Sophie's Choice

I knew very little about Sophie's Choice when I picked it up.  I downloaded this William Styron novel, along with several others higher on the list, for a steal during the Black Friday sales on Amazon.

What I did know about it was that Sophie was a Holocaust survivor.  I knew she was forced which one of her children would be sent to the gas chambers.  And I knew it had Meryl Streep.

The book was longer than I expected and at one point I accidentally spoiled a major point in the story.  At that point I shrugged my shoulders, went to Wikipedia, and spoiled some of the other major plot twists.  Nonetheless I was thoroughly entertained while reading it.

I will say that I was extremely surprised by the sheer graphic nature of the book.  I didn't mind it at all, but I was not expecting Styron to devote so much text to sex.  I would ask my wife repeatedly "Did _____ happen in the movie," and at times I don't think she fully believed me when I mentioned some of differences between the book.

The book is extremely well written. It's main character is a very real character and this is likely as Styron merges a lot of his self - down to his interest in Nat Turner - to Stingo. This book handled some very major themes, particularly the sense of guilt.  Sophie demonstrated so many ways to feel guilt: in survival, in her failure to action, in the way she did act while in the camps.  I think the destruction in the final chapter of the book was inevitable given Sophie's background & history.

Styron's book was unique in it's portrayal of a Holocaust victim who is not Jewish, another fact I was not aware of until I started reading.  Often we only put our focus on the 6 million Jews that perished.  The Nazi regime did not just focus on the "Jewish question;" the Third Reich killed nearly 1 million Romani, 3 million Russian POWs and 2 million Poles (let us also never forget the Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, physically & mentally disabled, and Freemasons who also perished).

As I stated earlier, Styron's book takes painstaking efforts to make the characters real.  With the exception of a few residents of the tertiary characters, none of the characters are two-dimensional stereotypes.  In that vain, Styron does not paint any of the characters in black & white terms, even Rudolf Hoss.  Styron seeks to show the humanity, the capacity for humans to both commit evil and good.  Our narrator even speculates on the intentions of the doctor who forced Sophie to make her choice and how he could do it.

Upon reflection, one of the most interesting depictions on the book is religion.  Despite Nathan Landau being such a prideful Jew and Sophie having been at one point a devout Catholic, nearly every character (despite being influenced by religion) seems to border agnosticism.

And perhaps that is why one of the book's most poignant quotes near the end is as follows:

The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.

The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?

Days Elapsed: 218
Books Completed: 5/100
Pages Read: 1631
Money Spent: $29.99

The Sheltering Sky

Part of me feels very neglectful in this blog. I cannot say what the passage of time was between The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Sheltering Sky.  Much like the characters in Paul Bowle's adventure trek through the Algerian desert, I found myself the victim of greater forces beyond my control, albeit mine were of a far more mundane variety.

The Sheltering Sky tells the story of three American travelers, a married couple and their friend, as they explore the vastness of Algeria.  The word travelers is an important distinction, as I think I'd do Port Moseby a disservice if I made him out to be otherwise.

"Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was where he had felt most at home." (Bowles 6).

The book features infidelity, disease, death, deception, indecency, decay and distrust.  From those adjectives, you'd except the story to be quite an exciting escape from reality.  Unfortunately, I found the first half of the novel to move rather too slowly.

It was not until (spoilers) the illness and death of Port and Kit's disappearance and descent into madness that I really came to enjoy the story. I already knew of these two essential facts - this was in the author's own foreward - but this major preemptive reveal did not diminish my reading experience. If anything, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop when Port first fell ill with typhus.

The last third of the book, detailing Kit's complete abandonment of the sum of her being was by far the best part.  Bowles masterfully almost writes an entirely new character that is still so familiar to us as the Kit of the first half of the novel.  The detail to which he describes her thought process and total embrace of insanity made the reading worth while. I do not feel like this last third of the book redeemed the rest of it - I recall Kurt Vonnegut's G-d Bless You Mr. Rosewater and after reading the final lines of the book just smiled - but this was not a struggle in the same way The Ginger Man was.

Days Elapsed: 218
Books Completed: 4/100
Pages Read: 1056
Money Spent: $27.97

The Postman Always Rings Twice

The Postman Always Rings Twice
by James M. Cain

This short novel features a forbidden romance, blackmail and murder.  The novel has a very limited list of characters, many of whom get fleshed out a bit, albeit limited.

The book is told from the perspective of Frank Chambers, a drifter who has been in several legal scruples in his brief past, who finds himself in a truck stop cafe along a highway in California being offered a job as a mechanic. It's when he meets his new employer's wife that things take a twist.

Overall the novel was an enjoyable experience, with several plot twists I didn't see coming.  The ending comes a little abruptly, but it is still an interesting surprise and chock full of irony.  The novel is brisk enough with not too much mystery that it makes sense why it was twice adapted into films. 

Days Elapsed: 41
Books Completed: 3/100
Pages Read: 734
Money Spent: $19.59

Run, run, run... as fast as you can...

Conan O'Brien?!?

