Book 61-The Age of Innocence (96th Book)

The Age of Innocence is the 61st book of my Novel 100  challenge and the first book I read for the challenge in 2015. I found this book easy to read, but lacking in interest. The story flowed well and the characters were interesting, but I wasn't wowed by the book. I was, however, quite interested in the theme which was a retrospective on New York in the 1870s.

The Age of Innocence details the lives of Newland Archer, May Welland and May's cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska. Newland is engaged to be married to May when her much more unpredictable cousin Ellen appears on the scene. Newland has started to have unconventional views about the social mores of New York Society and he finds these mirrored in Ellen's thoughts and lifestyle.  Here are a few of the things that he thought: "Women ought to be free-as free as we are." and "marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted sea." Although May is everything society would want for him, he is attracted to Ellen for her unpredictable nature. The affair is never to be carried out however, and the novel follows Newland as he grapples with his own beliefs and the society that would hold him back.

I found this novel very intriguing because it is about unconsummated love. I was reminded of a paper I wrote in university on courtly love in the middle ages. Courtship amongst knights and ladies of the time was seen to be at it's highest ideal if it was never consummated. Knights would fight wars and win battles in the name of their chosen lady, but their feelings were supposedly devoid of physical desire. Some of the knights had never even met their chosen lady and only corresponded with them through letters. This novel follows along those lines because even after May dies and Countess Olenska's estranged husband has passed away Newland prefers to hold on to the ideal of his attraction for Ellen rather than the consummation of it. "I can't love you unless I give you up." The novel closes as Newland sits on a park bench outside of Ellen's house while his son goes in to dinner  with her.  He slowly walks away as a servant comes out to close the blinds.

According to Daniel S. Burt in The Novel 100 readers of Edith Wharton's time did not pick up on the ironic nature of the novel and were convinced that Newland did the right thing in conforming to society's views and marrying May. It is clear as a modern reader that Wharton meant for the novel to be a scathing and ironic depiction of New York in 1870. It is interesting how novels are seen as time goes on. This was one of those rare novels that did well in it's own time and continues to do well today.  Although it has lost some of its meaning as time has gone on it is still represented as a classic novel.

I am little nervous about book 62, "The Good Soldier" since I am not a fan of war. The thing I like about this challenge is it is forcing me to read things I would never have picked up.

Book 60- The Counterfeiters (95th Book)

My last book of 2014 was The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide. I quite liked this book as I read it and I loved the themes! It was a book, within a book, within a book. What I mean is the book is about an author writing a book about writing a book. Huh?! Yeah, it is as confusing as it sounds. It reminds me a little bit of the movie Inception or The Matrix. The novel is really an investigation of what it takes to write a book and how novels are only the counterfeit to life.

The novel follows several characters some of whom become important some of whom do not. The one mainstay throughout the entire novel is Edouard the novelist who is writing a book called "The Counterfeiters" which is about an author writing a book called "The Counterfeiters". The actual novel that Andre Gide writes includes the journals of Edouard while he is writing his novel. In it he summarizes the actions that other characters take as he tries to find uses for his daily life in his novel. The version of the novel I read also included Gide's journals while he wrote his novel, as well as news articles that inspired parts of his story. It is great to see the writing process so clearly analyzed in the novel.

If you are of a philosophical bent then this is the novel for you. It has several themes in it including many characters who are coming of age and trying to find an identity in the face of real life. "I don't know enough about other people's live to write a novel; and I haven't yet had a life of my own." It also has a theme about the structures that bind us and sometimes shape our identity including religion, family and sexual orientation. "Family egoism, hardly less hideous than personal egoism". It also analyzes the theme of what fiction is and what it does for both the reader and the author. "The novelist does not as a rule rely sufficiently on the readers imagination" There is a lot of stuff jammed into one small novel!

This book is chock full of fantastic quotes about writing. I used to want to be a writer before I realized that I didn't have the internal motivation necessary to plug away at a project of my own accord. I also realized that journalism, which would provide me with deadlines, wasn't a match for my personality. Regardless of all of that, writing will always be a hobby for me and I created The Novel 100 project to give me structure and a purpose to keep writing. As such, the quotes about writing really stuck out for me.

"It sometimes seems to me that writing prevents one from living, and that one can express oneself better by acts than by words"

"...making a novel about ideas instead of about human beings?"

