The Classics: well, some of them, at least

I'm joining the Classics Club, hosted by Jillian at A Room of One's Own, and participating in this challenge: I'll read 50 classics, chosen by me, in no particular order, within 5 years, and blog about each one here.

The ones listed in purple are books I've read before, but not for 20 to 30 years. The exceptions are The English Patient and The Bell Jar, both of which I read about 15 years ago. I've tried to mix eras and genders. Some books are not technically classic in and of themselves, such as The Portable Dorothy Parker, but are collections of work by an author I consider part of the canon. I also wanted to get plenty of poetry in there, as I tend not to read much poetry unless nudged. So here is my list, to be completed by March 10, 2017. I'll reward myself with a trip to Hawaii! Well, maybe not. I think I'll choose to visit a literary monument of some sort, but I haven't yet decided. Maybe City Lights Bookstore? The Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum? Time will tell.

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
2. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
3. Persuasion, Jane Austen
4. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
5. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
6. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
7. The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
8. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
9. Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathaniel West
10. Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
11. The Good Earth, Pearl Buck
12. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
13. Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
14. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
15. Women In Love, D.H. Lawrence
16. Out of Africa, Isak Dineson
17. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
18. Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
19. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
20. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
21. Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
22. Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
23. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
24. The Hours, Michael Cunningham
25. The March, E.L. Doctorow
26. The Enormous Room, E.E. Cummings
27. The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
28. Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger
29. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
30. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
31. The Doctor Stories, William Carlos Williams
32. Collected Poems, Wallace Stevens
33. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
34. The Complete Poems, Elizabeth Bishop
35. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
36. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot
37. Howl, Alan Ginsberg
38. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
39. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
40. Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
41. The Wapshot Chronicles, John Cheever
42. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
43. Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
44. My Antonia, Willa Cather
45. O, Pioneers!, Willa Cather
46. The Poems of Emily Dickinson
47. Ship of Fools, Katherine Anne Porter
48. The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, Eudora Welty
49. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
50. The Portable Dorothy Parker

Shanghai Girls, by Lisa See

For some reason I expected to really like this book. Let's just say I won't be running out to get the sequel.

I like novels that are set in other countries, other cultures. Fiction is the perfect place to learn about different worlds; if it's well done, you just ease into the past, or the Amazon, or an Amish town, and the author reveals the details as part of the plot. This book, however, seemed to beat me over the head with its cultural commentary. The opening chapters were full of descriptions of food and clothing; and I found myself mentally swatting them away, wanting to get to the plot.

The story starts in Shanghai in the 1930's. It recounts the saga of a pair of sisters as they are forced to flee their beloved city after the Japanese invasion. They end up in Los Angeles, negotiating in-laws and racism. Pearl, the eldest and the narrator, suffers the most, and never lets you forget it. As she is forced to see the world through the lens of adulthood, she begins to take on the words and attitude of her mother, to whom she naturally acted in a condescending and disobedient manner as a child. Unfortunately, the quirky independence that made the young Pearl a likely heroine are buried in the bitter adult. She ends up sounding cranky and put-upon.

I didn't hate the book, it just didn't meet my expectations. It did remind me of how happy I am to have been born where I was, and how glad I am that my own girls were welcomed with joy rather than disappointment. Despite the many incredible things Chinese culture has to offer, its historical denigration of women is something I will never be able to read about without feeling appalled.

Favorite Wife: Escape from Polygamy, by Susan Ray Schmidt

Honestly, how could I not read this book?

Memoirs can be tricky, not least because they are often written by people who don't do all that much writing. This one was a pleasant surprise, being very well-structured, and overall pretty well-written. Susan Schmidt does a particularly good job of capturing the emotional intensity of adolescence, as well as its moment-to-moment extremes and contradictions. All of which is a great reminder of why it's not such a good idea to choose your husband at age fifteen.

This is a memoir jam-packed with drama: fratricide, warring sister wives, international manhunts, child brides, wild parties; you name it. If it were a novel, you really wouldn't buy the story, but somehow as non-fiction it seems believable. Needless to say, I was riveted.

