What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) by Raymond Carver

It was a white moon and covered with scars. Any damn fool could imagine a face there.

As I made clear in my review for Will You Please Be Quiet, Please, I love Raymond Carver.

What he does is like magic. His combination of a compelling scene, genuine characters, and gruff voice always seem to come together as a sum more than their parts. It's amazing to me he can pack so much emotional payoff in sometimes as little as just ten pages, and using such spare prose. He's a master of subtlety; a master of the craft who's able to impart big feeling is small action and with few words.

This collection of short stories sees Carver regularly rely on the common motif of broken relationships. Right off the bat, Why Don't You Dance? is a great example of this, fashioning a poignant narrative on the life cycle of relationships in typically spare prose over a short length that has the same impact of stories exponentially longer. The majority of the stories present in this collection take place in and around the ruins and the downslide of relationships that are doomed to fail, or have already. These are something all adults have experienced at least once in their lives, and they have always left their mark on us and changed us somehow. Thus the experience of reading them hits all the more harder. Carver's characters are not good people; they're lazy, incompetent, petty, and bitter. But we can relate to that, too, because—if we're being honest with ourselves—we've all experienced such character flaws in ourselves, just like we've experienced doomed and broken relationships.

A small wax and sawdust log burned on the grate. A carton of five more sat ready on the hearth. He got up from the sofa and put them all in the fireplace. He watched until they flamed. Then he finished his soda and made for the patio door. On the way, he saw the pies lined up on the sideboard. He stacked them in his arms, all six, one for every ten times she had ever betrayed him.

Some of the images Carver creates here are far more striking than anything I recall in his previous collection (such as a boy seeing his mother kissing a man 'with the television going' while spying through a window, a mentally disabled man and his attachment to his bass pond, and others). He also has a penchant for disarming the reader with his subtle, everyday depictions of working class life, only to hit them with a burst of unexpected violence or tragedy near the end of the stories.

Carver's brilliant and this is masterful work. The best fiction is that which turns a mirror toward us, forcing us to admit to ourselves our flaws and idiosyncrasies, and become better, more self-aware people, and Raymond Carver's collections of short stories do just that.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

For Whom The Bell Tolls (1937) by Ernest Hemingway

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.

There's so much to like in this book. Hemingway's writing is genuine; his knowledge feels authentic and he's choosing to depict a conflict that doesn't receive much attention, despite its outcome dictating the next several decades of Spanish history. The Spanish Civil War is viewed by many as a tragic lost cause, but the nuance present in both sides and the greater global conflict that was simmering at the time provides an intensely fertile ground for morally gray characters and factions and timeless, enthralling storytelling. The questions asked by this book are numerous, and nearly all of them are compelling: Is the lesser of two evils really worth fighting for, even if it means you're essentially fighting for evil? Which types of people would choose to fight, and which would abstain? Do two wrongs make a right? When, if ever, is it acceptable to answer atrocity with atrocity? How do human beings act and think when faced with death?

Hemingway's depiction of guerrilla warfare seems so authentic. There's a hurry-up-and-wait structure to the entire book that seems appropriate to what I understand of military campaigns, the popular adage that war is ninety-nine per cent boredom and one per cent sheer terror seems apt. The cast of characters throughout more than half of the book spend their time keeping a post, scouting, eating, and drinking, with not much of anything happening. The guerrilla nature of the war shows itself with the lack of discipline of several of the main character's comrades-in-arms; a man leaves his post to hunt a rabbit, for example. The left's guerrillas hide in caves in the woods, sustained mostly by their need not to fight for the right. The right, with their warplanes, and finely maintained cavalry, seem a tier above, rendering the conflict's appearance even more hopeless for the left. But any sympathetic drive to root for the underdogs is dampened by Hemingway's deft touch in painting both sides as being vulnerable to executing the same atrocities. Early in the narrative, a scenario recounted depicting the savage execution of suspected Fascist sympathizers is brutal enough to encourage us to pick a side only after having ingested a sizable boulder of salt.

