Book Review: Oliver Twist (Dickens)
Have I read this before: I think I had started to read this back in like junior high but couldn’t get into it.
Review: Dickens is good at writing characters who are absolute fart bags but are also so intriguing that you want to see what happens to them (and hope that karma will get them in the end). Sikes is a good example of this. He’s also good at introducing characters and character relationships that are fleeting when first discussed but come up as major plot points (or the main plot point) later. I remember Great Expectations had a few instances of this; Oliver Twist does, too.
Favorite Part: Sikes getting his comeuppance. He bugged me.
Rating: 6/10
Book Review: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Douglass)
Have I read this before: I think we read some excerpts of this in high school.
Review: I don’t think reading excerpts of this does the narrative justice, as you really do need the whole thing to see exactly how Douglass is shaped by his experiences, especially in terms of his desire to learn to read and write. I actually have no idea why we didn’t just read the whole thing; it’s not that long and it’s so much more impactful in its entirety.
Favorite Part: When Douglass beats the hell out of Covey. Cathartic.
Rating: 6/10
Book Review: A Moveable Feast (Hemingway)
Have I read this before: Nope.
Review: Want to experience the Lost Generation via Hemingway? Then read this and skip The Sun Also Rises. This is much more real and raw, obviously in part because it’s based on Hemingway’s actual interactions with other prominent individuals of the time. It’s a memoir, and it’s a good one. Also, the Kindle edition has a bunch of photographs and letters at the end, which is super cool.
Favorite Part: His description of F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of beauty. His chin was well built and he had good ears and a handsome, almost beautiful, unmarked nose. This should not have added up to a pretty face, but that came from the coloring, the very fair hair and the mouth. The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.”
Rating: 6/10
Book Review: The House of Mirth (Wharton)
Have I read this before: No.
Review: Of the characters I’ve disliked in the books on this book list, I believe all of them so far have been dudes. But now we can break that pattern and throw Lily Bart on the “obnoxious as hell” list. Like, I get that that’s kind of the point of her and that she acts as a symbol of the flaws with social standing, moral corruption, etc. But ugh. She was hard to read about.
Favorite Part: With the above in mind, it was nice to see her experience the consequences of her actions over and over, at least until it all builds up and becomes too much for her. Then, of course, it’s sad.
Rating: 5/10
Book Review: The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck)
Have I read this before: I got through like ten pages in junior high and was like NOPE
Review: So. Steinbeck. I stand by the claim that this should NOT be your first exposure to Steinbeck. Read The Pearl or East of Eden or Of Mice and Men first. I’m not saying The Grapes of Wrath is bad. It’s not. It’s very compelling. But it’s a slow burn at the start. And I mean sloooooooooow buuuuuuuuuuuurn. Like “trying to set water on fire” kind of slow burn. I’m sure that was why I had trouble getting into it when I was younger. But once you do, it’s definitely worth it. I owe Steinbeck an apology for hating on him since like 7th grade, but in my defense, SLOOOOOOOOOOOW BUUUUUUUUUUUURN.
Favorite Part: The ending scene. It’s very jarring and heart-wrenching and really shows the desperation of the time.
Rating: 6/10
Book Review: Emma (Austen)
Have I read this before: Nope.
Review: Matchmaking + jealousy = nothing working out until everything does. I feel like I’d appreciate this story more if I hadn’t been inundated with similar stories on this list. At least Austin’s writing style is tolerable, but man I’m sick of the “I’m English and I want love but I’m also slightly manipulative and good at getting into situations where communication would solve everything but I refuse to communicate.”
Favorite Part: I don’t really know if I have one. Again, it’s probably influenced by what I’ve been reading as of late, but this felt almost…generic.
Rating: 5/10
More Books. MORE!
I’m burning through my “250 Books” list due to bad weather + treadmill, so I need to add some more! Let’s put it at 300 for now, assuming I can find another 50 legit classics. The updated list will be linked in the new “300 Books” button above…at some point.
WOO!
Book Review: A Doll’s House (Ibsen)
Have I read this before: I remember reading this at some point, yes, but I don’t remember when.
Review: I love all the tension in this play. All the secrets, all the sneaking around, all the covert conversations…a lot of plays that I’ve read on this list have some or all of these elements, but I think Ibsen does it best in this one. Completely unrelated, but did you know that Ibsen is the second-most frequently performed dramatist in the world (after Shakespeare)?
Favorite Part: Nora’s choice at the end. It would have been so easy to make her do the opposite of what she did and for there to be a “happy ending” of the traditional sort, but she was written to make, in my opinion, the right choice.