"Yes I know, it sounds stupid. Let's say, if you prefer it, it hasn't got one subject...'a slice of life'"

I don't know if I will ever write a novel, but as an avid reader I like when authors explore what writing does for people. I have had a lot of epiphanies from novelists accurately capturing life. It is much easier to see a situation or problem when you see it represented outside of yourself.

Although this book doesn't have a very high rating for me (I only gave it three stars) I did like it. I think the trouble with my  project is that I have refined my tastes to such a point that I can now rate a book on many things. I am learning to grade novels on a curve. Not all books are going to get a 4 or 5 star rating from me. As the list of novels I have read grows, I think there will be far less 5 star novels  and a whole lot of  "middle of the road" or 3 star books for me.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (94th Book)

Sherlock Holmes is a character that has stood the test of time. I had some time to kill after reading My Antonia and I decided I should tackle Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character as he actually wrote him. I am obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, but I recently realized that I haven't actually read the REAL books. I have watched several Sherlock Holmes movies and TV shows. BBC's Sherlock being the best and an Asylum movie "Sherlock Holmes" from 2010 being the worst....it involved dinosaurs and was as cheesily horrible as one can imagine.

I have also read just about every novel adaptation you can think of including "The Baker Street Letters", "The Sherlockian", the Mary Russell series and "The Art of Deception".

I have even visited "221B Baker Street" or the Sherlock Holmes Museum while on a trip to London.

All this and yet I have never been formally introduced to the man by the author himself! I started my novel 100 challenge because I believed there would be many free novels that were available on my kobo that had become public domain. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes just so happened to be one of these novels. This was an excellent read! I was not let down and thoroughly enjoyed the little puzzles that filled this compilation of short stories. This book includes such famous stories of the "Red Headed League" and "A Scandal in Bohemia". I see why the world went crazy over this intelligent detective.

One of the adaption novels that I read ,"The Sherlockian", gave me some insight into Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the history of the infamous detective. Apparently Conan Doyle grew to hate Sherlock Holmes whose fame greatly exceeded his own! This novel followed a group of Sherlock enthusiasts as they try to solve the murder of one of their own, a man who had just announced he had found the lost diary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This novel pointed out why Sherlock was so accessible to people. Doctor Watson is nothing more than a plot aid to make Holmes accessible to the masses by allowing the overly intelligent detective to tell their bumbling assistant how they figured out the crime. I realized that this is a common tool in mystery novels including one of my other favourite Victorian detectives, Poirot by Agatha Christie. In her novels, Captain Hastings, does the work of Doctor Watson quite nicely! (Speaking of which I just finished an adaptation of Poirot called the Monogram Murders which wasn't too bad.)

At any rate. I LOVE Victorian mystery novels I am happy to say I have joined the ranks  of people who have actually read Sherlock Holmes. I immediately went and downloaded all the rest of novels and short stories and will hopefully find time to get to know the REAL Sherlock Holmes personally.

Book 59- My Antonia

Ah nostalgia! My Antonia by Willa Cather is a book about the things from our past that shape our lives and stick with us forever. Willa Cather set the novel in her childhood state of Nebraska, a place that very few if any novels deign to  talk about. The version of the story that I read included a foreword  that likened My Antonia to a quote by Virgil "For I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country". I do feel very nostalgic about my little hometown while still looking forward to the future. I have yet to write a novel, but perhaps one day I will do justice to my tiny island upbringing...

As far as novels go this one was not bad. I read it in fits and starts, hunkering down and reading large chunks  of the novel and then abandoning it for days. It took me almost the entire month to read this novel as a result.

As far as nostalgic fiction goes, it was pretty good, but it could never beat Laura Ingalls Wilder's books including Little House on the Prairie. I have very distinct memories of reading them as a tween just becoming a woman. I had a vintage boxed set that I picked up at a garage sale from back in the day when I regularly visited garage sales with my mom and aunt. Perhaps they are so poignant for me as a result of being tied to my own history. Hmm.

This novel has some great quotes in it about childhood and memories:

"I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest of people"

"...this had been the road of destiny, had taken us to those early accidents of fortunate which predetermined for us all that we can ever be"

"the best of days are the first to flee"

The novel does a very good job of describing a scene and I can't tell you  how many times I could feel just what the author was describing as though I was right there. The colours were vibrant, the seasons were clear, the the feelings were very real. This novel is also a novel of storytelling. It includes many little snippets of oral stories told by various characters. Antonia tells several and the narrator is told several more by many different people. I think we are losing a little bit of our oral history in this modern, digital age. For most of us we are lucky if we manage to carry on a conversation face to face with anyone in a given day let alone anything that would include something that resembles passing down our history That makes me sad.

