The 306 Greatest Books #162 - Men Without Women

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway. The book can be found on the Observer Book List.

Before coming into this book, I had been a big fan of Hemingway's longer works. This is mainly because they were the first real "literature" I had ever attempted to read on my own, including A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. However, I haven't read one of his books in a long time. Men Without Women was the last book of his on any of my lists that I had still left to read and I was confused at first. Apparently, this is a short story collection, and a rather short one at that. I hadn't even realized he had short story collections. In total, the book barely is more than 100 pages long and is comprised of 14 short stories, with two being over 20 pages, making most of the remaining stories 5 to 10 pages long at most. The stories were all written before his longer, more well known works, but most of the stories still seemed to hold the Hemingway style that I had grown to love. His writing style is beyond compare. He is able to draw you into a story very quickly and keep you there with just the beauty of his prose. But since these are some of his earlier works they do feel a bit rougher than his later, more polished works. Within the book, the longer stories are some of the best ones, like "The Undefeated" and "Fifty Grand". His stories clearly are based around situations he knows, like boxing and bull fighting, but I had come to realize something about Hemingway while reading through these stories, as well as reading about the background behind the book. As you can see, the book is titled Men Without Women, and that "without women" part is plainly clear to me now. As I read elsewhere, Hemingway is a great writer, however his focal characters are generally men, and white men at that. Besides white men though, he doesn't do the characters any justice, and in this short story collection, he often just leaves out any, or all, other characters all together. He is also racist and dismissive, and even in one instance it appears homophobic, but the moral of that one story seemed hazy in the end. Overall, I like Hemingway's writing, but I feel these short stories did not age well with the times. I could do without the clearly racist language and undertones, even if they were minor parts of the books, they were still glaring by their inclusion.

The 306 Greatest Books #161 - To The Lighthouse

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. The book can be found on the Norwegian Book List.

I was initially excited to read To The Lighthouse, mainly because the name of Virginia Woolf has become more popular than her own writing with the popularity of the play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? To The Lighthouse though, turned my expectations very quickly from excited to blasé. At first the book had a very straightforward narrative, but then Woolf would just kind of wander off. It was like trying to keep track of an ADHD kid. One minute she would be on track, following her plot line, but then her thought pattern would be off in a different direction. Eventually she would circle back around and follow up on her initial thread but it made it very difficult for me to follow because when she wandered off, so did my mind. The book is broken up into three sections, with this wandering most noticeable, for me, in the first section. The second part took a dramatic change in tone and style, acting like a fast-forward montage of sorts. The third part then ended up with a similar tone as the first. Eventually, I was able to follow along with the book fairly well and I got pretty invested with the characters. The second section hooked me in. The book, to me, seemed like a push back from the rampant misogynistic attitudes of the day, with the characters having to deal with an overly aggressive (at times) father/husband. The wife, Mrs. Ramsay, is the focal point of the book, despite her not being in the book that much. At times she seems completely aloof, and others, she seems very self-centered, but it is around her which the other characters are drawn to and must learn how to live when she is not around. The most impacted character is Lily Briscoe, a neighbor and burgeoning painter. She ends up being our focal character, through which we see the majority of Mrs. Ramsay's impact. It is an interesting read, and one that would definitely benefit from multiple readings, but in general it feels like the writing style in this this one was not for me.

The 306 Greatest Books #160 - The Big Sleep

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. The book can be found on the Observer Book List.

The Big Sleep returns me to the detective noir genre, taking place during the Great Depression with a detective named Philip Marlowe. The feel of the novel was very similar to The Maltese Falcon, however Hammett has something that Chandler lacks. In The Big Sleep I never felt this overwhelming urge to drive on through the novel like I did with The Maltese Falcon. I definitely had the voice-over effect in my head though. Marlowe was narrating the entire story, and that part was enjoyable, with his random quips being generally pretty funny. However, I had a problem with the general premise of the story. This is likely because of my time compared to civilization back then, but it still irked me and I would likely have put the book down never to be picked up again if it weren't for this list. The story begins with Marlowe being asked to find out information on an extortion racket. This later gets expanded upon with multiple murders, fights, and the sneaking around that you would expect from a good detective thriller. However, the overall misogynistic and anti-homosexual context of the story was too much for me to bear. The women in the story were either hyper-sexualized, dumb as rocks, or pointless. The attitude towards the gay characters made them out to be seen as less than dirt who didn't deserve any justice that they may need or want, and it made me angry and sick while reading. So overall, while I could have seen that this novel may have once had a place in history, that is where it now belongs, in the dustbins of history.

