book suggestions for 1999

* Finnegans Wake
-- James Joyce

Massive in size, dauntingly obscure, and full of verbal extravagance, James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake (1939), centering on a Dublin family, proceeds by analogy and parallel to incorporate virtually all history and much of art, psychology, and mythology. For his structure, Joyce relies on Giambattista Vico's cyclical view of history, which posits four ages: the divine, the heroic, the human, and the age of confusion. The novel, accordingly, is divided into four parts, each corresponding to a particular age with its characteristic features and attributes. In this richly experimental work, begun in 1923, Joyce joins the local and the universal through his portrayal of the creative father of the Earwicker family, his quarreling sons, and his renovating wife

* Poems by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, was, with Walt Whitman, one of the two foremost American poets of the 19th century.  Longing for a secure faith and Puritan by temperament, Dickinson was nevertheless unable to make a profession of faith.
The life of the imagination became an alternative commitment. She was steeped in Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays; Emerson's transcendentalism, in its optimistic affirmation of God's immediate, benevolent presence in nature and in the soul, provided a response to Calvinistic predestination. By 1858, Dickinson had begun to copy poems into little packets. In the early 1860s she underwent a profound psychological and emotional disturbance, which biographers have tried to connect with a tragic, unrequited love. Her poems have originality in form and content--irregular rhythms adapted from hymn meters, slant rhymes, eccentric phrasing and syntax, and emotional intensity and candor. The nature pieces range in tone from an Emersonian sense of wonder to a feeling of alienation akin to that of Poe or Melville. Her responses to God run the gamut from coy submission to rebellious defiance. The lack of biographical evidence about a lover has recently aroused suggestion that the love poems present an integral struggle with a masculine aspect of herself that seems to be the link with and the key to her sexual nature, spiritual identity, and creative imagination. Fearing that she would be misunderstood, Dickinson chose not to publish (she published only seven poems during her lifetime), confident of posthumous fame. During her final decades she never left her house and garden, but among her papers was a scrap that read, "Area--no test of depth." Since her death of Bright's disease, Emily Dickinson has come to be hailed as perhaps the greatest female poet since Sappho.

 

 

* Aeneid
--Vergil

{i-nee'-id} VERGIL's epic masterpiece, the Aeneid, written between 30 BC and 19 BC, was to Augustan Rome what Homer's Iliad and Odyssey had been to the classical Greeks--an explanation of their origins and heroic past. The poem, in 12 books, treats of the founding of Roman civilization by the Trojan AENEAS. It traces his career from his escape from the ruins of Troy, through his extended wanderings westward and his tragic love affair with DIDO, queen of Carthage, to his establishment in Italy after long years of bitter conflict with the indigenous Latins and Rutulians.
The poem is cast in the heroic mold, with its characters and events modeled after their Homeric predecessors; Vergil thereby appears to be glorifying the ideals of Rome and its first emperor, Augustus. However, by a judicious use of symbol, image, and analogy, Vergil's critical emphasis falls on the cost in sacrifice and loss of humanity inherent in such ideals. Accordingly, the tradition of Vergil as the "emperor's poet" has been challenged by recent critics.

* Howl
--Allen Ginsberg

"Howl" is a long poem by the American poet Allen GINSBERG, published in Howl and Other Poems (1956). It established Ginsberg as a force in American literature and became a major document of the BEAT GENERATION presaging the political movements of the 1960s. The poet speaks, in long, loosely structured lines, of a society that has destroyed "the best minds of my generation." Other poems in the collection indict a joyless society, whose soul is "electricity and banks" and where "everybody is serious but me."

* Anna Karenina
--Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina {kah-ray'-nee-nah} One of the great works of European fiction, Leo TOLSTOI's novel Anna Karenina (first published serially, 1875-77) centers on the adulterous love of an unhappily married woman for a dashing young officer, Count Vronsky. She leaves her husband and child for the sake of Vronsky but cannot choose between son and lover. After increasingly self-destructive behavior, Anna is led finally to suicide; yet she is portrayed with so much humanity and sympathy that the reader is irresistibly drawn to her. Anna's love for Vronsky, which is dominated by sexual passion, is contrasted throughout with the calm, family-centered love between two other characters, Konstantin Levin and Kitty, who represent the author's humanistic ideal. Through Levin, the liberal Russian landowner, Tolstoi expressed his views on a variety of subjects, including his attachment to the land.

