Quote for Today

 

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?”

― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

More than Infinity

Ficciones 

by Jorge Luis Borges

“When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope.”   ― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

One of the earliest memories of reading that I have is one of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. The idea that there is another world beyond or through the mirror in one's parlor is a fabulous way to introduce the flights of fancy that little Alice was prone to engage in as I had learned in Carroll's earlier book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I am reminded of this experience because of the importance of mirrors in the writing of Jorge Luis Borges as he privileges the mirror and his stories as books appear as mirrors for reality. Just as in Carroll the mirror image presents a reflection that is backwards and always seems a bit wrong; however, it is wrong in a way that one only senses and cannot actually identify with any hope of specificity. My own dreams, and perhaps yours, often seem to be similarly twisted, even absurd, reflections of reality.

In Ficciones Borges has included nine short fictions in part one and ten even shorter works called "artifices" in part two. I like every story in the first part but my favorite has to be "The Library of Babel" which, for readers, has to encompass the notions of heaven and hell all in one twisted story.

The first story in this collection, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, is an example of the importance of mirrors as it begins with the following sentence: "I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia."(p 5). Additional stories share favorite places of Borges whether they be a garden in the case of "The Garden of Forking Paths", or the library as in "The Library of Babel". The latter of those two stories would have to be my favorite, and perhaps the favorite of many readers as readers who love libraries. Borges' library is a cheerless and even fearful place. With its incalculably vast size suggesting infinity it can seemingly be a nightmare more than a dream. Yet there is always the possibility of finding hope hidden in the vastness of infinite space. While Borges himself spent several years in a dull library job cataloging books the imaginary library of Babel seems to defy any cataloging. Just like a world reflected in a mirror, "absurdities are the norm" in this library while disorder reigns. Conundrums also abound as with the notion that everything that has already been written, yet there are always new and definitively different books that one may encounter.


The worlds depicted in Borges' stories are filled with blank spaces, the ideas and ideals are abstract rather than personal, yet they yield a personal response. Those unwilling or unable to fill in some of the blank spaces with their own imaginations may find something lacking. No amount of further writing would help though all of the stories are short, even as short stories go with the second part filled with "Artifices" that are typically no more than two or three pages long. Just as the stories beckon with suggestions of ruins, lotteries, libraries, and gardens; so do the artifices with titles that invite you to partake of death, miracles, swords, differing visions of Judas, and the rise of the Phoenix. Infinite libraries suggest stories from an imagination that also may have been infinite.


The world of Borges' fiction expands to encompass more than reality. These short narratives reveal conflicting emotions, motives, and desires shared by all humans and explore what he imagines as a tortured struggle for salvation or perhaps merely redemption.  His genius gives rise to flights of the imagination unique in my experience. My love for these narratives stems from their presences as magical works of a literary master.

Reading Questionnaire

Reading Connections 

& Time

I ran across the following questionnaire five years ago at kiss a cloud where it was placed in response to the original (I believe) at Savidge Reads. Connections can be found everywhere when pursuing reading blogs.  While I wrote a response at the time I thought after five years I might update my thoughts about these questions.
Anyway I think that today, with its sunny skies and and cool October weather is as a good as any one for curling up with a good book. But before I get too settled on the couch I append my answers to the "timely" questions about reading and Time with thanks to Simon and Claire. 



What time do you find the best time to read?

For me it is the first thing in the morning for about an hour.


What are you spending time reading right now?

I am beginning to read two large novels, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; the latter is for a read-along on the Web and the former is for a class I am taking at the University of Chicago.  Other novels are also on my reading docket including Maps by Nurruddin Farah and The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings and, for another study group, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil.  That last title is a reread and it happened to be on my reading docket five years ago.


What’s the best book with time in the title you have read?

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time would have to top the list and it has become a favorite over the last half-decade.


What is your favourite time (as in era) to read novels based in?

While I have read and enjoyed books from the preclassical era (The Epic of Gilgamesh) to the Postmodern (Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell), the Victorian era is my favorite time with Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope and Hardy among my favorite authors.


What book could your read time and time again?

There is not one book that I could put above others in my reading experience and there are many that I have read more than once.  Several candidates for this book would include Jane Eyre, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Middlemarch, War & Peace and David Copperfield.  I should add that not a year goes by in which I do not read some Shakespeare.