It is often said that writers should write about what they know. This novel proves that point to a tee. No one would probably think that an engaging novel  could be set in Nebraska. Willa Cather definitely set them wrong. I hope to one day use my experiences to create something that is engaging, while still being inimitably me.

As we enter the Christmas season, My Antonia leaves us with two fantastic quotes and reminds me that the symbols of Christmas are deeply important. It also reminds me that no matter what faith we are, there is something deeply beautiful about people acting out of their own personal faith. Speaking of the Christmas Tree they threw together with stuff from around the house:

"Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale, legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches. Grandmother said it reminded her of the Tree of Knowledge"

"The prayers of all good people are good." 

No matter what faith you are I pray that the magic and mystery of the Christmas seasons will find its way into your heart.

2666 (93rd Book)

I thought that the book of the month, The Strangers (154 pages) was too short for my liking so I picked up this behemoth (898 pages) from the Vancouver Public Library to fill the remainder of the month. I almost ran out of time to read both! I think I have been warped forever by this challenge with my perceptions of what a "normal" length for a novel is. I scoff at any book under 300 pages. I never meant to become one of those people...

2666 by Roberto Bolano was a really odd breath of fresh air in a sea of ho hum fiction. What do I mean by that? I was excited to read it, and remained excited to read the novel throughout the entire process despite a really dark topic. The novel follows a series of different, completely unrelated people  who find themselves drawn to the Mexican town of Santa Teresa. It is apparently a picture perfect image of a very real town called Ciudad Juarez. I was horrified to discover that this is a real town since the novel depicts the utterly horrific murders of women over a several year period. Sure enough, I just googled the town, and it is famous for its extremely high numbers of female murders since 1993.

 I randomly chose this novel after recognizing it on the library shelf as a book from the 1001 list. I read the jacket description and was hooked. I love novels that draw extremely disparate people together in an unusual fashion. 2666 has several vastly different groups of people converging on Santa Teresa and meeting similar people and encountering similar things. If you are interested in this type of fiction I have two highly recommended novels for you:

A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher which is a novel in which a young boy is kidnapped from a planetarium. The people that both he and his sister run across in their search to find one another are extremely varied and incredibly fascinating. Take for instance a arachnologist with 8 fingers, a man who owns a huge hotel, and wounded airman and many other interesting individuals. By the end of the novel they are woven together in a most fascinating way that left my breathless and wanting to immediately reread the novel to pick up all the pieces that I might have missed.

The other is Nikolski by Nicholas Dickner (translated by Lazer Lederhendler). This novel follows a set of 3 seemingly unrelated people who all come together at the end of the novel and several repeated images, one of which is a broken compass that points to Nikolski Alaska rather than Magnetic north.

I am not sure why I liked this novel, but I was hooked and wanted to read right until the end to figure out what the hook was. Parts of it are a slog....but they are supposed to be. The novel is broken into 5 sections and the novel, which was published posthumously, was intended to be 5 separate books. The section entitled "The Part about the Crimes" is just shy of 300 pages of horrific deaths of woman many of which remain unsolved.  I struggled there, but at the same time, knowing that the novel was based on a real life town I forced myself to be witness to these tragedies.  I mulled over how a town allows such tragedies to happen, only to realize that BC has a very similar situation with the high number of murder or missing aboriginal woman.

I don't think I fully understand the novel, but the title is a date that lies several years beyond the authors death. Apparently many of his works make reference to this date and what I take from this novel is that it is a treatise on what makes a life worth living. The theme is particularly noticeable in the first section of the novel which follows a series of German literature enthusiasts who are obsessed with the cult author Benno von Archimboldi. This author has never been seen in real life and speculation around his life is the focus of  the group of german literature professors. They travel to Santa Teresa on hearing a report that he booked a ticket to the town and one after another they slowly come to the realization that they have been hiding from real life by their obsession with Archimboldi. Archimboldi is the focus of the 5th part of the novel and there is a lot of discussion around death and what honour and purity mean throughout his story.

What ever the point of the novel is there is so much packed into the novel that it makes for an interesting read, one that I would recommend to anyone that likes a cerebral novel. It isn't terribly good bedtime reading however, and particularly after the section on the dead women, the storyline frequently invaded my dreams. I count this novel as one of the successes of these two challenges in that I would have never picked this novel up if it weren't for my obsession with lists!