The Ginger Man
 by J.P. Donleavy

 ... you can't catch me, I don't get the humor of this man!

Number 99 on the Modern Library's top hundred books is J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man. It took me a month to finish The Ginger Man is that after while I really had no desire to pick it up and finish it. I've read other reviewers calling it a comic masterpiece, but for the most part, I just didn't get it. A lot of negative reviews focused on the reader's dislike of the main character's debauchery and low moral conduct. This is not what turned me off to the book...

 The fact it had no real central narrative is what did it for me. For the first few chapters, The Ginger Man was an interesting read; however, after a while I became bored as the plot simply went nowhere. The story is about an Sebastian Dangerfield, a broke American veteran in Ireland who is studying law at Trinity College.  He is married with a small child and basically spends his days drinking and cheating on his wife.

The story is a rinse, wash & repeat of Dangerfield drinking to excess, racking up massive debts, pawning possessions and then being left/leaving the woman he is currently with. 

There are admittedly a few funny scenes which come to mind:  an indecent exposure in a train, an attempt to buy condoms, his first encounter with a shy girl at a party who turns out to be a bit of a nymphomaniac.  However, these scenes are far and few between and all we're left with is a boring narrative of an unappealing main character who really doesn't do much of anything. In the end, perhaps the most humorous part of the  book is the striking resemblance the man on cover art looks like Conan O'Brien.  I ended up buying a physical copy just for the posterity.

Save your time and money on this one.

Days Elapsed: 35
Books Completed: 2/100
Pages Read: 606
Money Spent: $9.60

I'll Agree to Every Third Dance

The Magnificent Ambersons
by Booth Tarkington

I began my journey of reading the top 100 novels according to the Modern Library with this tale by Booth Tarkington of an aristocratic family's rise and decline following the American civil war.  Taking place in Midland, at the beginning of the novel the Ambersons, headed by its patriarch the Major, are the talk of the town.  Everything in town seems to surround them and in fact the family is at the center of the town.

The novel focuses on the third generation of this family, George Amberson Minafer.  Described in his teen years as almost a men among boys, the author sets him up as a thoroughly unlikable person.  When Tarkington talks of how seemingly everyone in Midland wants the spoiled, rich, only-child of Isabel Amberson to "get his comeuppance," the reader is naturally included in that group.

However, the brilliance of the novel lies in that as it progresses, we see George gradually grow in very slight and subtle ways.  When inevitably tragedy does befall him, we've found ourselves sad to see it happen.  Dislike for the character in the beginning over the course of 250 pages evolves into feelings of encourage, pity and paternalism for the character.  It is not until the end that we see just how much George really has changed.

Tarkington also does a tremendous job really painting a picture of how Midland changes from the time of George's birth to his early adulthood.  We see how the city has changed, not just physically but also culturally.  The small world at the beginning ceases to be by the end.  It is through these descriptions of the people around George and his family that we really see the social commentary of Booth Tarkington come to life. Written in 1918, the books primary setting is the turn of the 20th century and speaks to the author's regard for the rapid urban sprawl of the time as well as technological advancement.

All and all, The Magnificent Amberson is a great read and one where the reader will find themselves enjoying a variety of rich characters tremendously.

Days Elapsed: 5
Books Completed: 1/100
Pages Read: 258
Money Spent: $0.00

Let the Quest Begin

Since getting my Kindle Fire two years ago, I have endeavored to make sure I got a lot of use out of it.  I've enjoyed it thus far and in my quest to find some good reads, I ventured to the Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of All Time.  I decided I'd set out a quest to read the entirety of the Board's list in reverse order. (the readers list, while it shared some of the same works featured four Ayn Rand Books in the top ten and seven Robert Heinlein books in the top 100).

Of the top 100, I've read eight of the works: The Great Gatsby (2), Brave New World (5), Catch-22 (7), Slaughterhouse-Five (18), Animal Farm (31), Lord of the Flies (41) and Heart of Darkness (67).

I've given myself a few rules with regard to the books.  The first is that I must read every book in reverse order, regardless if I have read it previously or not.  I foresee Jack Keroac's On the Road (55) being a particular challenge.  Ten years ago I attempted to read it while traveling in the amazon rain forest and ended up chucking it into the jungle after a parrot pooped on it.

Another rule will be that I am going to see how much this journey costs me.  A large number of the books on the list are in public domain, but I expect there will be some rare cases where the book is available at a cost on Amazon but is available for free download on Project Gutenburg.  In these cases, I will go with the free copy.

The final rule is that I must write at least some sort of review on the book.

With that said, I begin my journey with Booth Tarkington's socially conscious The Magnificent Ambersons (100).  I am about 20% of the way through the book and can thus far only find the main character having no redeeming qualities that can explain why Lucy Morgan would be interested in him other than being physically attractive and of high social standing.  I expect the relationship will be explored further in the book

Although I am not too far into the story, for some reason the main character reminds me of a better-spoken and not-morbidly-obese version of Dudley Dursley from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.

Days elapsed: 1
Books completed: 0/100.
Pages read: approximately 50.
Money spent: $0.00