The Aeneid (19 BC) by Virgil

Aeneas Flees Burning Troy by Federico Barocci (1598)

The more I read ancient, epic poetry, the more I suspect that it's really just not for me.

As a Roman civ fanboy, I should have had a far greater interest in this than I did Homer's original poems. I found The Iliad to be beautifully written, but overly long and more than a bit repetitive. The Odyssey I liked quite a bit more. The Aeneid feels like more of the same, but of lesser quality.

It is, after all, propagandist fan-fiction of the highest caliber. Perhaps it's not the point, but I found little to hook me in the narrative and continued reading this with more of a rote feeling than an active engagement with it. Virgil was blatant in his intent to write this for a contemporary, Roman audience, so a lot of that blood-red chest-thumping is going to be lost on those of us reading it in the modern day. Was I supposed to feel some desire for the Trojans to found their new home? If so, I never did. So their serpentine journey through the Mediterranean felt more like just going through the motions to me rather than the winding adventure it was perhaps meant to be. Was I supposed to root for Aeneas? I never felt much sympathy for him, so his trials were rendered less entertaining than maybe they should have been.

I did find it interesting that the actual Trojan horse and sack of troy come from The Aeneid's second chapter rather than Homer's original poems. I noted their absence during my prior reads of The Iliad and The Odyssey. And there are portions of the story which are quite compelling; Aeneas coming across Dido in the underworld and the entire episode of Aeneas exploring the underworld with the Sibyl surely had to be an inspiration for Dante's later work Inferno. The Ahl translation that I read was superb, and my edition featured many illuminating endnotes which regularly described Virgil's brilliance in the construction of his Latin to feature multiple meanings, nearly by the page. Such is lost in the English translation, sadly, but it did allow me to appreciate why this was considered such a great work for so long by Latin readers over the past couple of millennia.

But there's just a bit too much of retreading Homer's steps going on. The most interesting portion of the story, to me, was trying to gain a grasp of whether or not Virgil was attempting to glorify the contemporary Augustan regime, and to what extent. It made for an interesting layer. But on its own, the story let me down. Maybe I should have waited a few more years between reading Homer and tackling The Aeneid.

I once read someone call a book "more enjoyable to appreciate than to read", and I'm feeling that with The Aeneid like I did with The Iliad. They were constructed as poetry, and I can't shake the suspicion that there's something lost in translation, because they just don't read the same prosaically. They're very repetitive, very indulgent, but not so much fun to read.

⭐⭐

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.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Slow Learner (1961-1964) by Thomas Pynchon

The short story collection Slow Learner is my first exposure to Pynchon. I wonder if I've made a mistake and should have begun with one of the novels, such as V, or The Crying of Lot 49 instead.

Beginning with The Small Rain, I was struck immediately by some of the odd dialogue present (Pynchon seems to have confused Canadian accents with Southern), and the sex scene towards the end was curiously written. But I liked the character of Levine and the backdrop of a town destroyed by a hurricane and how the setting challenged Levine's worldview and lifestyle.

A bit rough in patches but it served as a decent enough introduction, I suppose.

The second story I found far more palatable. It's casually poetic, witty, fluid, dryly humorous, and more than a bit weird, Low-lands has me beginning to see what people adore so much in Pynchon. What I most enjoy about postmodern writers is the skill with which they render daily ennui interesting, and Pynchon does that well in the initial half of the story.

Pynchon is the second author (the other being Haruki Murakami) I've read lately who, in his own words, admits to disliking his early writings and tears them down in a foreword as amateurish work. Far be it for me to disagree with these legendary, masterful writers, but I've quite enjoyed the early material of both of them and found it worthwhile as a lead-in to later, more polished, and higher quality work.

Interestingly, Pynchon's story reminds me of a more humorous predecessor and obvious influence of Murakami's work in the surrealistic turn Low-Lands takes in its latter half, where we find our hero literally crawling down the rabbit gypsy hole and exploring an underground network of tunnels dug into a garbage dump in which a whole society of gypsies live in order to marry a three-foot-five-inch gypsy woman named Nerissa and help raise her pet rat called Hyacinth.

I swear I'm not making this up.

Up third, the story Entropy contains a few beautiful and genuinely humorous scenes that are well written, but both are constantly tempered by Pynchon's reversion back to having his characters talk at me as if he had a bullet list next to his typewriter filled with themes and ideas he had to force into this story by any means necessary. This doesn't work for me, and if Pynchon continues like this, I don't think we'll be able to be friends.

I could chalk this one up to being very-much-not-my-thing--I usually like my short stories subtle, laconic, and peppered with a bit of ambiguity; all of which Pynchon—in his overwritten style jam-packed with random factoids and obscure references—represents the polar opposite of.

I've heard that Entropy serves as a great introduction to Pynchon's unique style, which was made famous in his later work such as Gravity's Rainbow, which I'm building up to reading by first sampling some of his short stories. This is a bit worrisome since I didn't much care for this one. But I have a feeling his style will work better with a bit more polish and the more ample legroom offered by the novel versus the short story. We'll see.

