A Clash of Kings (1998) (A Song of Ice and Fire, #2) by George R.R. Martin

More than a decade ago when I first read these books, Martin's A Clash of Kings was among my least favorite of the lot.

The first novel of this series, A Game of Thrones, ends rather explosively. And so the beginning of Clash has to spend some time picking up the scattered pieces, and replacing those broken in the last book on the board. We're immediately introduced to a new set of characters: Davos, Stannis, Melisandre. I have the specific recollection of a feeling of frustration the first time I read these chapters. I didn't care for these new people—I was far more concerned with what had happened to the characters I'd just left as I completed Thrones.

On re-reading the series, though, I've got the distinct feeling that I'm revisiting old friends from times past. Stannis and Davos are two of my favorite characters in the series, and it was a joy to crack open some of these chapters once again. My perspective was thus vastly different opening this book to re-read it than it was to read it for the first time. A Clash of Kings is relatively unfettered from the shackles that bind A Game of Thrones; that is, the responsibility of teaching new readers all about this world. Thrones suffers a bit from a roughness of style and pacing due to this, but Clash is refreshingly free of it, for the most part.

Despite that freer feeling, the beginning of this book does dial back the tension a bit in order to introduce its new characters. I think, in general, Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series suffers greatly from this sort of "dial-it-back-and-reset-the-board" feeling that you get with books such as Clash, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance With Dragons. These are such massive, unwieldy novels which include so many different characters and locales that it must be absurdly difficult for Martin to keep the train propelled on the tracks. Thus we're struck with these jagged sorts of starts and stops as he introduces new players (sometimes over hundreds of pages) to continue forcing the plot along, in addition to bringing in new locales to keep things fresh.

And it certainly remains fresh. This is the third time I've read this book, and I must confess I enjoyed it more this time than either of the first two times I read it. Martin's prose can get awfully schlocky at times (something seemingly all fantasy falls victim to with varying regularity) but somehow this campiness manages to work for me—someone for whom campiness falls flat and alienates, 9 times out of 10.

The pale pink light of dawn sparkled on branch and leaf and stone. Every blade of grass was carved from emerald, every drip of water turned to diamond. Flowers and mushrooms alike wore coats of glass. Even the mud puddles had a bright brown sheen. Through the shimmering greenery, the black tents of his brothers were encased in a fine glaze of ice.

So there is magic beyond the Wall after all.

Outside of its context, Jon's rumination on a late Autumn morning in the far north reads more than a tad purple and overwrought. But once you've taken this journey with Jon and shared his nerves, his camaraderie, the absence of his siblings... Well, it seems just the right time to hit the reader with a cloud of purple prose as Jon takes a moment and appreciates his surroundings, setting aside his tension, fear, and the realization of the danger he's in. Martin's not regularly given to this sort of attempt at profundity, so when it does happen, it's refreshing. It never feels like he's trying too hard.

With this book, as with others in the series, the characters bear the brunt of the load and carry my enjoyment. Tyrion Lannister's wit is told to us as much as it's shown to us in the first book, but when placed in a position of political power in Clash, it's readily displayed in each chapter. The dialogue between him and the other political figures in this book (Cersei, Varys, Littlefinger, Lancel, Janos, etc.) is superbly enjoyable. Martin paints political maneuvering with a deep enough stroke that it feels more realistic than most fantasy (which is given to an absurdly shallow and limited view of politics and governance that drives me batty), but never does it become so labyrinthine that it fails to still be fun. Martin's penchant for snappy, cinematic dialogue also helps it along greatly:

“Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.”
“So power is a mummer’s trick?”
“A shadow on the wall,” Varys murmured, “yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”
Tyrion smiled. “Lord Varys, I am growing strangely fond of you. I may kill you yet, but I think I’d feel sad about it.”
“I will take that as high praise.”

Much of the book includes this kind of politicking, although it's interspersed with various fantastical meanderings that pepper Martin's series and make the books enjoyable to experience from an imaginative standpoint. Jon's rambles north of the wall into the wild lands and Daenerys' experiences in the House of the Undying Ones tickle my mind's eye. But the real star of the book, for me, is undoubtedly the political plays of characters such as Tyrion, along with the military maneuvering and staging of generals Stannis Baratheon and Robb Stark, and how expertly these events tick the tension upwards to the book's (literally) explosive climax.

The closing chapters of the book abandon this character interplay for outright action, and it all feels earned. The tension bursts in such an enjoyable way, and one of the major conflicts of the books is resolved in a way which doesn't feel too clean, nor does any of the culling feel like it's made for shock value alone. Martin's third-person limited structure provides three viewpoint characters for this climactic event, and all feel as if they have a unique voice and perspective of the climactic events. None tread on the others and all keep the action flowing at a perfect pace. I blew through the last 200 pages or so with unexpected alacrity.

Although I'm not a huge fan of fantasy, nor genre fiction in general, I can't help but love this series. It does feature some of the hallmarks of those subgenres, but it's so strongly themed, its characters are so well-realized, its imagery is so compelling, and its dialogue is such a pleasure to read that I can't seem to get enough of them. I'll probably read and re-read these books continuously until I die, and even if the series is never finished, I'll still be nothing but thankful for Martin's work and the hours of enjoyment these books have brought to my life.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Lonesome Dove (1985) by Larry McMurtry

I was at a college house party once, more than a decade ago. I had just gotten an insignificant job writing about video games for an online publication. It didn't pay much, but I was a broke college student who enjoyed writing and I had been playing video games since before I could read, so it was a good match. I had been discussing this with one of my good friends when an acquaintance butted in. 

He was a friend-of-a-friend type; the kind of person who sits on the periphery of these conversations and, rather than seeming awkward, radiates a haughty, above-it-all air with a shit-eating grin that makes you want to toss a blunt object into their teeth like they're bowling pins.

Let's call him Jake.

Jake was not a tall fellow, but what he lacked in length he made up for in thickness. He had bleached blond spiky hair, embarrassingly poor tattoos, and the kind of beach muscles that would make a Jersey Shore cast member blush. I didn't know him well, but he seemed an affable enough sort when we did make small talk. I don't even remember how we came to know him—probably a friend of one of my girlfriend's friend's boyfriend's.

Jake made his entrance into my periphery and loomed under me. "You're still playing video games!? You gotta stop playing video games, man." He chuckled, subtly imparting to me how ridiculous my hobby was, and how silly it made me look. His comment was timed to perfectly coincide with the end of the conversation that was happening just prior—my friend to whom I was just speaking had already ambled on and was now out of earshot of Jake's comments.

This was nearly 15 years ago, but I can still remember Jake's sneering face in my mind's eye.

I was completely taken aback. Video games and those who play them have never enjoyed a sterling reputation, of course—and that reputation has decreased exponentially during the years since this conversation happened. But Jake's words were an openly made, mocking criticism the likes of which I hadn't heard since I'd been called a nerd in grade school.

At first I didn't respond, just gaped at him like an idiot, which likely confirmed his judgment of me.

"Well, they are paying me," I eventually managed, and left Jake to wallow in his smugness.

I assume that justification meant little to him—someone who wouldn't be caught dead doing such a detestable thing as playing a video game, paid or not—and, to be honest, the justification itself meant almost nothing to me. I'd have gone on playing video games whether I was being paid to or not, simply because I loved them. A few days later, after the embarrassment passed, I thought again about the incident, recoiled, and became internally angry about it. Who is he to judge my hobbies!? That anger eventually dampened, too, and gave way to introspection. Jake's statement left a lingering question in my mind: Why do I play video games? What is it that I enjoy so much about them? Why can I sit down at my computer desk and be so wholly locked into this experience that it would take a monumental sense of responsibility and discipline to move myself away from it? Why, when I think back on certain periods of my life, do I immediately think about which video games I was playing around that time?

