The Greek Myths (1955) by Robert Graves

I'm not sure whether to give this a negative review because Graves' delivery is so dry it seems almost intentionally unengaging, or to give it a great review because it's an all-encompassing study of the sources available for us today. Indeed, this belongs on everyone's bookshelf for quick reference. Or at least, it would have before the internet was invented.

Probably my lack of enjoyment of this volume stems from the fact that I thought it was something it was not until I opened it and began reading it. I was expecting a collection of short fiction in which Graves skillfully imparts Greek myths, and I instead got terse blurbs describing them with each followed by a lengthy discussion on the sources and historiography from Graves himself. While this is an invaluable tool to anybody studying or teaching mythology in an academic sense, it makes for very dry pleasure reading, and I ended up putting it down about halfway through and picking up Homer's Iliad instead.

HI am familiar with this type of tome, having studied history as an undergrad. But I can't say I missed the instances of several passages discussing names, births, and progeny, droning on and on ad nauseam. But again, this is counterbalanced by the fact that this is a fantastic collection, including sources, of these myths.

Perhaps I'm just not a fan of Graves' style. I didn't love I, Claudius despite having a keen interest in Roman Civ, and I certainly didn't love this. But I still feel it holds some value due to the quality of its study and its value as a quick reference tome for anybody interested in Greek Mythology.

⭐⭐

The Fellowship of the Ring (1954) (The Lord of the Rings, #1) by J.R.R. Tolkien

Rereading Martin's A Song of Ice And Fire—something written specifically as a counterpoint to Tolkien's work, and the various works in fantasy Tolkien inspired with it—has led me to realize just how off-the-rails HBO's famous (infamous?) television adaptation has gone. While earlier seasons stick closely to Martin's work (to great effect), latter seasons begin to depart, first in minor fashion, then in necessarily major strides as they surpass Martin's books and the weight of wrapping up the series falls on their heads alone. This has had the expected disastrous effect on the show's writing quality; a series once praised for its gray characters, complex machinations, and authentic fantasy world has devolved almost completely into a Marvel-inspired fantasy epic that consistently breaks its own rules and resorts to cheap faked-death cliffhangers where once it was renowned for playing seriously with its characters lives. The show is completely unrecognizable from its source material. Its appeal remains as genre pulp; fan-pleasing mental junk food that's pretty to look at but no longer espouses the qualities that made it so revered.

Imagine my surprise, then, to learn that Peter Jackson's now world-famous Lord of the Rings film adaptations are actually quite adherent to their source material. I was in high school when the film series released and had not yet read Tolkien's legendary masterwork, yet I adored the films for the ethereal, otherworldly sets, make-up, and special effects they provided, bolstered further by the iconic score constructed by Howard Shore; one now so iconic to fantasy films that it rivals comparisons of Ennio Morricone's famous spaghetti western themes.

In stark contrast to the HBO adaptation of Ice and Fire falling far short of Martin's work, I honestly believe that Fellowship works far better as a film than it ever did as a novel, and that Jackson's rendition of Tolkien's work is about as perfect as you can hope for. I'll even go as far as saying I'm shocked that this isn't a more common opinion.

In novel form, perhaps the strongest aspect is Tolkien's grasp of language. Not the English language in specific, but of the history of language: its etymology. Tolkien's background as a linguist allows him to construct the foundation of this world not with long paragraphs of exposition (although he does frequently fall victim to this), but with words; the languages present, names of structures and lands, and even the songs the characters sing. A lot of Middle-Earth feels fantastical because it's built around these languages. It does a lot to impart a feeling of foreignness that so much modern fantasy lacks.

Most disappointing to me was the constant parroted opinion that the characters of the films are much simpler versions of their book counterparts. I can confidently say, at least in this first episode, that this isn't entirely true. Are the characters altered? Sure: Gimli is used a bit too much as comic relief in the films and his people and character lack development, but honestly, he doesn't get much development in this novel, either.