Under the Rose, unfortunately, did nothing to dissuade the opinion formed by the prior story. Surely reading Raymond Carver's short fiction and John le Carré's spy fiction immediately before this didn't do any favors for Pynchon's brand of short spy fiction, which falls short of the high mark set by each. I found Under the Rose to be little more than an exercise in dry tedium. It's another story that probably works better in a longer format. I didn't feel I was given enough time to get to know these characters, indeed the only thing noteworthy about the characters are their silly names. The setting could have been an interesting one, but we're kept from spending much time there by a plot that trips forward monotonously, allowing for little life or character to the people in the story as it reaches a conclusion surely meant to have more impact than it does. Pynchon seemed more comfortable commenting on boring minutiae than filling out his characters. I found the entire thing a silly bore and loathed it.

I found the final story, titled The Secret Integration, to be a far more compelling one—at least initially. We're given a number of characters who instantly jump off the page at you, colored with Pynchon's trademark wackiness. The premise of a group of mischievous, memorable youths is whimsical and charming, but the serious edge Pynchon sets to it (the racial integration of a Massachusetts school during the American Civil Rights movement of the '60s) all but dissipates as Pynchon wastes his story mostly rambling on tangents about the various minutiae present in the story such as political figures of the Berkshires' past. I suspect this is just sort of Pynchon's thing: he seems to like vomiting his deep knowledge of useless, irrelevant facts onto the page right in the middle of a narrative that was really beginning to get interesting 8 pages ago when this meaningless diversion just got started. I didn't find any of these expository tangents engrossing enough to warrant their inclusion.

It's not all bad, though. This is the most well written story of the collection by far, featuring moments of virtuoso talent from Pynchon's pen. But the lack of a strict editor sees Pynchon waste this potentially entertaining story, and it fizzles out before it can make much of an impact, then ends.

Now that I've finished Slow Learner, my initial thoughts seem true: I do think I made a mistake reading this first of all Pynchon's work. It seems uneven and rambling, but I can see a glimmer of what folks must like about his work. So I'll pick another Pynchon up soon and hope that the good stuff shines through more often and more strongly, but for now I can't shake the fact that Pynchon's style just isn't for me.

⭐⭐

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) by Raymond Carver

One day a thousand years from now, whoever is living on this planet will unearth some of Carver's short stories from some old, burned out bookshop they've just excavated. They'll get to work meticulously translating it and they'll learn everything they need to know about latter-half 20th century American culture just from his work. Raymond Carver is our Geoffrey Chaucer and his short stories are our Canterbury Tales. He reminds me of Ernest Hemingway in that his work is almost always more than the sum of its parts. His prose is simple, dirty, and direct. But what he says with it is profound in his muted way. Reading him feels like brushing your hand against some dirty slate, or chucking an old, broken cinder block into a refuse pile. His short fiction is the holey work glove of 20th century American literature. And I mean that in the best possible way. If Hemingway had lived forever, perhaps Raymond Carver is what the injuries and trials of later life would have crushed him into.

Carver manages to capture everything about daily American ennui with such sparseness and subtlety; our insecurities and failures, our hopes and dreams, our faded love for one-another and our boredom and lack of inspiration. These stories are no more than vignettes into everyday working class life, but they're often so poignant and relatable for that. Carver's characters feel so real, sad, detestable, and pitiable. Mostly insecure, unsuccessful, cigarette-ash-covered and beer-soaked middle-aged men, they feel like your creepy uncle. Everybody has the unfortunate privilege of knowing somebody like these characters. So many of them have this putrid, embarrassing artery of insecurity running through every fiber of their being and polluting everything they do. You can trace it from their actions back down to their core like branches to the trunk of a tree. Their insecurity damages everything around them.

In the story They're Not Your Husband, Earl's insecurity tears his wife down—seemingly a hard-working, earnest woman, at least from what we're shown. It's painful for us to witness, and even harsher when considering how real it feels, despite being fiction. It begs us to question Earl, himself: Is this a man who's down on his luck, as it would seem? Or is this perhaps a man whose own shallow, passive aggressive actions have led to his unemployment? Maybe it's so affecting because we can all see traces of ourselves, at our worst, in Carver's characters. Like looking into a filthy mirror. Carver makes sure to get out of the way and let his characters do the talking with simplistic, direct prose and dialogue. And his stories are more affecting for it.

I discovered him via an interest in Haruki Murakami's work and hearing that Carver's short fiction was a strong influence on him, and never is this clearer than in the story Are You A Doctor? A phone call from a strange woman, a chance encounter peppered with romanticism... And someone making tea.

These sorts of chance encounters and the mystery that accompanies them are now a thing of the past, and the mystery that makes them provocative is somewhat lost on those of us living in the modern world, in which any name can be googled in ten seconds on a smartphone. A phone call from a stranger will never again be as mysterious as it once was, but Carver's story helps those raised in the era of smartphones understand how dangerous and compelling such a meeting once was.

Another story titled Nobody Said Anything features an expertly crafted narrative voice of your typical hormone-flooded teenage boy—a horny, lonely creature playing hooky from school and searching for something that would more entertainingly occupy his worthless time. The kid's loneliness goes from typical to pitiable to depressing over the short course of the narrative. The closing lines of the story manage to flip our feeling of him completely from mild disgust to pity.