And, further: Is this all of this adoration artificial? Maybe they are just a complete waste of time, and I've been tricked into thinking otherwise. Perhaps video games satiate my mind the way cotton candy might fill your stomach when you're hungry—completely lacking in any actual substance, and better replaced by something more substantial. Maybe everyone sees this except me, and I'm being a fool about it.

I am nothing if not a hobbyist, and over the past 15 years I've asked myself these kinds of questions about my hobbies many times:

"Is this worthwhile?" 

"What value does this offer me?"

"Is this enriching my life?"

The process has become what I consider to be a healthy habit with regards to how I spend my free time. In recent years I've begun to develop an answer to that question when I've asked it of my lifelong infatuation with video games.

Video games can be deceptive to those who play them, and even moreso to those who don't. On the surface, it's easy to see why they're so attractive: They look beautiful (especially nowadays), they provide a steady dopamine drip by feeding the player bite-sized rewards for accomplishing menial tasks, and they immerse their players with heaping doses of escapism, allowing them to forget their troubles—sometimes to great fault, as gaming addiction is a very real thing which destroys lives by allowing the player to so effectively ignore their problems while their entire life crumbles around them.

But for me, games go beyond those minor benefits, and their value easily eclipses their pitfalls. My favorite moments in games often come when I feel a completely foreign sense of place; when I'm existing, as another person, in a place so foreign to me that I'd never have thought it up on my own. My senses are assaulted by this notion of otherworldliness and my brain regularly struggles to accept such a novel experience.

I'm on a planet far out into the depths of the Milky Way, staring at twin suns as the wind howls around me.

I'm on horseback in a quiet orchard in a fantasy world, trotting slowly along past a giant windmill.

It's 2029 in Prague, and I'm taking a moment of respite in my apartment as an unsettled city howls curses around me.

So when I think of what actual value it is that video games impart on my life, I'm left ignoring the moment-to-moment satisfaction of leveling up or getting a new piece of gear, and instead focusing on this intense feeling of having been at such a unique place at a certain point in my life. The experience of existing in this reality alone, of adapting to its rules and thinking critically about its events, is a worthwhile endeavor even in a vacuum, but it's profoundly affecting within the context of the current challenges one is faced with in their life; playing a game about human social relationships after a difficult break-up, or a game which examines a struggle you know about personally such as substance abuse. Even something as simple as an open world game which takes place in a city to which you've been.

These places may not exist in reality, and few of them are experiences which you could have in the real world. But these fantastical experiences have bled into my psyche and the challenges they've proposed to my thought processes exist now not only as a memory, but as a part of who I am; a part of the way I think about and affect the real world around me. I've lived other lives, I've spoken with people who do not actually exist. I've considered their problems and how I might impact them. I've enriched my own life experience and thought processes with each new "place" I visit, and I truly believe I've become a more empathetic, considerate person because I have played so many video games.

The Dunwich Horror (1929) by H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft is undoubtedly a master of atmospheric writing. His strength is in setting scenes and crafting an appropriate mood with which to manage the experience he's looking for from his readers. The opening paragraph of The Dunwich Horror is a fine example of this skill:

When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprizing uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or in the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Beyond that, though, I have to make the striking confession that I think I hate H.P. Lovecraft's work.

Reading Lovecraft's stories are, to me, the horror equivalent of reading a trashy romance paperback on a crowded train. You've got to have significant self-confidence to take undampened pleasure in reading this sort of thing in public. Lovecraft's naming conventions and otherworldly jargon always read undeniably cheesy to me. The actions which take place in the story and his characters' absurdly overdone gravitas in reaction to them always strike me as so unnatural and overly saturated that I find them impossible to take seriously:

"Ygnaiih ... ygnaiih ... thflthkh'ngha ... Yog-Sothoth...." rang the hideous croaking out of space. "Y'bthnk ... h'ehye ... n'grkdl'lh...." 

"Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah ... e'yaya-yayaaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... h'yuh ... h'yuh ... HELP! HELP! ... ff—ff—ff—FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!..."

Perhaps that's part of the charm. I have never been a fan of camp. It often falls deafly on me and I gather no amusement from it whatsoever. I feel a lot of the same vibe shared between Lovecraft's stories and cheesy '80s horror films. So maybe that's what I'm missing here. Either way, the content of these stories and the way in which they are told is not something that appeals to me, and given that I am now several stories into Lovecraft's oeuvre, I expect they will never appeal to me the way they appeal to Lovecraft's fans.

Undoubtedly inspired by far better writers such as Poe, Lovecraft falls into some of the same complaints I have with Poe's work (although I love him, generally); he relies on some of the same woefully overdone dialogue in fruitless attempts to reconstruct the vernacular of the time period which he depicts:

"An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the rud hed jest caved in like the storm hed blowed it over, only the wind wa'n't strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' ye could hear lots o' folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she yelled agin, an' says the front yard picket fence bed jest crumpled up, though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then everybody on the line could hear Cha'ncey an' ol' Seth Bishop a-yellin', tew, an' Sally was shriekin' aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse—not lightnin' nor nothin', but suthin' heavy agin' the front, that kep' a-launchin' itself agin an' agin, though ye couldn't see nuthin' aout the front winders. An' then ... an' then...."

I won't mince words here: This is utter garbage. I cannot stand it, and I refuse to read it. Perhaps I'm missing out on key story turns by skipping this stinking trash, but I'd rather stop reading the story than plod through this kind of thing. I level the same complaints towards Poe when he resorts to this crap, and Lovecraft has no excuse because folksy vernacular has already been depicted in a far better manner by writers prior to him from which he ought to have taken inspiration.

I find it more than passing amusing that some works created in the modern day which are undoubtedly inspired by Lovecraft appeal to me far more than the work of the man himself. I think this is a credit to his imagination and the atmospheric quality of his writing, but also affected by his lack of ability as an actual storyteller and his lack of properly managing the tone of his stories. They've never struck me as particularly terrifying, either; this could be due to the fact that he so often leans heavily on fear of the other; that which is foreign to us. This was surely more revolting and disconcerting to one such as Lovecraft, who is often criticized in modern circles for being a racist and a xenophobe. Such an enlightened, open-minded thinker as myself is utterly unaffected by such archaic thinking. Kidding aside; this brand of horror doesn't work for me, although the otherworldliness of his cosmic horror is something I do find enticing. I suspect his aesthetic is strongly responsible for why I gravitate towards Lovecraftian horror, but not Lovecraft's horror.

The more of Lovecraft I read, the less I like him. Which is ironic considering that Lovecraft relies so much on the horror of the unknown, the unknowable, and the other... And his mythology is so much more strange and enticing when you know very little about it.

⭐

Animal Farm (1944) by George Orwell

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on—that is, badly.

As a traditional liberal I'm not above admitting that my enjoyment of this book is carried by a healthy amount of confirmation bias. That admittance aside, I found Orwell's blatantly allegorical and satirical effort impossible to put down.

Animal Farm doesn't overstay its welcome, which is good; its 'gimmick' would have worn itself out before too long had the pagecount been heftier. More than anything, it's thoroughly amusing. The setting and characters are immediately silly and thus disarming, allowing for the later events of the story to be that much more affecting. This is not a book which has any pretension towards profundity; it's not all that deep and doesn't spend much time ruminating on the ideas its lambasting. Rather, it reads angrily; with a thoroughly frustrated air to me. Orwell's distaste for the Soviet Union at a time when his government had been somewhat unperturbed by Stalin's actions is palpable, and reading between Animal Farm's lines in this fashion was an added layer of entertainment for me. Orwell succeeds in transferring his bitter opposition to the grinding, cancerous, malformed wheel of Stalinism and puts together an affecting, cautionary tale on revolution—despite its glossy layer of silly satire. I had myself fully prepared for Orwell's satire and was thus caught off-guard by just how affecting the impact of the story's climax was.