War is ugly; civil war is uglier, and I applaud Hemingway for pulling no punches in its depiction. It'd have been too easy to have made one side too sympathetic, and Hemingway resists the urge, making the narrative that much more enticing and thought-provoking. For Whom The Bell Tolls is not a smash-the-fash treatise for unthinking banner-wavers. He further humanizes the Republicans and Communists; depicting those of the Party in their full bureaucratic sloth and incompetence, an image which would only become so popular and recognizable decades later. Both sides are riddled with human fallibility, both sides equal parts detestable and sympathetic. The fascists and the communists may be equally guilty of cruelty, ignorance, and malice on a grand scale, but at the end of the day they're made up of human beings, and the further you focus down to the individual, the more we recognize ourselves in them. The more we realize—hopefully, if our heads aren't so firmly planted within our asses—that we are all capable of the same atrocities, given the circumstances. That war is hell, and we are all its devils. Such an idea is well-worn and almost cliched in our modern day, but back in Hemingway's 1937, it must have been rather refreshing to read.

Hemingway in Spain

The more I've read of Hemingway, the more I've felt that there's a core flaw in the way he writes relationships. It makes an appearance in A Farewell to Arms, as it makes an appearance in For Whom the Bell Tolls. In both books, the core "romance" feels utterly shallow. On making contact with the guerrillas in the hills, Robert Jordan meets Maria, a beautiful young Spanish woman scarred by the conflict at the heart of the novel. The two fall for one another almost immediately, and instantly begin a tryst. When separating this relationship from context, it's ridiculous. There is no common interest, no connection between these two characters. Robert Jordan is a hardened, competent soldier, likely very attractive. Maria is a young, comely woman herself. That's it. That's the romance. There's no series of conversations in which the two get to know one another's morals and interests, what makes each tick, etc. They're just attracted to one another and they begin sleeping together. The relationship doesn't hold up to any scrutiny whatsoever, and I found myself bored to tears by it, rolling my eyes at each instance in which Jordan professes his undying love for his beau, whom he had just met 2 days ago and knew very little about.

However, when considering the context of the great conflict occurring around them, I believe the connection makes more sense. It's even remarked on by Jordan himself, partway through the novel in a conversation with Agustin; that their relationship occurs the way it does because they lack time to get to know one another. I think there's more to it than that, and I think the characters are aware of it. As with A Farewell to Arms, I began to view the relationship as two doomed people latching on to one another; the two of them shipwrecked and drowning sailors desperately grasping for driftwood after a storm. They aren't actually in love with one another, they're just desperate for something to hold onto; an endgame, something to look forward to, a prayer to chant to themselves in the quiet moments, when the war seems hopeless—"I will take Maria with me and marry her after the war... We'll go live somewhere quiet". Maria is Robert Jordan's candle in the dark, his vision of a better time once the conflict is over. His hope that life can go back to normal, that the conflict might end and he might settle quietly once more. A rationalization he tells himself, when knowing, just beneath the surface, that he is overwhelmingly likely to die in the hills at any moment. Such is the hopelessness of the conflict he finds himself embroiled in.

Whether Hemingway intends this to be the case, or whether he's just inept at depicting a meaningful, deep relationship between two human beings is anyone's guess. After reading The Sun Also Rises, I tend toward belief in the former rather than the latter. And, in any case, Hemingway is dead—both proverbially and literally—and his literature lives on for us to interpret as we will.

For Whom The Bell Tolls is a deep, nuanced view of civil war, of war in general, of soldiers and death and duty, and what all of those things force us to experience when we're faced with them. And, perhaps most compelling of all: The change they force in us if we're lucky enough to survive them. How we act in the face of death is part of what makes us human, after all. A human being's mortality tends to define us, and I think that's at the core of what Hemingway writes. Not just in this book, but all of his books.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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?

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov

Not going to be carrying this one around in public.

I read a used, dog-eared copy of Lolita that I purchased at a local library sale for next to nothing. The very first thing I read colored my expectations quite strongly. It wasn't the first page, nor the title page, nor even the dedication. It was right smack on the cover, a quote from Vanity Fair celebrating the work:

"The only convincing love story of our century."

