books we have read . . .

BOOK #83: The Western Canon..............finished January 24, 1998
--Harold Bloom

The Western Canon is more than just a required-reading list--it is a vision. Infused with a love of learning, compelling in its arguments for a unifying written culture, it argues eloquently and brilliantly against the politicization of literature and presents a guide to the great works and essential writers of the ages: the "Western Canon."  Harold Bloom's book, much-discussed and praised in publications as diverse as The Economist and Entertainment Weekly, offers a dazzling display of erudition mixed with passion. For years to come it will serve as an inspiration to return to the joys of reading our literary tradition offers us.

BOOK #82: The New Testament.............finished January 10, 1998

Covenant and law are central in the Old Testament, and Jesus Christ is central in the New Testament. The dominant theme is the interpretation of Jesus' nature as Christ or Messiah (the anointed one), Son of man, Son of God, Lord, and Prophet. This was a complete reinterpretation of the Jewish hope for an anointed king descended from David. Perhaps before Jesus' death, his disciples had already acclaimed him as Messiah, but they became convinced of this from experiences that proved to them he was again alive. Thus the resurrection is the second major theme. The Messiah now came to mean, not a conquering, successful king, but a crucified Lord whose unique relationship to God could be suggested only partially by the titles applied to him.

BOOK #81: The Republic..........................finished January 3, 1998
--Plato

One of the major works of the Greek philosopher Plato, The Republic (c.370 BC) advances many of Plato's principal ideas, notably those concerned with government and justice. Composed as a debate between Socrates and five other speakers, The Republic is best known for its description of the ideal state (based on Sparta), which Plato argues should be ruled by philosopher-kings. The principles of justice that govern the state correspond to those which rule the individual, and the philosopher is best suited to govern because he perceives this natural harmony. An important section, the allegory of the cave (book 7), presents Plato's concept of the ideal Forms. The cave is the world of illusion and ignorance; only the philosopher has ventured beyond the shadows of the cave to perceive the ideal models of justice.

Book #80: Robinson Crusoe............finished December 20, 1997
--Daniel Defoe

Daniel DEFOE's famous novel, fully titled The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719), was suggested by the actual experiences of Alexander Selkirk, a marooned sailor. Robinson Crusoe, a young Englishman, disregards his father's advice and runs off to sea to seek his fortune. After various adventures, he suffers shipwreck and is cast ashore on a deserted island. There he spends many years alone, creating a home for himself in a new environment. Eventually he acquires a companion, an Indian whom he rescues from cannibals and names Friday. After encounters with pirates and mutineers, Crusoe and Friday manage to escape from the island. The novel is an enthralling account of a man's survival in the wilderness, but also a spiritual autobiography, detailing his struggle to maintain personal integrity during years of solitude.

Book #79: Hawthorne's Short Stories...finished December 6, 1997
--Nathaniel Hawthorne

My copy is called Hawthorne's Short Stories edited by Neton Arvin, Vintage Books. "Here are the best of Hawthorn's short stories. There are twenty-four of them--not only the most familiar, but also many that are virtually unknown to the average reader. The stories include: The Gray Cahmpion, The Minister's Black Veil, The Maypole of Merry Mount, Wakefield, The Great Carbuncle, The Profphetic Pictures, Lady Eleanore's Mantle, Old Esther Dudley, The Ambitious Guest, The White Old Maid, Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure, Endicott and the Red Cross, The Birthmark, Young Goodman Brown, Rappaccini's Daughter, The Celestial Railroad, Feathertop: A Moralized Legend, Egotism; Or, the Bosom Serpent, The Artist of the Beautiful, The Great Stone Face, Ethan Brand, The Wives of the Dead, The Antique Ring, Alice Doane's Appeal.

Book #78: The Moon and Sixpence....finished November 22, 1997
--W. Somerset Maugham

It seems unthinkable that Charles Strickland, the dull, bourgeouis city gent, should have the tortured soul of a genius, yet Strickland is driven to abandon his home, his wife and his children to devote himself slavishly to painting. In a tiny studio in Paris he fills canvas after canvas, refusing to sell or exhibit his work. Beset by poverty, sickness and his own intransigent, unscrupulous nature, he drifts to Marseilles and, finally, to Tahiti, where, even blinded by leprosy, he produces some of his most passionate and mysterious works of art. Inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpense is an unforgettable study of a man possessed by the need to create--regardless of the cost to himself, and others.

Book #77: King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table................finished November 8, 1997

Arthur and his knights assumed quasi-definitive form in the heroic prose epic MORTE D'ARTHUR of Sir Thomas MALORY. Here could be found all the ingredients that have continued as a source of inspiration for the poets Edmund Spenser and Algernon Charles Swinburne as well as for takeoffs as various as Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1899), T. H. WHITE's Once and Future King (1958), and the Alan Jay Lerner-Frederick Loewe musical Camelot (1960); (see LERNER, ALAN JAY, AND LOEWE, FREDERICK.) These elements include Arthur's natural birth to Igraine and King Uther Pendragon; his tutelage by the magician MERLIN; his assumption of the English throne after extracting the sword Excalibur from a rock; the institution of a round table for the knights at his court in Caerleon, or CAMELOT; the adulterous love affair between his queen, GUINEVERE, and the noble Lancelot; the treachery of his nephew Mordred (or Modred); the mortal combat between Arthur and Mordred at the battle of Camlan; his mysterious translation to the island of Avalon, where he was taken to be buried (or healed); the quest of Sir GALAHAD for the Holy Grail; and the adventures of GAWAIN, Gareth, Kay, Bedivere, Tristram, and others.

Book #76: Lolita...........................finished October 25, 1997
--Vladimir Nabakov
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Awe and exhilaration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Vladimir Nabakov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.

Book #75: The Time Machine............finished October 11, 1997
--H.G. Wells
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The Time Machine (1895), a novel by H. G. WELLS, was the first of the inventive scientific fantasies on which Wells built his early reputation. Like his later sociophilosophical works, it is a serious story with a political message concerning future relations between the ruling and working classes in industrial society. The Time Traveller travels by machine to an era in which the world is inhabited by two races, the pleasure-loving Eloi and the apelike Morlocks who live underground and feed on the Eloi. As Wells's ironic comment on the outcome of 19th-century progress, The Time Machine is a gloomy and pessimistic parable of the future of humankind.

Book #74: Three Lives...............................finished September 27, 1997
--Gertrude Stein
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When Three Lives first appeared in 1909, self-published in an edition of just five hundred copies, perhaps only Gertrude Stein herself believed in the importance of the work that is now considered to have heralded the modern are in literature. yet in this innovative composition Stein precedes even James Joyce in experiementing with repetition, speech patters, and the idea of creating a portrait in words akin to the painted ones by her contemporaries Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. With this impressive history in mind, the modern reader may be surprised by the refreshing wit and accessibility of "The Good Anna," "Melanctha," and "The Gentle Lena." Each story is set in an American town called Bridgepoint. Anna and Lena, both servants, and Melanctha, a mulatto woman having a love affair with a black doctor, all come to life as Stein pulls us inside their thoughts and their world. The humor of Anna and her dogs, the authenticity of Melanctha--lauded by Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson--and the quiet tragedy of Lena's pregnancy attest to what we know now to be great writing, both in its revolutionary form and in the truth it tells about women's lives.

