Reading list: La Cousine Bette by Balzac

How to start: La cousine Bette is one book from among the 91 stories, novels and essays that comprise La Comédie humaine.  Balzac was a prolific French writer who died at the age of 51.

Favourite quote: (in the original French) "Puis, que les vrais amants de l'art aillent voir, à Florence, le Penseur, de Michel-Ange, et, dans la cathédrale de Mayence, la Vierge d'Albert Durer, qui a fait, en ébène, une femme vivante sous ses triples robes, et la chevelure la plus ondoyante, la plus maniable que jamais femme de chambre ait peignée; que les ignorants y courent, et tous reconnaitront que le génie peut imprégner l'habit, l'armure, la robe, d'une pensée et y mettre un corps, tout aussi bien que l'homme imprime son caractère et les habitudes de sa vie à son enveloppe.
"La sculpture est la réalisation continuelle du fait qui s'est appelé pour la seule et unique fois dans la peinture: Raphaël! La solution de ce terrible problème ne se trouve que dans un travail constant, soutenu, car les difficultés matérielles doivent être tellement vaincues, la main doit être si châtiée, si prête et obéissante, que le sculpteur puisse lutter âme à âme avec cette insaisissable nature morale, qu'il faut transfigurer en la matérialisant. Si Paganini, qui faisait raconter son âme par les cordes de son violon, avait passé trois jours sans étudier, il aurait perdu, avec son expression, le registre de son instrument: il désignait ainsi le mariage existant entre le bois, l'archet, les cordes et lui; cet accord dissous, il serait soudain devenu un violoniste ordinaire. 
"Le travail constant est la loi de l'art comme celle de la vie; car l'art, c'est la création idéalisée. Aussi, les grands artistes, les poètes complets n'attendent-ils ni les commandes ni les chalands; ils enfantent, aujourd'hui, demain, toujours. Il en résulte cette habitude du labeur, cette perpétuelle connaissance des difficultés qui les maintient en concubinage avec la muse, avec ses forces créatrices. Canova vivait dans son atelier, comme Voltaire a vécu dans son cabinet, Homère et Phidias ont dû vive ainsi."

Tangential: Balzac loved coffee! In fact his death has been attributed to its overconsumption. The Airship Blog has an entertaining read on the subject.

Reading list: Bright Lights Big City

How to start: This novel by Jay McInerney is short, fast-paced and has an ending as satisfying as a pickle with snap. 

Favourite quote: "But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name." (page 127)

Tangential: This was Jay McInerney's first novel and if you want to know more about him than the wikipedia entry, there's this article from The Guardian.

Reading list: Charles Dickens' Dombey & Son

How to start: Dombey and Son is a huge book. I thought I was done halfway through, only to discover I hadn’t noticed that the edition I’d picked up had a second part. But Dickens is always fun to read…

Three favourite quotes: “The barrier between Mr Dombey and his wife, was not weakened by time. Ill-assorted couple, unhappy in themselves and in each other, bound together by no tie by the manacle that joined their fettered hands, and straining that so harshly, in their shrinking asunder, that it wore and chafed to the bone, Time, consoler of affliction and softener of anger, could do nothing to help them. Their pride, however different in kind and object, was equal in degree; and in their flinty opposition struck out fire between them which might smoulder or might blaze, as circumstances were, but burned up everything within their mutual reach, and made their marriage way a road of ashes.”

“The cheerful vista of the long street, burnished by the morning light, the sight of the blue sky and airy clouds, the vigorous freshness of the day, so flushed and rosy in its conquest of the night awakened no responsive feelings in her so hurt bosom.”

“… and they got up together, and went on together; Di more off the ground than on it, endeavouring to kiss his mistress flying, tumbling over and getting up again without the least concern, dashing at big dogs in a jocose defiance of his species, terrifying with touches of his nose young housemaids who were cleaning doorsteps, and continually stopping, in the midst of a thousand extravagances, to look back at Florence, and bark until all the dogs within hearing answered, and all the dogs who could come out, came out to stare at him.”

Tangential: Orwell wrote an interesting essay on Charles Dickens. I really liked his appraisal of the 19th century author. And recently the Allusionist did a whole feature about Charles Dickens with a special Christmas-time tie-in.

Reading List: One Hundred Years of Solitude

How to start: One Hundred Years of Solitude won its author a Nobel Prize. In order to appreciate the book, halfway through the story, I googled a teenage-like complaint, “what is so great about one hundred years of solitude” and came across an excellent summary that pulled me through to the end.

Favourite quote: “Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.” (p 381)

Tangential: On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, Vanity Fair featured an article on the subject.