Knowing the premise of the book, I thought; "wow, I wonder how Nabokov is going to pull off telling a genuine love story between a pedophile and a preteen girl".

The answer is: He doesn't. Not at all. Because that's not what the book is about.

Either the Vanity Fair commenter is a complete nincompoop and somehow managed to read a saccharine love affair into this grotesquely creepy, savagely predatory account, or the commenter shares my opinion and the publisher put this quote on the cover with the intention of warping their readers' expectations. Because if this is a love story, it's a love story only in how much Humbert loves himself.

There are two things most readers already know about this book even before picking it up: 1) It's a controversial story about a pedophile and his affair with a 12-year old girl. And, 2) It's extraordinarily well-written. Both of these are true. I expected the twist to be that I would be made to sympathize with the narrator, Humbert Humbert, on some level or other. But I never found myself coming close to the point of sympathy. From the get-go, Humbert is a rather blatant psychopath. He reacts with complete nonchalance to a death early in the story, he casually plots to murder others throughout, and for the vast majority of the novel he cares little for Lolita herself beyond what she means to him. Humbert isn't a gray hero or even a pitiable villain. He exists in this story as little more than a vampire; some monster of the night who manages to get his fangs into poor Lolita and spends the rest of the story slowly sapping her; consuming her essence, wearing her out, and grinding her down to a nub. He cares to preserve her only for his own enjoyment, admitting frequently that once she grows, he'll no longer be enamored with her. Were he to lose her, he would care only insofar as the absence of her affects his own life. He's an utterly selfish, predatory scoundrel, and we're given no reason whatsoever to sympathize with him. Nabokov himself agreed with this view of his narrator, calling Humbert "a vain and cruel wretch" and "a hateful person" in the Paris Review in 1967.

Although it's undoubtedly ballsy to tell a story of a pedophile in the comparably conservative 1950s, the true accomplishment of Lolita isn't just its controversial premise. Lolita herself gets little of the spotlight. She has hardly any dialogue, and what we do hear of her often does little more than describe Humbert's borderline insane obsession with her as an angelic superbeing:

Lolita had been safely solipsized. The implied sun pulsated in the supplied poplars; we were fantastically and divinely alone; I watched her, rosy, gold-dusted, beyond the veil of my controlled delight, unaware of it, alien to it, and the sun was on her lips, and her lips were apparently still forming the words of the Carmen-barmen ditty that no longer reached my consciousness.

In other, rarer episodes, the narrative depicts her as a rather typical young teenage girl; fawning over boys, playing tennis, sunbathing. For a love story to ring true, both characters must be genuine. No, Nabokov's real accomplishment in Lolita is the character of Humbert's unique voice and the quality of prose he uses to depict it. The character is so viscerally revolting that I found myself making cringing faces—almost subconsciously—while reading his words. And this isn't limited to Humbert's more overt displays of pedophilia. His worldview, his flamboyant way of speaking (particularly about himself), his dislike for the other people in the story, his single-minded obsession with possessing Lolita and the sociopathy he displays in its pursuit all qualify. He is a repulsive, disgusting character with no redeeming qualities. Reading Lolita is like reading a monster story from the point-of-view of the monster.

Vladimir Nabokov

And therein lies the twist. Lolita is colored with such odiousness by its narrator while simultaneously being one of the most gorgeous things I've ever read. Nabokov himself called Lolita "my love affair with the English language", and it shows. I don't believe I've ever read such consistently beautiful, fluid prose. Nabokov is at the peak of his powers as a writer, despite being confined with his second language—English—rather than his native Russian. Lolita is overly descriptive and undeniably flamboyant—indicative by itself of its narrator's high view on himself—but not so much so that it becomes over-the-top and a chore to read, like other writers who aspire to such high levels but succeed only in making their fiction an overly fatty, impenetrable mess. It rides along a narrow road and accomplishes both aesthetic beauty and consistency with its narrators voice. Additionally, Humbert's anti-social nature and cynical observations are often quite clever and darkly humorous. It seems that Nabokov succeeds in everything he intends to depict, despite comedy (especially dark comedy) being exceedingly hard to produce on the written page.

