Reading List

I heard from Dr. Cooper today! She said she's going to try to finish my thesis tomorrow while on the train from Scotland to London (that's 8 hours by car according to Google Maps, so yes, I think she'll have time). That means my time as a lady of leisure will be coming to a close, but I'm OK with that.

On the plus side, I've done quite a bit of reading in the past few weeks, more than I think I've done at any point during grad school so far. I think the beginning of this stretch started with a new biography of Cardinal Wolsey that just came out, but unfortunately, it wasn't academic enough to be proper history and it wasn't well-written or interesting enough to be popular history. Then I re-read Jane Austen's Emma with a much more sympathetic eye than I did the first time around. I've never liked Emma's character because she's snobbish and a know-it-all, but having watched and enjoyed the recent BBC miniseries, I was able to enjoy the book as well. The light-hearted charm of the actress who played Emma in the miniseries, Romola Garai, undoubtedly influenced me in this regard.

After Emma, I read the collected short stories of Mark Twain, which were as satirically funny as anything you'd expect of the original Man in the White Suit (sit down, Tom Wolfe). If I were making a list of famous dead people I'd want to meet, he would be on it, hands-down. This year is the 100th anniversary of his death, and a new biography of him just came out that I saw reviewed very favorably in the Economist. I haven't laid hands on a copy from the library yet, not for lack of trying!

Twain was followed up by Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, a satire of the early 20th-century newspaper industry, which follows an absurd series of events befalling a group of newspapermen all trying to get the exclusive story on a coup in a made-up North African nation (which was based on Waugh's own experience covering the anticipated Italian invasion of Abyssinia, modern-day Ethiopia, in 1935). It was entertaining, but not terribly memorable.

The next item on the list was All Quiet on the Western Front, which I hadn't read since high school. I re-read it after a conversation with Sean in which he mentioned someone having posed the question of what were the five books that had changed your life the most. We both agreed that this is a very difficult question, because you can certainly enjoy books and re-read them time and again without them ever having changed your view of the world (Harry Potter, for instance). Sean said that All Quiet would definitely be on his list, and since it had made quite an impression on me when I read it, I decided to give it another go. Well, it still makes quite the impression, let me tell you. It's bleak and savage and at the same time completely heart-rending. You see the way that Paul and his friends have to completely deaden themselves of all normal human emotion in order to survive the horrors of the front, but then that same survival instinct renders him completely unable to connect with his family, with the rest of the world, when he's home on leave. When Paul talks of how he knows that everything he's bottled up is just going to come exploding out of him one day after the war is over, I can't help but think of soldiers coming home today from Iraq and Afghanistan, struggling with PTSD and rage and depression after having survived the battlefield. As much as the machinery of war has changed, the experience of the soldier seems, in many terrible ways, to have remained the same.

I have a strong recollection of the first time I read this book, which is pretty rare for someone with my bad memory. It was on the couch in the tv room downstairs, the old hideous orange and white couch that was wooly and scratchy, and I remember not being able to put it down, so I read it through in one afternoon. When I opened the book this time, I found a ticket stub from a showing of the Sixth Sense in the summer of 1999. Was that mine or Jen's? I don't know. I know I had already read it by the time it was assigned in high school, so maybe. Side note: our copy of this book was my dad's from college, and I noticed that he had written his college address inside the front cover: Bourgeois Hall. JTD, the bourgeois-iest of them all!

My string of early-2oth-century literature continued then with E.M. Forster's Howards End. It's all about the inter-relationships between three groups of people in England around 1910: the artsy, literary Schlegel family; the rich capitalist Wilcox family; and the poor Leonard Bast and his wife. At heart is Howards End, a country house belonging to Mrs. Wilcox, who dies and tries to leave it, on the spur of the moment, to Ms. Schlegel, only her husband and son never tell Ms. Schlegel, who in time becomes the second Mrs. Wilcox, while her sister gets knocked up by the poor guy who gets beaten to death by Mr. Wilcox's nasty son, who goes to jail at the end while Mr. Wilcox, Mrs. Wilcox, her sister, and her sister's illegitimate kid all wind up living together at Howards End. Um, yeah. According to Spark Notes, which I read after the fact, these groups and Howards End stand in for the author's question of who would inherit England in the 20th century: the dreamy idealists, the rough capitalists, or the working class? Since Leonard dies, I think we can safely rule out the working class, but the odd living situation at the end of the book suggests that there's not going to be any one victor, but more likely a combination of influences. Anyway, for this big-picture thinking wrapped in a domestic tale, this book is considered a classic of Brit lit.