5 books I read in my youth

Preface: I don’t like re-reading books. Some people do. As I get older, I feel like I read better, which lends weight to something I read by Peter Brown, who, writing about Augustine of Hippo included a quote by Proust: “No one can truly understand a book, Proust has said, unless he has already been able to ‘allow the equivalents to ripen slowly in his own heart.’” The more I read, the more I notice which is a cause of delight and occasional discouragement. I’m aspiring. The aspiration is a gift and nourishing it is the responsibility. When I look back and worry that I didn’t properly absorb a book, I have to forgive myself, first because I find re-reading boring, and second because I have to trust that it was useful in getting me forward. There is no other way to appreciate literature than to keep reading.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

I distinctly remember buying my own copy in elementary school. It fueled many romantic ideas. I didn’t take any notes although I did attempt to memorize a poem from the book for a school poetry event. One classmate recited “Tiger, tiger burning bright in the forests of the night…” and I recited what Jo had composed after her sister’s death, hiding a printed copy of it on my folded arm as if no one would guess it was there when I forgot lines.

Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice was by far my favourite book in highschool. I loved Jane Austen’s humour and when I finished reading the book I was so attached that I read a book of critical essays just to stay with the characters longer. I also watched the BBC eight-part series repeatedly. No other novel since has sparked such an obsession.

The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I remember liking these books, but since I read them when I was young, I didn’t take note of my favorite passages. Francine Prose appreciates Fitzgerald’s ability to “write both meticulously and carelessly, sometimes on the same page.” She describes a particular example: “At lazy moments, F. Scott Fitzgerald could resort to strings of clichés, but in the next paragraph he could give a familiar word the sort of new slant that totally reinvents the language. That reinvention occurs, beginning with his use of the word deferential, in the description of the rose-colored grand hotel that opens Tender Is the Night: ‘Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach… Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausses Hôtel des Étragers and Cannes, five miles away.’

“Each adjective (flushed, dazzling) strikes us as apt. And the simile ‘rotted like water lilies’ will come to seem increasingly applicable to much of what happens in a novel that is partly about the dissolution and decay of romance and beauty.”

Francine has more to say about both novels, but I’m too lazy to write it all out, so you might as well get her book.

Tangential: In April of 2017, Little Atoms producer Neil Denny interviewed Sarah Churchwell in and they discussed her book Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby. It was a fascinating listen.

Reading list: Two Serious Ladies

How to start: The novel is strange, but so was the life of its author, and understanding that might help to appreciate the work Jane Bowles did. Francine Prose especially admires the narrative voice: “a voice that suggests the vocabulary and cadence of a highly educated, slightly batty, and neurotic child (…)” and later, “Jane Bowles’s touch is so sure, her language so well chosen and controlled, her artifice so dazzling (and so insouciantly ready to acknowledge itself as artificial) that we not only admire but are wholly convinced, or at least beguiled, by a passage of dialogue that we cannot imagine any normal human being speaking.” (From Reading Like a Writer, page 107-8, and 186-7.)

Favourite passage:
“Having a nice time?” the girl asked Miss Goering in a husky voice.
“Well,” said Miss Goering, “it wasn’t exactly in order to have a good time that I came out. I have more or less forced myself to, simply because I despise going out in the night-time alone and prefer not to leave my own house. However, it has come to such a point that I am forcing myself to make these little excursions –”
Miss Goering stopped because she actually did not know how she could go on and explain to this girl what she meant without talking a very long time indeed, and she realized that this would be impossible right at that moment, since the waiter was constantly walking back and forth between the bar and the young people’s booth.
“Anyway,” said Miss Goering, “I certainly think it does no harm to relax a bit and have a lovely time.”

Reading list: Isaac Babel

How to start: Isaac Babel was a multi-talented writer who was executed at 45 during one of Stalin’s great purges. John Updike wrote an excellent synopsis of his life in the New Yorker. In the Wikipedia entry on Babel, George Saunders is quoted as saying: “There’s a Russian writer named Isaac Babel that I love. I can drop in anywhere in his works, read a few pages and go, Oh yeah, language. It’s almost like if you were tuning a guitar and you heard a beautifully tuned one and you say, Yeah, that’s what we want. We want something that perfect. When I read him, it recalibrates my ear. It reminds me of the difference between an OK sentence and a really masterful sentence. Babel does it for me.”