* Moby Dick
--Herman Melville

Herman MELVILLE's stupendous novel of the sea, Moby-Dick (1851), combines first-person narration, factual scientific prose (especially in the chapters about whales and whaling), highly poetic passages, dramatic scenes, transcendental symbols, and structural counterpoint. Ostensibly the story of Captain Ahab's maniacal search for revenge against Moby-Dick, the beautiful, deadly white whale that had maimed him, on another level the book is an exploration of the themes of pride, leadership, tolerance, free will, fatalism, compassion, appearance versus reality, natural ambiguity, and "inscrutable malice.

* Catch 22
--Joseph Heller

Joseph HELLER's famous first novel, Catch-22 (1961; film 1970) is a dark but humorous portrait of a U.S. Air Force unit during World War II and a telling satire of military bureaucracy. Yossarian, the ANTI-HERO, is, like all of the characters, caught up in Catch-22, a mysterious regulation that is, in essence, a circular argument. He must fly more missions unless he can prove himself insane, but he cannot prove this because, by his unwillingness to fly, he proves that he is sane. In this way, Heller ironically hypothesizes that those who believe themselves insane are actually the sanest, whereas the supposedly sane people are the real madmen.


* Fahrenheit 451
--Ray Bradbury

An American science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury, b.  Aug.  22, 1920, is recognized as an innovator in that genre, both in his style and in his themes.  The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951;  film, 1969), and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962;  film, 1983) are classic evocations of one of his principal themes:  the beautiful but dangerous power of the imagination.  He can also be a social critic, as in his Fahrenheit 451 (1953;  film, 1966).  In addition, Bradbury has written stage plays, screenplays, verse, children's literature, and Dandelion Wine (1957), a warmly nostalgic novel of a small American town in the 1920s. Bradbury's collected short stories were published in 1980.

* Wealth of Nations 
--Adam Smith 

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), usually referred to as The Wealth of Nations, by Adam SMITH, is a vibrant attack against mercantilism and one of the most influential books ever written on economics. Its main ideas are that when people pursue their own selfish interests, society as a whole benefits; that the division of labor improves productivity and the standard of living; that competition--rather than private or government monopoly--should regulate prices and wages; that competition, moreover, produces socially beneficial consequences; and that government should not interfere with market forces, because "governments are spendthrift, irresponsible, and unproductive." Smith was also critical of capitalists, however, particularly of their tendency to form monopolies and seek special privileges. 

* Pilgrim's Process
--John Bunyan 

John Bunyan's allegorical work, Pilgrim's Progress (Part 1, 1678; Part 2, 1684), depicts Christian's pilgrimage from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Abandoning wife and family, Christian traverses the Slough of Despond, resists Mr. Worldly Wiseman and Talkative, and, in a brilliantly satirical episode, survives Vanity Fair, where Lord Hategood and a vicious jury condemn Faithful. Although Christian arrives at his spiritual destination, Ignorance is denied entry to salvation and is carried off--a grim reminder that, in the Puritan view, the struggle to enter heaven may be lost at any point. 

* An Essay on Man
--Alexander Pope 

An Essay on Man by Alexander POPE is a long philosophical poem first published in 1733. Written in heroic couplets, the poem is divided into four epistles dealing, respectively, with man in relation to the universe; man as an individual; man as a social being; and man's potential for happiness. Although Samuel Johnson attacked the poem for its banality, Pope wrote it to "vindicate the ways of God to man," and it remains a major statement of traditional values as interpreted by an 18th-century rationalist. 

