I haven’t been reading many comics lately, but this is one series that I’m still really interested in. When last I wrote about The Unwritten, I described it thusly:

“Imagine if J.K. Rowling based Harry Potter after her son of the same name and then disappeared before the last book had been finished, and her son then grew into his 20s as a bitter Harry Potter Con regular living off his fame as a muse. That’s essentially how this series began – Wilson Tayler based his incredibly popular series on his son Tom Tayler, and Tom was drifting through life on that fame until the stories around him started coming to life.”

In this trade our three heroes find themselves on a tour of the Arrowhead, the farmhouse where Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick, while following a clue left behind by Tommy’s father. Lizzie and Savoy are dealing with problems which look to be setting up some fun events for future issues, including Savoy discovering he’s now a vampire, and Tommy lives through a part of Moby Dick, which eventually crashes into a number of other classic stories.

This was a trip of a read. I love the stage in these kinds of stories where you’re learning the rules of the new universe you’re in. We follow Tommy has he discovers what he can do and can’t do while interacting with the stories, and that’s a lot of fun. The idea of stories coming to life gives The Unwritten an unlimited number of possibilities of where to lead, and I hope they take advantage of that. You also get to have a nerd moment when they’re referencing something you’ve read, but it’s never been necessary to have read the stories (I haven’t gotten to Moby Dick yet). Mike Carey is pacing the story perfectly in my opinion.

Basil Hallward sees Dorian Gray as his true inspiration as a painter, and the story begins with him finishing a portrait of the young man. During this same afternoon, Basil introduces Dorian to his friend Henry Wotton, a true dandy who swears by a hedonistic lifestyle, wherein the only real pursuits in life should be feeding the senses. Dorian is young and incredibly pliable, and Henry convinces him that beauty is what matters in life and to cherish what he has while he has it.

Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

Dorian, immediately influenced by Henry’s outlook on life, finds himself distraught with the idea of someday losing his looks, and upon seeing his newly painted portrait, wishes offhandedly that he could sell his soul and have the painting grow old instead of him. And that’s exactly what happens. He spends his life acting selfish and petty, and the the portrait grows older and more horrid in his place.

He doesn’t just age gracefully and keep his looks, he actually doesn’t age at all. At 40 he still looks 20. This is brought up briefly when he tricks someone by pretending to be a young man, but I feel like those around him his entire life would be less oooh, how beautiful you still are and more aaaah, get away freakish manchild, but maybe that’s just me.

That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.

Dorian Gray both glorifies hedonism, something it was widely criticized for when first published, and shows us its pitfalls. The picture may give Dorian leave to do as he wishes, but the shame of the image drives him deeper and deeper into his frantic vanity. It’s also a novel about influence, and how those around us can inspire, in the case of Dorian’s initial influence on Basil, or ruin us, in the case of Henry’s influence on Dorian.

I came into this expecting to love it, and I was a little disappointed overall. I found the dialogue heavy bits of this book incredible – I loved every scene in which Henry spoke – but the description heavy bits, especially a couple of chapters mid-way through, were very dull to me. I still really enjoyed this, though, and it makes me think I’ll love his plays.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think it is rather vain.

This book was brought forward as evidence against Oscar Wilde’s character when he was charged with sodomy and sentenced to two years of hard labour. He was released impoverished and in poor health, and he wandered about Europe for a couple years before his death in 1900.

With all the hype surrounding the film adaptation of The Hunger Games, I broke down and decided to read it. I was a little worried I was getting myself into the next Twilight, but I’m glad I picked it up.

Set in a post-apocalyptic alternative (or is it??….it is) future of our world, a new country of Panem is under rule by a totalitarian government. This government occupies the central capital, whose technology is so advanced as to seem alien to us, and the twelve surrounding districts live in squalor. Seventy-five years ago the districts rose up against the capital in revolt and were crushed, and since then as a punishment and a reminder, they’re forced annually to participate in The Hunger Games.

Each year a male and a female child between the ages of 12 and 18 are chosen in a lottery from each district to participate in the games. Each year a child is within the eligible age, an entry is put in the lottery for them, and every entry stays until they enter the games or reach the age of 19. So a child of 12 will have one entry in the lottery, and a kid of 18 will have 7 entries. The kids can also put extra entries in each year, each entry earning them enough grain to (barely) feed a family member for the year. So a child trying to help support a family of 4 could have 35 entries when he’s 18. This makes it much more likely for the poor to be chosen.

