50 Books to Read Before You Die

words to inspire before you expire

Tag: Time (Page 1 of 2)

March 15, 2019 /

” . . . everybody knows life isn’t worth living. Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn’t much matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living—and for thousands of years. In fact, nothing could be clearer. Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying. At that point, what would disturb my train of thought was the terrifying leap I would feel my heart take at the idea of having twenty more years of life ahead of me. But I simply had to stifle it by imagining what I’d be thinking in twenty years when it would all come down to the same thing anyway. Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.”

—from The Stranger by Albert Camus

January 7, 2019 /

“There was Manderley, our Manderley, secretive and silent as it has always been, the grey stone shining in the moonlight of my dream, the mullioned windows reflecting the green lawns and the terrace. Time could not wreck the perfect symmetry of those walls, not the site itself, a jewel in the hollow of a hand.”

—from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Missing From the List: Cloud Atlas

August 31, 2018 /

Hello again, class.

I didn’t expect to write about Cloud Atlas because I didn’t think I’d have the chance to read it, while focusing on the books from the 50-books list. But I gave it a shot, and it absolutely belongs here. I know why it didn’t make the list, but I also know that it 100% should have.

Cloud Atlas is a rare book. Author David Mitchell wrote 6 interconnecting stories in a unique and cohesive format—each story is in a different time period with vastly different characters and even different writing styles, but mostly similar themes. The stories never completely converge . . . one story may bleed into the next or reference another in the past or the future, but they are separate stories.

The first story is from the perspective of the attorney Adam Ewing on a Pacific ship in the 1800s, writing his experiences in his journal. The journal stops midway and picks up with an entirely new character, Robert Frobisher, a young composer in the 1930s working with a crippled aging composer as a sort of apprentice. Frobisher writes letters to his distant lover—both his letters and his lover are plot devices in the third story, a 70s mystery novel focusing on the stouthearted journalist Luisa Rey, who attempts to get to the bottom of a corporate conspiracy.

Then, in present day, we focus on a spirited and manipulative publisher, Timothy Cavendish, hilariously finding himself trapped in an elderly care facility by a sadistic nurse. Then we jump forward into the future, where Neo-Seoul is run by something called the Corpocracy; the hero is a clone, Sonmi-451, who begins to understand her own humanity and is kidnapped in her failed revolution, and before her execution she is given a final interview to explain the complicated details of her life. Last but not least, in the far away future after what seems like an apocalyptic event, a fearful and flawed man named Zachry, simply trying to get by in a hard-enough life, struggles to deal with a band of cannibals, a tech-savvy foreigner who he may have feelings for, and a prophecy that threatens to unbalance his life.

Author David Mitchell

But that’s only the first half of the novel—from the final story, the novel begins to work backwards, revisiting the second half of each story in reverse order. Each story has some importance to the overall arc of the novel, but Mitchell makes it clear that they are important individually, too. The ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is comic genius, while the Pacific journal is a Victorian masterpiece, ringing with Moby-Dick vibes. The Luisa Rey mystery is a perfectly cheesy hard-boiled thriller, and the broken language of Zachry’s world after “The Fall” perfectly grasps the sense of long-lost humanity and our tragic downfall as a species. Each story is good, and all combined, the one shared story is even better.

For all their differences, there are things beyond continuity that keep the stories together, and finding those things is kind of like solving a puzzle. Every story seems to have a mention about cannibals, for instance—from the actual cannibals in the far off future to Timothy Cavendish mockingly shouting at his fellow inmates at the elderly home, “Soylent Green is people!” (in reference to the 1970s movie Soylent Green, for the unobservant of you). Overall, the theme of cannibalism—the literal or metaphorical feeding off others—seems to be Mitchell’s commentary on human hunger, the inner animal with an insatiable appetite that threatens humanity’s existence. It’s a small piece of the puzzle, but an important one.

Other themes pop up consistently as well, if you have enough patience to make the connections—it’s got so many layers that I’m sure it welcomes rereading. And the goal seems to be one overall story about a soul, reincarnated again and again throughout time. The reader gets to see the story of the same soul in several different lives, moving across the centuries the same way clouds move above us, changing shape and color but staying still inherently clouds . . . hence the name Cloud Atlas—a mapping out of the life of a soul, moving like the clouds across the sky.