Orwell's ever a master satirist, but, even more deeply, he also regularly succeeds at making the emotional impact of his storytelling resonate with his readers. Animal Farm's tight, pacey narrative and initially disarming silliness which gives way to emotional, affecting storytelling make it worth a read.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Game of Thrones (1996) (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1) by George R.R. Martin

WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this review! Turn back now if you haven't read A Game of Thrones yet!

Some random morning, 2010: I wake up on a couch with a splitting headache after about 5 hours of sleep. My mind instantly reverts to my default plan of attack in such situations: 'You are to commence immediately in dumping an obscene amount of coffee down our gullet and finding a bagel by any means necessary'. Aye-aye, brain.

I recall now that my friends and I had hit it hard the night prior and I had been too drunk to drive home. The sun blares with gusto through the front window of their apartment. It's summer-time, or maybe late spring? I don't remember. It doesn't matter.

I drag my feet over to the kitchen to prep the coffee maker when one of my buddies exits his bedroom and shuffles off to the bathroom, looking as shitty as I feel. I hear the toilet flush and he exits a moment later. I spare a longing thought for my own toothbrush, miles away at my own place. My friend's eyes are glued to his phone the whole way over (presumably to a text message—we had very few fancy apps ten years back). He reaches blindly for an upside-down mug. Finally he looks up at me and speaks the first words of the day:

"Hey, have you ever heard of Game of Thrones?" He asks.

"Wharrght!" I barely caught what he said. My brain's going to take a few minutes to warm up, and several hours to get back to functioning at peak capacity. I'm experienced in dealing with this situation and I know not to push the organ too hard, too early.

"New fantasy series HBO is doing. It's in development. My brother is really excited for it, he's obsessed with the books. He keeps texting me news about casting and all this other crap. He won't shut up about it."

I would go on to buy A Game of Thrones shortly after this conversation occurred to see what all the fuss was about. Amazon was already a thing, after all, even back then.

—

I was fortunate enough to read A Game of Thrones prior to the release of its television adaptation. I was able to explore it with no prior notions of what kind of a writer George R.R. Martin was. I didn't expect anybody to die terribly. All I knew was that it was fantasy, and hey, I liked the Lord of the Rings movies, right? So why not give this a shot since it comes so highly recommended?

I think this way of falling into A Song of Ice and Fire is exceedingly rare to the folks approaching this series now since it's discussed in pretty much every avenue of pop culture, be it nightly talk shows or water cooler discussions in the office.

I mean, it really is everywhere. A few years ago I was in Spain, walking along the beach after dinner, and I saw Jon Snow's moody face staring at me (below). 

A random Jon Snow sighting in southern Spain

I pity that so many people will lack the unreal experience of having their expectations completely shattered by this book. It's almost impossible to come into it blind unless you've been living under a rock for the past 8 years.

It's hard to discuss A Game of Thrones in a vacuum without considering how much of a pop culture icon it is. But in strict terms of its craft, I think what's perhaps most impressive about this book is how expertly Martin drip-feeds us his worldbuilding and characters. Not once did I feel that I was overwhelmed with too much information, though this did happen to me in the beginning of A Clash of Kings, which I felt dragged terribly as it introduces new characters and picks up the pieces of the devastating conclusion of A Game of Thrones. But its predecessor suffers nothing like that, which is an astounding feat considering just how much exposition is thrown at us in similar first novels of fantasy series. The world slowly reveals itself to you, becoming more and more enticing along the way. And you grow to like most of these characters immediately, because they feel like real people.

The only archetypes that really exist here are those Martin puts in place specifically to tear down. Sometimes it seems like this book exists as a challenge to the most popular sorts of fantasy that has existed, and, indeed, still exists, like stuff written by Brandon Sanderson, for example. It's as if Martin has taken existing characters from other fantasy stories and placed them in a realistic feudal society. We see at the conclusion of this novel what happens when the upright, uncompromisingly moralistic, ne'er-do-poor Eddard Stark comes face to face with the political machinations of real world feudalism, where absolute power is free to be had by whomever is most adept at grasping for it. I have the distinct memory of reading the scene in which Eddard is executed and simply refusing to believe it actually happened. "No way, no how. Arya didn't actually see him die, right? It had to have been a double or something." I was in such disbelief that he was actually executed. Surely Martin expected his readers to have this reaction, because he dangles right in front of your freaking eyes exactly what would have happened in other books: Cersei states that Eddard will be allowed to take the black and join his bastard son Jon at the wall, presumably to redeem himself at sometime later in the story and set things right again. "What a nice story development! I see where this is going!" But nope, he gets killed. Right there, suddenly, on the whim of one sporadic decision by Joffrey. It's such a wonderfully realistic twist in the story, yet it's devastating and impossible to anticipate.

As a former history undergrad, the plot of ASOIAF reminds me perhaps most of reading actual history, with all its convolutedness, rather than any other fictional genre—even fantasy, the one to which it technically belongs. Eddard's execution created such regret of what could have been, and the later novels in ASOIAF are filled with stuff exactly like it. It's what could have happened after Augustus' death if Germanicus had not died and instead survived to heroically take the purple. It's the knowledge that could have been preserved had the Library of Alexandria not burned to the ground. It's the glory of golden age Baghdad—the height of medicine and education around the globe in the 13th century—had the Mongols not sacked the city, salted its earth, and filled in its irrigation canals. These are the kinds of grand tragedies that exist in history; tragedies that you feel in your gut, tragedies that make you sick to think about, and ASOIAF was the first time I've ever come close to experiencing this kind of visceral regret while reading fiction. It's able to accomplish this mainly with its worldbuilding (which makes the world actually feel like it's thousands of years old) and its phenomenal character writing.

I graduated college in 2007. I did so much reading—mostly of incredibly dry and boring histories—that I spent nearly three years without picking up more than a book or two. I was almost completely burned out on the act of reading itself and preferred to spend my free time playing video games or watching television. Reading A Game of Thrones was thus a bridge to me; a bridge which led me from history to fiction, and, in a more metaphorical sense, the first of many such bridges which led me to inhabiting the person I am today. It made reading "history" fun again, and opened up the entirely new world of fiction to me, which has immutably changed me for the better. Martin reminded me of what is so fantastic about reading fiction by writing characters that feel like real people and subverting the tropes of an entire genre.

I read maybe 3 books in 2009. I read 62 in 2019. I carry either a book or my e-reader everywhere with me. I listen to audiobooks when I drive, shower, or do the dishes. I spend nearly all of my free "me-time" reading. It's become my chief hobby, something I never thought possible after finishing college.

That's what George R.R. Martin did for me, and why this series is so important to me. George R.R. Martin made me a reader again.

—

The apartment my three friends occupied nearly ten years ago is long gone. The building is still there, but that place is no more. Sometimes I still drive past it on my way elsewhere and remember that morning.

Now we're all in our thirties and fondly remember our wild-and-woolly nights out in our early twenties. Two of my friends are married. One has a child. One now lives across the country from us, in Texas. Sometimes a song or a smell hits me with a blast of nostalgia for that time in my life, and sometimes I see Martin's book series on my shelf and get hit with a similar feeling.