Such quality often carries the book as it stumbles onward through some dry spells in which nothing much is happening. Were it anybody else writing this story, I'd probably have set it down during one of two road trips in which we spend dozens of pages reading not much more than Humbert's obsessive fawning over his victim. Humbert is detestable, but Nabokov's talent as a writer keeps him from weighing too heavily on us as we read. Some of the stress incurred from reading such a putrid human being is dissipated by Nabokov's deft use of gallows humor through the work. Aside from Nabokov's colorful descriptions of Americana, there's not much to these passages in which Humbert and Lolita simply dip between motels. But these sections often feature depictions of the American west that are so gorgeous they're often worth the price of admission just by themselves, absent of any context:

And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called “sage brush” appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic.

Man, just look at that. I'd read Nabokov describing almost anything—it's stunning.

I knew quite a bit about this book before I ever read a page. And I had pretty high expectations from it. It managed to meet those while also surprising me a bit. It's extraordinarily written, it says important things and made me think deeply about its themes, and it imparted on me life experience I'd never have gained otherwise. It challenged me with a deep, genuine character whose beliefs and experiences attacked my own with each page.

All of these things are why I read fiction, and so Lolita succeeds.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Terror (2007) by Dan Simmons

Simmons' work is such a Frankenstein's monster of different genres and sub-genres, modes, and styles, and he's so deft at blending the disparate appendages that the transitions between each never come close to feeling jarring or contrived.

The Terror is equal parts historical fiction and horror, with a healthy dash of Inuit mythology thrown in for good measure. The framework and foundation of The Terror is of a naval historical fiction surrounding the doomed Franklin Expedition tasked with the discovery of the Northwest passage in the mid-1840s, but I suspect Simmons' true desires were to plumb the various subgenres of horror that he blends within this larger framework. Nearly every popular subgenre of horror is present; there's the much-touted monster aspect of the story, but there also exists elements of pulpier slasher fiction in the later pages. My personal favorite — and perhaps the most disturbing of the lot, because it's true — are the descriptions of men suffering from severe bouts of scurvy. These passages are true body horror. I found myself recoiling is disgust and visceral offense while reading through them, physically cringing all the more because they weren't merely figments of Simmons' healthy (and somewhat disturbed?) imagination but real symptoms suffered by real men. Awful stuff.

Simmons is a master of pacing. At nearly 800 pages, The Terror is not a short book — and it doesn't have a vast, epic scope to help keeps things fresh and shepherd the reader through that pagecount. Simmons instead resorts to regularly changing the third person limited viewpoint characters and jumping back and forth through time. The changes in mode and voice greatly help to keep things from going stale, and the narrative blends smoothly between the different characters. The Terror never falls victim to the slog that drags other works of this nature down. It's masterful work, and its quality is telling in that it kept me burning through pages and pages of relatively minor activity set mostly all within the same ship, frozen in the same ice, over hundreds of pages of narrative.

It helps that his characters are so authentic and that their voices are all so unique. Simmons' agency in crafting the characters out of real, historical men is notable. There's a strong sense of poignancy reading through this story and knowing that the expedition is doomed to fail, because you grow to like some of these characters and to preemptively mourn their inevitable deaths. Bridgens' quiet, wise manner; Irving's youthful, hopeful naivete; Crozier's curmudgeonly manner and focus on duty. I found the main villain of the crew to be extremely compelling, as well, and the subtle way in which his evil is portrayed in the first half of the book leaves the pieces of the puzzle to the reader to put together, and colors the entire middle portion of the book with an air of negative foreshadowing. Voice is a strength, especially in the later chapters when characters' wits and mental stability begin to fail them. Simmons is a master craftsman and I'll remember certain chapters late in this book for the rest of my life due to how unique and affecting they remain to me.