* Don Juan
--Lord Byron 

George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th baron Byron of Rochdale, b. Jan. 22, 1788, d. Apr. 19, 1824, was the most conspicuous and influential of the English romantic poets. His facetious and satirical poem Don Juan (1819-24) is often considered his masterpiece. Don Juan is a legendary figure of Spanish origin whose amorous adventures have been the subject of numerous literary and musical works. According to the most common form of the legend, Don Juan seduces the daughter of the military commander of Seville and afterward kills her father when he seeks to avenge his daughter's honor. Don Juan later brazenly invites the statue erected in his memory to dinner, whereupon the slain garrison chief comes alive and drags Don Juan off to Hell. The legend has served as a springboard for writers as various as Tirso de Molina, Corneille, Moliere, Lord Byron, Dumas the elder, Jose Zorrilla, Soren Kierkegaard, Nikolaus Lenau, George Bernard Shaw, and Edmond Rostand--each of whom has offered his own interpretation. Among composers inspired by the story are Purcell, Gluck, Mozart, Richard Strauss, and Eugene Goossens. 

* Sonnets
--Shakespeare 

Originally published in 1609, William SHAKESPEARE's sonnets are 154 poems that scholars believe were written in the 1590s. Conjecture continues on several points--the sequence of composition, whether the sonnets have a chronological and thematic order, and the identity of the people addressed. Many of the first 126 sonnets were apparently written to a young man, and some of those numbered 125-154 are addressed to a mysterious "dark lady." Shakespeare, or his publisher, dedicated the volume to a "Mr. W. H.," whose identity has never been established. Unlike the Italian, or Petrarchan, SONNET, Shakespeare's sonnets--also called Elizabethan or English sonnets--consist of three quatrains and a rhyming couplet, with a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. They cover a variety of philosophical themes such as time and death, love, friendship, and the immortality of poetry. 

 

* Treasure Island

--Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island (1883) is a classic adventure story by Robert Louis STEVENSON. The narrator, young Jim Hawkins, describes the hunt for Captain Kidd's treasure, which involves a voyage on the schooner Hispaniola and a clash with pirates led by the notorious one-legged Long John Silver. Other memorable characters include the blind villain, Pew, and the eccentric pirate, Ben Gunn.

 

* The Brothers Karamazov

--Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80; Eng. trans., 1927) is Fyodor DOSTOYEVSKY's last work and greatest novel. In it, Dostoyevsky presents four Karamazov brothers--the passionate Dmitri, the intellectual Ivan, the mystical Alyosha, and the misanthropic Smerdyakov. He dramatizes their fate, their relationship to their father, and the guilt they suffer because of his murder. The novel concerns itself with everything that Dostoyevsky struggled with during his lifetime: faith and doubt, love of authority and hatred of it, sensuality and abstinence, hatred of the human race and love of it. All are taken up again on a scale that runs from precise realism to universal psychological and metaphysical generalizations. The central theme explores the possibility of the child raising his hand against his father and, by extension, the right of a human being to raise his hand against God.

* Wuthering Heights
--Emily Bronte

Set against the wild background of the Yorkshire moors, Wuthering Heights (1847), published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell by Emily Bronte (see BRONTE family), is the most famous romantic novel in English. The story concerns the demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and the Gypsy foundling Heathcliff. When Heathcliff's love is thwarted by Catherine's marriage to Edgar Linton, Heathcliff grows cruel and vindictive, taking his revenge by eloping with Edgar's sister, then brutalizing everyone within his power. Wuthering Heights, which brings the intensity of the lyric poem to prose fiction, captures the bleakness and mystery of the landscape surrounding Haworth, the author's Yorkshire home.