We may have gone our separate ways, but it's impossible not to think about them and that time when I reread this series and recall where I first heard of it and how it has changed the way I live on a daily basis. I can only hope future books I read will have some semblance of the impact that this one has had on my life.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Here it was just about bearable.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich must have been far more noteworthy on its release, back in the days when mum was the word on the Siberian Soviet work camps. Having a window into the daily life of these 'zeks'—convicts—must have been enlightening and thought-provoking to those living outside the iron curtain in the 1950s. 

Sadly much of it does not ring very noteworthy or affecting today. Rather than horror, Solzhenitsyn's depiction of the gulag work camps relies on showing the hopeless ennui of the prisoners. Robbed of everything fulfilling in life, the zeks are focused instead of how to get a bit more food, steal a bit more sleep, or avoid the overseers' sticks. I found myself considering this more a fictionalized pamphlet than an actual novella. It was surprising to me that something written on the gulag—a topic which I'm intensely interested in—could be so unaffecting and emotionally unengaging. It shouldn't be that difficult to generate sympathy for wrongly imprisoned human beings, yet that was the case for me. None of the zeks in the story felt human or relatable, despite their circumstances.

I didn't find any of the characters particularly noteworthy, the prose was straightforward, and the events of the story did not affect me, either. So what we have here is mostly a dry, uneventful window into the life of a political prisoner. One which is surprisingly mundane and deadened rather than brutal, humiliating, or torturous. I opened the book expecting (and desiring) to be galvanized against the injustice of the work camps and found myself turning pages in a ho-hum fashion.

Perhaps the translation is partly to blame? I don't speak Russian, so I can't be sure. I picked up the H.T. Willetts translation after hearing it praised, but I found the syntax read rather awkwardly, and the prose, though it had potential, was mostly dry. Whether this is due to Solzhenitsyn's writing style or Willetts' translation, I couldn't say.

I dislike calling media 'boring' because it's always felt like a lazy criticism to me. But, if the tattered footwrap fits...

I haven't yet read Solzhenitsyn's epic journalized-fiction on the gulags, The Gulag Archipelago, but I suspect that style suits Solzhenitsyn far more than this type of fiction does. I wasn't a huge fan of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but I do still look forward to reading Solzhenitsyn's other, more praised work sometime in the near future.

⭐⭐

Romeo and Juliet (1595) by William Shakespeare

Romeo climbs Juliet's balcony in the play's iconic scene

I do have some recollection of reading the famous play Romeo and Juliet in high school, as most Americans do. We even took a field trip to see it performed live. However, like most students of teen age, I paid the great work little respect and thus recall almost none of my previous read, nor the experience of seeing the play itself, and thus was able to experience it again with fresher eyes.

I've always viewed Shakespeare's work as being rather stuffy and impenetrable. Probably this is due to the early modern English language in which his plays are written. Thankfully, I thoroughly destroyed this barrier in the past with a complete reading of the King James Version of the Holy Bible. No work of early modern English will ever intimidate me after completing such a slog as that, and I was able to experience Romeo and Juliet in a far more natural manner than I was probably ever able to while studying it in school.

Shakespeare's actually quite different from my previous view of him. The early pages of Romeo and Juliet left me staggered not from his poetic, creative, beautiful dialogue (although it does feature plenty of that), but with the experience of reading Romeo and Mercutio's sharp, barb-like dialogue between one another and pausing, dumbstruck, with the thought of: "Hold on a second... Was that a dick joke? In Shakespeare!?"

If love be rough with you, be rough with love;

Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down.

Yes, yes it was. It was a dick joke. There are plenty of vagina jokes, too!

Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry 

Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

Surprisingly (at least to me—a Shakespearean neophyte), various clever, bawdy references are peppered throughout.

Reading such dialogue is amusing, mostly due to my previous notion that Shakespeare's work was utterly proper and academic, but also due to the everlasting notion that the generations before ours were always somehow better than us; more polite, more proper, more civilized. And it's nice to be reminded so often while reading literature that that's certainly not the case. That it never was. That even highly educated nobility, decked out in their expensive, colorful livery, were still shamelessly making dick jokes with their pals as they drank at a party.

And so I learned that Romeo and Juliet often reads as a modern romantic comedy. The first half of the play is strikingly casual, entertaining, and humorous. I swept through its pages with relative ease compared to how challenging I used to find his work—I attempted to read Macbeth several years ago and failed inside the first dozen pages. I can only imagine that Shakespeare's contemporaries would have greatly enjoyed such levity.

This kind of light, comic romance would be fully disarming to one who was not already aware of the play's conclusion. My reading of the play undoubtedly suffered at the spoiling of this reveal, as I expect most readers' must be. With hindsight, I came to admire the deftness with which Shakespeare sets up the tragic ending. The play's paciness also helps this along, as it moves quickly from scene to scene and wastes little time with unnecessary diversion.



As I read, I grew to respect Shakespeare not as some high-minded artist, but rather as an exceptional entertainer. Of course, some of this is lost on us modern day readers, as there's a bit of a time barrier. But I still enjoyed Romeo and Juliet far more than I expected to. If I had to level a criticism at the play, it would probably fall more on the medium with which I experienced it rather than any of the text itself. Reading a play in written form is always going to fall short of the full experience of seeing it live, and I found myself craving some exposition to help illustrate the scene for me; something which I would not have felt had I been witnessing the stage production rather than reading it.

Regardless; a worthwhile experience. And I look forward to reading more Shakespeare soon.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Little Mermaid (1836) by Hans Christian Andersen

During certain difficult periods of my youth I've fallen prey to cursing myself and wishing to be anyone other than who I am. I'd guess that these sorts of moments of self-doubt and alienation are rather common among young adults. It wasn't until my late twenties that I began to set aside this brand of deep, subtle, festering self-hatred and instead choose to focus first on learning who exactly it is that I'm hating, then working to accept the person I am, and finally striving to improve the qualities I've already unknowingly developed, and then to correct some of my most unfortunate deficiencies. I think it's an important part of adulthood to finally come to terms with who you are and begin, from there, to learn and work to become who you really want to be.

The Little Mermaid's tragic fable touches on the theme of identity and desire, centered around a young girl who's given the opportunity to become somebody she is not in order to please what she believes are the desires of another. She realizes the heartbreaking gravity of such a tragic error, along with the fickle nature of desire.

Andersen's evocative scene-setting is perhaps what he does best, and it remains strong throughout this short story. Colorful descriptions of seashell-speckled aquatic palaces, the wriggling dark tentacles littering the walls of the sea witch's abode. Even the settings on dry land are especially spellbinding: limestone castles and fantastical beaches. These kinds of establishing shots read through in casual exposition are what I loved so much about Thumbelina, and it remains strong throughout The Little Mermaid.

The book is permeated with some Christian subtext that feels a bit jarring and out of place in the story, and I think it would have worked better had the titular mermaid been focused not on being granted an immortal soul, but simply the prince's love. I found the conclusion to be wanting as well, as we see Andersen devolve into a rather... psychedelic experience in the closing pages. It might have been compelling had it not been so abruptly and carelessly introduced, but I felt that it shifted the somber tone of the conclusion too quickly. I'd have much preferred for Andersen to instead have ended things on a simpler, more tragic note.

⭐⭐⭐

Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck

Everyone who reads classic literature as an adult has picked up a book they were forced to read as a teenager and had a completely different experience the second time around. I had just this experience with Of Mice and Men, and I've had it before with certain other books that are part of the typical American educational curriculum—my recent re-read of The Great Gatsby provided a similar experience.

I'm not an educator, nor am I particularly well-versed in raising children. But I still can't help but criticize the choice to make this book such a cornerstone of teenage literary education because there seems to be so little for children and teenagers to relate to within its pages. The gentle giant trope could be one, sure. But what felt most poignant for me was Steinbeck's clear reference to the American dream, and his constant depiction of how hopeless the lives and futures of these men (and the woman) are.