Book #73: The Sun Also Rises...............................finished September 13, 1997
--Ernest Hemingway
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Ernest Hemingway's first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), is a semiautobiographical account of the adventures of a group of expatriates, members of the so-called lost generation, in France and Spain in 1925. They are led by Jake Barnes, a journalist. Although a war wound has made Jake impotent, he and Robert Cohn, another American romantic, are rivals for the attentions of Lady Brett Ashley. The action moves from Paris to Pamplona and the fiesta of San Fermin, where the real hero, a bullfighter named Pedro Romero, conquers several bulls as well as Lady Brett, who nobly rejects her Spanish lover and returns hopelessly to Jake.

Book #72: Tales from the Arabian Nights.......................finished August 30, 1997
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The Arabian Nights, also called The Thousand and One Nights, is a large collection of stories, mostly of Arabian, Indian, or Persian origin, written in Arabic between the 14th and 16th centuries. They were introduced into Europe through Antoine Galland's French translation (1704-17). The best-known English version is by the explorer Sir Richard BURTON, who published (1885-88) a complete version. The frame story, Persian in origin, turns on the woman-hating King Schahriah (Shahryar) who, after his queen's blatant infidelity, marries a different woman each night and then slays her the next morning, thus ensuring her faithfulness. The bride SCHEHERAZADE (Shahrazad), however, beguiles the king with a series of stories for a thousand and one nights, withholding the ending of each story until the next night. In this way she saves her life. The elaborately plotted stories, filled with intrigue, are folkloric in origin. Three of the best known are "The History of Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp," "The History of Sinbad the Sailor," and "The History of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves."

Book #71: The Jungle Books.........................finished August 16, 1997
--Rudyard Kipling
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The Jungle Book (1894) is a group of stories by the English writer Rudyard KIPLING. They relate the history of an Indian boy, Mowgli, who strays from his village and is reared by a family of wolves. Mowgli's intelligence and manual dexterity make him valuable to the animals, who defend him from the perils of the wilderness. Mowgli learns the complex "Law of the Jungle" and in turn imparts human qualities to the animals. Although ostensibly a work for children, The Jungle Book has found many appreciative adult readers, some of whom have regarded it as an allegory of colonial government. Kipling repeated his success with The Second Jungle Book (1895).

Book #70: For the New Intellectual.......................finished August 2, 1997
--Ayn Rand
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This is Ayn Rand's challenge to the prevalent philosophical doctrines of our time and the "atmosphere of guilt, of panic, of despair, of boredom, and of all-pervasive evasion" that they create. One of the most controversial figures on the intellectual scene, Ayn Rand was the proponent of a moral philosophy--an ethic of rational self-interest--that stands in sharp opposition to the ethics of altruism and self-sacrifice. The fundamentals of this morality--"a philosophy for living on earth"--are here vibrantly set forth by the spokesman for a new class, For the New Intellectual.

 

Book #69: On Liberty...........................finish July 19, 1997
--John Stuart Mill
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On Liberty (1859) is a book by the English philosopher and social critic John Stuart MILL in defense of the individual's right to think and act independently. Although Mill starts with the utilitarian premise that the morally correct act is that which achieves the greatest good for the greatest number, he goes beyond utilitarianism in his concern for individual liberty--the freedom to think and act without external authority. He has a strong sense of individual responsibility as well: the individual is to exert his or her freedom only insofar as he or she does not hamper the freedom of others. Mill's solution to allowing individual creativity while maintaining some kind of minimal order is a representative government; hence he is much admired by Americans.

 

Book #68: Common Sense...............................finish July 5, 1997
--Thomas Paine
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Common Sense, a political pamphlet by Thomas PAINE, had a profound effect on the thinking of Americans during the early stages of the American Revolution. Published in January 1776 and distributed throughout the colonies in an edition of well over 100,000 copies, Common Sense brought into sharp focus the rising revolutionary sentiment by placing blame for the suffering of the colonies directly on the reigning British monarch, George III. The spirit of Paine's argument was echoed in the American Declaration of Independence.

 

Book #67: Galatea 2.2...............................finish June 21, 1997
--Richard Powers
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After four novels and several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2--Richard Powers--returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irrestisible project: to train a neural net on a cononical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing. Powers drills it in the classics, a crash course that elicits a violent reconsideration of his own literary vocation, his decade-long, failed relationship with a former pupil, and his growing obsession with the twenty-two-year-old master's candidate against whom his cybernetic Helen is slated to compete. "A splendid intellectual adventure, a heartbreaking love story, a brief tutorial on cognitive science, and the autobiography of one of the most gifted writers of the younger generation"--Washington Post Book World.

 

Book #66: The Waste Land................................finish June 7, 1997
--T.S. Eliot
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T. S. ELIOT's most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922) helped establish and is considered prototypical of the so-called modern sensibility in literature and the arts. Replete with obscure literary, historical, and mythical allusions, as well as intricate patterns of symbolism, the 5-part poem represents the modern world as vacuous and lacking in spiritual vitality. Eliot uses an array of cultural references and an interplay of reflection and description in order to demonstrate the possibility of existence becoming a ceremonious order testifying to physical and spiritual well-being. The Waste Land, originally almost twice its published 434-line length, was edited by Ezra Pound.

 

Book #65: The Divine Comedy...............................finish May 24, 1997
--Dante
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"Dante and Shakespeare", wrote T.S. Eliot, "divide the modern world between them . . . Shakespeare gives the greatest wideth of human passion; Dante the greatest altitude and greatest depth." La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy), an enduring literary masterpiece, is an epic poem written in Italian by DANTE ALIGHIERI. Probably begun in 1307 and finished just before the author's death in 1321, it was originally entitled simply Commedia. The long narrative, divided into 100 cantos (more than 14,000 lines), is in three main sections: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Its vivid scenes and sharply drawn characters highlight Dante's imaginative journey through the circles of hell to the rim of purgatory, under the guidance of VERGIL, into the paradise of heaven, led by his lady BEATRICE, where he briefly glimpses God's glory. The surface narrative conceals an allegory of life on Earth and the pilgrim poet as a figure of Everyman. For his material Dante drew on a wealth of scriptural, patristic, classical, and medieval sources, as well as his own experiences. The poem is composed in terza rima (triple rhyme), employing rich imagery and flexible vernacular language. The work, which is of Homeric proportions, is infused with the emotional and intellectual ardor of medieval Catholicism. The greatest poem of the Middle Ages, it has a beauty and humanity that transcend its times.

Book #64: Antony and Cleopatra.........................finish May 10, 1997
--Shakespeare
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Shakespeare's tragedy Antony and Cleopatra (c.1607) is esteemed more for its panoramic setting and the characterization of the principal figures than it is for its plot, based on Sir Thomas North's translation of PLUTARCH'S LIVES. The symbolic worlds of Rome and Egypt are settings for contrasting scenes and conflicting values in the play. Marc Antony is tragically torn between his roles as Roman triumvir and as lover of Cleopatra, the enigmatic queen of Egypt, who is simultaneously a temptress, a political opportunist, and an emotionally vulnerable woman. The actions of the two lovers both degrade and ennoble them; both move inexorably through tragic conflicts to suicide.