Poster from the movie adaptation of Cloud Atlas (2012)

I know why it didn’t make the list—as good as each single story is, they’re still each performing at one-sixths capacity. Mitchell didn’t devote all his time to Ewing’s journal, just a fraction of it, so there’s no way it matches the feat that Moby-Dick achieved, over a hundred years later (blog post pending). The same can be said of his futuristic stories, creative as they are, which still come off as straightforward reflections of other stronger works like Brave New World. Mitchell’s genius may be overpowered by the weight of the story he’s telling, and even though it’s impressive and rare, that’s mostly so because Mitchell is one author rather than six.

But that’s not good enough for me. It should be on the list anyway. The six wildly different stories are still interrelated enough to make something new—something that is distinctly Cloud-Atlas-y, not a collection of cheap duplicates but something made greater in the fusion of powerful stories in their own right. This is an epic—an overarching story of humanity’s past and future, where we follow a soul’s path through time. It’s an amazing, incredible tale that everyone should read.

Still working on Huckleberry Finn, up next time. I don’t know how I’ll feel when I sit down to write about it, but I can tell you I liked Cloud Atlas better. We’ll see how that goes I guess.

Until then,

Prof. Jeffrey

August 27, 2018 /

“So he dozed off, pretty soon. By-and-by I got the old split bottom chair and clumb up, as easy as I could, not to make any noise, and got down the gun. I slipped the ramrod down it to make sure it was loaded, and then I laid it across the turnip barrel, pointing towards pap, and set down behind it to wait for him to stir. And how slow and still the time did drag along.”

—from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Missing From the List: The Secret Agent

May 11, 2018 /

Author Joseph Conrad

Hello again class.

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad is something of an espionage thriller—it’s not James Bond, though. It’s more mundane than your average blockbuster hit. On the surface, anyway.

Before I started The Secret Agent, the professor assigning it hooked me by saying that Conrad’s novel predicted acts of terrorism like the 9/11 attack, almost one hundred years beforehand. That’s not exactly true—not in the way I expected. But the way the book follows a terrorist attack out of sequence (the suicide bombing of an observatory, linked to a group of radical anarchists) makes that fictional event thematically linked to the events of 9/11. The novel’s approach to radicalism, government, corruption, and ideology paints the portrait of an act of terrorism in a modern world. That’s a world we’re familiar with now—not only because of 9/11, but because of the normalcy of violence done by terrorists with easy-to-buy weapons and misguided ideologies. Conrad didn’t predict 9/11 itself, but he predicted the world in which it happened.

The Secret Agent takes place in the late 1800’s (right before the era of modernism in literature began to pick up speed). In it, we follow the agent Adolf Verloc, stationed in London on behalf of a foreign government. He owns a pornographic shop and lives with his wife and her family, and on the side he participates in an illegal anarchist group and reports back to his own government on their actions.

Just as we start to understand this setup, the novel jumps forward and backward in time. A set of characters begin solving the mystery behind the bombing at the observatory, marveling at the horror and “beauty” of it each in their own way. Then we go back to solve the mystery ourselves, and the twist is surprising enough for a novel like this, especially of it’s time.

Part of what makes The Secret Agent special is it’s treatment of time. The movement back and forth outside of chronology was not a standard like it is in today’s film and TV—it was an experimental way to tell this story to its greatest benefit, not done for thrills (not only for thrills, at least). The same thing happens when Conrad’s characters focus on the nature of the explosion, and the people who experienced it—the moment it happened must have lasted an eternity, while the eternity of life breezes by in a moment. Conrad’s point seems to be that time isn’t as stable a structure as we like to imagine—time is in flux, and our misguided perceptions of time only widen the discrepancies between perception and reality.

The characters of The Secret Agent are trapped in this revolving plot, fated to the doom of this explosion and its aftermath. There’s a sense that the explosion is relived when we jump back in time, and the memory of it helps us to do that. In that way, it’s related to the 9/11 attacks. While those directly affected by it suffered so much more, we all deal with a kind of global trauma from that day. Through our memories of the event we relive the experience, and those moments get played out again as if for an eternity. One second is not equal to another—the handful of seconds on that day, when billions of lives changed, had more of a cost than most of the insignificant seconds that make up the day-to-day.