What recently published book do you think deserves to become a classic in Time?

Two that might make the grade that I have read are Embers by Sandor Marai (1942 but rediscovered in 2002) and the above-mentioned Cloud Atlas  (2004). The closest to a time theme for me would be Immortality by Milan Kundera (1990).


What book has been your biggest waste of time?

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai is still at the top of this short list;  being a tremendous waste of a book filled with uninteresting characters and narrated in an unnecessarily convoluted manner. So many better books have been written about India (most recently The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga).


What’s your favorite read of all time?

This would be a tie between Jane Eyre and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.


Who is your favorite author of all time?

Marcel Proust.

Reading Begins at Home

Books from my Parents' Library

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”   ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice


Before I was born and continuing after I arrived along with my sister (two years later) my parents had a small library in the home where we were raised.  This library consisted of  bookshelves that spread along one wall of our living room;  shelves that were filled with books from my earliest memory.  These books formed a not insignificant part of my reading from my earliest days - they were the source of such early reads as the Tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and more.  As I grew older and read more I remember my first encounters with Treasure Island and Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.  I became a life-long fan of Stevenson's writing, but above all I still keep and cherish an age-worn copy of  A Child's Garden of Verses because  it was one of my mother's books from when she was a very young girl.   It was from those shelves that I experienced my first taste of horror and speculative fiction with Edgar Allan Poe and dipped my toe into the world of Dante whom I do not claim to have understood on my first encounter.   What I could understand a bit better was the development of Jane Eyre from her terrible days in boarding school to her romantic encounters with Mr. Rochester, or Carol Kennicott and the events on Main Street depicted by Sinclair Lewis.  Along the reading way I acquired my own bookshelves in my bedroom.  It was here I began my own collection of classics like Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Twain,  The Jungle Books of Kipling,  and a collection of biographies of scientists and inventors like Michael Faraday, George Washington Carver, and Thomas Edison.
   
Later in my teen years I opened a tome that changed my life, The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand whose heroic architect, Howard Roark, was among the heroes that I admired in my reading.  Heroes like Roark included Edmond Dantes from The Count of Monte Cristo.   Dumas' novel was a book I read as part of my school reading which augmented that program of reading that already had a sturdy foundation built at home.  There were other books for school including Willa Cather's My Antonia, Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days,  and the wonderful tale of immigrants, Giants in the Earth by O. E. Rolvaag.  These and many more as my reading for school expanded in high school and University.

My sister and I both spent many hours at the local library, The Matheson Memorial Library, in our home town.  It was there that we encountered many other authors and books that we enjoyed reading.  I first met Philip Carey on those shelves as Somerset Maugham's tale Of Human Bondage mesmerized me much as Jane Eyre had some years earlier.  The library books were a luxury that we could afford because they were free for us to read and make our own.  This was all part of a reading life that began in the home and did not stop, but continued during our school years as an independent and important part of our lives.  With all of our reading, in school, in the library, in the park and around town, and the reading that continues to this day, both my Sister and I continue to live in homes that are filled with books.  Because our love of reading had its start in the home of our parents with their library of books that they read and cherished as well.

More Themes in Shakespeare and Carroll

Alice and Hamlet

What is Alice's problem?  I previously noted two thematic similarities between Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Hamlet.  Reflecting on part of my "Summer" reading that includes Hamlet and Carroll's masterpieces I have noted areas where the different works share themes in common.  Even though, one is a tragic drama and the others are flights of fancy.  So let's go underneath the veneer of comedy in one and tragedy in the other and we may, in fact we will, find some more shared themes.


Hamlet is famous for, among other things, the "play within the play".   A touring group of players arrives and Hamlet arranges for them to perform a play "The Murder of Gonzaga" and add a few lines that he will prepare.  Thus his plan is set and in the soliloquy that ends Act 2 Hamlet declaims:

"Out of my weakness and my melancholy, 
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me.  I'll have grounds
More relative than this.  The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King." (II, 2, 630-634)

The insertion of stories, plays, or tales is not uncommon in literary works so is it not surprising that we find the same thing happening in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  In chapter three Alice becomes engaged in an argument over the meaning of it;  "'I know what "it" means well enough, when I find a thing,' said the Duck: 'it's generally a frog, or a worm."  This leads after a bit of a race to the Mouse recounting his sad tale in answer as to why "it is you hate C and D,".  This tale is not amended by Alice nor is it directed, but through her offensive remarks to the mouse (about C and D) she surely causes the tale.  And it is a tale that is delightfully displayed on the page in the shape of a tail!  Later in the story Alice's inquisitiveness once again leads to the relation of a story, this time from the Mock Turtle.  Thus we have yet another common area for these different works with the interpolation of literary works within them in furtherance of the plot. 