* Walden, or Life in the Woods
--Henry David Thoreau

"Walden" is a book about how to live life like life was supposed to be lived (or so the author's opinion). It is the account of Thoreau's two-year experiment in which he lived in a hut at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, trying to see if he could make himself rich by making his wants few, to discover how much land a man really needs, to seek humble communion with Nature and God, to "live so sturdy and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life...to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms", to get the whole of life, "and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world". He writes about the falsehood of society and why we are unhappy, namely, because we constantly seek material gain through work and not the higher elevation of our souls. If we reduce our wants and live economically, we have time to live and not to work. Thoreau once saw a snake lying low in a pond, waiting for the warm air of spring before it came out, and he said it appeared to him that men remain in their present low and shallow position because they have yet to see a beautiful spring day to come out and enjoy. Thoreau's philosophy and beautiful book may be our "spring of hope". (Stephen Taylor)

* Don Quixote
--Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Don Quixote, or El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, is Miguel de CERVANTES SAAVEDRA's great picaresque Spanish novel and a classic of world satire. Part I was published in 1605 as a burlesque of contemporary chivalric romances and Part II in 1615 to counteract a plagiarized sequel. The hero Don Quixote is a lean elderly man, who, inflamed by a diet of romantic reading, thinks himself a knight errant and sets out on his emaciated horse, Rosinante, to fight giants, rescue damsels, uplift the oppressed, and court the approval of his so-called lady, Dulcinea del Toboso. Exalting everyone and everything he meets to conform to his chivalric fantasies, he dubs Sancho Panza, the fat peasant who accompanies him on his outdated quest, his squire. The famous pair initially represent the opposition between idealism and realism; as the novel progresses, however, their characters deepen and the two begin to merge. After demonstrating his practicality as governor of an island, Sancho Panza longs for the freedom of the road; whereas Quixote, tricked by his friends and a scholar disguised as a knight, returns home and sadly wakens from his magnificent aberrations. The richness of the novel exercised a continuing influence on European fiction from the 17th to the 20th century and served as the model for a popular Broadway musical, Man of La Mancha (1965).

* Doctor Zhivago
--Boris Pasternak

Doctor Zhivago (1958; film, 1965), a Russian novel that won its author, Boris PASTERNAK, the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature, prompted the USSR to organize a campaign of vilification against both the man and the book. The novel records the life of a physician and poet reminiscent of Pasternak himself. A poetic celebration of intimacy, poetry, and individuality, it is at the same time a tragic demonstration of how fragile and insubstantial these qualities can be in the wake of destructive historical forces such as the Russian Revolution. Twenty years in the writing, Doctor Zhivago was hailed in the West as a testament to the endurance of humanistic values within the USSR. The new era of openness in the Soviet Union saw the Russian publication of the novel, finally in 1988, as Pasternak received the honors that had been so long withheld within his own country.

* Goodbye to Berlin
--Christopher Isherwood

Christopher William Bradshaw-Isherwood, b. Cheshire, England, Aug. 26, 1904, d. Jan. 4, 1986, was a novelist and a writer of nonfiction. His work is largely autobiographical or quasi-autobiographical. While a schoolboy in Surrey, he began a lifelong friendship with the poet W.H. AUDEN, with whom he wrote several plays, among them Dog Beneath the Skin (1935) and The Ascent of F6 (1937). In 1928 he began to study medicine but soon left the University of London to visit Auden in Germany. Living there off and on until 1933, Isherwood described the social and political climate of pre-Hitler Germany, which he described in Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935), Sally Bowles (1937), and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The drama I Am a Camera (1951) and the musical Cabaret (1966) came from his writings on Germany. In 1939, Isherwood immigrated to the United States, settled in California, and became a U.S. citizen in 1946. Over the years he worked on film scripts in Hollywood and adapted plays for television. Down There on a Visit (1962), which some critics consider his best novel, centers on Isherwood's life in Germany, Greece, England, and California. Kathleen and Frank (1971), culled from his parents' letters and diaries, was his effort to understand his family and his early childhood. Homosexual love became a central concern in such writings as A Meeting by the River (1967), and Christopher and His Kind (1976). VEDANTA, a Hindu religious philosophy, preoccupied Isherwood from his early days in Hollywood; My Guru and His Disciple (1980) is the account of his relationship with a Vedantist swami. Where Joy Resides (1989) was published posthumously.