American adults are constantly enraptured by the future. We're thinking about retirement, house maintenance, debt management. Marriage, children. We're thinking about our five-year-plan, or relocating to a more affordable or more luxurious area. We're considering career changes. I'd go as far as to say this kind of thinking is a universal aspect of daily American life. And these characters are no different in this regard. They dream big, but they're their own worst enemies. They constantly plan to grow a stake of money with which to buy land, but they end up blowing it on whoring and gambling, or being struck by misfortune, and their best-laid plans (of mice and men OHHH, HE SAID IT! HE SAID THE TITLE!) going awry. This is something intensely, viscerally understood and feared by adults, and a thought I believe is probably hopelessly lost on children and teenagers who've never had to provide for themselves and who've never been dominated by their dreams for—and worries about—the future. It's why I believe I garnered nothing from Of Mice and Men when I first read it as a 13-year-old, but the story ended up resonating so strongly with me as a 35-year-old.

We're constantly confronted with the other face of these characters' dreams; their doubts and learned cynicism. Candy—the elderly, maimed white man who's forced to allow his dog to be euthanized—is a figure who has almost nothing left to hope for, but still allows himself to believe in the dream of owning and working his own land. Crooks, the beaten-down black man, even taps into this hope briefly, before being cruelly cowed once again by Curley's wife in a blunt exhibit of the racial power hierarchy that was excruciating to read. These characters are facing lives and tribulations far more extreme than yours truly, and probably more severe than most of the folks with access to the internet reading this write-up. But modern readers are still readily able to relate to them. We've all sat at our desk at work, dreaming about quitting our job and picking up and moving to Europe, or thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, or volunteering in Antarctica—only to be swiftly removed of this possibility once our student loan payments and credit card bills come due later in the month.

John Steinbeck

The story carries on in this manner nearly throughout; relatable and all the more poignant and tragic for it. Candy's dog and a character at the end of the story fail in their tasks and are euthanized, no longer able to provide for themselves and dealt with in a manner meant to end further suffering. George is tragically forced to destroy the symbol and the constant reminder of the existence of all of his hopes and dreams. The characters who experience frustration when denied the means to reach their dreams often lash out at one-another in helplessness; Curley's wife is unnecessarily cruel to Crooks, as Crooks was unnecessarily cruel to Lenny beforehand. Curley is frustrated with his existence and finds life unfulfilling and lashes out at anyone unlucky enough to be near him. These people damage each other constantly and their frustrations lead to in-fighting when cooperation makes so much more sense, but they simply can't help venting their dissatisfaction. Their cyclical lives continue on like Ouroboros, perpetuating their misery, still retaining a grain of hope but ultimately being discarded once their usefulness is gone. Crooks and Candy themselves both rally against this inevitable obsolescence—Candy is aged and maimed but insists on his ability to work, Crooks' body is failing him but he stubbornly continues to cling to what little he has. The book asks us what these people have to live for. They'll never escape these circumstances, but hope is nevertheless present, inextinguishable. 

It's an excellent, tight novella and there are few wasted pages. Steinbeck succeeds in depicting contemporary slang in a manner far better than some of his peers alongside whom he stands in the pantheon of American literature. Perhaps the only bone I have to pick with the story is the jarring, out-of-character visions Lenny seems to have in the closing pages. I found them so irrational and unnatural as to wonder how they made it into the text without being edited out. Lennie is not a person who's capable even of moment-to-moment problem-solving or planning; how is he suddenly able to roleplay a conversation with George, or his long-dead Aunt? It felt a bit too melodramatic and indulgent to me, and I think the conclusion of the book plays out far better without its inclusion.

Regardless, this is a book well-worth reading. It says a lot about American life even today, and it says a lot about the human condition: How unceasingly we dare to dream, how frustrating life can be when those dreams are dashed, and how we're all-too-ready to take that frustration out on each other when our hopes turn to ash and we're forced back to the drawing board. Contrary to the tragic arc of this book, it actually left me hopeful—hopeful for the future, and inspired not to give up on my grand plans and dreams, most of which will likely never come to fruition but remain important nonetheless.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Stranger (1942) by Albert Camus

I wonder what it is that causes me to take such great pleasure from reading protagonists so steeped in depressed ennui. My love for authors like Carver, Murakami, and now Camus always surprises me because I consider myself a rather passionate and content person. I'm not wealthy, nor more talented in any significant way than any other. I work a relatively normal 9-5 and I have no great ambitions or dreams. Yet I enjoy my life thoroughly. Why is it, then, that so many of the writers I enjoy choose to deal with such ennui? Is it because I'm so unremarkable that I'm capable of such contentedness? Or have I somehow learned to live in this manner through my enjoyment of such tortured, lonesome outsiders as Meursault?

Camus utilizes meager, dead, disconnected prose which assaults us with Meursault's dead apathy; he drily confronts the death of his mother, his neighbor beating his dog, his friend beating his mistress, and his girlfriend propose marriage to him—all momentous occasions to which he reacts with a stunning lack of emotion. I felt viscerally the stressed difference between my own reactions as the reader and Meursault's lack of concern. The contrast was strong, jarring, and deliberate.

Perhaps what I enjoyed most was how Meursault's awakening was depicted via the change in Camus' prose. It begins depicting the grayed, deadened character of Meursault. He's a man so steeped in his own banal existence that his life's course is driven purely by societal norms to nearly comical effect. He can't bring himself to mourn, pity, or love. He's a man incapable of making a decision. He has no great passions nor small desires. He neither fears nor dreads any potential events. He's effectively a sociopath.

Meursault's impactful event that sets him on the course of change is a momentous one; indeed, one few of us would ever be forced to deal with. One which would undoubtedly break any who'd experience it, as it does to Meursault. Perhaps such negative life events force us to re-examine our existence; we find faith, we find obsession, or, at worst, we're broken so badly we're unable to recover and turn to violence or suicide. Camus' prose opens markedly after Meursault's rebirth and flows, winding down the page. After a hundred pages of one-word answers, Maursault gives an impassioned tirade as to the meaning of it all; what is it all for? In the end, he's broken free of his chains of ennui and his banal existence reforms him in a manner in which he's finally capable of such passion, and realizes he's free to choose his own reason for and manner of being—or not to choose.

I have lingering questions about Camus' narrative. What caused Meursault to become so deadened in the first place? Would Camus suggest that modernism itself renders us so deteriorated, so robbed of any passion? And how can I apply some of what this story has made me feel to further enrich my own life? Am I really so contented? And, shit—did I really grasp what Camus was trying to say in the first place? Clearly I've got more reading to do, but these kinds of questions are why I read this kind of literature in the first place. I'll probably re-read this again in the future in order to re-examine these questions. I doubt they'll all ever be answered, but nobody really wants to know how the magician does his tricks... Do they?

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Pillars of the Earth (1989) by Ken Follett

Pillars succeeds mostly on its strong re-creation of the time period. British history is so populated by sheer event that it's almost impossible to pick a single time period in the past thousand years and have it not offer a compelling setting.

Follett is a strong writer of historical fiction. His setting rings true and offers an ample amount of historical education in addition to the page-turning quality of his narrative. Historical fiction has always been partly of an educational nature to me; something akin to a textbook repurposed into a more easily consumable morsel, and Pillars succeeds in this.

The story starts strongly and offers an ample bevy of narrative hooks; Tom Builder's struggle to provide for his family during a time of civil strife is something nearly every adult is able to identify with, and Prior Phillip representing the enlightened clergyman is a nice change from the somewhat more common cliche of the manipulative, greedy character (almost always a Bishop or Pope) we tend to see in depictions of dark age priests in contemporary historical fiction. And intelligent characters are always enjoyable to read, in which we have Jack Jackson to float our leaky, dirty twelfth-century boat.