Book #63: The Koran..........................finish April 26, 1997
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The Koran, or Qur'an (Arabic for "recital"), is the Sacred Scripture of ISLAM. Muslims acknowledge it as the actual words of God revealed to the Prophet MUHAMMAD between c.610 and his death (632). The text contains 114 chapters (suras), arranged--except for the opening sura--approximately according to length, beginning with the longer chapters.

Book #62: Souls of Black Folk..............finish April 12, 1997
--W.E.B. Du Bois
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With this extraordinary work, first published in 1903 but even more pertinent today, W.E.B. Du Bois declared that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line"--and predicted the racial conflicts that continue to plague our society. An Afro-centric thinker, writer and scholar in a time of absolute white dominance, Du Bois urged the establishment of an "all-black party" and preached the need for black "conscious self-realization" and for the separate autonomy of the black community. At the same time he stressed the white man's responsibility for correcting racial inequality and pleaded for mutual understanding, for a nonviolent solution to a centuries-old dilemma. As Dr. Alvin Poussaint declares in one of the two notable introductions to this volume, The Souls of Black Folk is "a monument to the black man's struggle in this country."

Book #61: Naked Lunch......................finished March 29, 1997
--William S. Burroughs
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"A masterpiece. A cry from hell, a brutal, terrifying, and savagely funny book that swings between uncontrolled hallucination and fierce, exact satire. Naked Lunch is the unnerving tale of a monumental decent into the hellish world of a narcotics addict as he travels from New York to Tangiers, then into Interzone, a nightmarish modern urban wasteland in which the forces of good and evil vie for control of the individual and all of humanity. By mixing the fantastic and the realistic with his own unmistakable vision and voice, Burroughs has created a unique masterpiece that is a classic of twentieth-century fiction. A book of great beauty . . . Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius."

Book #60: David Copperfield.....................finished March 15, 1997
--Charles Dickens
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The semiautobiographical David Copperfield (1849-50), which takes its hero from orphaned childhood to final fulfillment in marriage and career by way of a variety of trials and false starts, is probably Charles DICKENS's most memorable novel. From a cruel stepfather, a vicious headmaster, and menial degradation as a boy laborer in London, David is rescued by his great-aunt Betsey Trotwood. He is then apprenticed to a lawyer, Mr. Wickfield, whose daughter Agnes befriends him. David marries the childish, irresponsible Dora, but does not find real happiness until after Dora's death, when he realizes he has always loved Agnes. Known and loved as much for its comic portraiture as for its universally appealing plot, David Copperfield introduces such unforgettable secondary characters as the eternally optimistic but always indebted Mr. Micawber, the unctuous Uriah Heep, the ever "willin'" Barkis, the eccentric Peggotty family, and the contrasting reckless Steerforth and reliable Traddles. In recording David's earliest experiences, Dickens also laid bare the abusive treatment of children that characterized Victorian England.

Book #59: Jane Eyre.............finished March 1, 1997
--Charlotte Bronte
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One of the classics of 19th-century English literature, Jane Eyre (1847), by Charlotte Bronte (see BRONTE family), introduced a new kind of heroine in the plain but passionate governess for whom the novel is named. Forced to earn a living in the only way open to respectable middle-class women in Victorian England, Jane nevertheless yearns for love and independence amid seemingly hopeless surroundings and struggles to assert herself against society's repressive codes. Reflecting something of Bronte's own unhappy youth, the novel recounts Jane Eyre's love for her enigmatic, rather Byronic employer, Edward Rochester. The realism with which Jane's position is portrayed is combined with both melodrama and romance to permit a satisfactory resolution to the story: the eventual marriage of Jane and Mr. Rochester following the death of his mad, sequestered wife.

Book #58: Oscar Wilde: Five Plays...............finished February 15, 1997
--Oscar Wilde
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The book I will be reading is Penguin Plays: Oscar Wilde containing the following five plays: Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, Salomé, and The Importance of Being Ernest. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895; published 1899), by Oscar WILDE, is considered by some critics the greatest comedy of modern times. A mad, witty farce peppered with brilliant epigrams, The Importance of Being Earnest both parodies the well-made play and satirizes Victorian earnestness. The slight and somewhat ridiculous plot hinges on mistaken identities and secrets. Two playboys, Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing, court two young ladies, Cecily Cardew and Gwendolen Fairfax. The success of both suits hinges on Jack's being named Ernest--the name by which, in fact, he ultimately turns out to have been christened. Lady Bracknell and the governess Miss Prism are among the other foolish but memorable characters.

Book #57: Crime and Punishment......................finished February 1, 1997
--Dostoevsky
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Crime and Punishment (1866), a psychological masterpiece by the Russian novelist Fyodor DOSTOYEVSKY, mixes such contemporary 19th-century themes as the anonymous, alienating power of society with the universal problems of crime, guilt, and redemption. Raskolnikov, an impoverished student in St. Petersburg, kills and robs a grasping old woman pawnbroker, but his ostensible motives serve merely to introduce the author's exploration of the nature of justice and truth. Raskolnikov ultimately decides to accept punishment through his love for the young prostitute Sonya, whose life is one of suffering and remorse.

Book #56: A Clockwork Orange..................finished January 18, 1997
--Anthony Burgess
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This classic novel of our time, the book that spawned the unforgettable Stanley Kubrick film, "is, as the saying goes, a page-turner. Alex's rhapsodies on violence are hair-raisingly fascinating." It's all here. Alex and his three "droogs": Pete, Georgie and Dim ("Dim being really dim") . . . "Ultraviolence" set to the strains of Beethoven's Ninth . . . The cruelty . . . the capture . . . the "treatment" . . . the strange and beautiful redemption. And the ending you never imagined. "Anthony Burgess has written what looks like a nasty little shocker, but is really that rare thing in English letters--a philosophical novel."

Book #55: The Varieties of Religious Experience...........finished January 4, 1997
--William James
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Standing at the crossroads of psychology and religion, this catalyzing work applied the scientific method to a field abounding in abstract theory. William James believed that individual religious experiences, rather than the precepts of organized religions, were the backbone of the world's religious life. His discussions of conversion, repentance, mysticism, and saintliness, and his observations on actual, personal religious experiences--all support this thesis.

Book #54: Pentateuch...................finish December 21, 1996
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The first five books of the Old Testament. Genesis recounts the creation of the universe and the first human beings, the traditions of the DELUGE, and the stories of the patriarchs down to the sojourn of the Hebrews in Egypt and the deaths of JACOB and JOSEPH. EXODUS tells how Moses led the people from Egypt and received the covenant and Law on Mount Sinai. Leviticus is largely a legal code; NUMBERS continues the story of migration toward the Promised Land. Deuteronomy partly repeats the narrative, recording other laws, and concludes with the death of Moses. It teaches a strict doctrine of corporate reward and punishment.