Book 58- The Stranger

Book 58 is The Stranger by Albert Camus. The picture to the left is the cover of the hideous thrift store version of the novel that I read from! I had no idea what to think about the novel because I only knew so much about Camus (mostly that he was tied to the Existential philosophy) and nothing about the novel itself. I started the book in high spirits and totally over estimated my ability to plow through novels at a fast pace. I read the first 70 pages at the beginning of the month and then spent the remainder of the month reading the novel 2666 thinking I would have tons of time to read both... I almost didn't make it.

I found The Stranger extremely easy to read and accomplished the task in only two days of actual reading. Throughout the majority of the novel I was reminded heavily of The Trial by Kafka who was one of Camus's influences so this is not surprising. With Mersault's ambivalence with the world the novel has the same confusing feel that The Trial has. In both novels the world feels like it doesn't make sense. The main difference is that while the protagonist in The Trial doesn't understand the world, the protagonist in The Stranger doesn't care about the world. I didn't like the protagonist in this book. I found him callous and uncaring and vaguely sociopathic. He is devoid of feeling and his apathy at his mother death, ends up being his downfall.

I used to identify with the Existential philosophy in university where I first learned about it in a psychology class. I liked the fact that existentialists embraced the inability to know for certain what the world was about. Even as a Christian who holds to some truths strongly, I identified with the idea that meaning is created by each person individually. Seeing the outworking of the philosophy identified in one character, however, I see I only identify with it to a point. While Mersault was fully alive in every moment he was unable to put himself in another's shoes and he was certainly not able to comprehend the consequences of his actions without a great deal of thought.

This novel was not at all what I expected. It is also one of about 6-10 novels that are on The Novel 100 list, but not on the list of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die. I am always curious about the differences between the two lists, but in this case I am satisfied that the larger list made the right choice. I will be curious to read the other novels by Camus on the 1001 list to see if I have a similar reaction to them, but at this point he will not jump to the top of my favourites list.

The other day I was flipping through my former blog posts and realized that I have been working on this list since sometime in August 2010. That means I have been plugging away at this challenge I have set for myself for over 4 years. I looked at the remainder of the list and realized I still have 3.5 years left to go if I continue to read books at my current pace of 1 book a month! This is definitely a long term commitment that I have gotten myself into. Despite all books I have had to slog through I am very grateful that I started this challenge. It has expanded my horizons hugely and I have stumbled upon many unexpected favourites! I would highly recommend that people work through someone else's list of books even if you don't think you will like them.

Book 57- The Princess of Cleves (92nd Book)

The book of the month for September was the Princess of Cleves. I finally got back to the original purpose of my Novel 100 challenge which was to make use of my ereader and take advantage of all the free books that Kobo has to offer; the Princess of Cleves was one of these. This novel is a French novel set in the time of Henry the second. It was written by a women of the court, Madame de Lafayette, although, during her life time it was anonymous. The novel sets itself amongst real historical characters, but follows fictional ones in one of the earliest novels to chronicle a character's psychological conflict.

I enjoyed this novel, but was not wowed by it. The story was an easy read and I found myself flipping the pages quickly. This is apparently a transition for the novel at this period which tended to focus on works that were upwards of 1,000 pages and detailed long winded histories of loosely tied in events. I was grateful for it's brevity!

If you can wade through the first 30-40 pages which place the novel in it's historical setting then the novel is an easy read. The novel starts with the reader thrown into a listing of all the figures that make up the court of the time. I actually flipped back to the beginning of the novel  to check whether or not I was reading the preface since the information was that dry! I struggled to keep the characters straight at the beginning, but once the actual plot began it got a lot easier.

I am not sure what I think of the overall story given that the Princess of Cleves denies herself of the man she loves even after her husband's death. On one hand, it is an honourable thing that she stuck to her principals and the demands that both her mother and dead husband had placed on her. On the other hand, even people of the time were unsure if this was a believable thing for a young woman in her position to do. Apparently there were debates that raged on about the novel, which was a hit even in its own time. As some one of the modern world, I get a bit uncomfortable when novels come across as being  preachy.

That's about all I have to say about the Princess of Cleves. I am excited for the next novel which is The Stranger by Albert Camus, also a French novel. I love that this challenge is exposing me to world fiction rather than simply English Literature which we are so used to reading in or North American context.