iris murdoch

By the Decade Reading Challenge UPDATE

Thomas3 Comments

Following the lead of Blogger 3M I have been making my way through a list of 12 books from 12 consecutive decades in 2007. With seven books down with six months to go I thought I would give an update on my progress with mini-reviews of the books that I have read so far.

1910s: The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence – 5/23/07
I must admit this book was a bit of a slog for me. The book follows three generations of the Brangwen family in semi-rural/semi-industrial England. Written in 1915 the book was fairly frank in its discussion of sexual and emotional relationships. I had a friend who used to say “C’mon Oprah, not everything can be a life changing experience.” In that vein I want to say to Lawrence “C’mon D, not every action or emotion needs to be that complex or fraught with meaning.”
1930s: The Big Money by John Dos Passos (3rd in his USA trilogy) – 5/30/07
Each volume of Dos Passos’ USA trilogy uses a mix of narrative forms to tell the tale of the great American experience. In addition to straightforward chapters telling the stories of various characters, Dos Passos intersperses those chapters with non-fiction accounts of famous Americans of the time and sections that highlight snippets of newsreel headlines, stories, song lyrics, and advertising slogans. Once you get used to all of that the trilogy still seems like a bit of an acquired taste. I will say that I enjoyed this volume the best of the trilogy.
1940s: Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon – 5/20/07
I had never heard of Simenon before I picked up this novel from a bookstore. The story takes place in something that seems like occupied Belgium or France during WWII. It captures a fascinating slice of life when the moral depravity of the occupiers becomes a way of life for the occupied. The book doesn’t address the issues of the genocide central to WWII, rather it focuses on the everyday ways that humans can lose their humanity. I quite enjoyed this one.
1950s: Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell (3rd in his Alexandria Quartet) – 2/27/07
Each of the volumes of the Alexandria Quartet tells roughly the same story from a different point of view. As someone who generally prefers to read about Western Europe or North America I have become oddly and intensely fascinated with these books as they describe Egpyt before and during World War II. I find that I like each volume more than the previous. This bodes well for the final volume which I will probably put off (savor) until next year.
1960s: The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark – 7/1/07
In many ways I found the setting of this book (1961 Israel and Jordan) fascinating in the same way I appreciated the setting in Mountolive as described above. The book describes the highly charged and unstable atmosphere in Israel and Jordan in the years following the creation of Israel. Not being a middle-east expert it was a bit of an education for me. The story revolves around a British woman who is a half Jewish convert to Catholicism who decides to go on a pilgrimage to the Christian holy sites in Jordan and Israel. Religion, sex/love, and political intrigue all play an equal part. This Muriel Spark book felt very different, less quirky, than other Spark books I have read. Almost a cross between Iris Murdoch and Ward Just.
1970s: A Word Child by Iris Murdoch – 6/4/07
What can I say. I love Iris Murdoch. She was a philosophy fellow at Oxford who wrote many wonderful novels that read like religious/ethical soap operas. Like most of her books, A Word Child has a large cast of educated characters who jump from bed to bed or relationship to relationship within that circle of characters and under the weight of religious, moral, and ethical dilemmas. Tragedy is just under the surface of every page, but the reader doesn’t really know which of those tragedies will ultimately break that surface to end the book. Every time I read Murdoch I wish a filmmaker with the skill of Merchant Ivory would put her 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s period pieces on film.
2000s: I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe – 4/20/07
Having read The Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and From Bauhaus to Our House, I think that Wolfe is incapable of writing a boring book. Whether or not you agree or disagree with his books, his politics, or his gimmicky way of dressing, Tom Wolfe knows how to write smart, compelling page turners. Charlotte Simmons is a real doorstop of a book but you fly through it in no time. It is amazing how the aging Wolfe captures the essence and much of the detail of the lives of college students at the turn of the 21st century. Having said that, some of Wolfe’s characterizations, including parts of Charlotte, are somewhat one dimensional and implausible. Still no reason to stay away from this one, it is definitely worth the read. Perhaps most unrealistic is the dearth of technology usage among the students. Wolfe doesn’t realize just how wired and wireless students today have become.