Book #53: The Nicomachean Ethics....................finished December 7, 1996
--Aristotle
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In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle sets out to discover the good life for man: the life of happiness or eudaimonia. Happiness for Aristotle is the activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. Virtue is shown in the deliberate choice of actions as part of a workd-out plan of life, a plan which takes a middle course between excess and deficiency. This is the famous doctrine of the golden mean--courage, for example, is a mean between cowardice and rashness, and justice between a man's getting more or less than his due. The supreme happiness, according to Aristotle, is to be found in a life of philosophical contemplation; but this is only possible for the few, and a secondary kind of happiness is available in a virtuous life of political activity and public magnificence.

Book #52: Murder on the Orient Express............finished November 23, 1996
--Agatha Christie
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Just after midnight, a snowdrift stopped the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxuriuos train was surprisingly full for the time of year. But by the morning there was one passenger fewer. An American lay dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside. With tension mounting, detective Hercule Poirot comes up with not one, but two solutions to the crime.

Book #51: The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy...............finished November 9, 1996
--Douglas Adams
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One Thursday lunchtime the Earth gets unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. For Arthur Dent, who has only just had his house demolished that morning, this seems already to be more than he can cope with. Sadly, however, the weekend has only just begun, and teh Galaxy is a very strange and startling place.

Book #50: Julius Caesar...................finished October 26, 1996
--Shakespeare
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William Shakespeare's Tragedy of Julius Caesar, first performed in 1599, is based on Plutarch's Parallel Lives, translated by Sir Thomas North as The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579). Like Hamlet, which shortly followed it, Julius Caesar adapts the conventions of Senecan revenge tragedy. The ritual assassination of Caesar, carried out by Brutus, Cassius, and their co-conspirators, is justified by Brutus as a blow struck for republican liberty against the "spirit" of Caesar's imperial ambitions. In his cynical, brilliant oration over Caesar's corpse, Mark Antony incites the mob by implying that Caesar was enviously murdered. Brutus's motives, when placed in a public, political context, are misconstrued, and civil war ensues. The language of the play, remarkable for its rapid changes of style, comprises coarse prose comedy, tense personal argument, and noble public rhetoric.

Book #49: Middlemarch...................finish October 12, 1996
--George Eliot
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A novel by George ELIOT that is often considered her masterpiece, Middlemarch (1871-72), subtitled "A Study of Provincial Life," explores the moral growth of two principal characters. Dorothea Brooke, a highly intelligent young woman, marries Casaubon, an elderly scholar who has spent his life on the study of mythology. Dorothea believes that she is devoting her life to a great cause, but after the marriage she learns that Casaubon is petty, vindictive, and not even a capable scholar. In the novel's second major plot, a young physician, Lydgate, foolishly marries a silly, mercenary young woman. To support her, he must compromise his medical standards and his idealism. Through their sufferings Dorothea and Lydgate come to a greater understanding of themselves and others.

Book #48: The Scarlet Letter...................finished Sep. 28, 1996
--Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A novel by Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, The Scarlet Letter (1850) is a somber tale of sin and redemption set in Puritan Massachusetts during the 17th century. Its heroine, Hester Prynne, has been exiled from the village of Salem for adultery and must wear a red "A" on her dress to mark her disgrace. Her lover, the young minister Arthur Dimmesdale, has remained silent about their passion, but Hester's husband, Roger Chillingworth, suspects Dimmesdale and pursues him mercilessly until Dimmesdale publicly confesses and dies in Hester's arms. Hester atones for her sin through service to others, whereas Chillingworth is shown to be guilty of a greater sin, the violation of another's soul.

Book #47: Uncle Tom's Cabin.....................finished Sep. 14, 1996
-- Harriet Beecher Stowe
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Harriet Beecher STOWE's best-known novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, first published serially in 1851-52, was an enormously popular tale of the injustices of slavery. Uncle Tom, an almost Christlike model of goodness and charity, is a house slave who is reluctantly sold by his first owners. He is ultimately beaten to death by Simon Legree, a tyrannical overseer, after many heartrending examples of generosity and heroism. Little Eva and Topsy are other memorable characters in the novel. Once believed to be a major cause of the Civil War, the novel did popularize the abolitionist movement. The term Uncle Tom is today used pejoratively to describe a black American who is too deferential to whites.

Book #46: Women in Love......................finished Aug. 31, 1996
-- D.H. Lawrence
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Women in Love (1920), considered one of D. H. LAWRENCE's finest novels, explores the relationships between men and women, concentrating on the quest of Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen--first encountered in The RAINBOW-- for self-fulfillment. Of the two male characters, Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin, Birkin strongly resembles Lawrence himself in his reliance on "blood consciousness," or instinctual feelings, rather than on the sterile intellect--a philosophy thought to have been influenced by Sigmund Freud. Although its prose is occasionally turgid, the novel successfully conveys Lawrence's sense of the importance of his subject and the vital force of his characters.

Book #45: The Ambassadors.......................finished Aug. 17, 1996
-- Henry James
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The Ambassadors (1903), Henry JAMES's favorite among his own novels, contrasts rigid New England morals with flexible French ones. A Massachusetts dowager orders her fiance, Lambert Strether, to rescue her son, Chad Newsome, from a Parisian femme fatale. But the "ambassador" can only commend the woman for improving Chad's manners, and self-sacrificially he modifies his own philosophy. "Live all you can" becomes his creed, although the aging Strether's pleasures are mostly vicarious ones. The Ambassadors illustrates James's celebrated "major phase" style: restricted point of view, knotty syntax, painterly impressionism, ornate imagery, and dramatic presentation of largely cerebral action.

Book #44: Fifth Business.......................finished Aug. 3, 1996
-- Robertson Davies
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Robertson Davies, b. Thamesville, Ontario, Aug. 28, 1913, one of Canada's leading cultural figures, writes essays and plays but is primarily known for his novels. Davies has written three trilogies. The first--comprising Tempest Tost (1951), Leaven of Malice (1954), and A Mixture of Frailties (1958)--is the so-called Salterton Trilogy. The Deptford Trilogy, his most famous, consists of Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975). The Rebel Angels (1982), What's Bred in the Bone (1985), and The Lyre of Orpheus (1989) constitute the third. Much of his fiction is influenced by the psychology of Carl JUNG. Davies taught English at the University of Toronto until 1981.

Book #43: Bhagavad Gita.....................finished July 20, 1996
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{bah'-guh-vuhd gee'-tah} The Bhagavad Gita (Sanskrit, "The Lord's Song") is one of the most widely studied sacred writings of HINDUISM. Taken from Book VI of the Indian epic MAHABHARATA, the Bhagavad Gita, written as a poem, is KRISHNA's response to questions posed by Arjuna, a warrior prince, concerning his responsibility in good and evil as he is about to go into battle. Krishna, incarnated as Arjuna's charioteer, laid the cornerstone of Hindu philosophy by instructing Arjuna with the following principles: the world of matter and individual consciousness are grounded in the same spiritual reality; intuition can grasp the divine reality; human beings possess two natures, a divine self within a material being; and life is intended to lead people to unity with the divine spirit.