I'm not sure quite what I expected when I picked this up, but it certainly wasn't what I got. I've read Simmons before — I greatly enjoyed Hyperion — and I'm beginning to think of him as one of the best modern writers I've experienced. I used to think of him as a science fiction writer, but the amount of research he's put into crafting The Terror is equal to any great writer of historical fiction I've ever read. But the real strength of this book is how Simmons colors it with his abject weirdness. The soul of horror is growing tension and creating the fear of what's to come, and Simmons is such a freaking oddball that you're never quite sure what he's going to pull out of his bag of tricks next.

In this way Simmons reminds of Stephen King. Except without the cocaine. And, you know... Actually good.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) by Shirley Jackson

WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this review! Turn back now if you haven't read We Have Always Lived in the Castle yet!

I've never read a writer capable of crafting such genuinely engrossing mentally unstable characters as Shirley Jackson. I found myself enthralled by Mary Katherine Blackwood, who is a human being so different from myself that she's interesting just for that, without even considering how real and intriguing the character is beyond such differences. It took a few pages for me to get used to her quirks but she was so skillfully crafted that I felt I had come to know her very well by the end of the story.

The conflict which takes place in the story felt a bit manufactured, but it was entertaining nonetheless and I also enjoyed the blunt scumbagitude of Charles Blackwood. For the majority of the story, it feels as though we're observing the Blackwoods far after the climactic, world-shifting event has already occurred. It makes for a bit of a lull in the story's first half as we get to know how dysfunctional and broken daily life has become for this family, but I suppose this period is necessary to fully come to terms with the odd situation we found our protagonist in, in addition to warming to her mental instability, which often presents itself as quirky and cute with a dark streak that bursts forth often out of nowhere and without warning.

By the end of the story I realized that my previous notion of this story occurring after-the-fact might not have be completely accurate. We're past the climax of the grander story, sure. But following the conclusion of this one I began to grasp how the seed of this story grew in Jackson's mind. Not as an aftermath, but as a prelude—We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a story about how the crazy ladies who live in the burned out, overgrown house came to be. You can see the Blackwood house growing into the house of legend that children are afraid of, and the Blackwood sisters themselves being the scary old ladies who steal children and cook them and eat them. And the way the story comes together to form this in its closing pages is absolutely brilliant. It was a subtle 'Aha!' moment that I was allowed to form in my own mind rather than having it foisted on me with a clumsy, contrived plot twist.

Jackson touches on some interesting questions regarding guilt and conscience, too. How it affects people, or doesn't affect them. But the mark those questions have left on me is still fresh and they're something I'll need to consider further as I put some more time between me and finishing this excellent book.

This is a brilliant piece of fiction. Probably more solidly constructed and more polished than The Haunting of Hill House. It's beautifully written and Mary Katherine is one of the most memorable characters I've read. It's subtly off-putting, more than a bit creepy, and it took me completely out of my comfort zone. It posed some questions to me that I haven't considered before and it presented me with a human character populated by thoughts and motivations completely foreign to my own, and I can't possibly ask more from reading a work of fiction.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Black Cat (1840) by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe's prose is pretty wordy by today's standards, but he avoids the same pitfalls Lovecraft dives headfirst into because he's very to-the-point with the actual content of his stories. Poe's lilting style suggests that his perpetually unreliable narrators are not quite in their rightest mind, and it's subtly offputting for that. He's nowhere near as subtle as a Shirley Jackson, but her work frequently reminds me of his—neither are blatant enough leave you bored by another maniacally insane narrator.

The more demonstrably insane a character is, the more boring, one-dimensional, and unrelatable they seem to become. And so depictions of insanity are always way more interesting and when they sprout from a kernel of logic that grows into such otherwise unstable action. It's why we love characters like the Joker, Tyler Durden, or Hannibal Lecter. We've all been in moods that'd see us burn a pile of money, or blow up a credit card company, or eat someone's liver with some nice fava beans and Chianti.