The story is from the view of Katniss Everdeen, a 16-year-old girl from District 12. She’s poor and has to feed her family by illegally poaching in the woods outside the approved boundary, and as a result she’s grown strong and independent, which makes her a formidable foe and a trustworthy ally when she finds herself in the games.

It’s a fun look at a warped future of reality television, complete with how they work behind the scenes to give false impressions to the audience. The story moves along very quickly, and Collins does a great job of building suspense and making you care about the characters. Some of it did feel predictable, but there were a few moments that took me by surprise.

A lot of people seem to be focused on stating how derivative this story is, which gets on my nerves a little. I’ve only read the first of the series, but a story is not Nineteen Eighty-Four because it has a totalitarian government, it’s not The Running Man because it has a televised reality contest in which people die, and it’s probably not Battle Royale because the government is forcing a group of kids to fight to the death, although to be fair I haven’t actually read or seen that yet. I am willing to guess that while the main device of the books are similar, the tone and the characters and the message and how the plot moves along is likely sufficiently different.

I remember an English instructor once saying that if you gave a class of students a basic frame of a story and asked them all to write a novella around that, you’d end up with a different story from each student, and I think that’s true. I don’t think it’s wrong to bring up parallels and discuss them, but when people start drawing conclusions and making accusations based on (often superficial) similarities it comes across as a hipster trying to be clever. Art inspires more art, and coincidences happen, and neither are wrong. Take a deep breath and think of is as a type of parallel or convergent evolution if that helps.

Anyway, enough with the ranting. I really enjoyed this. It’s essentially every daydream I had between the ages of six and fifteen packed into a novel, so it was quite fun to read through that. I’ve heard the series goes a bit downhill from here, but I’ll likely take the chance and pick up Catching Fire sometime soon.

November 16, 1973

Dear Mr. McCarthy:

I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.

I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?

I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.

I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.

Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.

Kurt Vonnegut

– Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage, Kurt Vonnegut [via]

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

The story is framed by a group of men sitting in a boat on the River Thames, listening to Charles Marlow tell a story from his past. Our narrator is actually one of the unnamed men on the boat, but almost the entire novella is Marlowe telling his story.

It’s a story of his time captaining a steamboat on the Congo River. I’m not sure they mention that he’s in The Congo Free State, as it was then called, but I knew this going in. When he first arrives, he stops briefly at a trading station and returns to find his boat sunk, possibly due to sabotage. He spends a few months repairing it, and during this time he learns about Mr. Kurtz, a man both hated a revered in the station – revered for his skill at acquiring ivory and hated for fear he’ll take over their manager’s position and for rumours that he’s gone rogue.

They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.

There are also rumours that Kurtz is seriously ill, so after Marlowe repairs his boat, he takes a small company of men and a crew of native cannibals up the river and into the heart of the jungle’s darkness, only to discover the heart of man’s darkness.

Every time I try to keep the meat of the story vague I end up sounding a bit like a tool. Oh well.

Why frame the story with the men sitting on the boat? I think it’s to keep us out of Marlowe’s head, to allow us to hear him struggle with interpreting his feelings. We feel like we’re sitting on that boat, letting someone work through a story they desperately need to tell.

I love novels about people exploring new lands and encountering new cultures. The depiction of the Congolese felt a wee bit Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but if you write that off as an unfortunate artifact of the time, it’s an exciting old travelogue with a lot to say, bringing up questions and letting you answer yourself.

The language in this is wonderful, but dense at times – particularly when he’s struggling with the imposing silence and darkness of the jungle. I probably listened to the entire second part of this twice, because I kept getting distracted. It would’ve been a great audiobook for a flight or bus ride, somewhere you wouldn’t feel guilty about just sitting there listening.

Kenneth Branagh was an amazing narrator. There was really no doubt that he would be great, but he really lived up to my expectations. I checked on Audible, and he also narrates a Graham Greene novel and a collection of Chekhov stories, so I’ll eventually make my way to those. I don’t know if I would have enjoyed this as much without his performance.

“Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, `When I grow up I will go there.’ The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven’t been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour’s off. Other places were scattered about the Equator, and in every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and . . . well, we won’t talk about that. But there was one yet–the biggest, the most blank, so to speak– that I had a hankering after.

“True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery–a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird– a silly little bird.

- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

This is my first Piers Anthony novel. My dad was a big fan of him when I was growing up, and I always saw his books lying around the house. Curiosity got the best of me, and I thought I’d start with his most famous.