And that's my main problem with Fellowship. Where the film has its fantastic visuals to fall back on, the book has only descriptions. Which is fine, but I wanted something more. I yearned for something like Martin's brilliant, colorful cast of dozens of characters, or Abercrombie's biting sardonic wit to fill these pages. The bulk of Fellowship is filled with our characters moving from place to place, experiencing this wonderful world that Tolkien has created, but we learn very little of them and not enough depth of these locales we're witnessing is provided. Tolkien breezes past description of ruins, rivers, old settlements, etc, with very little time devoted to creating any depth or substance. Sure, those ruins sound great. I like ruins! But then we're onward once again.
Instead it felt too often that Tolkien caved to his indulgence, filling his pages with something like song, which is fine as a display of this world's culture, but I wanted something more substantial to dig into.

I am admittedly not a huge fan of fantasy. I've read quite a bit of it, but very little I've liked, and maybe it's just the fantasy formula in general that turns me off of Fellowship rather than Tolkien himself. After all, this is a beloved novel. But it just wasn't for me. Too much of it was pretty window-dressing; meandering through lovely lands without meaningful history. Contrary to what Tolkien fans espouse, the characters were paper-thin and failed to grow, and the world, though pretty to imagine, never inspired me with its history like Martin's does, even when he's at his most indulgent and taking us on seemingly pointless tours through Essos in A Dance With Dragons.

After finishing, I began to view Martin not so much as the aforementioned "counterpoint" to Tolkien, but rather an evolution of him, as I believe Martin features a lot of what makes Tolkien attractive—an old, interesting world and a compelling narrative with strong themes—but Martin constructs his world and his characters with more care and roots said construction more within reality than fantasy, and provides each with exponentially more depth, thus making them far more intriguing than Tolkien does his.

Yes, yes, I know: Burn the witch. Who doesn't adore LOTR? But I can't help it: This is my second time reading Fellowship, and charming though he can be, Tolkien just doesn't work for me.

⭐⭐

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) by Washington Irving

Irving's talent for description reminds me a bit of Stevenson's, however, the story lacks the depth of something like Jekyll and Hyde and Irving's prose tends to get away from him when compared to the tighter efforts of similar work. Sleepy Hollow began to wear thin near the halfway mark of the story.

The real value here is in the richly colored depiction of early American life in the Tappan Zee area and the Northern European folkloric influences Irving adapts for this story.

⭐⭐⭐

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde

Wilde probably had written so many plays and so much poetry despite having only a single novel and a relatively small amount of short stories because prose doesn't seem to feature his particular talents—describing beautiful things in a witty fashion using beautiful words, and coming up with scandalous scenarios—as much as the other media of writing do. Certainly this novel seems to expose some of his flaws as a writer.

I found I couldn't connect with any of the characters, who felt more like talking heads existing to pass on Wilde's philosophical diatribe than human beings to which interesting things happen. Most glaringly, I couldn't understand the other characters' attachments to Dorian Gray, who, by my estimation, was nothing more than a pretty face. There certainly wasn't anything substantial within his character that drew me or, indeed, would draw anybody else. He's an empty vessel; we're told he's beautiful and he is wealthy, but he displays nothing at all of his own character in the entire first half of the book, never mind anything interesting.

I often felt that the three main characters blended together. They seem to lack many differentiating beliefs and they all speak with an almost identical voice. There was very little separating them whatsoever; especially Lord Henry and Dorian. The three seemed all to be facets of Wilde himself, indeed upon my research of the book I learned that he thought of them as such, too. None have their own unique character, save small differentiating factors: Basil has a sentimentalist streak, Lord Henry is just Dorian, but a bit older and more experienced.