By the Decade: Reading 12 decades in 12 months

Thomas6 Comments

Blogger 3M has issued a challenge to the book-reading blogosphere to read books from as many consecutive decades as possible by the end of the year. She is going to do 15 books/15 decades between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2007. You can check out her By the Decade Reading Challenge and sign up by June 30, 2007 if you want to participate officially.

Even if you don’t, you might want to think about going beyond the bestseller list and choosing some things from other decades.

I have decided to do 12 books from 12 consecutive decades, working back from our present 2000s (otherwise named by my partner as the “ought naughts” as in “these Bush years ought naught to have happened”) to the 1890s.

So, here is my list (bold titles have been finished):

1890s: Lourdes by Emile Zola
1900s: The Golden Bowl by Henry James
1910s: The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence – 5/23/07
1920s: Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley – 7/16/07
1930s: The Big Money by John Dos Passos (3rd in his USA trilogy) – 5/30/07
1940s: Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon – 5/20/07
1950s: Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell (3rd in his Alexandria Quartet) – 2/27/07
1960s: The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark – 7/1/07
1970s: A Word Child by Iris Murdoch – 6/4/07
1980s: In the City of Fear by Ward Just – 11/10/07
1990s: American Pastoral by Philip Roth
2000s: I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe – 4/20/07

Somerset Maugham and my Addiction to Spreadsheets

Thomas10 Comments

Back in 1994, after getting through about 30 pages of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Cakes and Ale, I realized that I had read it before. As a result, I began keeping a log of all of the books that I finished. I had a blank journal where I kept track of the title, author, and the date I finished each book. I loved watching the pages fill up and comparing what I was reading at the moment to what I finished a year earlier. Looking back at the titles on the list conjured up memories about where I was and what my life was like when I read a particular book. I finished Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone on a gorgeous sunny September afternoon in 1997 while lying on the grass in the Place des Vosges in Paris. Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto was finished on a frigid January day in Minneapolis while I was on winter break from graduate school. I finished Love in the Time of Cholera while I was lying in a hammock overlooking the Pacific on the island of Kaua’i. These are welcome associations I doubt I would make if it weren’t for the list.

As much as I love this handwritten log, over a decade of entries made it hard to gather information from the list quickly. I had a devil of a time trying to figure out which of Anita Brookner’s many novels I had already read. So I decided to enter all of the data into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. And so the mania began. Once the information was entered into a spreadsheet I could instantly sort the list to figure out which of my favorite author’s still have books out there that I haven’t read yet. Sadly, I have already read all of Maugham, Forster, and the late Carol Shields and almost finished Iris Murdoch’s prolific output. Happily, I have a whole lot of Trollope to go and Ward Just, Anita Brookner, Ann Patchett are still alive and writing.

I still keep the handwritten log–there is nothing I like more than adding a title–but now I also add each book to the spreadsheet. In fact, I actually get pleasure from the act of adding data to the spreadsheet. It is busy work that I find deeply satisfying.

Since I started the book spreadsheet I have also created one for every concert and opera that I have been to, one that lists every work of music contained in my 350+ classical CD collection, one that organizes music festivals I want to go to, and even one that indexes all of my favorite recipes by category and tells me which cookbook contains the recipe. Perhaps my magnum opus, is the spreadsheet I created when I was trying to decide which city to move to once I finished my planing degree at Cornell. That spreadsheet has 13 cities and about 22 categories of ratings. Everything from weather, to average airfares to Europe, to the quality of each city’s symphony. Each category was weighted by priority and totalled to give me a city ranking. It was a joy to behold, helped me make my relocation decision, and has proven accurate five years later.

This weekend I plan to create a spreadsheet of all the places I have travelled to.

It’ll be a hoot. You should give it a try.