What really makes the novel work is Conrad’s writing, which is difficult and beautiful. His total understanding of his characters and the political action they take are matched by his style. That style may not be for everyone, but for those willing to put in the time and effort, it’s incredibly rewarding. That same style earned Conrad plenty of acclaim with his novel Heart of Darkness, and we’ll go into more detail when that blog post comes along.

As for The Secret Agent . . . while it sounds like it’s inclined to glorify terrorism, I can assure you it doesn’t. The Secret Agent has lasted so long because it shows terrorism for what it is: misguided violence with unbelievable consequences, even beyond the lives lost. Conrad uses ideas like this to criticize radical thinking as well as government inefficiency, both of which our world still suffers from as much as acts of terrorism. It’s worth reading because of its continued relevancy, and that’s why it should have made the list.

I’m still working through Gulliver’s Travels again, and it’s special in its own way. If I had to choose, something like The Secret Agent would be on the list instead of Gulliver’s Travels, but I know which one has affected the world of literature more. The Secret Agent has had little impact beyond it’s own area of literature, but Gulliver’s Travels has a uniqueness that has affected everything after it. More on that next time.

Prof. Jeffrey

January 22, 2018 /

“‘ . . . until now, no man has found himself in a position similar to mine. The dominions of kings are limited, either by mountains or rivers, or a change of manners, or an alteration of language. My kingdom is bounded only by the world, for I am neither an Italian, nor a Frenchman, nor a Hindoo, nor an American, nor a Spaniard. I am a cosmopolite. No country can say it saw my birth. God alone knows what country will see me die . . . You may, therefore, comprehend, that being of no country, asking no protection from any government, acknowledging no man as my brother, not one of the scruples that arrest the powerful, or the obstacles which paralyse the weak, paralyse or arrest me. I have only two adversaries—I will not say two conquerors, for with perseverance I subdue even them, though they are time and distance. There is a third, and the most terrible—that is my condition as a mortal being. This alone can stop me in my onward career, and before I have attained the goal at which I aim, for all the rest I have calculated. What men call the chances of fate, namely, ruin, change, circumstances—I have anticipated them all, and if any of these should overtake me, yet they will not overwhelm me. Unless I die, I shall always be what I am . . .’”

—from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

December 28, 2017 /

“‘I clearly see . . .
How time is hurrying towards me in order
To deal me such a blow as would be most
Grievous for him who is not set for it;
Thus, it is right to arm myself with foresight,
That if I lose the place most dear, I may
Not lose the rest through what my poems say.'”

—from Canto XVII of Dante’s Paradiso by Dante Alighieri

October 26, 2017 /

“‘There are two great powers . . . and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.”

—from The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

Missing From the List: To the Lighthouse

September 28, 2017 /

Welcome back, class.

I’ll start with the concerning fact that Virginia Woolf doesn’t have a single work on the list. And, to follow up: out of 50 titles on the list, ten are composed by women. So today is about Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse.

Virginia Woolf is one of those hallmark authors who stand out by reputation alone, regardless of sex as a qualifier, while still being one of the clearer representatives of feminism known in literature. The fact that she has no novel on the 50-books list highlights the fact that so many other women are left off of it, too.

So either the creators of this list actually tried and failed to find an appropriate amount of female authors, which hints at incompetence (hence, my Missing From the List posts); or, even worse, they deliberately chose all books by male authors and decided in retrospect to throw a bone toward diversity, and the female authors they did choose are featured simply to meet a diversity quotient (and that’s just considering female authors—for authors of racial and other minorities, you’ll have to hear this rant in a separate post).

Either way, the misogyny is strong with this one.

After such a rant, though, I have to admit I’ve only read one of Woolf’s works—but it was really good! To the Lighthouse is a beautiful work of modernist fiction that is special not because of the story, but because of its meaning and the way it’s told. For more on what modernism is, look at my previous post on it.

The Isle of Skye, where the action of To the Lighthouse takes place.