Book #42: The Sheltering Sky ...................finished July 6, 1996
-- Paul Bowles
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An American writer, Paul Bowles, b. New York City, Dec. 30, 1910, first had a career as a composer. After studying with Virgil Thomsonand Aaron Copland, Bowles wrote opera, orchestral pieces, and filmscores. In 1952, Bowles moved to Tangier, Morocco, and began to write novels and short stories that explore the harsh cultural incongruities between primitive and modern modes of life. These works include The Sheltering Sky (1949; film, 1990), The Delicate Prey (1950), Let It Come Down (1952), The Spider's House (1955), and The Time of Friendship (1967). Bowles published his autobiography, Without Stopping, in 1972,and Days: Tangier Journal: 1987-89, in 1991.

Book #41: Norse, Roman and Greek Mythology.......finished June 22, 1996
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The text I will read is a book called _Mythology_ by Edith Hamilton. You can get any collection of classical Greek, Roman and Norse mythology. My book covers the following myths and characters: Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hades, Pallas Athena, Phoebus Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hermes, Ares, Hephaestus, Hestia, Demeter, Dionysus (Bacchus), creation myths, Prometheus, Io, Europa, Polyphemus, Narcissus, Hyacinth, Adonis, Cupid, Psyche, Pyramus and Thisbe, Orpheus and Eurydice, Ceyx and Alcyone, Pygmalion and Galatea, Baucis and Philemon, Endymion, Daphne, Alpheus and Arethusa, the Quest of the Golden Fleece, Phaethon, Pegasus and Bellerophon, Otus and Ephialtes, Aedalus, Perseus, Theseus, Hercules, Atalanta, Trojan War, Fall of Troy, Odysseus, Aeneas, Hause of Atreus, House of Thebes, Cadmus, Oedipus, Antigone, House of Athens, Midas, and Norse Mythology.

Book #40: The Odyssey...................finished June 8, 1996
-- Homer
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The ancient Greek epic the Odyssey, by HOMER, is thought to have been composed during the later part of the 8th century BC. As with the ILIAD, the poem's tight thematic control and organization belie its oral-formulaic origins. The poem describes the long and difficult return journey of the Greek hero Odysseus to Ithaca at the conclusion of the Trojan War. After 10 years of war, followed by 10 years of wandering, affliction, and distraction in perilous and semimagical surroundings, Odysseus arrives home only to find his wife, Penelope, besieged by suitors. By juxtaposing the fantastic worlds of the wanderings with the real world of Ithaca, and by contrasting the despair and dissatisfaction of Odysseus while away from home with the joy and satisfaction he feels on returning, Homer focuses on what it is to be human and on the values and ideals that inform human existence. The Odyssey has served as the archetype for later applications of the theme of wandering, of which both the first half of Vergil's Aeneid and James Joyce's Ulysses are probably the most distinguished examples.&127

Book #39: Richard III.....................finished May 25, 1996
-- Shakespeare
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The Tragedy of King Richard III (written c.1592), one of William SHAKESPEARE's most popular history plays, owes its success to the portrait of the villainous Richard, duke of Gloucester. On the death of his brother Edward IV, Richard usurps the crown by murdering Edward's two sons, the so-called "Princes in the Tower." These and his other crimes, which include the murder of his brother George, duke of Clarence, are avenged by Henry, duke of Richmond, who kills Richard at the Battle of Bosworth Field and becomes Henry VII, the first Tudor king and the grandfather of Elizabeth I. Richard's hunchbacked body matches the perversion of his mind, but his disarming frankness and comic ingenuity have never failed to interest audiences, and compensate for the play's relative crudity.

Book #38: Northanger Abbey .....................finished May 11, 1996
-- Jane Austen
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There as a child she wrote sprightly and amusing burlesques of contemporary sentimental fiction and composed early versions of her first three novels: Elinor and Marianne (c.1795) became Sense and Sensibility (1811), First Impressions (c.1796-97) became Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Susan, A Novel in Two Volumes became Northanger Abbey (written c..1798-99 and published posthumously in 1818).

Book #37: Iliad.....................finished Apr. 27, 1996
-- Homer
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The Iliad, an epic poem of roughly 16,000 lines in dactylic hexameter, is thought to be the earliest surviving example of Greek literature (see GREEK LITERATURE, ANCIENT). Although opinions as to its composition vary, the Iliad is usually ascribed to the poet HOMER, who may have dictated the poem after composing it orally. Set in the 10th and last year of the TROJAN WAR, the Iliad deals specifically with the Greek hero ACHILLES, who leaves the battlefield in anger after the commander in chief, AGAMEMNON, confiscates his prize of war, the maid Briseis. Without Achilles' prowess, the fortunes of the Greeks decline. Achilles returns to combat only after his friend Patroclus is slain by HECTOR, the Trojan prince. The final battle between Achilles and Hector, in which the Greek triumphs, presages the destruction of Troy. Achilles' vengeance ultimately yields to compassion when, in the most moving episode of the poem, Achilles returns Hector's body to his aged father PRIAM.

Book #36: Ivanhoe...................finished Apr. 13, 1996
-- Sir Walter Scott
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{y'-vuhn-hoh} Set in 12th-century England, Ivanhoe is the first of Sir Walter SCOTT's novels in which the action takes place outside Scotland. Scott's principal concern in Ivanhoe is to show the noble idealism of chivalry along with its often cruel and impractical consequences. The work also introduces some of Scott's most memorable characters, among them Richard the Lion-hearted, the Jewess Rebecca, and the Knight Templar Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert. Long one of Scott's most popular novels, Ivanhoe colorfully depicts medieval panoply in the age of the Third Crusade and offers narrative excitement by means of such episodes as the tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouche and the siege of Torquilstone.

Book #35: My Antonia...............finished Mar. 30, 1996
-- Willa Cather
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My Antonia (1918) is Willa Cather's vivid evocation of the prairies, small towns, and people of pioneer Nebraska when the wild, bare territory was being settled. The narrative voice is that of lawyer Jim Burden as he recreates his past and the major figure of his memory and imagination, the Bohemian girl Antonia Shimerda, who symbolizes for him the magic, force, and endurance of the land of his childhood. The first important American novel to deal sympathetically with the immigrant settlers of the plains, My Antonia is a classic in the lucid beauty of its style and its revealing range of human character. For a central structure, it juxtaposes Burden, the intellectual loner and wanderer, with Antonia, whose physically rich and rooted family life links her to "the founders of early races."

Book #34: Tom Jones.............finished Mar. 16, 1996
--Henry Fielding
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Tom Jones (1749; film, 1963) is the finest novel of Henry FIELDING. By humorously deploying the devices of mock epic and romance and by giving his narrative a wide social range, Fielding opened the way for the novels of Dickens, George Eliot, and Thackeray. Tom Jones recounts the adventures of the foundling Tom, a generous but hot-blooded young man who is temporarily banished by his benefactor, Squire Allworthy, through the deviousness of the odious Blifil, his rival for the hand of Sophia. The explosive Squire Western, saintly schoolmaster Partridge, and amorous Lady Bellaston are among the memorable characters of the novel, which Fielding infused with a morality of relaxed Christian benevolence.