While different in scope than the particulars of plot,  a thematic similarity that is just as important for both of these works is the status of words.  We need only go as far as the Second Act of Hamlet in our search to find these famous words from Hamlet to Polonius:  "Words, words, words", (II, 2, 210).
This is an unnecessary reminder that Hamlet is filled with words, many of them new to the English language, from Hamlet's several soliloquies to the famous remarks from the verbose dissembler Polonius to the various discussions of the King and Queen with the court.  Hamlet's comments are the most famous whether it is his "rogue and peasant slave am I" comment or the more famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy.  We find Hamlet orating all the way to the grave where he intones to his friend, "Alas, poor Yorick!  I knew him, Horatio." (V, 1, 190-1)


Alice, while not as verbally adept as Hamlet, has many episodes where words play a significant role during her journeys both in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.  It is the latter that has a moment that has captured my fancy over the years when she meets Humpty Dumpty.  After unsuccessfully attempting  to engage Humpty in conversation, she is asked for "your name and your business".

"'My name is Alice, but----'
'It's a stupid name enough!' Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently.  'What does it mean?'
'Must a name mean something?' Alice asked doubtfully.
'Of course it must,' Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: 'my name means the shape I am--and a good handsome shape it is, too.  With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.'" (p 186)
This leads Alice and Humpty Dumpty into a lengthy discussion about words and age (Alice's) and birthdays, but leading back to words, whereupon we have this wonderful passage:
"'I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously.  'Of course you don't--till I tell you.  I meant "there's a knock-down argument for you!"'
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be the master---that's all.'" (p 190)

Alice is puzzled by this and you may be as well, but Humpty Dumpty has a point that is worth considering, for just as names may be natural (like Humpty Dumpty's) or conventional (like Alice's) our words have meanings that sometimes seem to have a life of their own, unless we take control.

In conclusion I would suggest that both Hamlet and Carroll's classics take on a different appearance when considered in light of each other.  They both share differences and similarities and at the bottom raise questions that keep readers returning to ponder the delights of them as living works of literature that speak to us today and will still do so tomorrow.  

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll. Oxford World Classics, 1971 (1866, 1872)
The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare. Folger Shakespeare Library, 1992 (1603).

Themes in Shakespeare and Carroll

Hamlet and Alice



Gertrude. Why seems it so particular with thee? 
Hamlet. "Seems," madam? Nay, it is; I know not "seems."
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black, 
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, 
Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, 
That can denote me truly: these indeed seem, 
For they are actions that a man might play: 
But I have that within which passeth show; 

These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (75-90)


What is Hamlet's problem?  Almost fifty years since my first reading of Hamlet I am once again reading this tragedy that is nothing if not pregnant with questions worthy of my personal pondering and group discussions.  At the same time as part of my "Summer" reading I am rereading a personal favorite that I have known even longer than Hamlet--Lewis Carroll's twin delights: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.  You may wonder what these apparently different works of literature have in common.  After all, one is a tragic drama and the others are flights of fancy.  Yet peering underneath the veneer of comedy in one and tragedy in the other we may, in fact we will, find some shared themes.

