Ulysses reading schedule

Let's take six weeks on this one (thanks for the feedback!), starting on Father's Day (a nice present to myself). While Christie's book was called the best mystery ever written, Ulysses has been termed simply "the best novel ever written." Here's a suggested reading schedule:

June 28: Chapters 1-8 (~175 pages)
July 10: Chapters 9-13 (~190 pages)
July 20: Chapters 14-15 (~200 pages)
July 31: Chapters 16-18 (~185 pages)

Don't look for a lot of insight in my comments. I'll be happy to get through this book with my wits intact. I anticipate it will require many revisitations before I can feel comfortable with the novel. Still, it will be nice to have had the experience of reading the greatest novel by (arguably) the greatest novelist of the 20th Century.

Mystery novel

I am currently reading Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None. I'm not going to say anything about the specific plot or characters -- don't want to ruin anything for you -- but I will say that, although this is the first mystery novel I've ever read and I don't have any experience with the genre, I am really enjoying it and can see why it has been called "the best mystery novel ever written."  Several elements within the text seem like cliches, but since the novel was written in the late 1930s, it probably originated those elements which have since become cliches. An easy-to-read, compelling, fascinating character study. My students and I have generated several connections to modern-day texts (film, TV, and book), making the novel's influence apparent. A quick read, but very good so far. Hopefully, the ending will not disappoint.

His Dark Materials

Pullman's novels, according to his fans, are better than J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. These people must be crossovers from the Flat Earth Society. Someone, please pass them the Kool-Aid. Pullman's anti-God trilogy doesn't even come close to LOTR. It is less enjoyable than the Harry Potter books and less literarily rich than Le Guin's Earthsea books, and neither of those can touch Tolkien's books for their majesty, profundity, and satisfaction. Not even close. Pullman's works are really not even fantasy; they are closer to science fiction. Even so, I won't ever go back to them, and the only reason I re-read Compass was because I was teaching it and using it for my fantasy lit conference paper. The first book (Compass) is the best, but it's downhill from there. By the time I hit Book 3, I just wanted it to be over. The characters were inconsistent between books, the plot holes more disturbing, the morality more overbearing and heavy-handed, the coincidences more ridiculous, and the conclusion completely over-the-top and unbelievable. Don't waste your time with anything beyond Book 1, if that.

Books: 2008

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Faust by Johann von Goethe
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin
Critical Literacy/Critical Teaching by Dozier, Johnston, and Rogers*
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
Dubliners by James Joyce
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr
Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis
I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier
Smith of Wootton Major / Farmer Giles of Ham by J.R.R. Tolkien
Quantity and Quality in Social Research by Alan Bryman*

Next: Middlemarch by George Eliot
(But first some nonfiction)
*Nonfiction

Young Adult Fiction

I recently read three young adult novels: Wicked Lovely, Elijah of Buxton, and I am the Cheese. I wasn't going to add them to my list of books read since none is particularly challenging. However, they are all full-length novels, and the shortest among them -- Cheese -- was also the best and most "literary". They aren't books I would normally pick up and read, but since they were also on the list of summer reading books for school, I figured I should be familiar with them. Elijah (written by Christopher Paul Curtis) was like the Canadian version of a poor man's Huckleberry Finn, though the second half was much better than the first, unlike the Twain novel, which got worse as it went along. The book is written in dialect, but it's not as intense a dialect as Huck Finn. The story isn't nearly as interesting, either. It's a coming-of-age story of a free-born black boy (about eleven years old) who lives in Buxton, Canada, in the mid-nineteenth century (antebellum). It's a good story for students to have read before tackling Huck Finn because it lends itself to many comparisons, but I wouldn't assign it to them as it's rather slow-moving. The ending is a bit dissatisfying as well.

Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr was better, but still only middling. Now this is going to sound sexist, but I'll comment anyway. It seems that the woman who wrote the book doesn't understand what women really like in guys, nor does she have any understanding of guys in general. The main male love interest is the type of guy who girls think they would like but in reality would quickly lose interest in: popular and self-assured but not arrogant, he really listens to her and supports her, he's strong but understanding, selfless, he likes to cook and keeps a clean house, he's independent but not afraid to commit to her, he doesn't push her romantically and is happy to go at her pace, he's jealous but not overly so, he wants to be friends and more-than-friends with her, he's self-sacrificing, and he isn't at all bothered when she doesn't want to sleep with him. In short, he's a metrosexual artificially-constructed pseudo-rebel and totally unbelievable, although I could certainly picture pubescent girls swooning over him. The author just can't write males. In fact, the main male rival for the protagonist's affections is almost immediately won over by Keenan's charm. The ending of the novel was stupid and the author refused to make any choices. None of the characters suffered significant and permanent loss, nor did they seem to change significantly. I would not have been surprised to find out that the book was actually written by a thirteen-year-old girl. The book did have some interesting scenes, but overall it was so slow-moving that I suspect the author dragged things out from a lack of ideas. I can see the appeal to young (female) readers, but I don't think many young males would like it.

I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier was excellent. Typical Cormier, which is to say unflinching, compelling, interesting story, dramatically tense. It's a difficult book to read, since the reader is forced to put a lot of pieces together, though Cormier gives a lot of help at the end of the book. The description is cliche at times and minimal. It moves forward steadily (the whole book is only 214 pages) and was certainly the best-paced novel of the three. Talk about making tough choices. Cormier's loyalty is to the story, not the characters (unlike Marr), and his ending supports that philosophy. I enjoyed The Chocolate War, though the ending was tough to swallow, and this novel did not disappoint either. This would have been a good novel to teach in school, since it was challenging and had many opportunities for discussion and making predictions. The novel unfolded like an origami, eventually bringing the reader full-circle.

All-in-all, I'm glad I read these. As an English teacher, it's important to connect with adolescent fiction, and it's satisfying to be able to chug three novels in a week, as opposed to my ten-day excursion on the Pequod, or the 100 hours of solitude I was forced to spend with Marquez's masterpiece.