Book #33: To the Lighthouse.....................finished Mar. 2, 1996
-- Virginia Woolf
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To the Lighthouse (1927), regarded as one of Virginia WOOLF's finest novels, uses a carefully patterned STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS technique that attempts to echo the scattered conversations and random thoughts that occur in the minds of several of the characters. Usually the narrators are observing Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, an upper-middle-class British couple on vacation with a houseful of children and guests. Mrs. Ramsay, the heart of the group, devotes her life completely to her family--a fact realized by them only after her death.

Book #32: Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass..........finished Feb. 17, 1996
-- Lewis Carroll
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), by Lewis CARROLL (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), and its sequel, THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (1871), are usually considered the most famous children's books written in English. The story is a dream in which Alice changes size, recites nonsensical parodies of moral verse, encounters such fantastic creatures as the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat, and finally asserts herself against loud but empty threats of trial and execution. Children probably enjoy Alice's triumph and the ingenious invention of the book, while adult readers and critics are engaged by the themes of growing up, death and extinction, and the arbitrariness of moral and social authority. The story was made into an animated film by Walt Disney in 1951 and has been the subject of numerous plays.

Book #31: Animal Farm..............finished Feb. 3, 1996
-- George Orwell
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George ORWELL's Animal Farm (1945) is a parable of the utopian roots of the Russian Revolution and the totalitarian state that resulted under Stalin. Written in the form of a beast FABLE, it is a story about the rebellion of domestic animals against their human oppressors. At first the victorious animals are animated by a spirit of equality and shared hardship, but soon the pigs, the cleverest of the beasts, take over the farm. Their now famous slogan is "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." In a parody of the Soviet leadership in postrevolutionary Russia, the pigs institute a dictatorship and eventually become even more oppressive than their former masters. In the end, the pigs invite their human neighbors to a feast of reconciliation, leading the other animals to realize that they have merely exchanged one tyranny for another.

Book #30: The Awakening........................finished Jan. 20, 1996
-- Kate Chopin
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This pioneering short novel of feminist fiction is a sympathetic portrayal of a woman's discovery of the stifling bonds of her marriage and the strength of her own sexuality. First published in 1899, it shocked the popular taste of the day, outraged official morality, and destroyed the author's reputation and career. Today, however, this novel and Kate Chopin's other writings have found a highly receptive audient among a generation of women who have learn to value their own individuality and independence. The Awakening is "as pertinent as any fiction this eyar or last. It is uncanny, nothing else . . . a masterpiece."

Book #29: The American..............finished Jan. 6, 1996
-- Henry James
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The American (1877), an early novel by Henry JAMES, contrasts rich, unsophisticated Christopher Newman, the American, with aristocratic Madame de Bellegarde and her villainous son. Newman persuades her passive daughter Claire to marry him, but her family finds his money, though tempting, too tainted by commercialism. His Yankee directness and decency are no match for Old World matriarchies, duels, convents, and duplicities. The outcome, a thwarted romance, is hardly tragic, however; James once noted that his hero and heroine "would have made an impossible couple." Because it depicts a clash in cultural values, The American is often considered the first "international novel."

Book #28: The Innocents Abroad..................finished Dec. 23, 1995
-- Mark Twain
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One of the most famous travel books ever written about Europe and the Holy Land by an American, The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain's irrevverent and incisive commentary on the "New Barbarians"' encounter with the "Old World." Twain's hilarious satire is a double-edged weapon, impaling with sharp wit the chauvinist and the cosmopolitan alike. His naive Westerner is a blustering pretender to sophistication, a too-quick convert to culture. Turning the coin, the ruins of antiquity appear but a shadow of their heralded glory; the scenery of Europe and the Holy Land dwarfs in contrast to the splendor of a Western landscape. With stunning agility Twain unconsciously uses his travelogue to search out the "archetypal differences" between Americans and Europeans--the "American identity." The Innocents Abroad . . . a classic work which, without ceasing to be amusing, marks a critical point in the development of our literature, and especially in our attempt through literature to find out who we Americans are."

Book #27: Looking Backward....................finished Dec. 9, 1995
-- Edward Bellamy
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The year is 2000. America is a society of full employment, material abundance, and social harmony. This utopian vision, seen through the eyes of Julian West, a young Bostonian who awakes after more than a century asleep to find his world vastly altered, forms the dramatic background of Edward Bellamy's classic 1888 novel. Looking Backward is a passionate attack on the social ills of nineteenth-century industrialized America and a plea for social reform and moreal renewal. It is also a novel rich in fantasy and romance: West's initial sense of wonder, his gradual acceptance to the new order and a new love, and Bellamy's wonderfully conceived catalog of future inventions (electric lighting, shopping malls, credit cards, electronic broadcasting) ensured its mass popularity.

Book #26: Leaves of Grass.....................finished Nov. 25, 1995
-- Walt Whitman
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s Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt WHITMAN's first published volume of poetry, consisted of 12 poems written without regular meter or rhyme. Until his death in 1892, Whitman revised and expanded his book until the ninth and final version contained hundreds of poems. Among the most famous are "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "O Captain! My Captain!" and "SONG OF MYSELF." The first edition contained a preface, later omitted, in which Whitman expounded a theory of the poet's vocation. The volume was not well received in the United States and found its first enthusiastic champions in England.

Book #25: On the Road.............finished Nov. 11, 1995
-- Jack Kerouac
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Sent from publisher to publisher, and thus earning a reputation even before its publication in 1957, Jack KEROUAC's most famous novel, On the Road, became a major document of the so-called BEAT GENERATION of the 1950s and of the American COUNTERCULTURE of the 1960s. In the novel Kerouac writes of the cross-country wanderings of young men and women who engage in various extremes of experience. Critics almost unanimously pronounced the novel immoral, unstructured, and self-indulgent, but Kerouac argued that he was attempting to achieve spontaneity and to suggest an inner journey that could not be expressed in words. His characters pursue experience in order to find meaning and purpose, qualities the protagonists believe their generation has lost.

Book #24: Great Tales and Poems...................finished Oct. 25, 1995
-- Edgar Allan Poe
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Born in Boston in 1809, Edgar Allan Poe was the possessor of one of the most original imaginations the world has ever known. The inventor of the modern detective story, a master of the tale of horror, a poet of haunting melody, Poe has gripped the intellect, the emotions, and the esthetic impulses of the world's readers for over a century. (The collection I will be reading includes 21 tales and 35 poems: Washington Square Press.)

Book #23: Main Street...............finished Oct. 11, 1995
-- Sinclair Lewis
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Main Street (1920), the novel that established Sinclair LEWIS as a major American writer, presents a satiric portrait of Gopher Prairie, Minn., a typically dull and conservative mid-western town, modeled on Lewis's native Sauk Centre, Minn. Carol Kennicott, a physician's wife, finds life in Gopher Prairie intellectually deadening and her relationship with her husband emotionally unfulfilling. When her attempts to kindle the town's interest in music and drama fail, she becomes discouraged and leaves in the hope of realizing a more independent life in a large city. Although the novel is generally read as an attack on middle-class life, Carol's dilemma can also be seen as a feminist dilemma: she is an intelligent woman with nothing at home to challenge her and no skills with which to earn a living in the larger world.