Civilization's continuing consumption and desolation of nature seemed to be a theme running through the undercurrent of the story. The airport encroaches on the creek the boy fishes to such an extent that the fish are bloated and unrecognizable, its waters are ground down to a slimy trickle when they used to be surging and flush with healthy fish. The boys' fishing represents this as well, as they gleefully and methodically pursue their warped prey in order to kill and dismember it in a fashion that renders their actions more savage than you'd expect. It feels like Tom Sawyer written in the dark, postmodern hopelessness of Cormac McCarthy rather than the satirical gallows humor of Mark Twain.

What's in Alaska features more humor than most of the others, which was a nice change of pace. Many of Carver's stories are so bleak and grey that it helps to have a palate cleanser once in a while. I also enjoyed the layers to this one, as it's heavily hinted that one of the characters is cheating on another with a third.
My overall favorite is probably Jerry and Molly and Sam which sees a man decide to abandon the family dog, eventually ending in his experiencing an epiphany. The story is so heartrending and the change in the narrator is so genuine and real that finishing it left me reeling. I had to set the book down and take a break afterwards just to think about it, and it's amazing to me that a story clocking in at fewer than 20 pages can have such an effect.

There's always a lot packed in to the few pages Carver dedicates to each story. I never feel good after reading him, but that's not really the point. I don't think 'fun' is the right word to describe his stories, but there is joy in reading them for me—perhaps because I'm in a better place in my life now but can still easily recognize poorer times passed in which I felt bled through with the same negative emotions and existential anxiety that these characters seem to, and I can subconsciously, optimistically urge them onward towards more hopeful, carefree lifestyles once they become more aged. So reading them is cathartic and—unexpectedly—generates optimism within me.

The value of good literature is that it imparts life experience onto us. It allows us to live and feel life situations we'd never experience ourselves. And although some of these early stories are a bit too subtle for their own good, Carver's still excellent at drawing emotion from the reader with so little. Even past death he continues to create a love for the medium of the short story within his readers regardless of demographics and interests. He's certainly done so for me over the past year.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Call for the Dead (1961) (George Smiley, #1) by John le Carré

My second le Carré novel—the author's first—had a notably lighter impact on me than my introduction to the man's work, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Call for the Dead is noteworthy in that it's such a polished first novel. It reads quite quickly and le Carré's prose is surprisingly polished for a new novelist. I suspect the man had been nursing his talent for quite some time, perhaps with other methods. But what made The Spy Who Came In From The Cold so compelling to me—its gritty realism, the undertones of what motivates one to live such a difficult life as one lived by a spy, and its compelling characters—are present here, albeit in early form, somewhat like the tip of the iceberg that would be revealed in the coming, more polished novels in the Smiley series.

George Smiley is the main draw of this novel. Gone are the super-spies we know now—the Bournes and Bonds and various other hip, muscular, shirtless Bees—and we're left with a short, fat, poorly dressed, bespectacled, middle-aged man whose only worthwhile weapon is his mind. Smiley (who made only a peripheral appearance in the other novel I've read) is a joy to read. His analytical mind walks us tradecraft-neophytes through the potential motivations for the people he's examining in a studious, workmanlike manner, and we never feel left out of the know as to why he's performing the actions he is.

Perhaps most enjoyable for me were the asides in which Smiley dipped into his and his adversaries' political motivations for doing what they do. le Carré's characters feel like real people with real wants who end up desperate and trapped in the world in which they've come to reside. The antagonists are not flag-waving Marxists or steel-jawed monsters who kill at whim. The best of them are cold professionals. But more importantly, they're real, disillusioned people doing what they can to enact the drastic changes in the world they'd like to see. This humanity makes them relatable, and even pitiable. Although initially cast as villains; you end up feeling sorry for them rather than rooting against them. And it's a credit to le Carré's skill that this turn never feels cloying nor manipulative. My favorite characters are always those I don't necessarily agree with, but am still capable of empathizing with. And in this, more than nearly anything else in his work, le Carré succeeds.

A young John le Carré

Although I enjoyed it, I think Call for the Dead, overall, does feel a bit thin. There are elements of Smiley's frustration in dealing with the stifling bureaucracy and rampant idiocy within his own organization that immediately interested me but were never touched on again past the first few chapters. And some of the side characters—Guillam, most notably—were left distinctly underdeveloped despite playing a considerable role in the climax, which caused it to lack a bit of the impact it could have had.

When you consider its status as le Carré's first novel, Call for the Dead is still quite impressive regardless of these flaws. But rating on its own merit leads me to classify it more as a longish novella than a full novel of its own account. That said, it's a marvelous first effort, and I'll definitely be reading the rest of the George Smiley books. le Carré has me hooked.

⭐⭐⭐

QUOTES LIKED

“But gossip must see its characters
in black and white, equip them with
sins and motives easily conveyed in
the shorthand of conversation.”

“His secretive nature detested the purpose of all interviews, their oppressive intimacy, their inescapable reality.”

“Dieter had a theory that was pure Faust. Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective. He used to say that the greatest mistake man ever made was to distinguish between the mind and the body: an order does not exist if it is not obeyed.”

“Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective.”