* The Tempest
--Shakespeare

Probably the last play that William SHAKESPEARE wrote before he retired from the theater, The Tempest (c.1610-11) is a romantic high comedy pervaded by fantasy and wonder. It tells of the young Miranda and her father, the magician Prospero, rightful duke of Milan, who as the result of a conspiracy now dwell on an enchanted island. Prospero has come to rule the island's natural creatures, including the good spirit Ariel and the evil monster Caliban. By magic he raises a tempest that brings to the island the conspirators against him, among others, and he stage-manages events thereafter. At length all issues are peacefully resolved, Miranda is wooed and won by a young man, Ferdinand, and Prospero relinquishes his powers. The play has no direct literary sources; some viewers find in it a summation of Shakespeare's dramatic concerns.

* Heart of Darkness
--Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness (1902), a short novel by Joseph CONRAD, is acknowledged as one of the finest pieces of short fiction in English. Conrad's own experience as the captain of a West African river steamer in 1890 formed the basis of the story narrated by Marlowe, Conrad's protagonist, who travels up the Congo in search of Kurtz, an ivory trader. Marlowe's voyage from the coast takes him past signs of European exploitation of the natives toward the "heart of darkness," where Kurtz, once an idealistic young man, is now the leader of what Marlowe calls "unspeakable rites." Conrad's story hints at horrors that Marlowe is unable to describe, leaving the reader to imagine actions that lie outside civilized human behavior.

* Ulysses
--James Joyce

{yoo-lis'-eez}The single most influential novel of the 20th century, James JOYCE's Ulysses (1922) is a modern epic whose structure loosely parallels that of Homer's Odyssey. Set in Dublin, the novel deals with one day (June 16, 1904) in the lives of Leopold Bloom, a wandering Jew whose sense of estrangement from society makes him a universal symbol of humanity, Stephen Dedalus, and Leopold's sensuous wife, Molly, whose final affirmation of life is given in the lengthy interior monologue that concludes the book. Ulysses is noted for its erudite allusions to theology, mythology, history, and language; its stylistic virtuosity; its masterful use of the interior monologue and other innovative STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS techniques; its encyclopedic breadth of detail; and, above all, its richly comic portrayal of life. Banned from the United States as obscene until 1933, Ulysses is today generally considered one of the highest achievements of modern literature. A new edition of Ulysses--the first since 1961 and the result of 7 years of computer-assisted work--was published on Bloomsday 1984. Purportedly correcting about 5,000 printer's errors, this new edition generated controversy among Joyce scholars, many of whom felt that more errors were created than corrected.

* Two Treaties of Government
--John Locke

Locke's considerable importance in political thought is better known. As the first systematic theorist of the philosophy of LIBERALISM, Locke exercised enormous influence in both England and America. In his Two Treatises of Government (1690), Locke set forth the view that the state exists to preserve the natural rights of its citizens. When governments fail in that task, citizens have the right--and sometimes the duty--to withdraw their support and even to rebel. Locke opposed Thomas HOBBES's view that the original state of nature was "nasty, brutish, and short," and that individuals through a SOCIAL CONTRACT surrendered--for the sake of self-preservation--their rights to a supreme sovereign who was the source of all morality and law. Locke maintained that the state of nature was a happy and tolerant one, that the social contract preserved the preexistent natural rights of the individual to life, liberty, and property, and that the enjoyment of private rights--the pursuit of happiness--led, in civil society, to the common good. Locke's notion of government was a limited one: the checks and balances among branches of government (later reflected in the U.S. Constitution) and true representation in the legislature would maintain limited government and individual liberties.