Favourite passage:
“You’re shortsighted, eh?”
“Quite so.”
“Alexander Fyodorovich, you ought to wear glasses.”
“Never!”
Then, bubbling over like a mere boy, I said to him:
“Just think: you’re not merely blind, you’re practically dead! Line, that divine trait, mistress of the world, eternally escapes you. Here we are, you and I, walking about in this magic garden, this Finnish forest that almost baffles description. All our lives we shall never see anything more beautiful. And you can’t see the pink edges of the frozen waterfall, over there by the stream! You are blind to the Japanese chiseling of the weeping willow leaning over the waterfall. The red trunks of the pines are covered by snow in which a thousand sparks are gleaming. The snow, shapeless when it fell, has draped itself along the branches, lying on their surfaces that undulate like a line drawn by Leonardo. In the snow flaming clouds are reflected. And think what you’d have to say about Fröken Kirsti’s silk stockings; about the line of her leg, that lovely line! I beseech you Alexander Fyodorovich, buy a pair of glasses!”
“My child,” he replied, “don’t waste your time. Forty copecks for spectacles are the only forty copecks I’ve no wish to squander. I don’t need your line, vulgar as truth is vulgar. You live your life as though you were a teacher of trigonometry, while I for my part live in a world of miracles, even when I’m only at Klyazma. What do I need to see Fröken Kirsti’s freckles for, if even when I can scarcely make her out I can see in her all I wish to see? What do I need Finnish clouds for, when above my head I see a moving ocean? What do I need line for, when I have color? To me the whole universe is a gigantic theater, and I am the only member of the audience who hasn’t glued opera glasses to his eyes. The orchestra is playing the overture to the third act; the stage is far away, just as in a dream; my heart swells with ecstasy. I see Juliet’s purple velvet, Romeo’s lilac silk, and not a single false beard. And you want me to blind myself with forty-copeck spectacles!”
- from "Line and Color"

Reading list: 3 titles

Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

How to start: Akutagawa died young, committing suicide at 35 and ending a brilliant writing career. Today, a literary prize in Japan bears his name. An article in Japan Times gives further detail about his life and legacy.

Favourite passage: "Goi was a very plain-looking man. His hollow cheeks made his chin seem unusually long. His lips... if we mentioned his every striking feature, there would be no end. He was extremely homely and sloppy in appearance."

Tangential: Rashomon was made into a film in 1950 to great critical acclaim. Roger Ebert had a lot to say about it.

Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme

How to start: Barthelme is a postmodern writer and my appreciation for the genre amounts to the appreciation I have of Jelly Bellys for their transitory shock of flavour. If I don't understand most of his stories, his obituary in the New York Times makes me wish I did.

Favourite passage: "They sit down together. The pork with red cabbage steams before them. They speak quietly about the McKinley Administration, which is being revised by revisionist historians. The story ends. It was written for several reasons. Nine of them are secrets. The tenth is that one should never cease considering human love, which remains as grisly and golden as ever, no matter what is tattooed upon the warm tympanic page."

Mother's Milk by Edward St. Aubyn

How to start: Mother's Milk is the fourth book in a series of five, that collectively form the Patrick Melrose Novels. In 2012 the series was published as a single volume.

Three favourite passages: "He was having (get it off your chest, dear, it'll do you good) a midlife crisis, and yet he wasn't, because a midlife crisis was a cliché, a verbal Tamazepam made to put an experience to sleep, and the experience he was having was still wide awake (...)."

"He struggled so hard to get away from his roles as a father and a husband, only to miss them the moment he succeeded. There was no better antidote to his enormous sense of futility than the enormous sense of purpose which his children brought to the most obviously futile tasks, such as pouring buckets of sea water into holes in the sand. Before he managed to break away from his family, he liked to imagine that once he was alone he would become an open field of attention, or a solitary observer training his binoculars on some rare species of insight usually obscured by the mass of obligations that swayed before him like a swarm of twittering starlings. In reality solitude generated its own roles, not based on duty but on hunger."

"Now she had an hour, perhaps two, in which to answer letters, pay her taxes, keep in touch with her friends, revive her intellect, take some exercise, read a good book, think of a brilliant money-making scheme, take up yoga, see an osteopath, go to the dentist and get some sleep. Sleep, remember sleep? The word had once referred to great haunches of unconsciousness, six, eight, nine-hour slabs; (...)."

Tangential: The New Yorker published an interview with the author in 2014, entitled "The Real Life of Edward St. Aubyn."

Reading List: War and Peace

How To Start: Begin, if you like, by reading about how much someone else enjoyed reading War & Peace. For me it was Lucy. She wrote a blog post entitled: "Why Read War & Peace? The Reasons Why I Love Tolstoy's Masterpiece."