“They never understand it, do they? They never know what it costs—the sordid tricks of lying and deceiving, the isolation from ordinary people. They think you can run on their kind of fuel—the flag waving and the music. But you need a different kind of fuel, don't you, when you're alone? You've got to hate, and it needs strength to hate all the time. And what you must love is so remote, so vague when you're not a part of it.”

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury

There's a special king of ire you can raise among fans of the Star Wars franchise by suggesting the whole damn thing isn't science fiction at all, but rather fantasy in space. Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 mines a similar vein of having all the trappings of science fiction present simply for genre appeal, but it features none of the intelligence that makes the subgenre compelling in the first place.

Fahrenheit has futuristic fireproof structures, robots who butter bread for their humans, and houses constructed entirely of television-screen-walls. This book has got a glossy coat of science fictiony paint, but peel off that outer layer and you'll find that what's underneath is a pretty bog standard, empty-headed dystopia with very little concern for the actual science (both soft and hard) portion of the science fiction moniker.

This might not seem very important given the book is a dystopia first and a science fiction novel second, but the real bone I have to pick with Bradbury is how flatly this book falls on its face when considering the soft sciences it relies on to build its world and thus make its point about where Western civilization was headed in the 1950s and 1960s with the advent of the television. Bradbury's book lacks both the intelligent foresight of Huxley's Brave New World and the strong narrative structure of Orwell's 1984 and replaces it with little else but his rampant insecurity and incapable worldbuilding, the latter of which is perhaps what was most offensive about Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury's creation is artificial, incoherent, and completely falls apart if you think about it for more than 5 minutes.

Bradbury would have us that government has replaced books and classic liberal thinking with television as a control device. He'd have us believe that liberal arts have been all but abolished. Classic subjects in the western canon such as literature and history are no longer taught, replaced with seemingly vapid and obedience-inducing classes on television and sports and various other opiates-of-the-people. A scary thought, especially to his core audience of folks who enjoy reading literature—myself included.

But, with the absence of these classes, which are fundamental to a child's ability to learn in the first place, how are these characters even literate? Why is there a need to burn books at all when such a civilization would presumably be incapable of producing an adult capable of reading one? Further, what kind of education provides the bedrock for a civilization with such advanced robotics and technology as are present in Fahrenheit 451? Who is designing these groundbreaking new pieces of technology when children are supposedly not even taught to think critically in any fashion whatsoever? How is this society still capable of urban planning and complex public transportation? Air flight? War? The extraordinary new technologies our modern society is populated with are far from a given, which is why they've never existed in the tens of thousands of years of human civilization until just the past century. Bradbury's poor worldbuilding betrays a lack of understanding of how a modern, developed society even functions. Ironically, this book doesn't seem to understand the importance of basic critical thinking and open-mindedness to a functioning, wealthy society, despite railing against its potential extinction and rallying Bradbury's readers behind the importance of these ideas. The flimsiness and logical incoherence of Bradbury's world — something that should be the foundation on which the rest of the story converts itself organically via its plot and characters into the points he seems to want to make — wrecks the entire thing. It's infuriating, and I refuse to keep reading it.

It's a popular notion that the best children's literature is also enjoyable for adults. Fahrenheit 451 is the opposite; it's literature for adults that's so stunted and poorly conceived that it could only be genuinely enjoyed and resonant to teenagers. This is straw fiction set up by a grumbling fan of the medium of the novel who views new technology as a perversion of everything he loves. It's a pontification about the evils of stuff he hates that other people are wrong to like. It's a book with a message that works only on the outermost surface and fails at every deeper level within.

Fahrenheit 451 is "old man yells at cloud" dressed up in fancy clothes. It's old folks in the '30s telling you that jazz is just noise, in the '50s telling you that television will rot your brain, in the '70s telling you that KISS are satanists, in the '90s telling you that video games will make you shoot up schools. If this book succeeds as a cautionary tale or a prompt towards open-mindedness, it does so accidentally, in showing the dangers of becoming so secure in your own bubble that you end up dismissing new forms of media outright, rather than considering the potential strengths of such new media. Look at what television has done in the decades since Bradbury penned this novel. Some of the most successful creations of artistry have been created in this new golden age of television.

I've had one run-in with Mr. Bradbury in the past and found him so reliant on simile and purple-prose as to be unreadable. I suppose the best thing I could say about Fahrenheit 451 is that it's far more readable than Something Wicked This Way Comes, but instead of trying hard to be literary with its prose, it tries hard to be literary with its themes. Unfortunately, it fails in this manner just as badly.

Sorry Ray, but I think I hate your work.

⭐

Oliver Twist (1837) by Charles Dickens

It's difficult rating books like Oliver Twist where I seem to bounce rapidly from really loving it to grinding through, seemingly by the page.

Dickens' writing is gorgeous which makes the majority of the book an enjoyable read. His ability to set a scene is unmatched and his dialogue seems genuine, and the very setting of Victorian London is hard to beat. The credibility rising from Dickens depicting his contemporary setting only makes Oliver Twist stronger.

But the story itself, beyond these aspects, didn't engage me. Dickens' characters are pretty thin and he relies more on his wittiness and his sense of humor to carry them than their caricature-like construction. I felt little attachment to any of them and I didn't feel that any of them really grew as we continued, nor would I really have cared if they had. The only two in the whole thing I ended up rooting for were Nancy and Sikes' poor dog.