Book #22: Ethan Frome.............finished Sep. 27, 1995
-- Edith Wharton
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{eeth'-uhn frohm} The simplest and least typical of Edith WHARTON's works, Ethan Frome (1911) became the society novelist's most popular story. The novella presents a bleak picture of Massachusetts farm life, with characters who lead lives of almost unmitigated isolation. As a result, they are narrow, emotionally distorted, and never able to approach their full potential. Ethan Frome, as a young farmer, had shown traces of warmth and intelligence, but years of poverty and marriage to Zeena, a whining invalid, have made him desperate. When his wife's young cousin, Mattie, comes to live with them, he responds to her youth and liveliness, and they fall in love. Suspecting this, Zeena forces Mattie to leave. Ethan and Mattie attempt suicide rather than part, but instead of being killed, they are crippled for life. Ironically, it is then Mattie who becomes the nag, while Ethan's wife develops patience in her role as nurse.

Book #21: The Grapes of Wrath...............finished Sep. 13, 1995
-- John Steinbeck
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The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by U.S. novelist John STEINBECK is one of the most powerful chronicles in American literature of the Depression of the 1930s. It deals with the Joads, a family that loses its farm through foreclosure and leaves the Oklahoma Dust Bowl for California in the hope of finding work. The eldest generation has the comfort of religion, the next one has a dogged perseverance, but the youngest has little to believe in. Embittered by the brutal exploitation of migrant workers, Tom, who had been jailed for murder and who later kills again, becomes a labor organizer. In this Pulitzer Prize-winning (1940) novel, Steinbeck alternates his narrative with serious discussion of the problems of migrant laborers.

Book #20: Winesburg, Ohio....................finished Aug. 30, 1995
-- Sherwood Anderson
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Sherwood ANDERSON's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a collection of loosely connected short stories about the inhabitants of a small town in Ohio, established him as one of the best American fiction writers of his generation. George Willard, a young reporter, is the book's central character, to whom other inhabitants of the town tell their stories. Most characters speak of their humble but poignant memories and aspirations, revealing the complexity of private life beneath social appearance.

Book #19: The Adventures of Augie March...........finished Aug. 16, 1995
-- Saul Bellow
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With his picaresque novel The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Saul Bellow won both a National Book Award and his first popular success. The first-person story of a young Chicagoan from a lower-class Jewish background, it follows Augie through a series of jobs, locales, and relationships--both comic and serious--that constitute the "hero's" education in life. Augie's refusal to follow the opportunistic path to success taken by his older brother Simon, his insistence on maintaining his freedom and an integrity of sorts, and, above all, his inextinguishable spontaneity and optimism lead him (and the reader) by the novel's end to recognize that freedom resides in admitting that one's fate is one's character.

Book #18: Slaughterhouse-Five................finished Aug. 2, 1995
-- Kurt Vonnegut
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Kurt VONNEGUT, Jr.'s innovative sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) tells the story of the World War II firebombing of Dresden and its effect on the life of a young American prisoner of war, Billy Pilgrim. The novel synthesizes Vonnegut's previous work, and it proved so central to the American quest for an aesthetic equivalent to its own turmoil during the Vietnam War that within a year it had established Vonnegut as one of the country's leading writers.

Book #17: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court...........finished Jul. 19, 1995
-- Mark Twain
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"You know about transmigration of souls; do you know about transposition of epochs--and bodies? So Hank Morgan, mechanic and factory supervisor from Harford, Connecticut, introduces his strange history, which begins when he wakes up to find himself in sixth-century England. And so Mark Twain introduces us to the results--satiric, satanic, anguished and anarchic--of an imaginary confrontation between the new, nineteenth-century America and Olde England. Rich comedy and extravagant romance permeate the narrative, but these are undercut by a darkness and depth of seriousness which give the work an ambivalence--the product of Twain's own divided attitude. A benign fantasy becomes an apocalyptic vision of terrifying violence and destruction. A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court is a superbyly entertaining novel. It is also a profoundly disturbing one.

Book #16: The Sound and the Fury.............finished Jul. 5, 1995
-- William Faulkner

A four-part novel by William FAULKNER, The Sound and the Fury (1929) dramatizes the disintegration of the Compson family from four points of view. The first section is told from the viewpoint of a 33-year-old idiot, the second by a neurotic on the day of his suicide, the third by a paranoid on the day that his worst fantasies become real, and the fourth by the omniscient author. This STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS novel explores past and present to reveal the lovelessness of the Compson brothers. The title is from Shakespeare's metaphorical description of life in Macbeth (act 5, scene 3)--"a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing."

Book #15: Far from the Madding Crowd............finished Jun. 21, 1995
-- Thomas Hardy

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), an early novel by Thomas HARDY in which he first used the ancient term Wessex to describe the Dorset of his youth, represents the author's attempt to create a setting more atmospheric than geographic. In the novel, Hardy deals with a favorite theme: the opposition between selfless and selfish love. Selfless love is here embodied in the patience and natural goodness shown by the bailiff Gabriel Oak, and selfish love, whether based on violence or on a shallow indifference to consequences, is illustrated by Farmer Boldwood and the soldier-bounder Sergeant Troy. Bathsheba Everdene, the object of the three suitors' attentions and the unwitting cause of a series of Hardyesque mishaps, finally rewards the steadfastness of the deserving Gabriel.

Book #14: The Wind in the Willows.............finished Jun. 7, 1995
-- Grahame, Kenneth

The major theme of the children's story The Wind in the Willows (1908), by Kenneth GRAHAME, is the struggle between the noisy, common way of life and the quiet and genteel. The Wild Wooders, including the stoats and the weasels, epitomize the former, while the River-Bankers, including Badger, Mole, Rat, and Toad, represent the latter. Toad, perhaps a projection of the author, is a lovable rebel who does not fit well into either camp. Structurally, the fantasy is a small epic in prose, partly paralleling the events in Homer's Odyssey.

Book #13: The Last of the Mohicans.............finished May. 24, 1995
-- James Fenimore Cooper

Skirmishes, captures, flights and rescues are only some of the ingredients of this classic tale of bloody conflict between the British and the French in the exploitations of the native tribes by the two protagonists, setting Indian against Indian, Mohican against Huron. However, there is one honourable European, Natty Bumppo, the loyal and courageous woodsman, who prefers the simple code of natural law to the machinations of the white man. Together with Uncas, the last of the Mohicans, he hels to thwart the efforts of Magua, the sinister Huron, who tries to prevent Alice and Cora Munro from joining their father, the British commander of Fort William Henry. James Fenimore Cooper was teh first great American novelist, and his love of the early frontier and the lore of the woods man struck a chord with his readers that still finds an echo today.

Book #12: Emma.....................finished May. 10, 1995
-- Jane Austen

Emma (1816), one of Jane AUSTEN's three later novels, is often considered her most mature work. Like all her novels, it traces the social maturing of a young woman while probing the relationship of self, especially the female self, to society. It experiments with dialogue and internal monologue to capture the flow of conversation and the erratic movements of the mind. It tells of Emma Woodhouse, "handsome, clever, and rich," who, in manipulating her friends, learns the limits and dangers of such social games. She ends by marrying George Knightley, a fatherly figure who both chides her and aids her development.