Wilde's prose is littered with the witticisms he's known for and it's beautifully constructed, but I still can't help but think he makes a better poet and playwright than novelist. Dorian Gray reads more like a collection of nicely packaged Oscar Wilde quotes than it does a stand-alone novel. The pacing felt uneven as well; it's front-loaded with a slog of philosophical soliloquy as we're immediately piled on with Wilde's new Hedonism as provided gleefully by Lord Henry. Dorian is immediately taken with it, but from there the story takes a bit too long to get going as Wilde indulges himself in depictions of London's high society at the turn of the century, opera and plays and dinner parties and the like. Subsequent to this is Dorian's years-long slide into debauchery, which, disappointingly, is summarized within one chapter, punctuated by a peculiar set of forgettable paragraphs that drone on while listing all of passions which he indulges over the years. This was disappointing to me since the development of Dorian Gray as a character was what I was most looking forward to in the story. However Wilde recovers himself towards the end and remembers he's writing a damned novel, and eventually does add some characterization and move the plot along through the last 60 pages or so.


If you like Wilde's work, you'll probably like this. He chooses a spectacular premise to build the book around but my dissatisfaction stems from my feeling that he failed in constructing the pillars the story needed to rest upon. His philosophy is interesting as well, but I feel it failed in its application.

There's enough here to recommend a read, as Wilde is particularly well-suited to the description of beautiful things. I certainly came away with a bevy of new highlights. But I found it all ultimately superficial, Wilde's attempt at throwing a gloss over raw philosophical ramblings, something highly ironic considering the subject matter of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

⭐⭐⭐

Dubliners (1914) by James Joyce

James Joyce isn’t scary.

At least, not in Dubliners. I was nervous to read Joyce, as I’m somewhat of a neophyte to classic literature, and Joyce’s reputation is that of a nearly impenetrable etymological, historical, and poetic genius. But, luckily for me, this is no Finnegans Wake (which I once peeked into to see what all the fuss was about and set down almost immediately, feeling like I was reading a different language). It’s no Ulysses, either. Hell, even A Portrait of the Young Man As An Artist is a measurably tougher read than Dubliners. I came to learn after beginning that Joyce purposely wrote it to be the most approachable of his works; the polar opposite of Finnegans Wake, which requires the footnotes and annotations of an almost post-graduate level of study to be rendered even somewhat coherent. No, Dubliners is Joyce at his most consumable, most easily digestible, and still provides as much soulful nourishment as any other work I’ve ever read—which is admittedly not very much, yet.

It’s not altogether correct to describe Joyce’s Dubliners as a short story collection. It may be technically accurate, sure. But while these can be read stand-alone–and indeed, I began reading Dubliners with the goal of reviewing each story individually on Goodreads – they’re better taken in as a singular work as each story elevates the others. It’s far greater than the sum of its parts when approached as a novel rather than a collection of short stories.

There were some chapters I deemed forgettable when I tried to analyze them in a vacuum. But reading Farrington’s despicable character in Counterparts prior to Maria’s sweet, independent loneliness in Clay before finally wading through Duffy’s regretful heartbreak in A Painful Case provides such a rollercoaster of emotions that consuming the three in one sitting is a far different experience than reading one of the trio by itself. Thus I’d recommend against approaching this like a typical short story collection and suggest reading it as a novel instead.

A number of the stories depict the more mundane aspects of Dublin life, but Joyce’s prose elevates everything to a higher level. From Joyce’s pen the mundane springs beautifully and the beautiful emerges jaw-droppingly. Joyce is at his best when he writes about love. I have yet to read any author from any country in any time period who is able to approach depicting the feeling of love as skillfully as Joyce does.

These are not all happy stories, though. This is realist literature, after all. And they’re not always coherent, either—modernist, too. Joyce assumes his readers’ intelligence and often leaves it to them to fill in the blanks. While this can be frustrating when attempted by a sub par writer, it works beautifully when done by Joyce, and adds another facet of quality to the stories rather than detracting from their impact with ambiguity.