However not all of the characters succeed. Despite Jack's admirable intelligence and his victimhood to bullying at the hands of his step-brother, I actually found him somewhat more empty than I had wished for. He's easy to root for, but I had trouble identifying with his character. Follett's knowledge of architecture is obvious, but the use of so much jargon was above my understanding at times, and I think Jack's character relies strongly on his infatuation for mathematics, art, and architecture, which was something I was unable to grasp at times.

Stronger offenders, though, were the villains of the story. William Hamleigh was such an obvious target for the reader's hatred, but I found most of his sadism utterly unrelatable, and found his narration rather flimsy and insincere as a result. There's nothing William really wants or is driven by; he seems to exist just to cause suffering for others. I believe there was room for more characterization in his mother, too, who seems the most compelling of the bunch of villains we have, but so little time is spent with her and she remains not much more than an interesting but thin force to the narrative. Ditto to Bishop Waleran, who, with just a bit of foundation in the form of past motivation peppered through the narrative, could have accomplished more than just being the nakedly ambitious clergyman.

Pillars is an enjoyable book, and it offered a nice break to some of the denser, more difficult literature I've been attempting to tackle lately. And it's a really solid example of historical fiction. But it's not one of my favorites as it feels rather thin in certain areas, despite its paciness and its strong narrative hooks.

⭐⭐⭐

The Crying of Lot 49 (1965) by Thomas Pynchon

Maybe I've begun reading Pynchon at the wrong place. I picked up his short stories as a neat, bite-sized introduction to his work, and found them rather wanting. Pynchon himself seems to consider them of poor quality. Continuing along the same logical route, I chose to pick up his shortest novel to continue getting to know him.

Pynchon's zaniness and irreverence is perhaps the main draw, but such a sense of humor is lost on a stodgy clod like myself, so I've got look for other stuff to enjoy here.

Above everything else, this book is messy. Pynchon just can't seem to help himself from diverting into every boondogglesome alley, as if every single tidbit of a story that forms in his mind must be forced into this book, no matter how poorly it suits the current narrative. A primary offender is the ridiculous play which eats up 10 pages of real estate near the end of the first third of this book, in which we're treated to a pointless and comically violent depiction of Renaissance Italian politics. These diversions might work better in a longer novel, or one with a strong narrative root driving it forward, but they feel far too scattered in a novel of such short length.

The novel is filled with oddball diversions such as this and left me skimming them all before too long. Far be it from me to criticize one of Pynchon's literary stature, but the value of such diversions was completely lost on me. I didn't find them comical or topical, but bloated and useless. Rather than expanding on or enhancing its themes or the story it's trying to tell, it feels unfocused and messy. Pynchon is 50 years too early; he's the millennial with a twitter account who thinks his every passing thought is worth sharing, except he's got a typewriter instead, and a horde of postmodern readers who seem to gobble up such nonsense.

Reading Pynchon often feels like listening to someone with ADHD who just did way too much cocaine, but his talent as a nuts-and-bolts writer is undeniable. When the going's good, I'm quite enjoying myself. His description of Mucho early in the novel felt lifelike and poignant, for example. But he seems to miss much more often than he hits, which makes for a jagged, tiresome experience.

This book is like a literal pile of garbage; there are tons of pieces of random, useless detritus (shown here in the form of disparate paragraphs) thrown together into the refuse bin that is this novel, jumbled up, and then congealed together by the permeating, noisome slime that is its main plot line.

Or perhaps I'm just too stupid to get it?

I think it's time to pick up something lengthier and more substantial next. It's probably not time to tackle Gravity's Rainbow yet, but something like V. or Inherent Vice might be more suitable.

I'm still holding out hope that I one day will be capable of reading and enjoying Pynchon, but that hope seems to dwindle a bit more with each story of his that I pick up.

⭐

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by James Joyce

Penguin's beautiful Deluxe Edition of Portrait. Perhaps my favorite paperback on my shelves.

Joyce's prose is unbelievably, otherworldly gorgeous.

It's the primary reason I love his work so much. There's the stuff you've got to carve through if you're as basic a reader as myself—the late 19th century Irish politics, the nearly untranslatable contemporary slang that requires reference for a modern reader to understand, transitions into changes in voice and mode that often make it a bit difficult to follow the narrative. But then Joyce hits you with a paragraph of some of the most beautiful prose you've ever read, and it's instantly your favorite thing again:

As he brooded upon her image, a strange unrest crept into his blood. Sometimes a fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening along the quiet avenue. The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart. The noise of children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment. 

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.

His unrest issued from him like a wave of sound: and on the tide of flowing music the ark was journeying, trailing her cables of lanterns in her wake. Then a noise like dwarf artillery broke the movement.

Joyce as a young man

I read recently that a reviewer whom I respect refuses to consider any prose 'purple'. Perhaps I'm learning why this is, firsthand, as I read through Portrait. A lot of Joyce's work here could be considered purple. It's incredibly ornate, and it's lavishness is possibly overdone. The more I read, the more I considered that this was deliberate. Perhaps Joyce was attempting to depict a young, talented thinker's tendency to try too hard, and maybe the protagonist and titular Young Man, Stephen Dedalus, lacks reservation in the earlier chapters and Joyce's prose strives to depict this overzealousness. If so, then more the fool I, because I greatly enjoyed it nonetheless and did not find it to be too fatty or too flashy for my tastes, which are actually typically more reserved.

One of my favorite early episodes had to do with the timidity with which Stephen approached his infatuation with his muse. As I was reading along I suddenly realized Stephen's internal monologue was now focused on an object of affection. I didn't recall said object being introduced, so I backtracked to see if I had somehow missed something. But I hadn't—Dedalus first approaches the thought of romantic love via his admiration of Dumas' famous novel The Count of Monte Cristo, and the titular count's undying love for Mercedes. This soon morphs into Stephen's infatuation with an unnamed character—something he touches on regularly in the following pages throughout the first half, but rarely ever outright, or in a concrete way. I found it a novel way of displaying the protagonist's fear of confronting his own emotions in any way other than a roundabout one. He looms on the periphery of his feelings and touches them briefly, but rarely indulges in them directly. It's a bit of tantalization by Joyce, the impact of which is helped strongly along by Joyce's sheer, beautiful prose, which imparts his character's strong feelings in a way with which we are able to viscerally empathize.

Such instances of Joyce's artful, beautiful prose carry the book. It's probably, page by page, the single most beautiful book I've ever read. I've got dozens of highlights proving that statement. But as always with Joyce, you've got to take the good with the bad. I understand Catholic guilt occupies a huge chunk of Joyce's character, but do I really need dozens of detailed pages describing, in depth, the tortures of hell?

The ebb and flow between Irish politics, drop-dead gorgeous inner monologue, and Catholic dogma seems paced fairly well, though. The things that didn't appeal to me didn't drag down my overall experience of the book, and I expect as time passes I'll think more and more highly of it—something similar as to what happened with my memory of Dubliners. The drier, more specific portions of the text seem smaller and smaller in the rearview, and the examples of memorable, songlike prose grow all the larger with each recollection.