Okay, so maybe not the last one. But you get my point. Dostoyevsky's fond of prattling on about the inherent irrationality of humanity and how it torpedoes our repeated (and inevitably failed) attempts at crafting a Utopian society, and Poe totally gets that. Except rather than axing a landlady in the noggin, he chooses to axe his wife in the noggin. And drink tons of booze and write poetry, too (which sounds like a fuckin' party to me, let's go).

This reminds me a lot of The Tell-Tale Heart —so much so that they could be companion pieces. It's a fantastically morbid work of art that had to be a stunningly realized piece of short fiction when it was produced in Poe's contemporary era. And it leaves me wondering: "How the hell did this guy have any friends?" I mean, if one of my buds wrote something like this, I'd probably be making a concerted effort to avoid them. Or at least to make sure they spent as little time as possible in the same room as my pets.

Poe's brilliant, and I find it interesting that the man himself has been so overridden by the pop culture
persona his work has mutated him into—like a real-life version of Frankenstein's monster. I mean, I own a pair of socks with Edgar Allan Poe's face all over them. And really, can you imagine what he'd have thought about a freaking NFL mascot being named after one of his works? It's completely bizarre, but I find it hard to argue that his work and his persona aren't each so interesting and worthwhile that they're not deserving of the utmost honor that is being completely perverted by modern American corporate interests in order to make a quick buck.

So here's to Poe, whose face adorns my socks and whose stories haunt my mind.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

A Dog's Tale (1903) by Mark Twain

"The more I see of some people, the better I like my dog." — Mark Twain

Skillfully penned with moments of wry levity that Twain is known for. It's also quite deep in its examination of how casually human cruelty is often committed. While human beings don't have a monopoly on dealing death and pain to other species, we're certainly the most well-practiced at it, and one of the few species who revel in dispensing such things for purposes of pleasure. Perhaps animals are not possessed of human emotions or intellect, but those are not always attributes necessary to experience suffering, nor does a shallower view of suffering make it any less considerable or more bearable.

I'm too sad to write any more and I want to go hug my dog now.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Meditations (167) by Marcus Aurelius

Perhaps the stoic philosophy Marcus Aurelius' ruminates upon within this diary can most adequately be summarized as "going with the flow", and thinking a lot about said 'flow' while you're at it.

It's always been amusing to me just how comparable our American society is within that of ancient Rome, despite being separated by the Atlantic ocean, language, religion, and two millennia. Meditations would suggest that the upper crust of Rome during the Pax Romana shared a similar malaise and an ennui to that depicted in an American film penned by a Sofia Coppola, or a Japanese novel by Haruki Murakami, for example. A good part of Meditations is focused on the same questions developed countries have been asking themselves for literal ages: "How do you live a fulfilling life when you are no longer struggling to survive each day?" In this, Meditations is still highly applicable to daily life in developed countries.

Much of Marcus Aurelius' philosophy is anchored in reason and discipline, something I find personally appealing. When tasked with a great question about the human condition (eg. "where does the soul go when we die?") he's often given to tracing a thread back down from the abstract, monumental cloud that is the question back to the earth of reason and attempting to answer it as simple and straightforward manner as possible. I find this appeal to cold logic and tranquility quite comforting; it tends to take the teeth out of the questions that worry us so—it's like being terrified of the monster in the dark, only to switch on the light and realize it was just your hat and jacket on the coat rack. Through this stoic calm he seems to realize the core idea of this entire book: Any worries we have exist only in our mind, thus mastery over our own mind leads to the mastery of any worries we might have. It's a simple way of facing down adversity and making it seem less daunting, and it's probably what has made this book so timeless.

This is one of those books that changes when you read it at different times of your life. Its density allows for this. When I read it in University, most of its appeal was the novelty of reading an Emperor's inner thoughts. Now that I'm midway through my third decade, however, I find its call to self-discipline most appealing.