Rating: 5/10
Book review: The Call of the Wild (London)
Have I read this before: I don’t think I’ve ever read this, but I did listen to an audiobook version of it back when I was working at Pima in 2012. I had to tag PDFs for read-aloud accessibility software – super mundane – and I listened to a good number of audiobooks while doing that.
Review: It’s so refreshing to read a book that’s not yet another exploration of class struggles in 18th- or 19th- or 20th-century England. I mean, I guess I just finished Breakfast of Champions, which was a great departure from what has been a typical theme/setting on this book list, but still. This one is from a dog’s perspective. About as different as you can get. And honestly, it was easier to empathize with Buck than it has been for a number of the English characters I’ve read about over the past few years, despite the fact that I am assuredly not a sled dog (at least in this lifetime).
Favorite Part: I like how this book almost reads as a fable. There’s something fantastical and legendary about Buck and his trials and eventual response to the “call of the wild” could easily be argued as teaching a moral lesson.
Rating: 6/10
Book Review: Breakfast of Champions (Vonnegut)
Have I read this before: Nope.
Review: Vonnegut is great, guys. I really like the absurdity of his stories and style because it doesn’t detract from what he’s trying to say (which I think is easy to do with an absurdity angle) but instead heightens it. This is also one of his stories that contains his own illustrations/drawings as well. If you want to be able to say “I read the Vonnegut book where he drew a vagina,” this is your choice. And if you want a very engaging and sometimes humorous examination of mental illness, this is your choice as well.
Favorite Part: Some quotes:
“The words in the book, incidentally, were about life on a dying planet named Lingo-Three, whose inhabitants resembled American automobiles. They had wheels. They were powered by internal combustion engines. They ate fossil fuels. They weren’t manufactured, though. They reproduced. They laid eggs containing baby automobiles, and the babies matured in pools of oil drained from adult crankcases.”
“Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.”
“I had to think fast about who was on the other end of the telephone. I put the first most decorated veteran in Midland City on the other end. He had a penis eight hundred miles long and two hundred and ten miles in diameter, but practically all of it was in the fourth dimension.”
Rating: 7/10
Golden Books
Did any of you have Little Golden Books when you were a kid?
I had a TON of these at my dad’s condo. Like everything else he ever bought, he liked to collect them.
And I loved to read them.
I remember I used to pick six or seven of them at night, bring them up to my bed (I slept on the top of a bunk bed…not sure why I had a bunk bed because I was an ONLY CHILD but whatevs), and would read them while a Classic Disney CD would play gently over my CD player.
Childhood, yo.
Book review: The Adventures of Augie March (Bellow)
Have I read this before: No. And I wish that was still true.
Review: Jesus FUCK
So a title like “The Adventures of Augie March” implies that the book is likely an exciting, romping tale of the trials and tribulations of the interesting titular character, right?
WRONG-O!
Oh my GOD this was boring.
Oh my GOD Augie was a passive, easy-to-manipulate bag of farts (I know this was half the point, but a line has to be drawn somewhere)
Oh my GOD I grappled with “do I actually have to read this or can I skip it?” more than I have with any other book in recent memory.
At no point did I care what happened to this guy. There was nothing about him that gripped me as a character and none of his “adventures” (apart from maybe the eagle training thing) were exciting. And the eagle training thing was only exciting because the eagle was the only being that exuded any sort of personality in this entire book.
Augie’s brother was ANNOYING. Every woman Augie encountered was ANNOYING. Augie himself didn’t have enough of a personality to be annoying, which itself was ANNOYING.
Like, there were attempts to give him an ounce of snark every 100 pages or so, but those attempts failed and just made him sound like an inconsistent character (and not on purpose).
Also, I had no motivation to care about Augie. He just wasn’t interesting to me at all. John Irving does the “regular character but interesting” thing really well; Bellow does not. I mean, it’s like:
Irving: here’s a character. You should be invested in him.
Me: why?
Irving: here are reasons.
Me: oh, okay.
Bellow: here’s a character. You should be invested in him.
Me: why?
Bellow: fuck you. Here are 17 pages about a button.
Seriously, this and The Optimist’s Daughter are going to be duking it out for my “worst book of 2022” title. At least The Optimist’s Daughter was relatively short.
Favorite Part: Seeing the “100%” in the corner of my Kindle so I could close this book and never have to look at it again.
Rating: 2/10
Book Review: The World According to Garp (Irving)
Have I read this before: Nopers.