Perhaps the only negative (albeit a subjective one) I experienced when reading this was my own lack of consistent understanding regarding the constant references to the city, its social norms, and its religion. This struck me particularly with the story Ivy Day in the Committee Room, which centers upon several men attempting to create a fire of Catholicism in their friend, a converted Protestant, who takes little interest in the religion and only converted in order to marry his Catholic wife. I’m too ignorant of Catholicism to dig deeper than the surface of what they were discussing and initially it seemed nothing more than a relatively dry story of a man’s friends striving to make him more religious. It was only after I referred to some analysis of the story online that I realized these friends, throughout the conversation, were blatantly wrong with many of their assertions and references to the history of the Catholic church. Another reference I missed was that the priest himself was named after a street in Dublin’s old red light district, and was surrounded by motifs of the color red through the entire final scene. With this added context, Ivy Day becomes much deeper; it morphs from a fairly bland story into a subtly scathing criticism of many of Dublin’s denizens in what Joyce depicts as a fair-weather form of Catholicism which saves nary a soul.

The fact that I’m not a Catholic and not from Dublin constantly detracted from my enjoyment of the book throughout, and caused me to regularly refer to the gratuitous endnotes my edition contained, along with exterior internet analysis, to get the most out of Dubliners. This is very much a subjective criticism, of course, but something to note nonetheless.

Perhaps due to this ignorance of so much of its subject matter, when I think of my time reading Dubliners, I think first about emotion: love, melancholy, relief, sorrow, regret. Joyce’s writing left such a specter roaming my brain that I recall the raw emotion I felt while reading Dubliners more than I recall any of its rumination upon Dublin’s character, religion, and politics. I’m not sure I’ve ever had the written word affect me so much as some of these stories have, and the fact that I’m neither from Dublin nor, obviously, a 100+ year old man who lived at the time in which Joyce was writing, is a testament to Joyce’s skill in conveying these ideas. Doing so with such mundane, everyday stories of regular people renders Dubliners even more impressive.

Even apart from their context, his words are powerful:

“One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”

“He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.”

“Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”

“I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.” 

“When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street.”

Despite this beauty, reading through Dubliners was up-and-down for me. Joyce's prose is clearly enrapturing and I always feel myself settle into the reverie that comes with reading a really, really good writer each time I sit down to continue reading. While all his short stories in this collection deal with some sort of epiphany or another, I find that not all of these epiphanies have hit me as hard as he probably intended. Perhaps some of this is the fact that I'm reading this 100 years after he had written it. Perhaps it's also due to the fact that I am not Irish, or that I've spent nowhere near long enough in Dublin to grasp its eccentricities. This has left me with the feeling more of reading some good word porn rather than being impacted by a great story, and I'm thankful my paperback copy has a healthy amount of annotations to help me grasp a bit of what Joyce is assuming is colloquial knowledge regarding Dublin's early 20th century neighborhoods, popular restaurants, streets, and buildings.

To add to this difficulty, I often have the feeling when experiencing sparse modernist work like this that the artist, rather than being purposefully ambiguous for greater impact, is being purposefully obtuse in an attempt to obscure the fact that the story is rather threadbare and create a facade of more depth than actually exists. I couldn't shake that feeling while reading the very first story in the collection, The Sisters, despite Joyce's reputation as a literary Titan.

Don't get me wrong; The Sisters is a beautifully atmospheric work by Joyce despite the fact that it leaves the reader to fill in the blanks and place their own suppositions. Though I enjoyed his skill at setting the tone and found some portions of his prose outright gorgeous, Sisters didn't do enough for me. Maybe I'm too old-fashioned, concrete, and objective; too much a philosophical Luddite to really get modernism? But that's unfortunately not a question I'm equipped to answer.

“I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.”

As I continued reading I found myself more and more invested in the sheer beauty of Joyce's words, even if I couldn't fully relate to the stories themselves. The third story, titled Araby, is a stunningly beautiful coming-of-age vignette in which a boy becomes aware of his unrealistic idealism. Joyce's style is subtle almost to a fault, but engulfing. He assumes the reader's intelligence and floods his prose with gorgeous personification and simile. Reading this was more like experiencing a painting than it was reading a short story. Wonderful.