I'm sure I'll read it again, and I'll probably pick up something new to be enthralled about when I do.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Sworn Sword (2003) (The Tales of Dunk and Egg, #2) by George R.R. Martin

Martin does so enjoy parading the reality of feudalism in front of us. Feudalism-inspired fantasy has so classically been stilted towards the romantic that it can be shocking to see it depicted as it actually was. We're dosed with a close-up view of the peasantry in The Sworn Sword, and it isn't pretty. As a child raised on Disney films, it's easy for me to forget that the peasantry weren't actually the noble, lowly heroes with good hearts that we so often see depicted in media, but instead a class of people so intellectually stunted they read more like they're mentally challenged to us. We are so used to dealing with other educated human beings each day that it can be difficult to imagine someone wholly uneducated, but Martin does a staggeringly good job in depicting a peasantry that feels so real it shocks and saddens.

It's not a miserable read, though. The characters in The Sworn Sword are markedly deeper and given more screen time than those in the most previous novella, The Hedge Knight. Rohanne Webber is one of my favorite characters that Martin has ever written. She's intelligent, interesting, and motivated by a situation that feels real to us. She provides an interesting encounter for Dunk, and Martin's dialogue and the body language he creates between the two make for a compelling dance. Some of the minor characters, such as Septon Sefton and Ser Bennis, are equally compelling, and the presence of so many enjoyable characters makes this such a satiating read for being only just over a hundred pages.

The Sworn Sword also features a riveting climax to rival the one I liked so much in The Hedge Knight. Martin pours the action on heavy, and at one point I found myself literally holding my breath. It's quite good, and the ending is perfect—It hits such a satisfying, bittersweet conclusion that I couldn't wait to move on to Martin's next novella.

There's not much wrong with this one. It's Martin at his swiftest and his best. Highly recommended.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I've been here before. I actually read The Great Gatsby in high school, just like every other studious American teenager in the past thousand years. Back in, oh... Let's call it 2000 or 2001.

Yes, I had this book—probably even the same mass market paperback edition, doodled in and mistreated and neglected and discarded back into the bin at the end of the month. I was bored by it pretty much immediately and I skimmed it and cursed its existence and didn't care a fig for Scott Fitpatrick or whatever his damn name was. I just wanted it over and I wanted my passing grade so I could go back to doing whatever it was 16-year-olds do in 2001—a puzzle to me because I don't even remember that far back anymore. Probably the same thing I'm doing now, just louder and more stupidly.

It's occupied a space on my shelf for a while, purchased at a library book sale a while back for a quarter (if even that). And I haven't really seen an urgent need to reread this, since I already read it. It occupies a space on my virtual shelf as well, over on Goodreads, imparting to everyone that I did, in fact, at one point in my life, pick it up multiple times, turn some pages, and put it back down. It occupies that same "I read this but I don't remember any of it and if you asked me what I thought about it I wouldn't be able to say anything substantial that wasn't just common opinion" space as Brave New World, For Whom The Bell Tolls, and a dozen other classics that look great in the "Read" pile but I haven't written reviews for.

I'm quite glad I picked it up and gave it another shot, though, because it sure is a beautiful book. It's one of those books that clock in at fewer than 200 pages, but pack a whole bunch of really good stuff into those pages. Fitzgerald's a genius wordcrafter. His prose immediately blew me away, hitting the highs of his contemporaries (Joyce comes to mind), but hitting them more frequently and remaining there more consistently. Reading The Great Gatsby is like being sung to by somebody with a lovely voice.

I've come to realize that my favorite examples of beautiful prose seem to come when old (dead, actually, more often than not), drunk, lovestruck guys describe stuff. And Gatsby is sure full of that:

"Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered 'Listen,' a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour." 

"For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk." 

"The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone, before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek, and her hand was wet with glistening drops as I took it to help her from the car."

The book's brimming with this superb stuff. There's something like this on nearly every page. So I found it a joy to read just for the wordporny quality of Fitzgerald's prose. But there's certainly more to it than that, if you like your books to be smart as well as pretty.