I didn't find Portrait to be a difficult read, per se, but it is a substantially different read than many other books—even those of the same era by Joyce contemporaries such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Joyce switches gears quite frequently and often without warning, but the quick cuts often feel more smooth than abrupt. I'm not sure why this is... Probably it has something to do with how surreal, introspective, and dreamlike the narrative tends to turn towards while Joyce narrates for us Dedalus' inner thoughts and feels. Thus reading Portrait feels more like experiencing various vignettes into the life of Dedalus, which jump forwards through time without any prefacing or preparation, and change smoothly into different styles. Joyce takes us from a cloudy, ambiguous outpouring of pure emotion and religious epiphany on the part of Dedalus' inner narrative, into an actual concrete, religious sermon delivered by a priest, and then the narrative changes to follow him in a more direct, traditional manner as he seeks to confess his sins. Normally this is not something I'd find interesting, but the way in which Joyce proceeds through different modes keeps it altogether fresh. And, as always, it's all beautifully written in his enveloping, affecting prose.

There were parts of the novel that seemed to drone on about an intensely philosophical topic—something common to earlier, 19th century literature, which undoubtedly inspired Joyce—and I found certain portions of this more difficult to trudge through. The aforementioned treatise on hell is guilty of this, and later on as Joyce dives headfirst into describing in specific terms the result of Stephen's gorgeously written aesthetic epiphany on the shore. Stephen goes into painstaking detail, depicted in dialogue with his friend Cranly, as to exactly what he considers to be beauty and art, and how he'd like to pursue it. It was all a bit deep and detailed for my common noggin, but this thorough examination gives way to a later discussion in which Stephen comes as close as he does in the entire book to renouncing his religion altogether. He states to Cranly that he has lost his religion, but is not sure that religion itself is not worthwhile—something I have struggled with myself as I've read more and more Christian scripture and literature and dedicated more and more time to understanding the religion and why it moves its followers so. And the ending few pages in which Joyce completely changes his style to first person, stream-of-consciousness, imparted to me that his character, Stephen Dedalus, had finally found his own voice and succeeded in developing into the artist he decided he wished to be.

Perhaps what this book is best at is moving its reader in a subconscious fashion. Joyce's prose somehow instills into you exactly what he's trying to say, without having to say it outright. I've been to some of the most amazing Catholic churches in the world—the colossal St. Peter's, the gracefully aged Santa Maria del Fiore, the famous Notre Dame (before she burned last year), Cordoba's stunning Mosque-Cathedral—but the religion has never resonated particularly strongly with me despite these memorable encounters with its architectural wonders. And though I'm American, I have been to Dublin—it's a fine city. I'd probably go back. But I have no strong love for the place, nor any substantial attachment. And clearly I'm not old enough to have been in school in the late 19th century.

Point being: I have no real understanding of what it is to be an Irish Catholic young man coming of age at the turn of the 20th century, I've never been particularly artistic or concerned with aesthetic beauty. So I have no reason for any of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to resonate with me as strongly as it does. Somehow, regardless of any of that, Joyce has imparted not only the depth of what that entails, but what it feels like on an emotional, spiritual level, through the sheer power of such viscerally affecting prose. I wasn't just told what it was like for Stephen to have a crisis of faith, but was made to feel it through every fiber of my being. Me—a postmodern American atheist. And I grew to love every bit of it, despite never really caring about the subject matter. It was a pretty memorable experience sliding through this novel, swooning at nearly every page, just bathing in the sheer beauty Joyce's prose provides. What a wonderful book.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Qur'an (632) by Anonymous

I'm reviewing this in a flippant, irreverent manner similar to the tone in which I examined the King James Bible from cover to cover last year. I realize that this may be offensive to some, and I preemptively apologize for any offense caused, but I find it dishonest to examine this text in any other manner or to soften my own opinions. Feel free to exit the review now if you think such a tone would upset you.

The most noteworthy characteristic, and indeed the downfall of the Qur'an to me personally—an ignorant unbeliever reading for purposes of personal education—is the sheer amount of fatty repetitiveness within.

I expected a religious treatise and instead got what seemed to be an unrehearsed and unedited yet carefully transcribed rant. Nearly every single surah ("book", in biblical terms) within includes similar diversions into rants on hypocrites, unbelievers, the mercy of god, etc. I suppose perhaps this sort of commonly shared content between surahs reads far more poetically in its original Arabic, but for my reading purposes it served only to wear me out and force my eyes to glaze over. With each surah it became more and more tiresome. I was ever ready for this book to sell me on the beauty its followers constantly profess that it contains, but it never came close. There are, of course, countless moments in the latter half of the Qur'an in which it threatened to dip into poetic verse, only instead to revert back to its comfortable, constantly repeated diatribe against unbelievers, those who don't listen, the hypocrites, and the blasphemers.

I fully believe that were you to rip out everything that...

- has already been told in the Bible
- has already been mentioned once in the Qur'an
- qualifies as a rant and amounts to little more than filler

...that all of the original thoughts and commentary contained in the Qur'an would only add up to about 50 pages. I have no hard metrics or data to confirm this hyperbolic statement, of course, as such a project would require an effort equal to that which created the Jefferson Bible, and I thought about this not until I had actually completed my read of the text and so had no opportunity to do so without rereading the book (which I'm not willing to do at this point). Such would make an interesting project—perhaps something for the future.

It's my belief that there's a significant problem with religious texts taken as the word of god in that every word of them must be taken as sacrosanct. If you accept that the Qur'an was dictated to Muhammad by god, you're powerless to disagree with any of it. You may genuinely feel that a part of it is wrong, but your own internally guiding logic will always be overruled by the call to instead be faithful, and you'll dismiss your own reasoning to instead adopt a view which clashes with your own beliefs. Perhaps this is why religion never appealed to me—I find it impossible not to value logical thinking over all else; something I view as a luxury of being raised in a liberal Western 21st century society.

This isn't something unique to the Qur'an, as the Bible suffers from this problem as well. There are many portions of both the New and Old Testament that are genuinely worthwhile; as spiritual guidance for the construction of personal morals, as parables of wisdom, as intriguing storytelling, or just as sheer prosaic beauty (with specific regards to its King James version, which I find quite aesthetically pleasing). But during my read of the Bible these positives were often polluted by instances of lengthy archaic rules of worship, calls to genocidal violence, and extreme punishment for what unbelievers would view as rather minor offenses.

I began reading the Qur'an with the honest intent of allowing it to surprise me (as I did with the Bible), but thus far I (an atheist without a clear bias for either religion) have found fewer redeeming qualities in the Qur'an than I did with my cover-to-cover read of the Bible last year.

Most surprising, perhaps, is that the Qur'an's god is the same as the one found in the Bible. Thus much of the Qur'an ends up being a retelling and a commentary on the events of the Bible, rather than its own independent religious text. I find it amusing to consider the Qur'an somewhat like The Aeneid to the Old and New Testament's Iliad and Odyssey. I was surprised to learn just how much of the Bible is not only mentioned in the Qur'an, but reaffirmed. Adam and the Garden of Eden, Moses, Abraham, Lot, and even Jesus as Mary's son and his status as a prophet are all retold in the Qur'an, which was written 600 years after the New Testament. A key point of the Qur'an is the failure of the people of the book to properly heed the words of god. The Qur'an very early takes shape as more of an admonishment than its own holy book. I found it similar to the Old Testament in this manner, as god spends quite a bit of time being cross with the Jews for failing to adequately follow his laws. Perhaps the largest difference in belief between the Bible and the Qur'an is the level of holiness of Jesus of Nazareth—the Bible, of course, touts him as the son of the Judaeo-Christian god. The Qur'an disagrees, but still considers him a holy figure and a prophet. Aside from that, the Qur'an is actually shockingly similar (in a purely mythological manner) to the Bible.

Noteworthy to me in these early books are just how harsh the Qur'an is against "unbelievers", regularly referring to us as evildoers and constantly reminding us we're destined to burn in hell: "Beware the Fire whose fuel is mankind and stones, made ready for the unbelievers".