It seems like Dickens' own upbringing as a working child gave rise to much of this story. Some of the scene-by-scene events are extremely compelling — such as the Artful Dodger's courtroom shenanigans, which I later read was actually inspired by a real event witnessed by Dickens. But I never felt that the overarching story set enough framework for these moments to really shine. I suspect Dickens had a number of these scenes in mind when writing Oliver Twist, but was not as inspired when laying the foundation in which to place them.

It's worth reading, if only for the caliber of Dickens' prose:

The stars seemed, to the boy’s eyes, farther from the earth than he had ever seen them before; there was no wind; and the sombre shadows thrown by the trees upon the ground, looked sepulchral and death-like, from being so still.

There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness. At such time, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space, when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate.

The sun rose and sank, and rose and sank again, and many times after that; and still the boy lay stretched on his uneasy bed, dwindling away beneath the dry and wasting heat of fever. The worm does not work more surely on the dead body, than does this slow creeping fire upon the living frame.

The child was pale and thin; his cheeks were sunken; and his eyes large and bright. The scanty parish dress, the livery of his misery, hung loosely on his feeble body; and his young limbs had wasted away, like those of an old man.

Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision.

But I've already read better Dickens and I look forward to getting into some of his other, more critically celebrated work now that I've finished Oliver Twist.

⭐⭐⭐

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.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Traveling Companion (1835) by Hans Christian Andersen

The Traveling Companion features the same charm that makes other Andersen stories so celebrated, but he dips too frequently into cloying irritation and I didn't find this story to be up to par with some of the others I've read from him recently. It lacks the sheer beauty of something like Thumbelina and the surprising dark humor of Big Claus and Little Claus, but I did find the resolution to be satisfying.

Worth reading, but a lesser entry in Andersen's celebrated canon than some of its contemporary counterparts.

⭐⭐

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) by Ray Bradbury

This review's probably going to make a lot of people mad. I'm sorry if you like this book; really, I am. But I couldn't stand to read any more of it. And yes, I know I'm just some random idiot on a website. Far be it from me to criticize a legendary writer like Ray Bradbury, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Bradbury's writing is so egregiously fat with purple prose that if you had showed me some of these paragraphs and told me that a try-hard high schooler had written them I'd have believed you. Seriously, even I don't try this hard to be artful and profound in my dollar-store-website reviews. I found myself reading some of these lines multiple times just trying to grasp what the fuck was even going on in the damn scene since Bradbury had described it in the most obtuse, impenetrable way—for the sake of no more than making the sentence as amusing and pretty as possible. I can only hear about a tattoo artist described as seated rapturously alongside his ceaseless melancholy, stinging himself with a dagger of bees! so many times before my eyes roll themselves right out of their sockets. In the beginning I was struck by Bradbury's endless, artful adjectives and his rambling nature, considering the book nearly more poetry than prose. By page 100, though, they were beginning to wear me out. And by page 150, they were absolutely unbearable. Maybe there's a decent story in here somewhere, but I couldn't dig my way through the piles of lard to find it.

I realize this is very much up to personal preference. If you like extremely stylized prose then you'll probably love this novel. I didn't hate every second of it, but I do hate it.

⭐

Ligeia (1838) by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe entrances us with a similar story to Morella (which I loved), but to lesser effect. His typical overwriting is present and has a strong effect on our tally of the narrator's sanity (or lack thereof). Portions of the short story are startling beautiful despite their nearly purple nature, and the climax—although good—did not affect me as much as Morella's did.

Still good stuff from Poe.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Call of Cthulu and Other Weird Stories (1917-1935) by H.P. Lovecraft (In-Progress)

I can certainly see the appeal of Lovecraft, and I don't have much to say that hasn't already been covered in any random review of one of his short stories you could chance upon. His building of atmosphere is up to par and perhaps even excels past some of the more well-respected literary horror I've been reading, and digging into some of these stories in the '20s must have been an absolute trip. That said, it's tough for me to adequately critique it given my modern biases considering his style has inspired so much genre media since the time when he was writing, be they short stories, novellas, television, film, or even video games.

His prose probably wouldn't be described as tight and I couldn't shake the feeling that some of these short stories could have been produced by one of my high school contemporaries clad in goth garb back in 1999. I can understand the praise for his ability to build atmosphere though I found many of his stories don't give me the claustrophobic sense of mind-altering madness he probably intended. Many of his creepy-crawlies thus far have felt more cartoonish than anything actually inspiring otherworldly awe, visceral revulsion, or knee-jerk, xenophobic odium. I do long for the sense of cosmic foreignness Lovecraft seems dead-set on inspiring.

Maybe I just need a few more reps of Lovecraft to fall into a groove and acquire the taste. I'll push further into this come next Halloween season — there's just too much on my plate right now.

The Gold Bug (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe

19th century writers and ruining their stories by depicting unintelligible dialect phonetically; name a more iconic duo.

Look, I finish almost everything I read. And I really do like Poe. But I just can't do it with this one. There's probably a very good story in here somewhere, but Legrand's African American servant Jupiter's illiterate dialogue is so frustratingly constructed that I simply can't bring myself to continue bludgeoning through it to get to the good stuff. Reading The Gold Bug is a miserable chore and I have much better things to do with my time (and better books to read) than to waste it decoding this nonsense.

