normal people deal with serious problems and show strength and courage in the face of them.
The book is packed with powerful scenes and statements. My copy of it is filled with pen marks from notes and underlining.
I highly recommend this book. Not only is it a great and moving story, but one can also learn more about history and the social climate of the time from reading it. The book is also an eye-opener to the situations and conditions in which some people are forced to live and provokes empathy in the reader for other human beings.

"The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line. And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment."