Best of Everything: Books

Hey folks, sorry for the delay in posting. Had to say goodbye to my "bestest" graduate school buddy yesterday and his family was here so I did that whole thing and thus had no time to post. I wasn't around Sunday either because I went up to Bellwood for a pre-Christmas Christmas at my girlfriend's family's house. Poppy Montgomery is sorry, and I am too. Apologies aside, on with the post.

This week is a big week for Veritas Lux Mea, culminating in the arrival of the Goose family on Saturday and the departure of the Goose with said family on Sunday. It's been great Pennysylvania, but I can't say I'm going to miss the Keystone State.

Regardless, such a big week calls for a big series, perhaps the best, which is why all this week I'm featuring the Best Of Everything Series, beginning today with "Reads." Instead of doing a Top-50 albums or songs, because this blog does not feature music exclusively but all sorts of politics, sports, hollywood and what-not, I will be featuring a little bit of everything in the "Best Of" series:

Wednesday: Hump Day Spectacular - Best of Women and Sports Thursday: Best of Music Friday: Best of 2005

Tune in tomorrow and all week for the rest of the series.

Has anyone else seen this deal from Wendys? Looks like I'm eating Wendy's everyday til Christmas. CS Monitor also has a story on the Wendy's airline extravaganza.

From the Times Online, a pretty interesting piece by Salman Rushdie on the culture debate.

As if you needed another reason to love Matthew McConaughey. I sure don't.

Music

Spoon is on Carson Daly tonight. CYHSY on Conan Friday.

Some Interpol:

PDA
Stella Was a Driver and She Was Always Down
Hands Away
NYC
Roland

Pitchfork's review of Interpol's Black EP

Great Classics (courtesy of Keyzer Soze). All of these songs remind me of college for one reason or another:

Bob Marley - "Buffalo Soldier"
CCR - "Bad Moon Rising"
Prince - "Purple Rain"
Don Mclean - "American Pie"

Featured Track: Plus 44 - "No It Isn't"

Blink-182's Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker have unveiled the first song from their new project, Plus 44. The band also includes Carol Heller, formerly of Get the Girl. The new group formed when their former band went on an indefinite hiatus. They plan to release their full length debut next summer.

Plus 44 - "No It Isn't"

Best of Everything: Reads


Part 1 in my Best of Everything Series kicks off with the one thing I am more acquainted with than anything: literature. I realize "reads" isn't exactly the King's english but I want to talk about more than books, so reads fits well. Being a graduate English major, I'm pretty sure I spend more time with books than I do with living, breathing people. By any means that does not make me an expert or anyone you should listen to, but I have read a helluva lot of books, and I've picked out a couple of good ones here and there, so if you're looking for some holiday shopping ideas or just want to brush up on your reads over Christmas break, here's a few you might want to consider:

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

Never having known a mother, her mother had died when Janey was a year old, Janey depended on her father for everything and regarded her father as boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father

Joseph Conrad, Victory

Heyst, a Swedish Baron, was known in the East Indies as a character, a perfect gentleman and a dreamer. For years he drifted harmlessly around the islands, until a failed business venture ties him to Samburan. He emerges from his exile only to steal Lena, a violinist traveling with the Ladies' Orchestra; his rival sends three outlaws to his island hideaway, now become the setting for a final duel of character. Victory (1915) is diverse in its themes, radical in it analysis and strange in its combination of realism, allegory, symbolism and melodrama.

Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco

McTeague (1899) chronicles the demise of a San Francisco couple at the end of the nineteenth century. Inspired by an actual crime that was sensationalized in the San Francisco papers, it tells the story of charlatan dentist McTeague, his wife Trina, and their spiralling descent into moral corruption. Norris is often considered to be the 'American Zola', and this is one of the most purely naturalistic American novels of the nineteenth century. With its compelling portrayal of human nature at its most basic level, McTeague is a gripping and passionate tale of greed, degeneration, and death. It is also one of the first major works of literature to be set in California, and it provided the story for Erich von Stroheim's classic of the silent screen, Greed

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

While Mark Twain is most often identified with his childhood home on the Mississippi, he wrote many of his enduring classics during the years he lived in Hartford, Connecticut. He had come a long way from Hannibal when he focused his irreverent humor on medieval tales, and wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The hit on the head that sent protagonist Hank Morgan back through 13 centuries did not affect his natural resourcefulness. Using his knowledge of an upcoming eclipse, Hank escapes a death sentence, and secures an important position at court. Gradually, he introduces 19th century technology so the clever Morgan soon has an easy life. That does not stop him from making disparaging, tongue-in-cheek remarks about the inequalities and imperfections of life in Camelot. Twain weaves many of the well-known Arthurian characters into his story, and he includes a pitched battle between Morgan's men and the nobility.

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs."

Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. ("Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.") But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso--who mistakes him for a vagrant--and then involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.

Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Darlene and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave through A Confederacy of Dunces are as complicated as anything you'll find in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in the end. But it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than life--who carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life.

Jessica Alba likes to read

Churck Palahniuk, Choke

Victor Mancini is a ruthless con artist. Victor Mancini is a med-school dropout who's taken a job playing an Irish indentured servant in a colonial-era theme park in order to help care for his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother. Victor Mancini is a sex addict. Victor Mancini is a direct descendant of Jesus Christ. All of these statements about the protagonist of Choke are more or less true. Welcome, once again, to the world of Chuck Palahniuk.

"Art never comes from happiness." So says Mancini's mother only a few pages into the novel. Given her own dicey and melodramatic style of parenting, you would think that her son's life would be chock-full of nothing but art. Alas, that's not the case. In the fine tradition of Oedipus, Stephen Dedalus, and Anthony Soprano, Victor hasn't quite reconciled his issues with his mother. Instead, he's trawling sexual-addiction recovery meetings for dates and purposely choking in restaurants for a few moments of attention. Longing for a hug, in other words, he's settling for the Heimlich.

Thematically, this is pretty familiar Palahniuk territory. It would be a pity to disclose the surprises of the plot, but suffice it to say that what we have here is a little bit of Tom Robbins's Another Roadside Attraction, a little bit of Don DeLillo's The Day Room, and, well, a little bit of Fight Club. Just as with Fight Club and the other two novels under Palahniuk's belt, we get a smattering of gloriously unflinching sound bites, including this skeptical bit on prayer chains: "A spiritual pyramid scheme. As if you can gang up on God. Bully him around."

Whether this is the novel that will break Palahniuk into the mainstream is hard to say. For a fourth book, in fact, the ratio of iffy, "dude"-intensive dialogue to interesting and insightful passages is a little higher than we might wish. In the end, though, the author's nerve and daring pull the whole thing off--just barely. And what's next for Victor Mancini's creator? Leave the last word to him, declaring as he does in the final pages: "Maybe it's our job to invent something better.... What it's going to be, I don't know."

Jay McInerney, The Last of the Savages

Affirming and wise, McInerney's latest (after Brightness Falls) opens in a setting familiar to other extraordinary American novels: the ivy-swaddled campus of a New England boarding school. Here, two students meet as roommates in the mid-1960s: Will Savage, a quixotic Southern bad boy bewitched by the blues, and Patrick Keane, the more reserved and ambitious narrator, bent on defying his humble origins. The two form one of youth's unlikely yet intangible friendships, permanently tethering their quite different paths. Will scours the back roads of the Delta for blues, quickly emerging as a player in the booming record industry, while Patrick grinds his way to the top of the country's elite academic and legal institutions. As Will disavows his old-fashioned, wealthy father, Patrick finds in the patriarch a beguiling mentor. Will is a radiant character?the sort of self-consuming talent who sinks his teeth into life's fruit while the rest of us wait in line?the sort we look upon, as Patrick does, with a volatile mix of admiration, pique and envy. With the humanity of an older man, yet with an accuracy that trips nerves long left for dead, Patrick recalls bygone days when, as he says at the end of this warm, wondrously empathetic work, "I knew, at least for a little while, what it was like to be free."

Toni Morrison, Beloved

In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved.

A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret--these are the central concerns of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Morrison, a Nobel laureate, has written many fine novels, including Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Paradise--but Beloved is arguably her best. To modern readers, antebellum slavery is a subject so familiar that it is almost impossible to render its horrors in a way that seems neither clichéd nor melodramatic. Rapes, beatings, murders, and mutilations are recounted here, but they belong to characters so precisely drawn that the tragedy remains individual, terrifying to us because it is terrifying to the sufferer. And Morrison is master of the telling detail: in the bit, for example, a punishing piece of headgear used to discipline recalcitrant slaves, she manages to encapsulate all of slavery's many cruelties into one apt symbol--a device that deprives its wearer of speech. "Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye." Most importantly, the language here, while often lyrical, is never overheated. Even as she recalls the cruelties visited upon her while a slave, Sethe is evocative without being overemotional: "Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft--hiding close by--the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn't look at at all. And not stopping them--looking and letting it happen.... And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now." Even the supernatural is treated as an ordinary fact of life: "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby," comments Sethe's mother-in-law.

Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe's history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby's death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe's daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion.

Others:
William Faulkner, A Light in August
High Fidelity
Anything by Chuck Palahniuk
Anything by David Sedaris
Orwell 1984

"Best Of" Lists (Highly Recommended)

Theory

Hans Bertens, Literary Theory: The Basics

Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, Theory, (Post)Modernity, Opposition: An "Other" Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory

Best Men's Magazine

Men's Health

Runner up: Esquire
Second Runner Up: Razor

Best (favorite) Poets
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Bukowski
e.e.cummings
Philip Larkin
Pablo Neruda
Rainer Maria Rilke
James Wright
Wallace Stevens