These kinds of calls to violence are often quite blatant throughout the Qur'an:

Women 4:87: "Do you wish to guide one whom God had led astray? Whoso Good leads astray, you shall find no path. They long for you to blaspheme as they have blasphemed, thus becoming like them. Do not take them for friends until they emigrate in the cause of God. If they refuse, seize them and kill them wherever you find them..."

Man 76:3: "For the unbelievers We have readied chains, collars and a raging fire"

The Qur'an is often not kind to the modern notion of egalitarianism across genders, either:

"Your women are your sowing field: approach your field whenever you please"

But, of course, the Old Testament isn't much better. Both clash with classic liberal notions of liberty, and perhaps this is where the Qur'an drew its influence from.

What is the deal, with unbelievers and hypocrites!?

There's an ever-present tone of combativeness throughout that I found off-putting. I often found my Tarif Khalidi translation wanting, as it includes odd anachronisms such as "What is it with these people?" (a phrase which, each time I read it, would call to mind the voice of Jerry Seinfeld), and lacks any historical annotations, preferring instead to let the text stand on its own. This is a mistake for my purposes, as the book has thus far come off as more of an impatient rant than anything else, and I found myself craving additional historicity the further I got through the book.

The Muslim god does seem to be far more forgiving to his followers than to unbelievers, something more akin to the tone of the New Testament than the god of the Old Testament. It's constantly stressed that he is forgiving so long as his followers repent, and I recall the Old Testament god being far more vengeful and punishing in contrast. This warmth and magnanimity doesn't seem to extend to unbelievers, though, rendering a lot of what is said with an unfortunate air of intolerance.

It's tough to review the Qur'an without comparing it to the Bible. I didn't particularly care for the Bible as a whole, but it's so long and includes so much varied content that it's almost impossible to read through and not find something to like. While the Bible is at times every bit as intolerant, violent, and archaic in its morals as is the Qur'an, there are things that I liked when I read it: I enjoyed analyzing in-depth the morals of Jesus, I enjoyed some of its storytelling, and the King James version in particular features some passages of stunning prose—I'd go as far as to say that I genuinely enjoyed the book of Revelation. Unfortunately, I've found comparably little in the Qur'an to enjoy. There's so much repetition, so much sheer fat in the content included here that I found it rather difficult to bludgeon through the recycled biblical tales and the constant rants against unbelievers and those who feign piousness. It made for a monotonous read in which I constantly found myself to be skimming full chapters, eyes fully glazed over. And that's a problem, because this is an incredibly influential book that deserves a serious, focused analysis. As a non-religious person I'm admittedly a child with swimmies being tossed into the deep end of the pool whenever reading and attempting to analyze religion, and I fear I'm altogether incapable of a quality analysis of this book.

That said, the book makes it exceedingly difficult for readers such as myself to pick it up and gain an understanding of its religion. Take the excerpt to the left, for example. Sure, it's stylized—I get that. And sure, I can see how it'd come off as poetic, maybe, in the original Arabic. Or how it'd be rendered rather lyrical when read aloud at a mosque. But for my reading purposes, carving through an entire surah of this is an absolute chore. And this portion is topped by the final, closing surahs, which read like little more than an intoxicated man's ramblings with little substance therein. These types of things are not something I enjoy. They give me little of the insight into Islam that I crave. Reading them—either shallowly or with depth—not a fruitful endeavor for me. Perhaps that's not true for you—and more power to you. But I personally can't stand it.

So I think this stuff just really isn't for me, and thus I found little to enjoy here. Maybe this renders my thoughts on the Qur'an worth comparatively little, but I'm glad I read it nonetheless, and I will share my thoughts anyway, if for no other reason than to prove I did, at one point in my life, read these kinds of books that are supposedly so deserving of being read.

⭐

Death in Venice (1912) by Thomas Mann

And his soul savored the debauchery and delirium of doom.

I read Death in Venice as a sort of companion piece to Nabokov's Lolita, which I found of remarkably brilliant craft and gorgeously written.

Mann's work is markedly more serious and introspective than Nabokov's mischievous, malevolently playful, and often darkly humorous work. Venice wholly lacks humor, instead filling its pages with a very introspective character study of the now-famous Aschenbach. Aschenbach is a relatively dry individual, mostly concerned with his work, admitting regularly that he devotes his every waking hour to his writing and giving little thought to other aspects of life. What we witness through the first three-quarters of Death in Venice is a deconstruction of what was once the rigid regimen of the man's life. I found the episode in which he makes the irrational decision to stay in Venice to be rather genuine instead of random, as it could have felt.

What initially engaged me were some of the heady topics Mann regularly examined via the thoughts of his character:

• For a major product of the intellect to make an immediate broad and deep impact it must rest upon a secret affinity, indeed, a congruence between the personal destiny of its author and the collective destiny of his generation. The people do not know why they bestow fame upon a given work of art. Though far from connoisseurs, they believe they have discovered a hundred virtues to justify such enthusiasm, yet the true basis for their acclaim is an imponderable, mere affinity.  

• On a personal level, too, art is life intensified: it delights more deeply, consumes more rapidly; it engraves the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventure on the countenance of its servant and in the long run, for all the monastic calm of his external existence, leads to self-indulgence, overrefinement, lethargy, and a restless curiosity that a lifetime of wild passions and pleasures could scarcely engender. 

• The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden.   

• Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege. 

• He loved the sea and for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist’s need for repose, the desire to take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity, a propensity—proscribed and diametrically opposed to his mission in life and for that very reason seductive—a propensity for the unarticulated, the immoderate, the eternal, for nothingness. To repose in perfection is the desire of all those who strive for excellence, and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

Thomas Mann

In these, the book reads more similarly to some of the tangents a Dostoyevsky would be prone to, but they seem to sprout in a much less abrupt manner, arising organically through Aschenbach's thoughts or something that had occurred within the narrative.

Rather than Lolita—whose vastly controversial pedophilic relationship takes center-stage—the way Mann depicts Aschenbach's infatuation with Tadzio seems an altogether higher form of admiration. It's definitely not lustful, nor is it even really romantic love. Instead Aschenbach seems to hold the youth on a pedestal of aesthetic perfection, something that the character had already been established as clearly valuing, given his goal of depicting it in his own work. It makes sense to the reader that Aschenbach would fall into such a swoon over something like this. Tadzio just happened to be the perfect storm for the man; the right boy in the right place at the right time. Aschenbach's actions are perhaps 'creepy' from one witnessing him within the story, but since we are granted prime real estate in the man's head, it seems more to be genuine appreciation of something we can only somewhat grasp rather than the stalkerish infatuation that it appears on the surface. Humbert's obsession with Dolores Haze is disgusting, aggressive, and primarily self-serving, as it's meant to be viewed by Nabokov. He never aspires to what Mann seems to wish to depict: a more honest appreciation generated by the intense beliefs held by his character. As we witness Aschenbach's thoughts we realize there's no malevolence in his obsession. Thinking back on it after having completed the book intrigues me all the more.

I had no awareness of the plot of this book and so the climax surprised me. The novel descends into a spiral I won't spoil for others interested, but it's written in such a way that we feel the character's feverish, core alteration. The closing pages left me feeling as if I'd sunk into a fever dream; not completely conscious, nor was I asleep. It's a wonderfully off-putting bit of writing and a nice change of pace to what is can be a rather deliberate character study in the first half of the book.

Death in Venice makes a wonderful companion piece to Lolita. Nabokov is cleverer, but I think Mann aspires to something more. This is a must-read.

Translation note: I read Michael Henry Heim's translation, for which I'd heard plenty of praise, and found it to be enthralling. I never got the feeling I was reading a translation, but I don't speak German, nor did I read any other translation, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt. That said, I would recommend Heim.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