The 305 Greatest Books - #190: The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. The book can be found on the Observer Book List.

Ford's dedication letter at the beginning was interesting because he notes that the original title for the book was "The Saddest Story" and he changed the name to The Good Soldier in jest when his publisher requested a new title since the world was within the midst of WWI and they wanted something that would sell better. The book has actually nothing to do with war, or even the acts of a soldier. The principle character, Colonel Edward Ashburnham, just happens to have been a "good soldier" and therefore he became the namesake of the book. The book is written in a stream-of-conscience method which means that the plot line jumps around terribly. And while the story is fairly simple, my brain jumbled up characters, and I could never remember if we found out so-and-so died or if that was one yet to be revealed. I did have to Google some characters deaths because I just couldn't remember if they were mentioned (they were). The story is written in a first person POV by one of the main characters, John Dowell, who relays this story as it was relayed to him. He and the wife of another couple are the surviving members of this pair of rich couples who became the best of friends. However, as the story progresses and we discover how the spouses, as well as other people in their orbit, died, we learn that not everything was as straightforward as the author initially made it sound. And while the story was interesting I found it hard to empathize with these rich people who had nothing to do all day. Besides that, the passage of time has rendered a lot of this tragedy to become not as bad as other books, and in many instances real life, have portrayed. And so while it is an interesting story, and enjoyable if you can keep the plot threads straight, I wouldn't consider this one of the best stories every written but not a bad summer book read.

The 305 Greatest Books - #189: Bleak House by Charles Dickens

The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is Bleak House by Charles Dickens. The book can be found on the BBC Book List.

Bleak House is my final Dickens' novel on my list and probably the hardest one for me to get through. At one point, I was around 1/3rd of my way through the book, I googled "Why is Bleak House so terrible". The return results were actually rather encouraging. I found that many people consider the first portion of the book (about where I was at) to be difficult to follow because the story bounces around a LOT. However, people had said it gets better from there and that a lot of people consider it his best work. That helped and so I kept going forward, and while the book did indeed get more streamlined and better, I never fell in love with the book as many people did. I was even told I was outright wrong for disliking the book (not maliciously). The problem is that so many of the characters were just overly simplified stereotypes in one way or another and they were just grating on my nerves. Add on top of that a story plot that bounced from one chapter to the next without a clear storyline. It just got to be a lot. There were also few characters that I actually enjoyed. Even the main character, Esther Summerson, whom much of the story was told from a first person perspective, would repeatedly relay other characters telling her how wonderful she was. Gag me with a spoon. This was obviously also written as a serialized story with each and every chapter from 8 to 14 pages in length, and while that made the story easy to digest, it allowed Dickens to just write and write and write, creating a very bloviated novel. Overall, I believe having finished it that if I went back would actually probably like it better now, however I have no desire whatsoever to do that. 

The 305 Greatest Books - #188: Beloved by Toni Morrison

The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is Beloved by Toni Morrison. The book can be found on the Norwegian and My Book Lists.

Beloved definitely gave me the vibes that I was not tall enough to ride this emotional roller coaster. It is hard to discuss this book without getting into major plot spoilers, but in general the story is about a former slave family set during the the times right before and after the Civil War. While the story is a decade or so after the Civil War, flashbacks and remembrances occur before and during the war. This book definitely doesn't pull it's punches in regards to slavery and how people were treated during those times. The impetus for the novel was an event shortly after the main character, Sethe, ran away, where an infant is found bloody and dead. However, the text is confusing at the beginning and I wasn't sure if it was at first written cryptically or I was just not understanding it. But as the story continued, I realized that the narrative was purposely obscure and that the reason for that was eventually laid out for the reader. The novel is rough, and rightfully so. The harsh truths are the reasons that Beloved won the Pulitzer Price for Fiction and was likely the reason Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is a good book, with an interesting story thread. It is a fascinating read, both with how bluntly she depicts slave life, but also how that story is interwoven with this poltergeist-esque story as they are living in a haunted house. I cannot recommend this book enough. It is beautifully written and is definitely a story that pulls you in, while also educating you about the horrors that had engulfed our society at the time.

