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.  

The 305 Greatest Books - #185: Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih. The book can be found on the Norwegian 100 Greatest Book List and My Personal Book List. 

I believe that Season of Migration to the North may be the first book I have read that was originally written in Arabic. And this book almost makes me want to understand Arabic because the prose was so beautifully written that I can imagine it would be tenfold better in the original language. The story is about a man, the narrator, who encounters a stranger in his community, Mustafa. From that point forward, Mustafa's history becomes of paramount importance to the narrator, so much so that Mustafa has some degree of influence over the narrator, as well as many other people. I really enjoyed this book. The prose is wonderful and the story is engaging. There were a few parts that had me squeamish and I'm not how how much of them were related to the Arabic culture of the time (set in the 1920's, published in 1969) or how much of it was just inclusions by the author. I imagine a bit of both. The treatment of women in the story was also heavily dated, but also surprisingly progressive in many ways. However, with all that aside, this book has left me with many questions about the story and Mustafa's influence, which, while the story appears to address, I don't believe the author fully answers. Leaving a bit of a mystery especially once the ending comes about. Overall, I'd say this is a must read.

The 305 Greatest Books - #184: The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler

The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is The Decline of the West by Oscar Spengler. The book can be found on the Sybervision Book List.

Spoiler warning: I hated everything about this book. Reading this book has been several years in the waiting. It is one of the last two books I had on the original 100 Greatest Books list I started, the Sybervision Book List (a list from a now defunct company). The book was an attempt at cataloguing the progression of history up to the 1920's when the book was written from a rather Euro-centric point of view, specifically a German point of view. However my problems with this book are almost immediate. I don't know if it was the particular translation, which also was atrocious, or the original text, however I feel it was a mixture of both. This translation, which seems to be the one most commonly around, was by Charles Francis Atkinson also from the 1920's. The text is almost incomprehensible at times. The ideas the author was trying to get across got lost more often than they were found and frequently the author (I assume it was the author) would leave words in their original Greek or other language, of which the reader couldn't even begin to decipher. My favorite parts though (sarcasm) were when the translator felt the need to constantly add his two cents in to the text. Like, shut up, this isn't your book. The topics are also widely all over the place. He jumps around the timeline across centuries within sentences of each other and fails to use the "BC" or "AD" identifier on times more often than not. And a lot of his concepts are downright just wrong. He has an entire chapter about how Darwin was just wrong and although he doesn't mention his alternative, it seems he is in favor of Lamarck but his reasoning is inconsistent. The book reads much like this was a literary essay or textbook where the author was just given access to a series of Encyclopedias, to the point that on nearly every page the translator cites an encyclopedia entry. It's dull, difficult to follow, and at many times it is just inaccurate. However, there were some light points. I did find some of his information intriguing, when I could decipher the text. I appreciated the agnostic approach to religion within the text. And he appeared to have some insight into the evolution of Germany at the time, which he was opposed to. His overall point was the Europe at this time was the pinnacle of society, however it had become stagnated since the Middle Ages in many cases and was slowly going to be overun by Asian society and ideals. So overall, it was terrible. I honestly don't understand how anyone could praise this work, although an abridged version might be much easier to follow and if one only sticks to Volume 1. Then maybe?

The 305 Greatest Books - #183: The Gypsy Ballads by Federico García Lorca

The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is The Gypsy Ballads by Federico Garcia Lorca. The book can be found on the Norwegian Book List. 

Comprising 18 poems, each about 2 pages in length, The Gypsy Ballads, is by far one of the shortest works on this list. And since it is so short it is hard for me to properly do it justice. That, and I am no expert in poetry. Also, while I feel the translator did his utmost best to translate these poems into English to put across the same feeling as they did in their original Spanish, there is something inherently lost when you move from one language to another in any form of literature, most of all poetry, which relies not only on the words choices of the authors but also the cadence of the lines, and even how the words look on the page. All that being said I rather enjoyed this short work. Since it was so short I wanted to take my time and absorb each of the works in their own right and slowly analyze of the metaphors that were being used. While a poetry expert would be able to extract far more than I ever could, I did enjoy the poems as they were presented to me. The introduction in my edition helped me to get into the mindset required to understand most of the work and even rather gather information about a lot of the metaphors presented. While some of the poems were rather gruesome, especially towards the end, they were written in order to shock the reader purposefully to the atrocities being committed against the gypsy people. Other of the poems were sweet and soothing to read. His poetry formats also bounced around with some being more free verse while other rhyming. Overall, even though it was short, I also rather enjoyed it.