However, it wasn't until the eighth story, titled A Little Cloud, that I found the first story I could truly relate to; one not centered upon examining Dublin, Irish Nationalist politics, Catholicism, or alcoholism.

Centered around Little Chandler, a 32-year old timid, introverted, married man with a child who, upon meeting an old friend Galleher, realizes the path his life has taken and begins to yearn for Galleher's more well-traveled, Bohemian lifestyle. Joyce's class as a writer allows him to impact the melancholy of the existential worry Chandler feels, even though as a single, childless, 30-something travel junky my own life is more similar to Galleher's than Chandler's.

A Little Cloud is particularly appealing to me because it explores an internal, subconscious conversation I've had with myself constantly: Am I missing something important by choosing to live this way? Is it a 'grass is always greener' situation? Am I making the right choice? These questions are asked of themselves by more Western adults in 2018 than in the preceding decades, given our economic and political climate—particularly in the United States—and thus I wouldn't be surprised if this story is similarly impactful to other millennials who might choose to break into reading Joyce with Dubliners.

In addition to the story's particular appeal to me, there are the usual nuggets of Joyce's poetic brilliance nestled into the prose that make it a complete joy to read:

"The glow of a late autumn sunset covered the grass plots and walks. It cast a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures — on the children who ran screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the gardens."

And then, finally, comes The Dead. Joyce saves his best for last. The Dead is a wonderfully written; a melancholy short story that encapsulates Dubliners very well. It touches on the same subject matter; Irish nationalism, the Catholic church, alcoholism, the city of Dublin. The closing lines are particularly moving and do a fantastic job to end Dubliners as a whole:

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

The Dead is considered a masterpiece of short fiction, and I feel it makes a perfect endcap to Dubliners, being literary while also remaining approachable enough to be easily recommended as the jumping-off point for anyone interested to read Joyce. It's the only story I believe truly works as a stand-alone within this collection.

Dubliners's impeccable craft is impossible to deny, but I couldn’t shake the fact while reading it that it wasn’t written for me. It encapsulates the city of its namesake and will resonate most with its denizens. For the rest of us, though, Dubliners's other strengths do more than enough to suggest a read—and even a re-read if you’ve already walked the streets of Dublin with Joyce once before.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson

Breezily paced and written in concise, direct prose, Hill House establishes many of the haunted house genre's mainstay cliches and tropes that are still replicated today. Jackson keeps the plot moving forward without riddling it with bombastic events. Instead, she feeds us bits of suggestive events, mostly through the narrator's unreliable account and inner thoughts. I grew not to be outright "scared", but had my foundation shaken by something continuously just... Off. It's like sitting in a silent room in the dead of Summer and swearing you can hear a mosquito buzzing around somewhere, but you can't find out where, and you've heard the damn buzzing on-and-off for so long and seen no mosquito that now you're no longer sure it isn't just your imagination.

Eleanor's actions are just out of place enough to tell you that something is seriously wrong with her; she laughs at the wrong times, her judgments of other characters are so inaccurate they make you wonder if you missed something. Later on, she begins to waffle in her feelings between her companions, often veering wildly from cold fury into outright obsession in the very next chapter.

It's a chilling read mostly due to Jackson's deft depiction of mental illness rather than any ghostly paranormal activity, which is mostly left up to the reader's interpretations. There are a few select shared experiences between multiple characters, but the majority of the disturbances in the house are felt by Eleanor, and Eleanor alone, leaving us to question: Is this really happening to her, or is it all in her head?

This may end up disappointing those expecting more of a pulpy horror read. But if you have an appreciation for subtle, character-driven narrative with a perfect ending, then I highly recommend this.

Bonus points for the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition I had, with the ethereal, elegiac artwork of Eleanor on the cover continuously serving to creep me out when I put this down each night to go to bed. This book reads like this cover looks; simple, pretty, but also subtly off-putting. And you're often not quite sure why.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (1967) by Harlan Ellison

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream has an intriguing premise, but that's about all. That and torture porn, I guess.