"Keeps a syphon wid de figgurs on de slate --de queerest figgurs I ebber did see. Ise gittin to be skeered, I tell you. Hab for to keep mighty tight eye pon him noovers. Todder day he gib me slip fore de sun up and was gone de whole ob de blessed day. I had a big stick ready cut for to gib him d--d good beating when he did come --but Ise sich a fool dat I hadn't de heart arter all --he look so berry poorly."

Pardon my French, but: Fuck this shit, Edgar. You're better than this. It goes past style value. This is bad without even applying the lens of 21st century ethics and criticizing this in a racial fashion. I'm not reading this for literary purposes, but for enjoyment. And this sort of dialogue is such a chore to decipher that it completely destroys my ability to read and enjoy the story.

When it comes to dialect and dialogue, let's have more Twain and less Poe, please.

⭐

A Little Hatred (2019) (The First Law, #8) by Joe Abercrombie

I dislike fantasy. But Joe Abercrombie does two things far better than most fantasy writers:

1) He's very funny. His penchant for gallows humor is nearly unmatched, and the quality of his comedy stands out even more when compared to the humorless, stodgy lot that are contemporary writers of fantasy.

2) He writes incredible characters. In a sub-genre defined by inch-deep cardboard cut-outs given life by unextinguished, unrealized teenage power-fantasies that read as if they're written by 12-year old boys, Abercrombie's deep, interesting, human characters from various, unique demographics are a joy to read.

Neither of these qualities are any less than you'd expect from his newest work, but he does add something I haven't yet seen from him: He builds an incredibly interesting world.

Abercrombie's "Circle of the World" setting has always felt simply like it existed so that he could populate it with interesting characters. It was always rather pedestrian as far as fantasy worlds go—it's not poorly constructed, it's just sort of by-the-book. There are guys with swords here, other guys with swords there, there are some barbarians, there's some magic, etc. Nothing too extraordinary. But with A Little Hatred he's taken this opportunity to progress the technology level of his world into an Industrial Revolution, and the skill and education with which he's done so has made all the difference.

The nobility of Adua reeks of the heights of the Holy Roman Empire, the politicking of which is legendary. Toss in a bit of Dickensian poverty and an uppity, socialistic peasantry torn straight from the French Revolution and you've got the setting for A Little Hatred. The setting became the chief character for me, something that hasn't happened in any of his books thus far. That's not to say that the human characters are lacking, either. They're solid, interesting, and witty, with their own quirks and faults to keep things honest. The easy violence of newcomer Gunnar Broad is particularly my taste, and Savine dan Glokta's gleeful lack of a social conscience made her chapters endlessly entertaining when she begins to experience the events of the story.

Abercrombie surprised me with his quality several times through my reading of A Little Hatred.

Early on, a revolt is presented as a typically socialist Utopian action, with all the rah-rah propagandist one-liners you'd expect. I rolled my eyes at this portion of the plot, wondering if Abercrombie's personal politics had polluted his storytelling—Until it turned out like nearly every other socialist revolution in history has; with the replacement of the old regime (if you will) with starving, rioting, chaos, and eventually a new regime altogether too familiar to what was just toppled. He had deftly set me up and knocked me down, perhaps expecting all the while that I'd have a reaction like I did. Looking back, I admit that I probably should have seen such a development coming, but I'd rather credit Abercrombie's skill as a writer than admit my own gullibility.

Another occurrence was towards the end, featuring a character being an on-the-nose, close-minded nationalistic racist. His depiction as such grew a little too anachronistic and cliche for my tastes, until our perspective changes and another character accurately appraises the first as simply a little too 'provincial' and casually racist.

Abercrombie demonstrates his education and self-awareness in these instances, and it's quite refreshing. His characters are nuanced and they feel like real people because of that nuance. Abercrombie regularly demonstrates the expertise with what motivates human beings that great writers consistently possess, and the world-turning events which take place in his fiction feel like real history, demonstrating an education in such matters that writers of fantasy frequently lack. He doesn't give in to the masturbatory, 'this-is-what-the-world-should-be-like' tendencies that lesser fantasy writers do, and thus doesn't suffer the same penalties to your suspension of disbelief that other fantasy novels do. I've seen readers paint him as a relentless cynic, but you know what they say: 'A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist' and all that.

This book does suffer a bit from first-episode-of-a-trilogy-syndrome. I was so enthralled by Valbeck's social strife that I found myself struggling to care about the conflict in the North beyond revisiting its interesting characters—some of whom we're already well acquainted with from the prior books in the First Law series. It all feels a bit too sprawling, but I would be surprised if this sprawl isn't justified in the events of later books. I guess I've just got to wait and trust for now, something I have no problem doing considering the way this book comes together and ends on a superb note.

I once read someone say that Haruki Murakami 'feels like he writes books just for me'. That's how I feel about Abercrombie. His cynicism, humor, and characters always seem to hit the bulls-eye of what I'm looking for in modern fiction. If you're familiar with Abercrombie then you know what you're going to get: It's pulpy, campy, morbidly hilarious, and oddly relateable. The former two are found—mostly unintentionally—in nearly every fantasy novel penned today. But the latter two are what make Abercrombie special, and his surprisingly improved ability to craft an intriguing, genuine setting has provided a new angle to chew on.