Let us consider a couple of possible common themes.  One that is important to these works is the question of knowledge.  What is the status of knowledge: who knows what and, more importantly, how do we know anything?  In the opening paragraph of Wonderland Alice thinks, "what is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?"  One possibility is the book as a source of knowledge and Alice almost immediately demonstrates her interest in knowledge and learning as she is described as "bursting with curiosity" as she runs after the White Rabbit.  As she follows him down the rabbit-hole she is reminded of knowledge and learning from the book-shelves and maps to her memory of school lessons and the thought that this might be an opportunity for her to practice "showing off her knowledge", even though she thinks to herself it is not the most opportune moment for doing so.  Thus knowledge is present as a motif at the beginning of Carroll's story;  at least knowledge of the book-learning sort, and its corollary  curiosity, without which humans might not gain much knowledge.  
Turning to Hamlet, and again focusing on the beginning of the play, we also are presented with questions of knowledge as the soldiers are determined to show Horatio that their knowledge of the presence of a ghost is not merely "our fantasy" but a very real apparition that he may "approve our eyes" with his own knowledge of it.  The reference to their eyes reminds me of the famous opening line of Aristotle's Metaphysics where he states:  "ALL men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; " (Metaphysics, I, 1).

Before we have exited the first chapter of Wonderland we find Alice thinking again (she does quite a lot of this early on because there is no one with whom to converse) about pretending to be two people:  "But it's no use no to pretend to be two people!  Why there's hardly enough left of me to make one respectable person."  I mention this moment (when she had shrunk to the size of a mouse) because it seems to presage the theme of identity that flourishes in the next chapter where we encounter a larger-than-life Alice who  is bemoaning that dilemma when she wonders herself into the ultimate question:  "Who in the world am I?"  This puzzle will continue to haunt her throughout Wonderland and into the Looking-Glass while she carries with her that pesky curiosity which led her down the rabbit-hole in the first place.
But is Hamlet so different from Alice? In scene two of the second act we have the first of Hamlet's great soliloquies where he bemoans his ability to act for he "can say nothing".  He wonders if he is a coward.  In his doubt  he begins to question who he is and will soon be seen by Claudius and Gertrude as confused and possibly mad and certainly unlike the Hamlet they know.  Questions of identity will arise again and again intertwined with self-doubt.  Perhaps in his intelligence Hamlet's identity questions will be much deeper and darker than those of poor Alice, but as humans adrift in worlds turned upside down they both are experiencing aspects of the same issue of identity.

Here we see two important themes begun that are shared by both Hamlet and Alice.  There will undoubtedly be others, but for now I will return to my reading and promise more commentary on these works in the near future.

Postmodern Alice

Automated Alice

by Jeff Noon

"'Do you really think that life is a game, Alice?  Well, let me tell you: life is a lesson to be hard-earned!  I don't suppose you've finished you're latest lesson, about the correct usage of an ellipsis?'
 'An ellipsis, Great Aunt Ermintrude,' began Alice quite confidently, 'is a series of three dots at the end of an unfinished sentence, which implies a certain omittance of words, a certain lingering doubt . . .'" (p 219)


As someone who has loved Lewis Carroll's Alice stories since he was a very young boy I must say that I found Jeff Noon's amusing novel, Automated Alice both clever and funny, very funny. The whimsy begins with computermites and seems to be infinite before the book is over. 
Poor Alice is alone, bored, and sleepy in her Great Aunt Ermintrude's house in rainy Manchester, but she is quickly swept away into another world as she follows Whippoorwill, "a green-and-yellow-plumed parrot with a bright orange beak", up and away into the mechanism of  an old grandfather clock.  The reader, along with Alice, never has a chance to look back.  
If I have any complaint with the novel, it is that like a Viennese chocolate torte it was too sweet and before the end of the book my head began to feel like it does when I have overdosed on sugar. Curiously the capriciousness speeds along at a pace which is fast and faster, to the point where I began to feel my mind spinning. It reminded me of the Red Queen's admonition to Alice : “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” (Through the Looking Glass).
It is all tremendously amusing when you find yourself laughing out loud on almost every page and you are mystified by the circumlocutions and wordplay that is positively preternatural. This is a book for all who love puns, riddles, titillating moments filled with uncommon literary references that lend the text a postmodern sheen. Some call this novel an instance of cyberpunk fiction, but I merely suggest that all who dare explore the world of speculative fiction will find this a delightful novel.


Automated Alice by Jeff Noon. Crown Publishers, New York. 1996

Literary Blog Hop

Here's the question this week courtesy of  The Blue Bookcase:



What work of literature would you recommend to someone who doesn't like literature? 