Book #11: The Taming of the Shrew.........finished Apr. 25, 1995
-- Shakespeare

William SHAKESPEARE's energetic, farcical comedy The Taming of the Shrew is an exuberant exploration of the male fantasy, common in folklore, of taming a headstrong, stubborn, and high-spirited woman so that she will make a docile wife. Petruchio and Kate contend with each other with tremendous vitality, and Petruchio seems to enjoy great success in his program of reeducation. In modern interpretations, however, Kate's submissiveness is made to seem ironic; she has finally discovered the secret of how women can dominate their men. The taming action actually constitutes a play-within-the-play performed for the benefit of Christopher Sly, a drunken tinker.

Book #10: The Oregon Trail.....................finished Apr. 12, 1995
-- Francis Parkman Jr.

A classic celebration of the pioneer spirit and the American westward expansion. The Oregon Trail exuberantly documents Francis Parkman's 1846 expedition into the American wilderness. Observed with a reporter's eye and recorded in detail, the whole panorama of life on the Great Planins comes forth against the cruel indifference and majesty of the vast land itself--the emigrants with their "broad-brimmed hats, thin visages, and staring eyes" whose days were filled with hardship, and the Indians and buffalo whose demise Parkman foresaw.

Book #9: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde...........finished Mar. 29, 1995
-- Robert Louis Stevenson

The idea for The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) came to its author, Robert Louis STEVENSON, in a dream. The story emerges through the investigations of a lawyer, Mr. Utterson. Utterson discovers that a respectable physician, Dr. Jekyll, can chemically transform himself into a lascivious, unscrupulous alter ego; this is Mr. Hyde, the embodiment of Dr. Jekyll's "lower nature." Jekyll is fatally attracted to his alter ego, and eventually Hyde wins control. Fear of discovery leads finally to Jekyll's suicide. The personality division suggests Sigmund FREUD'S duality of id and superego and the inevitable conflict between them. Many film adaptations of the work have appeared since 1920.

Book #8: Dracula..................finished Mar. 15, 1995
-- Bram Stoker

Dracula (1897), a novel by Bram STOKER, chronicles the ascent and destruction of Count Dracula, a vampire who feeds on human blood. Set in London and Transylvania, the story is told in diary form by a young Englishman who gradually unravels the secret of Dracula's attacks on young women, who themselves are transformed into vampires. A Dutch metaphysician and scientist named Van Helsing is summoned to deal with the menace, and ultimately kills the vampire. The popular tale has been the subject of numerous films and dramatizations. In the title role, the actor Bela LUGOSI won lasting fame.

Book #7: Frankenstein...................finished Mar. 1, 1995
-- Mary Shelley

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), one of the most famous horror stories ever composed, was the first novel of Mary Wollstonecraft SHELLEY. It was written in 1816 as a result of a contest among Mary Shelley, her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and Byron's physician Polidori, to write a ghost story. The tale concerns Frankenstein, a German student scientist who learns how to breathe life into dead flesh, and who thus creates a nameless monster. Physically ugly but innately good, the monster turns evil when Frankenstein refuses to accept and nurture him. After the monster kills Frankenstein's wife and brother, the scientist pursues him to the North Pole, where they both perish. In his "Preface," Shelley warned against interpreting his wife's book as an attack on romantic philosophy; rather, it attacks romantic isolation. Numerous films were based on the story, including James Whale's popular 1931 version with Boris KARLOFF as the monster.

Book #6: The Call of the Wild.................finished Feb. 15, 1995
-- Jack London

In The Call of the Wild (1903), Jack LONDON tells the story of a pet dog named Buck, who is kidnapped from the safety of his California home and turned by the brutality of humans into a sled dog in the Klondike, and finally into a leader of the wolves. Powerfully written and deeply disturbing, the book calls attention to the hidden forces--in both human beings and beasts--that come to the surface in a struggle for survival. London unconsciously shows his sense of identification with the nature of the wolf, both as a lone animal and, through strength and cunning, as the leader of the pack.

Book #5: Three Men in a Boat..................finished Feb. 8, 1995
-- Jerome Jerome

An English humorist, Jerome Klapka Jerome, b. May 21, 1859, d. June 14, 1927, is best remembered for his hilarious story of an accident-prone river excursion, Three Men in a Boat (1889). Jerome also enjoyed success as the author of a popular play, The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1908), and as the founder (1892) of the monthly The Idler.

Book #4: Fanny Hill..............finished Jan. 25, 1995
-- John Cleland

John Cleland's Fanny Hill, or The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-49) is a classic erotic novel. Although the author attempted to avoid vulgarity by using poetic diction and euphemisms, the novel was suppressed shortly after its publication because of its frankly sexual scenes. The story of a prostitute, Fanny Hill parodies the novels of the time, particularly Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722).

Book #3: The Great Gatsby.................finished Jan. 11, 1995
-- Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby (1925), F. Scott FITZGERALD's most famous novel, is considered by many his finest single work. In the protagonist, Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald effectively embodies a romantic idealism that is sustained and destroyed by the intensity of his own dreams. The story is narrated by a Fitzgerald-like character, Nick Carraway, who engages the reader in the depiction of Gatsby's flawed grandeur and in the characterizations of Gatsby's love, Daisy, Daisy's husband, Tom Buchanan, Tom's mistress, Myrtle Wilson, and Myrtle's pallid husband. Expertly constructed and marvelously evocative of the inner emptiness of the Jazz Age's beautiful people, the novel has the air of myth. Few readers can escape perceiving in it the conflict between materialism and idealism that created and still defines the American character.

Book #2: Moll Flanders.............finished Dec. 21, 1994
-- Daniel Defoe

Moll Flanders (1722), by Daniel DEFOE, explores the economic and sexual life of a woman forced to survive unaided in society. The protagonist's financial troubles remind many critics of Defoe's own situation, but Moll's social predicament is peculiarly female. Written in the form of a memoir, the novel is Moll's first-person account of her repeated marriages--often bigamous and once incestuous--and her numerous children, whom she quickly abandons. When her physical charms fade, Moll turns to stealing, which she continues beyond necessity. Caught and transported to America, she starts a new, prosperous life there.

Book #1: Gulliver's Travels....................finished Dec. 7, 1994
-- Jonathan Swift

Gulliver's Travels (1726), Jonathan SWIFT's best-known satire, was first published as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver. Using the form of journal narrative recently popularized by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1709), Swift's naive but likeable hero recounts his adventures on four fictitious voyages: to Lilliput, land of tiny people; to Brobdingnag, land of giants; to Laputa, land of scientists, sorcerers, and immortals; and finally to Houyhnhnmland, a country ruled by rational horses who dominate the Yahoos, a filthy and depraved race who bear a strong resemblance to human beings. Swift's topical allusions now require learned explanation, but the disturbing force of his mockery of such human failings as pride, selfishness, avarice, and dishonesty is undiminished.

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