My favorite classics always seem to be the ones in which really fucked up, shitty people love and hate each other over a few hundred pages. Admittedly, the characters in The Great Gatsby aren't nearly as fucked up as some of the ones in my favorite books. But they're still nowhere near as glimmering and successful as they initially appear. And they certainly do love and hate each other.

Nick Carraway is a way more interesting character than anyone gives him credit for. Before reading this I'd heard a chatter here and there about Carraway perhaps being a repressed homosexual, which I disregarded and immediately assumed was 21st century readers applying vogue 21st century issues to a character 100 years old. Imagine my surprise when it's not only hinted at, but actually pretty freaking strongly thrown right into your face when Nick leaves the party with a woman's photographer husband early in the novel:

Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier, I followed. 

“Come to lunch some day,” he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.

“Where?”

“Anywhere?”

“Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy.

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with dignity, “I didn’t know I was touching it.”

“All right,” I agreed. “I’ll be glad to.”

…I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.

“Beauty and the Beast…Loneliness…Old Grocery Horse…Brook’n Bridge…”

Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning Tribune, and waiting for the four o’clock train.

I guess you could read around that, if you want? But it's pretty glaringly obvious to me. Nick's sexuality never feels token, though. It adds to Nick's character and makes him interesting when—as our viewpoint into this story and providing little else—he could have been quite bland. It provides some solid backstory that adds to The Great Gatsby's exploration of these peoples' lives being almost wholly a show for the world, a show hiding something altogether different underneath the surface. If accepted, it explains to us why Nick's marriage failed and why he's made the move to New York. It explains why he seems to float casually through heterosexual relationships with women through the novel, rarely commenting on them to us, choosing instead to focus on Gatsby's persona and his relationship with Daisy.

Daisy's lovely. Fitzgerald manages to introduce her as a charming, bubbly, cherubic figure with just a few words. We never really learn anything about her actual character until the very end of the book, but the way Fitzgerald uses his prose to color Nick's view of her tells us all we need (at least in the beginning) and makes us equally as entranced with her as Gatsby. Daisy doesn't spend much time in view in the first half of the book, but when she does, she owns its pages. It stunned me to realize I'd been so firmly grasped by a character with only about a half dozen paragraphs of description in the first 100 pages or so. Descriptions of Daisy encompass the majority of my personal wordporn-highlights in the book, a telling tactic that Fitzgerald uses deliberately in order to make the climactic pages of the book hit as hard as they do.

And they certainly do. This isn't just nice prose, it's a fantastic story as well. Fitzgerald has a way of lulling you into this reverie, encapsulated by his gorgeous, authentic depiction of 1920s New York, before pulling out the rug from under you and kicking you in the balls. His pal Hemingway does the same thing with far different themes, flirting with romanticism to get you swooning before splashing some water on your face and waking you up with a climax that leaves you chucking his book out a window and waking your parents up in the middle of the night in order to complain.

So it's got a lot going for it: It's got amazing prose. It tells a fantastic story that hits like a gut punch. Its characters are well-crafted and a little fucked-up under their sheen of gold and their ripples of velvet and lace—they're a joy to love and hate and read about. It also contains a historically relevant fictional depiction of a noteworthy time in American history. What else?

Well, Gatsby is also a scathing critique of the American Dream and the excesses in the roaring '20s. It's a story about a fabulously wealthy man who has everything—and who can buy everything he doesn't already have... Except a life with his one true love, and blah blah blah you've all heard this crap already in English Lit so I'm not going to drone on about The Great Gatsby's social and cultural critiques or its themes or its literary merits and echo what millions of other people have already said over the past 100 years. Mrs. Jones already drummed this crap into your head umpteen years ago and stressed to you how important and beautiful and noteworthy this book was and still is, and why it holds such a high place in the pantheon of American literature. You ignored her then, but it turns out she was right, and you just had to be in the right place emotionally and at the right level of maturity to have it profoundly affect you, like it will now. So just read it if you're considering picking it up again. And then reread it every few years until you die because it's probably as close to perfect as these non-rhyming collections of words ever get.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

NOTABLE HIGHLIGHTS

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.

It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.