I'm definitely looking forward to next book.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

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.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842) (Dupin, #2) by Edgar Allan Poe

I really love Poe, but this is just too damn dry.

Perhaps this much dry detail about a murder may have been intriguing and curiously morbid in a society less permeated with all sorts of depictions of bloody viscera, but for us modern folks steeped in true crime fiction, slasher-horror, and everything in between, there's a distinct lack of humanity and emotion in this story to attach ourselves to.

Poe's knowledge of the science of violence is not trivial considering the contemporary era in which he lived (where 'miasma' was the hot infection theory, and actual germ theory was still just a budding, abstract idea), and it serves him well in much of his other work, but you can see why the storytelling polish present in Conan Doyle's later Holmes stories were a necessary, welcome evolution to the detective-mystery fiction of Poe's Dupin. I wasn't a huge fan of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, but it's still superior to The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.

I assume this isn't skippable if you want to read the (apparently) far superior The Purloined Letter (I haven't read it yet!), otherwise I'd be comfortable urging Poe fans ignore this entry entirely and jump right on to the final—and perhaps most famous—Dupin episode.

⭐

Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He stood and stared into the distance for a long while; he knew this spot particularly well. While attending university it often happened — a hundred times, perhaps, usually on his way home — that he would pause at precisely this spot, look intently at this truly magnificent panorama and every time be almost amazed by the obscure, irresolvable impression it made on him. An inexplicable chill came over him as he gazed at this magnificence; this gorgeous scene was filled for him by some dumb, deaf spirit... He marvelled every time at this sombre, mysterious impression and, distrusting himself, put off any attempt to explain it. Now, all of a sudden, those old questions of his, that old bewilderment, came back to him sharply, and it was no accident, he felt, that they'd come back now. The simple fact that he'd stopped at the very same spot as before seemed outlandish and bizarre, as if he really had imagined that now he could think the same old thoughts as before, take an interest in the same old subjects and scenes that had interested him... such a short while ago. He almost found it funny, yet his chest felt so tight it hurt. In the depths, down below, somewhere just visible beneath his feet, this old past appeared to him in its entirety, those old thoughts, old problems, old subjects, old impressions, and this whole panorama, and he himself, and everything, everything... It was as if he were flying off somewhere, higher and higher, and everything was vanishing before his eyes... Making an involuntary movement with his hand, he suddenly sensed the twenty-copeck piece in his fist. He unclenched his hand, stared hard at the coin, drew back his arm and hurled the coin into the water; then he turned round and set off home. It felt as if he'd taken a pair of scissors and cut himself off from everyone and everything, there and then.

I once read someone say somewhere that behind the grim and grit of one of the most famous examples of literary realism lies a surprisingly traditional moralist in Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

It must have been so jarring for the 19th century denizens of St. Petersburg to read such a gripping, low, accurate portrayal of their city. Crime and Punishment, for me, hit its hardest through its suffocating, stuffy, and sloppy depictions of the city and its cramped apartments and public houses. Contrary to the cliche'd Russian setting, this novel takes place at the height of Summer. A hundred years before air conditioning would be invented left one of the world's most famously freezing countries a stifling mire, and Dostoyevsky chooses to show us some of its poorest inhabitants. They're riddled with illness, they drink too much, their clothing is falling to tatters. They live in glorified closets and sleep on cots and old couches. I felt myself there with them throughout the book thanks to Dostoyevsky's fantastic scene-setting.

His characters are equal to the quality the setting provides. Raskolnikov is a more fleshed-out, named version of the same man who narrates Notes from Underground . He's deeply flawed and realistically motivated. Dostoyevsky seems to have such a connection to this young, haughty, disillusioned type of person that I assume it could only come from deep within himself. Perhaps Raskolnikov is a young Dostoyevsky; maybe he was changed so significantly by his time in the gulag labor camps that he looked back on his former self in order to craft this novel.

I was surprised to read several reviews praising Raskolnikov, however. He's a fantastic protagonist; a Byronic anti-hero, and he's a joy to read and to examine. But I've constantly heard that this is a novel that makes you 'root for the bad guy', or pull for Raskolnikov to 'win'. I never felt that. Although he's undoubtedly interesting to read, I was almost immediately turned off by his inner monologue. Raskolnikov is a whiny, entitled pissant . His arrogance is unmatched by any other character in the entire novel. He's a young man with nothing; he's poor and subsists on money given to him by others. He's created nothing, he does nothing of value, yet he thinks of himself as a great genius. No reason is given to us for his failure to succeed, despite his having several advantages over the characters who surround him. Marmeladov is crippled with alcoholism, for example. His wife is ill and forced to care for their children. Their daughter is penniless and forced into prostitution as a result. These are characters dealing with severe adversity. What about Raskolnikov? Well, he was a student. He thinks himself clever and intelligent, so he must have been a good student. His education was paid for by his mother and sister, so he doesn't have to worry about that. But when we meet him, he's dropped out, and is not seeking work. Why? His internal monologue rambles on, often suggesting that he's just too good for it all. He's Napoleon, reborn! A great man for a new generation! Yet none of his actions have suggested this. He is a clever talker at times, and a methodical thinker. But none of this is put into any sort of practical success, and I despised him for his seemingly undeserved high opinion of himself. Never once did I root for him to succeed in his titular crime and get away with it. Instead I found myself attached mostly to Porfiry Petrovich and Dunya, the two most intelligent, wily, and likable and respectable characters in the entire thing, and hoping that Raskolnikov would be taken down a peg.