Review: I dug it. There’s something about Irving’s writing style that makes his books very easy and enjoyable to read. He also has this way of making it seem like nothing is “happening” in his books until you realize that a whole ton of stuff has happened and it’s all been interesting and amusing and intriguing. I felt that way with Owen Meany and I felt that way with Garp. Garp didn’t quite have the payoff that Owen Meany did (where everything came to a brilliant, unforgettable, incredible climax), but it was still interesting.
Favorite Part: Lotsa good quotes and imagery.
“Fowler was killed during a crash landing on an unpaved road. The landing struts were shorn off in a pothole and the whole landing gear collapsed, dropping the bomber into a hard belly slide that burst the ball turret with all the disproportionate force of a falling tree hitting a grape.”
Garp making a very relatable comment about running: “In my neighborhood there is no place to run…the sidewalks are threatened by dogs, festooned with the playthings of children, intermittently splashed with lawn sprinklers. And just when there’s some running room, there’s an elderly person taking up the whole sidewalk, precarious on crutches or armed with quaking canes.”
“In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”
Rating: 7/10
Book Review: The Turn of the Screw (James)
Have I read this before: Yes, back in 2010 I think. I had trouble with it.
Review: You want to read a ghost story (kinda) and get absolutely NO enjoyment out of it? Read this novella. The concept is there, but Henry James’ writing just sucks the life out of it all (no pun intended). I don’t know if it’s just me, but this was a struggle. Bro needs to stick to novels; Portrait of a Lady is written SO much better.
Favorite Part: The ending was…okay, I guess.
Rating: 3/10
Book Review: Sula (Morrison)
Have I read this before: Nope.
Review: This was a good book. I enjoyed how the neighborhood of Bottom is both characterized through and seen through Sula, her actions, and her personality. It’s almost like she holds the neighborhood together, despite the resentment the people seem to feel for her when she returns. The contrast between Sula and Nel is also interesting, especially given how many parallels exist between the two very different characters.
Favorite Part: It sounds bad to say it, but I thought the death of Chicken Little and Sula’s response to it was very well-written. It’s probably the most memorable part of the book to me.
Rating: 5/10
Book Review: Robinson Crusoe (Defoe)
Have I read this before: Nope.
Review: Did you know the full title of this book is like a chapter all on its own? “The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself.”
This was an okay book. As we all know, I like stories that involve the sea, but this was much less focused on the seafaring than on the “oh crap I’m on an island and I need to survive” stuff. Which was fine. This is another one of those books where a lot of people know the basic premise and characters but may not have actually read it.
Favorite Part: I love how Robinson’s first sea adventures as a younger boy involved getting shipwrecked TWICE before getting back home, and then like forty years later he’s got the chance to adventure again and he’s like, “nah, I can’t get shipwrecked a THIRD time, let’s go!” and then GUESS WHAT
Rating: 5/10
Book Review: The Portrait of a Lady (James)
Have I read this before: Nope.
Review: I can see how the concept of Isabel was a novel one at the time this was written. But it seems like there’s been so many Isabels since then that that type of character is overdone and tired. Like just think of how many books/shows/etc. have a free-spirited woman who gets ALL THE PROPOSALS but rejects ALL OF THE PROPOSALS because she’s so free-spirited? I get it, I like the message, but this is so overdone today.
Favorite Part: I did like this brief part of a conversation between Ralph and Isabel:
At last she said abruptly: “I don’t see what harm there is in my wishing not to tie myself. I don’t want to begin life by marrying. There are other things a woman can do.”
“There’s nothing she can do so well. But you’re of course so many-sided.”
“If one’s two-sided it’s enough,” said Isabel.
“You’re the most charming of polygons!” her companion broke out.
Rating: 5/10
Need a cool kid’s book?
(Even if you don’t, this book is great)
I actually don’t remember if I’ve ever posted about this, but
1) I’m too lazy to check, and
2) I don’t have anything else to blog about today
SO.
Seeing, Saying, Doing, Playing by Taro Gami is a fantastic little book that I originally got when I was a very small child.
Basically, this book consists of giant illustrations of tons of people doing stuff, and each thing is described with a verb.
Example page:
Zoomed in:
I don’t know how hard it is to find this anymore, but it really is a great book. Even flipping through it now I can remember all the illustrations.
Book Review: Othello (Shakespeare)
Have I read this before: Yes! I actually don’t remember if we read this in school or if I read it on my own. It seems like every play we read in high school involved a “live reading” where we each picked a character and read the play aloud. I don’t remember doing that with Othello, so I must have read it on my own.
Review: I remember a lot of dickish manipulation by Iago, but I’d forgotten the extent of it, haha. His manipulation tactics are strong and clever and I like how things kind of build up throughout the play and give more power to his lies and deceptions.