This is an interesting question and I welcome the opportunity to share an approach to it.  First, I would want to know why someone does not like literature?  Perhaps they do not know what literature is or they do not want to read anything.  Whatever the reason, my suggestion is to look to literature that has been read and enjoyed by readers of all ages for a long time.  Whether they are called classics or "the Canon" or something else they hold an appeal for readers that can persuade someone who claims to not like literature.  There is a huge variety to  choose from so for a start I would recommend not one, but two of  my personal favorites, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.  The latter is a story that won readers among children like the little girl who inspired Charles Dodgson to write it, but it is definitely a book for all ages as I have found rereading it as an adult it has, like most classics, new surprises and wonders for the adult reader.  Alice is a marvelous young heroine and it is easy to become immersed in her quandaries as she puzzles her way through Wonderland:

“I wonder if I've been changed in the night. Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland



And as a work of literature that demonstrates the power of words and the love of language of the author there are few better than this.  However, for the reader that might be more interested in a tale of young girl who learns to live and love in the British countryside there is Jane Eyre.  Her indomitable spirit and the way she negotiates the vicissitudes of  life make for a great read -- one that is sure to reach the heart of any person who claims to not like literature.

A Belated Literary Blog Hop 

Last weekend The Blue Bookcase  hosted the literary blog hop by posing this question-


What setting (time or place) from a book or story would you most like to visit? Eudora Welty said that, "Being shown how to locate, to place, any account is what does most toward making us believe it...," so in what location would you most like to hang out?


My first reaction to this question was to begin a catalogue, in my mind, of the possibilities which are undoubtedly endless: for the combinations of time, place, and distance are limited only by my imagination if not by my reading, which fortunately is finite but ongoing.  So, ruling out imagined places which will no doubt appear in future reading my first choice was to go back to the early days of my reading and choose a place that I have visited again and again over the years -- it must be one of my favorites.  That is the world of Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.  This sequel to his famous Adventures of Alice in Wonderland (another place high on my list) is a world that is worthy of subsequent magical imagists like Borges, who was also very good at creating imaginary worlds.  In my visit I would of course want to travel with the always inquisitive Alice, encountering a world of things that could be seen through the glass and  are thus merely reversed.  This being the first stage in a natural progression in the evolution of higher understanding. The reader restrains rather than indulges his appetites. He enhances his consciousness at the expense of his daily awareness. What fun!


Thought of such a visit brings to mind favorite moments playing chess, but none so wonderful as Alice's journey and encounters with wild characters including Queens.  I often feel that is as hard to make progress as felt by Alice when confronted by the speed of the Red Queen - I must run faster.  


If I tire of this visit I might continue my chess journey into the future world of John Brunner described in his Squares of the City: "Built in the heart of the jungle, The City was an architect's masterpiece -- the scene of a flesh and blood game of chess where the unwitting pawns were real people!"  





This sociological story of urban class warfare and political intrigue, takes place in the fictional South American capital city of Vados. In this world subliminal messages are used as political tools.  The story is most notable for having the structure of the famous 1892 chess game between Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin.  A far distance from the whirlwind of Carroll's mirrored universe, but it sounds quite exciting.  If I survived these visits I might appreciate even more the comfort of my favorite reading chair where, under the brightness of my reading lamp, I could journey through place and time in the safety of my own home.

Favorite of the Imagination

Lewis Carroll

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twoice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?" (Opening lines of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)


Lewis Carroll died on this day in 1898, aged sixty-five. He has been a favorite author of mine since I first read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland while I was still in grade school.  Fortunately the edition I had included the beautiful illustrations by Tenniel unlike the books poor Alice found her sister reading.  No one made me read Carroll and I grew to enjoy both Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass.  There was much poetry interlaced among the prose of these stories but Carroll also published several collections of poetry — parodies, occasional poems, and the sort of playful, oddball verse that abounds in his more famous books. Many of the collected poems reflect Carroll’s love of words and word games; some of them seem written as if in hope of getting boxed in by a rhyme scheme, in order to find a way to wriggle out. In “Melancholetta,” the speaker laments that his sister — Carroll had several — is forever weeping and woe-ing. In a brotherly attempt to end her sniffling, he sets up an evening out — dinner and a play, all in cheery company:


I asked three gay young dogs from town
To join us in our folly,
Whose mirth, I thought, might serve to drown
My sister's melancholy:
The lively Jones, the sportive Brown,
And Robinson the jolly.