 

* Poems by Sappho

The most famous woman poet of all time, known for her lyrics, Sappho was born c.630 BC at Eressos on the Greek island of Lesbos. About her life there is much anecdote, little fact. She was married and had a daughter and sometime between 604 and 595 suffered exile in Sicily. Of her nine books of poems only fragments remain, some recently discovered on Egyptian papyri. Celebrated for her marriage songs (epithalamia), she also wrote hymns, mythological poems, and personal poems of love. Of the last, most are addressed to women, possibly members of a literary circle with strong emotional attachments. Several poems invoking Aphrodite suggest that they may have shared some cult or ceremonial practices. Famous in ancient times for her depiction of passion, Sappho delights in sensuous images of flowers, the moon, the sea, and the night. Her style is straightforward, delicate, melodious, graceful, and witty. The Roman poet Catullus imitated her, and Ovid depicted her legendary love for Phaon in his Heroides

* Merrill, James

James Ingram Merrill, b. New York City, Mar. 3, 1926, has written numerous volumes of poetry and a novel, The (Diblos) Notebook (1965). His poetry, which uses puns and allusions to capture a very refined sensibility, exhibits dazzling wit and polish. Merrill explores his childhood and, more broadly, the problems of memory and the self in recovering a sense of identity. The self is haunted by contemporary history, in The Fire Screen (1969), and by the richness of social life, in Nights and Days (1966). Divine Comedies (1976) explores parapsychological phenomena in a long poem that features a ouija board. Merrill's later works include The Changing at Sandover (1982). He has also written plays, including The Immortal Husband (1956) and The Bait (1960)

 

* Ashbery, John

John Ashbery, b. Rochester, N.Y., July 28, 1927, an American poet, is noted for his experimental verse and vivid imagery. After studying at Harvard and Columbia, he published his first book of poems, Turandot, in 1953. He continued to write poetry while working as a copywriter and art critic in Paris and New York. Later volumes include Some Trees (1956), The Tennis Court Oath (1962), Rivers and Mountains (1966), The Vermont Notebook (1975), The Double Dream of Spring (1976), Houseboat Days (1977), As We Know (1979), Shadow Train (1981), The Wave (1984), and April Galleons (1987). Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, all in 1976. He has also written three plays, The Compromise (1960), The Heroes (1960), and The Philosopher (1964). Most critics consider Ashbery's work highly original and inventive, but many have complained about its obscurity and abnormal syntax. Ashbery himself likens his poetry to music, in which the structure carries the argument, "though the terms of this argument remain unknown quantities.

* The Gulag Archipelago
--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

{gu-lahg'}The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (1973-78) is Aleksandr SOLZHENITSYN's {sahl-zhuh-nee'-tsin}massive three-volume study of the Soviet penal system as it evolved between 1918 and 1956. Begun in 1958 and based on the author's personal experiences as a political prisoner in Russia, the study is further documented by the letters, memoirs, and reports of 227 witnesses, for whom the book forms a collective monument. Solzhenitsyn explores such topics as police terror, arrest, interrogation, torture, sentencing without trial, cell mates, and day-to-day prison existence in a tone that is at once mockingly ironic, bitterly compassionate, matter of fact, and rhapsodically idealistic. Its publication in Paris in 1973 led to Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the USSR. The title of the work is derived from the concept of the network of prison camps across Russia forming a metaphorical archipelago, Gulag being the Russian acronym for the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps. All volumes of the work were available in English translation by 1978.

* Solomon Gursky Was Here
--Mordecai Richler

"One of my favourite authors is Mordecai Richler and I would strongly suggest that you & your group pick up a copy of Solomon Gursky Was Here (1990). It is an exceptionally beautiful piece of literature: ripe with
humour, profound insights and dare I say it: breathless prose. It also won The Booker Prize in 1990." (Colin Smith)
Mordecai Richler: {rich'-lur}The characteristic subject of the Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler, b. Jan. 27, 1931, is Jewish life in the working-class districts of Montreal. The most famous native of the Saint Urbain Street area of his childhood is Duddy Kravitz, the determined young schemer of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959; film, 1974), Richler's most popular novel. Saint Urbain's Horseman (1971) is a complex meditation on the themes of justice and Jewishness in contemporary society. Richler's work is characterized by a strain of wild humor. Other works by Richler include the novels Joshua Then and Now (1980; film, 1985) and Solomon Gursky Was Here (1990); and Home Sweet Home (1984), essays on Canadian culture.

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Send in your own suggestions for the 1999 reading list.