Favorite Part: the whole handkerchief thing was probably my favorite thing. Again, lots of twists and build-ups to make everything just work out for Iago’s motives.
Rating: 6/10
Book Review: Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf)
Have I read this before: Nope.
Review: Eh. This one wasn’t my favorite. Like, To the Lighthouse was okay, but I don’t think Woolf’s writing style really jives with me. The story itself was okay I guess, but I wasn’t really a fan of the way it was conveyed. Also, it’s YET ANOTHER STORY SET IN ENGLAND, as if we need that.
Favorite Part: The death of Septimus. Super sad.
Rating: 3/10
Book Review: Lonesome Dove (McMurtry)
Have I read this before: No, and I hate myself for it.
Review: Let me preface this by saying that I don’t consider “Western” to be one of my preferred genres.* And I was hesitant as soon as I bought this book because I was like oh god, a 900-page Western?
But then I started it. And got into it. The first hundred pages or so are slow, but the characters are so vivid and fleshed out that WHO THE HELL CARES THAT ALL THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT IS BEANS AND CATTLE. GIVE ME ALL THE BEANS AND CATTLE IF IT MEANS I CAN KEEP HEARING ABOUT HOW BADASS CAPTAIN CALL IS.
I don’t understand how anyone could avoid getting sucked into this story. Just Gus’ and Call’s friendship alone was enough to keep me invested, but all the other stuff? All the manly, dirty, gritty cowboy stuff? AND THE STORY ITSELF? This book grabbed me by my non-existent balls. Hell, this book made me grow balls and then proceeded to grab me by them.
I liked it, is what I’m trying to say here.
Favorite Part: The whole GODDAMN THING. But mostly Captain Call. I know most people favor Gus, but Call is definitely my favorite. I love the scene where he absolutely loses his shit on the army scout and Gus has to call him off. It’s the only time he ever really loses his cool.
Rating: 9/10
*I say this despite the fact that the Western genre is batting 1.000 with The Ox-Bow Incident and Lonesome Dove as its two representatives
Book Buying
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this on here before, but I’m stingy when it comes to buying physical copies of (fiction) books. That is, I really have to like a book in order to want a physical copy of it. I think this stems from moving houses SO MANY TIMES in my life; books are super heavy and are rough to haul around.
Anyway.
Given all this, I ordered a physical copy of Lonesome Dove today.
Am I done with the book yet? No. But am I enamored enough with it at 60% of the way through to already want a physical copy? Yes.
It’s really good, y’all. You’ll see more details in my review in a few days, but unless the ending is like “and they woke up and it was ALL JUST A DREAM!!!” or some such nonsense, this is definitely going to be my top book of the year.
(Yes, I know it’s just February. But it’s a GOOD. BOOK.)
Book Review: Howards End (Forster)
Have I read this before: Nope! This is a newer addition to the book list.
Review: After I finish a book, I always like to look up reviews on Goodreads because I like to see what other people thought of it. In this case, there were a lot of reviews that mentioned the book was way too “England specific” and required you to be able to place yourself in a very specific time period in a very specific place and that being unable to do so detracted from the story. I disagree. My disagreement comes in part from the fact that like 70% of the books on my list are set in [insert someplace in England] and focus on [insert anachronistic English Society issue that most modern readers will never have to deal with] and so I’m kind of used to that. This book, however, feels quite universal in terms of the issues it tackles. Family vs. family, poverty vs. wealth, class vs. class, etc. It doesn’t have to be set where it’s set to be relatable. I enjoyed it for that.
Rating: 5/10
Book Review: The Glass Menagerie (Williams)
Have I read this before: I don’t think so.
Review: I liked Streetcar better of the two Williams plays I’ve read, but this wasn’t bad. Like his contemporaries, I think he does a good job of portraying that “trapped” feeling, regardless of where it arises from.
Favorite Part: Laura’s temporary happiness when dancing with Jim, even after the glass unicorn is broken.
Rating: 5/10
Also, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SEAN!
Book Review: A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway)
Have I read this before: Yes! I dig Hemingway.
Review: I think it’s easy to forget that Hemingway served as an ambulance driver in WWI and actually got pretty seriously wounded in…1918 I want to say? I think of all his novels, this is the one that is most clearly based on his own experiences (yes, even more so than The Sun Also Rises in my opinion). You can really feel how personal it is all throughout the story.
Favorite Part: I really like how much of the book is focused on the non-fighting/non-battle parts of war. It emphasizes how “regular life” continues on even during a World War and how young men and women deal with trying to just live their lives despite the war taking place and disrupting everything.
Rating: 7/10
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