Zane is a would-be photographer who has fallen on rough times. The story begins with him in an enchantments store looking for something that will change his life for the better, even though he can barely afford food. It’s an interesting scene, and does a good job of introducing the world. On A Pale Horse is set in what looks like modern earth, at least modern for the time, but magic and mythical beings have become a mundane part of life. There are cars but also magic carpets, photographers but also magicians – magic has been integrated into this society in much the same way technology has been integrated into ours.

His times fall even harder, and he eventually decides to off himself. In his apartment, while pulling a gun up to his head, Death walks in. His early arrival startles Zane and Death ends up accidentally taking the bullet. If you kill Death, you become Death, and so Zane take on the position.

He’s still mortal, and can still be killed, but Death’s accoutrements give him the special powers with which to perform his new job. The cloak protects against harm, and the shoes let him walk on water. He also has several pieces of jewellery that have been imbued with enchantments: an earing, a bracelet with a few gems on it, and a watch. He basically becomes the pimpest Grim Reaper you’re likely to see.

Most of the newly deceased travel to heaven or hell on their own, but those with a balance of good and evil in their soul need to be collected and sorted out individually, which is where Zane and his new magical bling come in. We follow him as he learns how to be Death, and over this time a conspiracy is revealed. We find that it might not have been blind luck that landed him this position.

The premise of this novel highlights what I love about the fantasy genre – being able to personify abstract ideas, for example, and play with the physics of a world allows us to really examine and challenge our regular lives without inhibition. This genre has a unique ability to pull this sort of feat off in a way that’s often underappreciated (and to be fair, often underutilized). Telling lies to reveal truth, as they say. Piers Anthony spends a lot of this novel building up scenarios that are designed to examine difficult to answer questions.

The problem lies in the execution, I think. I really could not get over his style of writing. The dialogue in particular, to me, felt so wooden. Some of it was almost as if he was trying to mimic witty Oscar Wilde dialogue and failing miserably at it, and some of it was just plain ol’ bad. Here’s a fun example:

She screamed “Mr. Z! You’re hurt!” She hurried to inspect the corpse, running right past Zane as if not seeing him. “In fact — you’re dead!”

That was not a flippant, comedic scene, or at least it hadn’t come across that way in the lead up. It was a landlord finding the dead body of a tenant. The entire book read like this – clunky and awkward. I dug some of his descriptive use of language, but it really didn’t work for the dialogue. No one speaks like this, no one has ever spoken like this, and I pray that no one will ever speak like this in the future.

I’m glad I read this finally, but it fell a bit flat. I don’t see myself continuing with the series.

The goal is to read 50+ classic novels in five years. Will I be blogging in five years? Will I be alive in five years? Will society as we know it still exist in five years? I can answer none of these questions for you, but this will be fun up until any of that happens.

This is really just my current classic literature wishlist. If I read a classic that’s not on the list, I’ll swap one out. I haven’t really read many classics, so I’m assuming along the way I’ll find authors I love and authors I can’t stand, and the list will rearrange to reflect that.

What constitutes a classic? I have no idea. I suppose it’s an arbitrary label decided by popular opinion? For my list, I figure anything written in the middle of the twentieth century and before counts if it’s still around today. The only book published after 1970 that’s currently on the list was written by a Nobel Laureate, so I figure that works.

Here are my 50 classics to be read by March 23, 2017:

1. The Trial and Death of Socrates: Four Dialogues by Plato (Sometime BC)
2. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)
3. As You Like It by William Shakespeare (1623)
4. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare (1623)
5. The Tempest by William Shakespeare (1623)
6. King John by William Shakespeare (1623)
7. Othello by William Shakespeare (1623)
8. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)
9. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
10. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854)
11. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861)
12. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1876)
13. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)
14. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)
15. A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle (1888)
16. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890)
17. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)
18. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (1895)
19. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (1895)
20. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1898)
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
22. The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle (1912)
23. The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (1912)
24. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1920)
25. Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre: The Best of H. P. Lovecraft by H. P. Lovecraft (1921 – 1936)
26. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924)
27. The Great Gatsby * by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
28. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1931)
29. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (1933)
30. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)
31. I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934)
32. The Hobbit * by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937)
33. And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)
34. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1839)
35. Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945)
36. Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (1945)
37. The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler (1949)
38. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
39. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1952)
40. Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut (1952)
41. Moonraker by Ian Flemming (1955)
42. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
43. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut (1959)
44. Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham (1960)
45. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut (1962)
46. A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway (1964)
47. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine by Kurt Vonnegut (1965)
48. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
49. Chocky by John Wyndham (1968)
50. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999)

* rereads