There's not really any science fiction here beyond the premise of an artificial intelligence hating and torturing the final few remnants of humanity in ways that are viscerally horrifying to a human reader. There's no attempt at an explanation as to how it can do the things it does; materializing various objects, mending injuries through mid-air, and altering the humans genetically. Nothing really happens for any reason because there aren't any rules explained to the reader, which causes the climactic action to have little payoff. The characters are shallow and the unreliable narrator never really amounts to anything, but as I read I found I had most problems with the lack of worldbuilding and wanted some basic framework to what was happening and why.

There are quite a few holes, even for a short story. These people have been stuck in here for a hundred years, yet none have thought to commit suicide? The computer can wirelessly and instantly alter their DNA, can keep them from death... Except it can't at the climax of the story? 

Why? Because Ellison decided so?

I'm pretty disappointed with this read as I expected much more. Is it horrifying? Sure, but it lacks any real impact. It reads more like Ellison came up with an interesting premise but didn't know how to explore it, and resorted to shocking tortureporn in place of an actual, impactful narrative—horrifying or otherwise.

It must have been a unique premise back in 1967, and it certainly features some inventive ways of shocking the audience, but its lack of depth renders its attempt at a shocking conclusion ultimately unsatisfying.

⭐

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

An odd experience reading this considering how great the story is and the intriguing ideas it explores while being an awfully overwritten mess that was a slog to trudge through.

Shelley explores what seems like postpartum depression via the lens of a horror novel and works in ruminations upon free will, human socialization, existentialism, and prejudice. However sandwiched between her exploration of these themes is both a lengthy travelogue an extensive periods of time in which Frankenstein does nothing but describe to the audience how hopelessly miserable he is. I would not be surprised to find that nearly a third of the pages of this novel are one of the two of these. I'd read for pages at a time of Frankenstein describing the layout of Swiss towns and mountains only to have absolutely nothing happen aside from him passing through them without event. I know Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary were all traveling through Switzerland prior to her writing this and she was surely inspired to write about the wonderful vistas they witnessed, but this is sheer, worthless fat; an indulgence on the author's part that doesn't serve the story and bores the reader to the point of forcing skimming or putting the book down. It's also hurt by the chapter-long instances of Frankenstein moaning directly to us just how woefully miserable he is, breaking the cardinal rule of show-don't-tell and causing the reader to shout "Oh just get on with it then, Victor, damn it, we haven't got all day".

I strongly considered putting the book down through the middle portion at the height of Shelley's dithering, put upon reflection it is my opinion that it presents novel questions and, more importantly, ends superbly enough to make it worth a read. I just can't help but suspect a more experienced writer than Shelley was at the time of writing Frankenstein could have turned in a far tighter story and shorn off a fair chunk of this bloated mess into the true masterpiece it's reputed to be.

⭐⭐⭐

The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) (Dupin, #1) by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe's Dupin blazes a trail and sets the standard for the mystery genre. The main character is a memorable one and Poe keeps us guessing, but the reveal stretches belief a bit and the story in general lacks some of the refinement we see later in Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes novels that Poe inspires here.

Poe deserves recognition for the pioneering quality of Murders in the Rue Morgue, but the Dupin stories are unfortunately overshadowed by the later, greater works which evolve and refine the genre.

⭐⭐⭐

The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe

Contrasting to meandering, overwritten horror classics such as Shelley's Frankenstein, Poe proves with The Tell-Tale Heart that length-requiring plot and character development is unnecessary when you have the capacity to unsettle your audience by atmosphere creation and the building of tension delivered with exceptionally tight and stylized prose. Brilliantly constructed and viscerally unsettling, Heart represents the strength of the short story as a medium and lives on as one of the foremost examples of the unreliable narrator in horror fiction.

One of Poe's best. I'll probably re-read this one each October until I die.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