Five Favourite Passages: "Rostov, standing in the foremost ranks of Kitizov's army, which the Tsar approached first of all, was possessed by the feeling, common to every man in the army - a feeling of self-oblivion, of proud consciousness of their might and passionate devotion to the man who was the centre of that solemn ceremony.
"He felt that at one word from that man all that vast mass (and he, an insignificant atom bound up with it) would rush through fire and water, to crime, to death, or to the gradest heroism, and so he could not but thrill and tremble at the sight of the man who was the embodiment of that word." (p 271)

"Life meanwhile, the actual life of men with their real interests of health and sickness, labour and rest, with their interests of thought, science, poetry, music, love, affection, hatred, passion, went its way, as always, independently, apart from the political amity or enmity of Napoleon Bonaparte, and apart from all possible reforms." (p 470)

"He prayed with that feeling of passion and compunction with which men pray in moments of intense emotion die to trivial causes." (p 567)

"When a man sees an animal dying, horror comes over him. What he is himself - his essence, visibly before his eyes, perishes - ceases to exist. But when the dying creature is a man and a man dearly loved, then, besides the horror at the extinction of life, what is felt is a rending of the soul, a spiritual wound, which, like a physical wound, is sometimes mortal, sometimes healed, but always aches and shrinks from contact with the outer world, that sets it smarting.
"(...) Crushed in spirit, they closed their eyes under the menacing cloud of death that hovered about them, and dared not look life in the face. Carefully they guarded their open wounds from every rough and painful touch. Everything - the carriage driving along the street, the summons to dinner, the maid asking which dress to get out; worse still - words of faint, feigned sympathy - set the wound smarting, seemed an insult to it, and jarred on that needful silence in which both were trying to listen to the stern, terrible litany that had not yet died away in their ears, and to gaze into the mysterious, endless vistas that seemed for a moment to have been unveiled before them." (p 1224)

"The countess was by now over sixty. Her hair was completely grey, and she wore a cap that surrounded her whole face with a frill. Her face was wrinkled, her upper lip had sunk, and her eyes were dim.
"After the deaths of her son and her husband that had followed so quickly on one another, she had felt herself a creature accidentally forgotten in this world, with no object and no interest in life. She ate and drank, slept and lay awake, but she did not live. Life gave her no impressions. She wanted nothing from life but peace, and that peace she could find only in death. But until death came to her she had to go on living - that is, using her vital forces. There was in the highest degree noticeable in her what may be observed in very small children and in very old people. No external aim could be seen in her existence; all that could be seen was the need to exercise her various capacities and propensities. She had to eat, to sleep, to think, to talk, to weep, to work, to get angry, and so on, simply because she had a stomach, a brain, muscles, nerves, and spleen. (...)
"(...) Only rarely a mournful half-smile passed between Nikolay, Pierre, Natasha, and Countess Marya that betrayed their comprehension of her condition.
"But these glances said something else besides. They said that she had done her work in life already, that she was not all here in what was seen in her now, that they would all be the same, and that they were glad to give way to her, to restrain themselves for the sake of this poor creature, once so dear, once so full of life as they. Memento mori, said those glances.
"Only quite heartless and stupid people and little children failed to understand this, and held themselves aloof from her." (p 1325-7)

Tangential: The translation matters! David Remnik wrote a fascinating article for the New Yorker entitled, "The Translation Wars."

Francine Prose's List of Books to Be Read Immediately

I thought it might be helpful to create an index with Francine Prose's list. The numbers in green refer to the page numbers in her book Reading Like a Writer where she talks either about the author or about the book she recommends. Two titles in grey are books she refers to but are not part of her list. Feel free to suggest corrections to this first draft.

Link to Evernote - a checklist and partial index

After reading The Corrections...

... these are my favourite quotes. When I look at them I wonder how much they are about the author, Jonathan Franzen, and then how much they are about the reader for having selected them.

“11. He turned to the doorway where she’d appeared. He began a sentence: « I am - » but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as seen as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn’t quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness were’t uniform, weren’t an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studious teenager he’d encountered the word « crepuscular » in McKay’s Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the word, so that for his entire adult life he’d seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn’t just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he’d sensibly established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvellously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he’d entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods - « packing my suitcase, » he heard himself say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was a suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He’d betrayed nothing.

16. …and assumed the burden of seeing La Guardia Airport and New York City and his life and clothes and body through the disappointed eyes of his parents.

18. …she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.

99. Enid, who all her life had been helpless not to observe the goings-on on other people’s plates, had watched Denise take a three-bite portion of salmon, a small helping of salad, and a crust of bread. The size of each was a reproach to the size of each of Enid’s.

100. …with the skimpy laugh with which she tried to hide large feelings.

251. Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn’t need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly.

263. …what you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn’t always agreeable or attractive.

271. And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.
As if sustained and too-direct contact with time’s raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.”