The novel is separated into three parts. Part 1, “The Window,” takes place on one evening in 1910, while the Ramsay family visits their vacation home on the Isle of Skye. We meet the characters and understand their complicated dynamics. Then there’s part 2, “Time Passes,” which is a fluid and ambiguous portrayal of ten years of time, encompassing World War I and the deaths of many major characters in the family. Finally, part 3, “The Lighthouse,” takes place on another evening in 1920, when the family returns to their vacation home as almost completely new people.

The story’s strength is it’s symbolism. The lighthouse represents an unreachable goal, and the terrible weather is the natural world that attacks and hinders humanity’s endeavors. The link between the two evenings, separated by ten years of time, is portrayed through the painting one character works on for those ten years, incomplete without the passage of time—just like the novel itself, incomplete without the strangeness of part 2, loosely stringing together the beginning and the end of Woolf’s novel. Through such symbolism, To the Lighthouse is careful, artistic, experimental, and wonderfully strange, and belongs on the list simply because of what it’s able to do.

Something I tend to forget about modernism is its obsession with time. Novelists from this period liked to portray the unreliability of time by reorganizing chronological order, speeding up and slowing down the story, and confusing a single moment with an eternity. Virginia Woolf fit right in with these modernists—entire chapters in parts 1 and 3 of To the Lighthouse take place in seconds, while part 2 speeds through ten years in no time at all. The action of parts 1 and 3 is also mostly internal, letting stream-of-consciousness explain characters and their motivations—something modernism all but invented.

Which brings me to a complicated point. In a lot of ways, this novel reminds me of Ulysses—need I remind you, one of my favorite novels ever. To the Lighthouse may never match Ulysses in my eyes, but it comes closer than most novels because it does everything Ulysses does (challenges convention, scrambles time, uses stream-of-consciousness to tell a better story, etc.), to the point that if I wanted someone to try Ulysses, I might have them read To the Lighthouse first.

And if To the Lighthouse accomplishes what Ulysses does, and it’s easier on the brain to boot, maybe To the Lighthouse should be on the list INSTEAD of Ulysses (which hurts me to write, I assure you). I’m noticing that there are works on the list that shouldn’t be read—studied or made aware of, absolutely, but not “cozy-up-with-on-the-couch” read. The Bible, The Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales, and Ulysses are each books on the list that make more sense as references and less sense as cover-to-cover reading challenges.

Author Virginia Woolf

On a list called “50 Books to Read Before You Die,” there should be books that readers can gain something from. Books like Ulysses fly a little to close to the sun for readers to enjoy, whereas a book like To the Lighthouse (while in no way an easy novel) allows readers the chance to fly as well.

To bring it back to feminism, and the lack of it featured on the list, here’s a post I made back in March (National Women’s History Month) on the great women writers I know.

Part of the reason To the Lighthouse should be on the list, even in place of Ulysses, is because it’s more accessible. But more importantly, Virginia Woolf’s lifetime statement on behalf of female authors allows To the Lighthouse to have something Ulysses only hopes to have: the voice of the female artist. This is more than the idea of a diversity quotient. This is about representation of female authors, and how statements of all kinds—novels, plays, poems, paintings, stories—when represented mostly by one kind of person, are incomplete statements.

I am still reading A Passage to India by E. M. Forster, another representative of modernism and of a minority—but more on that next class.

Until then,

Prof. Jeffrey

August 21, 2017 /

“All alone, outside the pueblo, on the bare plain of the mesa. The rock was like bleached bones in the moonlight. Down in the valley, the coyotes were howling at the moon. The bruises hurt him, the cuts were still bleeding; but it was not for pain that he sobbed; it was because he was all alone, because he had been driven out, alone, into this skeleton world of rocks and moonlight. At the edge of the precipice he sat down. The moon was behind him; he looked down into the black shadow of the mesa, into the black shadow of death. He had only to take one step, one little jump. . . . He held out his right hand in the moonlight. From the cut on his wrist the blood was still oozing. Every few seconds a drop fell, dark, almost colourless in the dead light. Drop, drop, drop. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow . . .

He had discovered Time and Death and God.”

—from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

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