As the appetizers are trotted in, the lively Jones does his conversational best, the brother throws up his hands, and the tap of despair drips on:


Vainly he strove, with ready wit,
To joke about the weather -
To ventilate the last 'ON DIT' -
To quote the price of leather -
She groaned "Here I and Sorrow sit:
Let us lament together!"
I urged "You're wasting time, you know:
Delay will spoil the venison."
"My heart is wasted with my woe!
There is no rest--in Venice, on
The Bridge of Sighs!" she quoted low
From Byron and from Tennyson.


A good place to find these and other of Carroll's writings is in the Modern Library edition of The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll.

Top Ten Reads of 2010

My list of favorite books read in 2010 (updated from earlier in the year) includes more than three dozen books (and not everything I read made that list).  But I thought I would try to whittle the list down to the top ten that I read last year.  So here it is in no particular order:

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The best dystopian novel I have read in a long time and a reminder of the power of this author to impress this reader.

2. Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonard Tsypkin. 

Tsypkin's novel mesmerizes with two stories that enthrall with emotion and truth. A taut gem of historical fiction and a doppelganger of style.

3. The Knife Man by Wendy Moore.

Wendy Moore's biography of Dr. John Hunter, The Knife Man, captures one man's contribution to the Enlightenment and modern surgical medicine.

4. Time Regained by Marcel Proust

The final volume of In Search of Lost Time chronicles the years of World War I, when, as M. de Charlus reflects on a moonlit walk, Paris threatens to become another Pompeii. Years later, after the war's end, Proust's narrator returns to Paris, where Mme. Verdurin has become the Princesse de Guermantes. He reflects on time, reality, jealousy, artistic creation, and the raw material for literature-his past life.

5. Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk.

Capturing a sense of the Istanbul of memory and tradition, Pamuk  juxtaposes it with the Istanbul as seen by outsiders, especially the literary lights that visited Istanbul over the years, Pamuk creates a rich texture for his story of the memories and city. This is a unique look at one of the great centers of civilization. 

6. Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

Aurelius presents the tenets that underlie the stoic philosophy he learned from his teachers including a discussion of the importance of your duty both to your own nature and that of the whole universe..

7. The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano. 

While all fiction emanates from the imagination and this novel is rare that a work successfully mimics the language of dreams..

8. Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum. 

The story of a man of more than fifty years old who caps his career with a world-spanning sailing trip that still has power to grip the reader's imagination today. .

9. Call Me by Your name by Andre Aciman. 

With emphasis on the erotic, he has created an almost Proustian meditation on time and desire, a love letter, an invocation in words that one must call simply "beautiful". 

10. Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford.

In a narrative beginning before the war and ending after the armistice, Ford's project is to situate an unimaginable cataclysm within a social, moral and psychological complexity. The result is a modern literary project that rivals those of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time or, more aptly, Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy.

I am reluctant to stop at ten best since I enjoyed many other books during the year, but this is enough of a retrospective for one cold January day.  Let's all move on to the great reads of the new year!

Poems for the Season

"Solstice"

The wind has a chill -
It is now solstice time.
So let us have our fill
Of a good winter wine!

- James Henderson, 2009

"Christmas Greeting"

...as Christmas-tide comes round,
They remember it again -
Echo still the joyful sound
Peace on earth, good-will to men!
Thus, forgetting tricks and play
For a moment, Lady dear,
We would wish you, if we may,
Merry Christmas, Glad New Year!

- Lewis Carroll

Books and Childhood

Children's Literature

Last night I attended a lecture by Seth Lerer, Professor of English at Stanford University, on Children's Literature.
He explored the iconic books, ancient and contemporary alike, that have forged a lifelong love of literature in young readers during their formative years.
His book, Children's Literature, charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop's fables to Mother Goose, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, from Where the Wild Things Are to Harry Potter. In his lively lecture Professor Lerer connected the current Newberry exhibit, Artifacts of Childhood, with his observations on the changing environments of family life and human growth, schooling and scholarship, and publishing and politics in which children found themselves changed by the books they read. The references to literature of childhood over the ages, many of which I was unaware of, were made fascinating by his witty, yet scholarly, observations. I look forward to reading his book.

Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter by Seth Lerer. University of Chicago Press, 2008.