The 306 Greatest Books #159 - Magician

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is Magician by Raymond E. Feist. The book can be found on the BBC Book List.

After having read a few of the more historical fiction novels, I was in the mood for a fantasy novel. Looking through my list I found Magician, which even though it was a rather long book (at over 800 pages), it seemed like it would be a fun read. The book itself is set on the world of Midkemia in an age that resembles our Medieval time period mixed with the world of Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings vibe actually struck a little too strongly. There is a land of elves, who are all very long lived, dwarfs, who live under mountains, goblins, wizards, and even a dragon on a pile of gold. It was so jarring at times that it seemed that Feist took the premise and characters of Lord of the Rings, placed them in a jar, shook them up, and spilled them onto the page for his set dressing. This was all disturbed when a race of aliens comes in through a rift in space. They begin to attack Midkemia, prompting a war that encompasses nearly the entire novel. I don't know if this rift in space was so different from the Lord of the Rings vibe that was set up but it felt off. I had a hard time reconciling this alien world with the medieval one already set up, and it took me a very long time through the story to feel like they belonged together. Looking at the characters in the book, there are many who appear throughout most of the story, however the primary character is Pug, a magician's apprentice. The story ends up taking place over more than a decade causing us to witness Pug go from apprentice to a full-fledged magician. It was Pug's interactions with both worlds on either side of the rift that made this novel enjoyable. While it took me a while to get into many of the other characters, I picked up on Pug the quickest. It was Pug's journey that made me care about the other characters and it was once he comes into his own that I really started to enjoy the book. Since the book was so long it felt like a slow crawl at times to get through, even though it is a fairly easy read and rather quick, but the Lord of the Rings aspects kept pulling me out of the story. It took until about 3/4's of the way through the book until I became fully enraptured and really started to plow through it. Even though I had a slow start to the book I am excited now to continue the series through the large number of sequels that have since been published. 

The 306 Greatest Books #158 - The Periodic Table

The next up on my reading of the 306 greatest books is The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. The book can be found on the Observer and My Book Lists.

Starting out this book was an enigma for me. I initially assumed it had something to do with the formation of the Periodic Table. Then upon reading a general book description I was immediately expecting an autobiographical account of a Holocaust survivor similar to Elie Wiesel's Night. This was nothing of the sort. I think Levi best sums up the book in his own words towards the end of the book:

"...I was in search of events, mine and those of others ... to see if I could convey to the layman the strong and bitter flavor of our trade (as chemists).... I was more interested in the stories of the solitary chemistry, unarmed and on foot ... who confronted matter without aids, with their brains and hands, reason and imagination." 

That is in essence what the book was about. It was a series of stories, some of them assumed to be autobiographical, and some of them clearly not, all within a framing story of a different element. Each chapter was laid out with the title of that element and the story that followed had something to do with it. Levi was a Holocaust survivor, however his trials during his time in the camps were largely left out of the book. He mentions them as being memoir-ed in other works of his so they were skipped over here. It was like a series of bedtime stories, with a thread that worked it's way through the whole book. More often than not, I hate short stories. But this book didn't work in that way. It worked as a narrative. His various other stories, outside of his autobiography, added heart and soul and a realness to the book by sometimes being a bit fantastical in themselves. The book was surprisingly funny and upbeat, despite the dire circumstances at times, but it was also moving and sentimental. You don't find out much about Levi's personal life, except in relation to the elemental story he is telling at the particular moment. The best part of the book had to be the Chromium chapter, which was surprising and hilarious, and a pretty much self contained story within the greater narrative. Overall, I would say this was a fantastic, engrossing read. The only weak part was the first chapter which felt like a drudge to get through with all of Levi's relatives ever listed out, who never reappeared in the story at all. But once you get past that part the rest was smooth sailing.