This goal of mine to
read all the books in that 1,001 list
of mine is definitely a stretching goal.
I’ve been surprised and pleased at how many of them I’ve genuinely
liked. I was expecting to hate many of
them—and that may yet be the case when I start really digging into the
Twentieth Century picks. As it is,
though, here are three that I managed to get through over the holidays:
Aesop’s Fables.
Best of the three here. There are
tales that many people would be familiar with, like “The Grasshopper and the
Ants,” in which the grasshopper plays music the whole summer long but when
winter comes starves, while the ants who worked all summer long survived the
winter.
There were over two
hundred fables in the book I read, and what struck me was the great pessimism
shadowing the animal tales. It’s common
for the protagonists to die, and whether they deserve their fates or not, the
ends seem inevitable.
Especially harsh,
though, are the maxims. One of the
earliest fables, four beasts agreed to divide their kills equally, but when it
comes time to dividing their plunder, the lion takes it all. The maxim: Might makes right.
The value of Aesop’s Fables is not so much in their
moral value, but in its observational use.
“Might makes right” is morally reprehensible, but in the world, it is
the strong who tend to make the rules.
If the reader learns from Aesop’s observations, we can understand the
nature and behavior of society and the individuals who contribute to it.
Beyond that, these
stories are very clever. My favorite
fable is not an animal tale, but one about Aesop when he was a slave. The slave Aesop requested the lightest basket
to carry on a journey. He was allowed to
have first choice, so he picked the breadbasket. At first, all his fellow-slaves mocked him
because the breadbasket was the heaviest of all. In the middle of the trip, though, all the bread
was eaten and Aesop got to carry an empty basket the rest of the journey.
That may be the
cleverest thing I’ve read all year.
Siddhartha.
Herman Hesse’s spiritualistic novella is quite enlivening. It examines the life of the eponymous
Siddhartha, a young Brahmin who joins the ascetic Samanas, meets the Buddha,
decides to live a wordly life of material and sexual pleasures, renounces his
wealth, becomes a ferryman, faces rejection by a son he never knew, and at the
end of life has attained enlightenment, a kind of awakening to the universe.
I experienced this
book on two levels: the first as a fictional biography, a style of story I’ve
quite enjoyed over the years. The first
time I recall running into this sort of story was Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, and shortly after with
Orson Scott Card’s Songmaster. Each story takes a character and follows them
from their entry into the world until their death. (I say entry instead of birth, because it’s
not crucial that we watch them grow up.
The story starts when they embark to achieve a goal.)
I’m fascinated by
watching the progress of a person from a young stage in life grow and change
over the course of their existence. I
love to see the catalysts and reasons for why they choose a certain path and later
discover reasons for their being on the wrong one and so run down another.
Such stories make me
contemplate the directions my life has headed in. They make me see what changes I’ve made and
make me wonder about what new directions and views I’ll hold in the future,
what revelations I’ll discover. These
fictional biographies give me a taste and make me ponder the beauty,
complexity, and grandeur of life. That Siddhartha is also such a short book
only adds to its achievement.
The second level, Siddhartha is also a quest story. Just as Santiago from Paul Coelho’s The Alchemist goes on a quest and has
many adventures on his search for treasure, so too does Siddhartha have many
adventures and experiences that are really checkpoints on his long quest for enlightenment.
That story works well
and is interesting. Unfortunately, the
quest story fell short for me, if only because I really don’t appreciate the
treasure he gains at the end. Siddhartha’s
enlightenment is that he discovered word “Om” bound everything together, all
the pain, pleasures, sorrows, and cares, and all the lives were bound together
in that sacred word.
It’s a lovely
expression, but because I don’t belong in that culture and have a different
concept of unity in the universe, this climactic moment didn’t have the same
power over me that it had for the story’s hero.
But that’s the trouble
with any story of spiritual journey. If
you already belong to that belief system, it’s going to touch your soul and
affirm all you’ve accepted before. If
you’re searching for something more, than perhaps this kind of story will lead
you to discover a deep truth unknown to you before. But if you’re in neither camp, you can
appreciate the journey for what it is, but you won’t feel a part of it. There’s a wall between you and what that
story is trying to convey.
In the end, I liked it
well enough, but it really didn’t mean very much to me. But that shouldn’t deter you from looking at
it and seeing if it won’t sing straight to you heart.
A Tale of Two Cities.
I have two pieces of advice for people who don’t consider themselves
readers. First, find what you love and
read that, and keep reading what you love until you consider yourself to be a
reader. Second, once you are a reader,
challenge yourself.
I’ve considered a
reader all my life, and I have been pushing myself to improve my talent for
years. I’ve read a great variety over
the years: scripture, mystery, science fiction, military history, fantasy,
science, biographies, classics, poetry, short fiction, and cereal boxes. There isn’t a lot in the way of the written
word that terrifies me.
Classics least of
all. I was reading Shakespeare in the
fourth grade. Jane Austen, Mark Twain,
and Edgar Allen Poe are favorite authors of mine. I’ve plugged away at the overwritten Moby Dick and Les Miserables without breaking a sweat. I thought The
Brothers Karamazov to be lively.
For reasons that
continue to baffle me, Charles Dickens is a challenge. I’ve started and never finished Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and Bleak
House. I finally got through A Christmas Carol, but only because it’s
short and it still took two attempts.
When my book club
picked A Tale of Two Cities, I met
this with excitement and trepidation. I
knew because it’s a book club book that I’d be able to hunker down and finish
this one. Deep inside, though, I knew it
would be a push.
Part of the difficulty
with Two Cities is the lack of a
central character. You could say that
it’s about Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton, the man who is sentenced to be
executed during the French Revolution and the man who takes his place,
respectively. Yet Darnay gets fewer
pages devoted to him than Lucie, Dr. Manette, Jarvis Lorry, and the
Defarges. And Sydney Carton goes missing
for the bulk of the story until he performs his eleventh-hour rescue.
In short, this was an
all-star cast story, all of them bound together by the most spectacular of
coincidences. It’s the kind of epic I
tend to enjoy the most, but it was difficult this time because with all the
events taking place, I barely felt invested with a character before Dickens
moved onto somebody else with little hint as to whether this person was going to
be a major or minor character.
The benefit to this is
that everyone really does get to be the hero of their own story. The problem is that there is barely time to
really connect with anybody. In fact, I
found that the less time spent with a character, the more attached to
them. Sydney Carter has two chapters
total that explores his perspective, and yet his personality, pain, and longing
for unrequited love stuck with me.
Then there were the
endless time spent among reprehensible people and long, historical drafts spent
with the ruthless Defarges and an abusive and whiny grave robber.
The only truly moving
part of this book, that I feel has made this book last over a century, is the
last page when Sydney Carter looks into the future and sees the fruits of his
sacrifice. It’s a great payoff, but it
takes a long time to come and I almost dropped off before I got there.
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