It was not to my taste. A lot of it had to do with the characters, none of whom I found sympathetic. They were the same type of characters that populate the other Forster novel I've read, A Room with a View (except here there's not the ameliorating element of Florence as a backdrop): the upper middle class. The Schlegel sisters are independently wealthy, so they spend all their time being cultured: going to concerts, speeches, and parties where they discuss the problem of poverty with other equally-well-off women. Margaret is the older one, more sensible, less attractive; Helen is the young, passionate, beautiful one who acts without thinking (their types are evidently taken from Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility). Of course, they don't work, and they have no responsibilities of any kind, so their vapid moralizing on how best to help the poor is ridiculous, because it's meaningless.

Howards End is the type of novel where nearly every utterance coming from a female is followed by "' --!'she cried out." That annoys me to an inexpressible degree. I also don't like books that decide to tell you something about characters, over and over, rather than actually demonstrating it. In this case, it was the original Mrs. Wilcox, whose interactions with Margaret in the beginning of the novel are brief, half unpleasant and the rest awkward, and the lady herself says barely anything--yet the rest of the book she's referred to as "selfless" and "omniscient." WTF? Where did that come from?

The novel is also considered to be ahead of its time in terms of studying gender relations, but I don't know that I found it so wonderful on that point either. When Margaret receives an unexpected proposal from the really rather stupid, brash, and unpleasant businessman Mr. Wilcox, she decides she will love him, and she tells herself that she will recognize his every fault, and forgive it, and simply over time make him a better man. That is the dumbest idea ever, so even though the narrator keeps telling you that she's the sensible one, I didn't agree. One of his "faults," apparently, is that he likes women to be completely submissive. Actually, he acknowledges that he finds it ever so precious that she's smart and argues with him, just so long as she ultimately gives in and meekly admits his greater experience and authority on every topic. And she does. She recognizes that this is what he wants her to be, and she willingly becomes it. Gah!!

To be fair, Margaret finally reaches a breaking point at the end of the novel and tells her husband off and decides to leave him. It had come out earlier that he had had an affair with poor Leonard's gross wife, Jacky, when she was a prostitute in Cyprus, and Margaret forgave him meekly because...just because. Later, when it comes out that Helen had pity sex with Leonard (who left a perfectly good job on the basis of Mr. Wilcox's casual advice, and then sank into poverty) and got pregnant, Mr. Wilcox gets on his moral high horse and says he can't have a 'fallen woman' staying in the house with him. Margaret freaks out on him when he refuses to acknowledge that what he did and what Helen did are the same thing, and decides to go to Europe with her sister. That's the point at which Leonard gets offed by the unpleasant Wilcox son, and the shock of his son going to jail turns Mr. Wilcox into an invalid. That's how, at the end of the story, Margaret winds up ruling the roost at Howards End, the house she was supposed to inherit anyway, and forcing her husband to get along with her "fallen woman" sister. So I guess there's a tiny bit of a gender-relation upset there, but the problem is that Margaret spent the majority of the book being a total idiot, and I hated her, and I hated Helen, Mr. Wilcox, and basically every character in the book! The only reason I finished it was that halfway through I had flipped to the end out of exasperation to see if there was anything there that could convince me to keep reading. I saw that Leonard got killed by Wilcox's son, and I was really puzzled as to why he would kill him, and what's the poor guy doing at the country house, and thus I was suckered into finishing it. Well, that's it for you, E.M. Forster. You shall not darken my bookcase again.

Now I'm reading Catch-22, which I read once before, for Dr. Regan's class on comedy when I was a freshman in college. It's absurdist, dark humor, and I keep catching myself expecting some little episode or vignette to have a satisfactory ending, or indeed any ending at all that doesn't go around in a circle or just cut off, but that's not what you get in Yossarian's world. I think we watched part of the film version in class, and all I remember from that is someone getting their head accidentally cut off by a helicopter while they're all out swimming. I haven't gotten to that part of the book yet, though. Cheery reads I've chosen lately, right?