Susan Ray was raised as a member of a break-away Mormon sect in a Mexican colony in the 50's and 60's. Polygamy was considered a necessary practice for men who wanted to achieve the full rewards of heaven. At the story's opening, many men had plural wives, though most didn't have very many. One of the interesting things that happens during the decade the novel covers is that the men in the community get more and more caught up in courting and marrying young women. (You can watch Susan's own husband Verlan falling prey to the notion that the more young women he marries, the better off he'll be in the afterlife. Not to mention having a pretty good time during his earthly one.) This is what I liked so much about this book: her disillusionment with her religion and community seems to parallel the sect becoming more and more fundamentalist, and straying from its original mission.

I am no fan of religious fanaticism, especially when the women and children seem to suffer disproportionately. This book, however, portrays the church leaders as righteous men and women who are getting it wrong. The author doesn't describe them as blatantly selfish or egomaniacal (with the exception of a few bad seeds), but as true believers who are blind to the error of their ways. Which is sort of a refreshing take on the whole thing. At the same time, she is pretty unflinching in her opinion that the women and children in the community suffer mightily from the institutionalization of polygamy. Her husband ultimately fathered over fifty children, and had a total of ten wives (Susan was his sixth). He worked construction in the US while his wives and children lived in various towns and colonies in Mexico, and took extended breaks to do missionary work. His families made do on next to nothing, and rarely saw him.

The other thing that struck me about this book was the apparently unflagging energy of just about every person in it. Susan had five children by the time she was twenty-three, and lived in pretty primitive conditions. Yet she always seems to have had time for visiting friends and relatives, hosting get-togethers, making adobe bricks and building a house, stuff like that. The church elders supported many families while settling multiple towns, converting dozens of new members, writing treatises on their faith and spending endless time driving the hudreds of miles between their multiple homes. Made me tired just to read about it!

The one subject I would like to have heard more about is the fate of the young men of the colonies. Near the beginning of the book, an elder tells a teenage boy that the young women of the colony are for the older men; young men are expected to convert their first wives. Which might work for a while. The fate of young men in polygamist communities is generally pretty grim; it's not clear whether this one eventually adopted the practice of driving them out.

Several of Susan Schmidt's relatives have also written books about life with the Church of the Firstborn of the Fullness of Times. Which name in itself might give you pause... I would love to read them, but I doubt they will be as thoroughly entertaining as this one.

The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace

I have discovered the key to David Foster Wallace's work, and it lies solely with the reader. Give it the time it deserves. His writing is so deeply layered, with ranging perspectives and a raft of information, many of which seem to bear little connection to the plot. Time and patience, however, reveal the tapestry. I truly didn't want the book ever to end, because this novel about the IRS, of all things, became the exploration of so many conundrums of modern life that it seemed that it might in the end explain everything.

This is a posthumous work, painstakingly stitched together from the papers Wallace left upon his untimely death. The editor, Michael Pietsch, describes it as a labor of love, but it must have been Herculean. One can only imagine how great the novel would have been if finished; as it is, we are lucky to have it in this form, and it is fantastic despite its lack of polish.

Think IRS: I immediately conjure gray walls, tens of thousands of smudged, tear-stained pages, pen protectors, ashen complexions. Monotony piled upon boredom. Step into the halls of the Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, and you'll find all of that, plus interminable lines, endless, incomprehensible regulations, crushing bureaucracy, and Machiavellian office politics, for starters.

The minutiae of tedium - sounds like a great subject for a novel, no? And yet... it is endlessly fascinating. Sitting cramped in my airplane seat, hours from either departure or destination, I read about characters caught in a perpetual traffic jam, and felt remarkably unconstricted. There was that sense of familiarity, the sorrow at the futility of hours spent wasted on mundane chores, combined with relief at knowing that my life (your life) could never be this banal. Though, described in exhaustive detail to the outside world, who knows?

What is the book about? Lots and lots of people working at the IRS. It could be subtitled: A Human Anthill. Depictions of childhoods both traumatic and run-of-the-mill are echoed in descriptions of adult lives both mundane and poignant. There's an awful lot in this book; really you just have to read it to begin to see its depth and breadth and yes, I'll say it, genius.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

I'm probably not the last person on the planet to read The Hunger Games, but there can't be too many left. Nonetheless, my opinion...

The premise of this book is quite horrible - children battling one another to the death. I didn't think I would feel so sanguine reading the gruesome details, but this book is Hollywood all the way; the blood and gore seem like special effects. That said, there is still no way I'm taking my not-quite-eleven-year-old to see it. There's a lot you can gloss over when you're reading that would be downright horrifying on a twenty-foot screen.