Aside from the evocative descriptions of St. Petersburg in the summer, perhaps my favorite scene in the entire novel is that of the crime itself and the riveting manner in which the criminal escapes the scene of it. I found myself glued to the pages as I read, entranced by Dostoyevsky's masterful weaving of the episode. But although the cat-and-mouse scenes that follow between Raskolnikov and Porfiry Petrovich are similarly suspenseful, I found this narrative too frequently broken up by lengthy discussions of philosophy between the characters. The footnotes present in my Penguin Deluxe edition were extremely helpful in this regard, as it appears that Dostoyevsky is using his characters as mouthpieces in order to debunk some contemporary socioeconomic theories. Perhaps this might be interesting to those reading this novel who might have an interest in such theories, and it certainly must have been a novel inclusion when it was published in its time, but I felt that these portions overstayed their welcome at times and broke up the pace of the main narrative in too jagged and clumsy a manner.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

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.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) (The Adventures of Tom and Huck, #1) by Mark Twain

There's a pretty common, easily identifiable process guiding decision-making in most human societies: We identify the ends at which we mean to arrive, we make certain decisions and engage in work to get there, and, hopefully, the process concludes after some time has passed, and we arrive at our desired destination.

As adults, we spend the vast majority of our lives operating within these processes. Some take place over decades of time, others months, or even weeks. "I want that promotion". "I'm saving up for a house". Even something as trivial as "I need to finish eating these bananas before they get overripe". Of course, these goal-oriented life processes don't always conclude in the manner in which we had hoped—Sometimes our boss is just an oblivious asshole who doesn't realize how valuable we are to our team. And nobody wants to eat more than one banana at a time, right? But typically with enough moxie and fastidiousness, and with reasonably conceived goals, we get where we're looking to go.

We often underestimate the intelligence of children. You can go downtown during summertime and see them all eating ice cream and getting it all over their face like some kind of fool. Or witness your son falling off a step while doing something stupid and hurting themselves. Any parent will tell you that they've thought (probably more than once) the words "Jesus Christ, my kid is a goddamn moron". But children are often just as intelligent as we are. They are definitely far more observant than we are. And they are, without a doubt, far, far more imaginative.

Twain's writing of children subtly grasps both their strengths and pitfalls. Tom Sawyer is an extremely clever, imaginative young man. He understands what makes people tick and often manipulates it to his advantage. He operates under the same aforementioned process we adults do—he identifies what he wants and operates in accordance with these goals. The difference is that oftentimes he doesn't arrive where he wants to go.

That's because, for children, there's a key element of this process that's missing: Experience. They're capable of crafting their own goals—"Skip school today", "get Becky to like me", "get out of whitewashing this fence", "make my Aunt miss me". But they often go about accomplishing these in a clumsy, sub-optimal manner—Sometimes to such an extent that they hurt those around them. They lack the experience of fully formed adults, so they're often unaware of how their actions could potentially affect others around them, and they fail to account for the inherent irrationality of human beings. For example, Tom manipulates Becky into liking him, but it all implodes when she realizes that he's not been completely genuine with her. Or, he runs away from home in order to garner an emotional response from his Aunt and Sid, but is surprised to find them honestly distraught when they assume he's dead—or worse. Tom is not stupid—quite the opposite; his cleverness is a joy to read throughout the story. But his lack of experience in dealing with people is often apparent in episodes like this. Twain has such a firm grasp on what it is to be a child: you're operating in this weird world of adults in which everyone seems to know the rules except you. So Tom longs to run away, to fish and play and shirk his responsibilities, because he knows the rules of those worlds—or, rather, he's free to make them up as he goes along.

Twain nails the writing of children in a way I haven't very often, if ever. The strength of his prose is remarkable, too. And his usage of local, contemporary slang brings a heightened sense of sincerity to the novel. But it does have its faults.

The vignettes that populate most of the book are expertly crafted, enjoyable, and affecting, but the lack of a strong overarching narrative until the final quarter of the book left me with an experience that felt like reading a group of short stories rather than one cohesive novel. It feels like Twain decided to write a novel, but had no strong 'glue' to hold it together. It still works pretty well as a novel, but don't expect a strong plot to keep you shuffling along.

Another criticism—perhaps more important—is the lack of any strong characters outside our lead. Most of the adults in the story are token or weak, from the cliched down-and-out drinker Muff Potter, to the awful evil-because-he's-part-Native-American Injun Joe. I realize that this is a pretty tight book and there's not too much space to flesh these people out, but it still left me feeling like they were a bore to read about. Even his steadfast companion Huckleberry Finn felt like more of a token orphan than a fully realized secondary character.

The strength of this book is in its character interactions and its dialogue. And that's enough. But with just a little bit more, I could have liked it a whole lot better.

⭐⭐⭐