The 305 Greatest Books - #187: The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. The book can be found on the Observer, BBC, and My Book Lists.

This is one of those books I would classify as your standard middle school novel, that I however was never tasked to read. Even though I had never read this before, this is one of those stories that has permeated society to the point that many (most?) people could give you a generalized overview of the story. The story follows a group of boys who are stranded on a deserted island and how their "society" degrades from there. What I was not expecting, but makes sense, is that this is a dystopian novel about essentially the aftereffects of a nuclear war. Comments had been made almost in passing throughout the novel, but it was interesting how the reader is bounced around between some hopeful characters interacting with those who "know" more about what has been going on in the world. On top of all that is just the general fall of society into barbarism with certain members of society fighting back against it with rules and those members losing over time to the more aggressive, violent members of society. I found the debates between the different members of society to be the most interesting, since these are life and death debates in their world and yet also brought down to a child's level. Absolutely wonderfully written. It is so easy to fly through the story (it being extraordinarily short helps), and it is gripping. I flew through the whole thing in less than a week and read half of it in about a day. It was also much darker and gruesome than I was anticipating for a story where children are the focus. There is some notable geological problems with the story, which also gets me giddy all over. However, overall, this book was a lot of fun and one that I would highly recommend. 

The 305 Greatest Books - #186: Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is Dead Souls by Nicolai Gogol. The book can be found on the Norwegian 100 Greatest Book List. 

I had been interested in Gogol ever since reading The Namesake, where the primary character in that story is named after the author of this story. Dead Souls is the only story by Gogol on my list, and it has been waiting patiently for me to read it ever since I read The Namesake probably about 20 years previously. Dead Souls starts out with a translators note, which made all the difference in understanding this book. In Russia, during the 1800's, a peasant was bound to the land and subject to the landowner. Each peasant pays the landowner a tax and the landowner then pays the collected taxes to the government for every person, or "soul", that is on the property. The number of souls that each landowner owes money on is determined during the census, which has large gaps in time (the story takes place in a gap of 18 years between censuses). If a peasant was to die during that time between censuses, the landowner would still owe taxes on that peasant until the next census identified them as dead. These are the "dead souls". The premise of the novel is that a businessman named Chichikov has come up with a scheme where he goes around buying up the dead souls of the landowners. The first volume of the book basically follows him around as he attempts to buy these dead souls off of various people until the last chapter of the volume where we find out his background and why he is doing what he is doing. And let me tell you, I read that section three times and I still couldn't figure it out the reasoning. This is the whole premise of the novel so you would think it should be well laid out, but no, not a clue. The second volume of the story helped to make some sense of it but it still doesn't make total sense. It may be an issue where things are done differently now, so his scheme wouldn't work, or that there are key parts that are not explained since they would be known at the time, or it could be that his scheme doesn't actually make sense and there was no fixing it so the author just glossed over that fact, either way, it made for a disappointing read since that was the whole premise of the book. (I could explain but I don't want to give too many spoilers). I have always been a fan of Russian literature, and while the author was born in present day Ukraine, he lived in the Russia of the time and wrote in Russian. Generally from what I have read, translations from Russian to English are usually very well done, this one included, and it made reading and understanding the text to be a breeze. I greatly enjoyed that part. But there are issues with the story, besides just the enigmatic justification for the story. Apparently, Gogol had based his publishing volume 2 of the story contingent on volume 1 doing well. However it apparently didn't, so he ended up destroying parts of the manuscript. So there are parts of sentences, pages, and even whole chapters just missing from the story (and noted as such by the translator). So whatever happens in Volume 2 is sometimes summarized by the translator because an unknown number of chapters is just ... gone. I had hoped it would be something akin to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but no such luck. It just feels incomplete and lacking in the end. Not enough answers for the questions raised and a lackluster finish to a story that started out interesting.