This is YA done right, with the emotional life of the protagonist taking precedence over the mundane details, but with enough of those details to make it interesting. Katniss (possibly the worst name in popular literature) is the kind of heroine you want your girls idolizing: smart, strong, capable, and not quite in control of her emotions. The book is completely addictive, with non-stop action and lots of visual detail, making you feel like you're right there in the midst of it. The author dodged some pretty tricky bullets as far as her heroine's moral choices went, which admittedly is often the case in YA. Katniss certainly had to consider whether she was capable of brutal murder, but was mostly saved from being put to the test. I appreciate that a heroine can't go around killing everyone in sight simply in order to survive, but a little more moral ambiguity would have made me like the book more.

Like many dystopian fantasies, there's an odd combination of a technologically advanced society intermingled with something more Medieval, and it's a little hard to figure out how those two coexist. I was surprised to learn, for example, that Katniss' childhood home had a TV, as I had pictured it without electricity. I think some of this might be explained to better satisfaction in the sequels.

The end of the contest was a little anti-climactic, and the immediate aftermath rang very hollow to me. It reminded me of reality TV, where much of the tension is manufactured. Again, I think these events may be a setup for the next two books. Suzanne Collins says she didn't set out to write a trilogy; that the events of the Hunger Games demanded more exploration. I might believe her. I expect I'll read the next two, despite having been apprised of a few major spoilers. If they are as entertaining and fast-paced as this one it will be time well spent.

I've seen the movie trailer, and I think it will be great. Despite my insistence that 'the book is always better than the movie,' this one may prove the exception. Collins wrote the screenplay as well, which bodes well for consistency with the original. I'll just have to sneak out to see it so the 10-year-old doesn't suspect...

Gain, by Richard Powers

In reading this book, I learned more than I ever dreamed I'd want to know about several subjects: soap-making, and the chemical evolution of cleaning products of every kind; the history of marketing; the moment-by-moment reality of chemotherapy; the history of the financial markets in America since their conception; an awful lot about cancer and what causes it and how it takes hold; and a whole lot of other stuff that now escapes me. Such erudition! I am stunned, impressed, and educated.

This book alternates between two stories. The first is that of the Clare family: Three brothers start a candle and soap company in mid-19th century Boston. Their little experiment evolves into a multi-national chemical company, with various Clares and others paving history with processes both chemical and financial. Along the way they play an integral part in developing the concept of modern marketing.

The parallel story is of Laura Brody, mild-mannered real estate agent in Lacewood, IL, home of Clare International HQ. Laura has moved past her divorce and is managing her teen aged kids, ex-husband and new career admirably. Her story gives a personal face to the unintended consequences of industry and supposed progress.

The incredible thing about this book? It was fascinating. I don't read much non-fiction; I need a story to make facts interesting. I quite willingly devoured pages of chemistry, economic theory and history in this novel, and never got bored. Richard Powers has the rare ability to transmit his passion for science through language, and to make any subject he tackles interesting. I'm willing to bet that he's not only the smartest guy in any room he inhabits, but also has a better understanding of art, and its intersection with both physical and social science. This is, after all, the basis of humanity, but most of us don't embody it as fully as Powers.

Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman

Another terrific Neil Gaiman book - is there any other kind? Anansi Boys is set in the same territory as American Gods, the nexus of humanity and godliness. In this case, the god in question thinks he is human, and only slowly comes to understand that his family is not just mildly dysfunctional, but is downright otherworldly.

Gaiman's ability to take on the voice of a character so decidedly unlike himself is uncanny. I understand that that is the job of the novelist, but still. The atmosphere ranges from the mundane to the bizarre, and I could always picture myself in the scene. There's something Everyman about Fat Charlie, which makes his realization of his godliness very satisfying.

The clumsy, always slightly-behind-the-curve child of a charmed ne'er-do-well, Charlie has no interest in revisiting his childhood home after his father's death. It turns out that some childhood fears are well-deserved; the frightening neighborhood ladies of his youth are in fact witches of a sort. As the layers slowly peel away, Fat Charlie is dragged into the realization that what he thought were dreams are real, and that he has a family unlike any other.

One of the things Neil Gaiman does really well is interweave the supernatural with the every day. The more fantastical elements of the story are counterbalanced with reality: difficult boss, demanding girlfriend. The result is a hero who provokes your frustration, but who you can't help rooting for.