decemberthirty | (no subject)

Okay, so there actually were topics other than baseball about which I wanted to post, but they were forgotten in the excitement of seeing the White Sox make the World Series. I still can't quite wrap my mind around that, but here's what I've been reading lately:

I finished The Namesake over the weekend, and I found it rather a let-down. Lahiri's writing is just as pretty and her descriptions of food just as mouthwatering as they were in Interpreter of Maladies, but her characterization has not improved and neither has her ability to (for lack of a better phrase) "write outside the box." The plot of the book was just what one would expect from this sort of immigrant narrative, and Gogol's emotional development from spoiled, whiny teenager to slightly-less-whiny thirtysomething was disappointingly obvious. When I read Interpreter of Maladies, I felt that there were a few stories that showed Lahiri's full potential as a writer, but I decided that most of the stories didn't live up to that potential. Now that I've read The Namesake, I wonder if perhaps Lahiri is writing just at the level of her potential, and it was only in those few stories that she managed to transcend her own limitations. I'm not sure I'll read any more of her books.

After finishing The Namesake, I started Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. I've been meaning to read Greene for ages, and I'm enjoying this quite a bit so far. I want to get started on some of the reading about secrets and repression that I need to do, but not having any of those books sitting on my shelf is proving to be an obstacle. Must get to the library.

In other reading news, Time magazine recently issued a list of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. The list is rather predictable and I'm not sure why they picked 1923--seems rather arbitrary to me--but since I love lists of all kinds I thought I'd post it.

The Adventures of Augie March--Saul Bellow
All the King's Men--Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral--Philip Roth
An American Tragedy--Theodore Dreiser
Animal Farm--George Orwell
Appointment in Samarra--John O'Hara
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret--Judy Blume
The Assistant--Bernard Malamud
At Swim-Two-Birds--Flann O'Brien
Atonement--Ian McEwan
Beloved--Toni Morrison
The Berlin Stories--Christopher Isherwood
The Big Sleep--Raymond Chandler
The Blind Assassin--Margaret Atwood
Blood Meridian--Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited--Evelyn Waugh
The Bridge of San Luis Rey--Thornton Wilder
Call It Sleep--Henry Roth
Catch-22--Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye--J.D. Salinger
A Clockwork Orange--Anthony Burgess
The Confessions of Nat Turner--William Styron
The Corrections--Jonathan Franzen
The Crying of Lot 49--Thomas Pynchon
A Dance to the Music of Time--Anthony Powell
The Day of the Locust--Nathanael West
Death Comes for the Archbishop--Willa Cather
A Death in the Family--James Agee
The Death of the Heart--Elizabeth Bowen
Deliverance--James Dickey
Dog Soldiers--Robert Stone
Falconer--John Cheever
The French Lieutenant's Woman--John Fowles
The Golden Notebook--Doris Lessig
Go Tell it on the Mountain--James Baldwin
Gone With the Wind--Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath--John Steinbeck
Gravity's Rainbow--Thomas Pynchon
The Great Gatsby--F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Handful of Dust--Evelyn Waugh
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter--Carson McCullers
The Heart of the Matter--Graham Greene
Herzog--Saul Bellow
Housekeeping--Marilynne Robinson
A House for Mr. Biswas--V.S. Naipaul
I, Claudius--Robert Graves
Infinite Jest--David Foster Wallace
Invisible Man--Ralph Ellison
Light in August--William Faulkner
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe--C.S. Lewis
Lolita--Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies--William Golding
The Lord of the Rings--J.R.R. Tolkein
Loving--Henry Green
Lucky Jim--Kingsley Amis
The Man Who Loved Children--Christina Stead
Midnight's Children--Salman Rushdie
Money--Martin Amis
The Moviegoer--Walker Percy
Mrs. Dalloway--Virginia Woolf
Naked Lunch--William Burroughs
Native Son--Richard Wright
Neuromancer--William Gibson
Never Let Me Go--Kazuo Ishiguro
1984--George Orwell
On the Road--Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--Ken Kesey
The Painted Bird--Jerzy Kosinski
Pale Fire--Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India--E.M. Forster
Play It As It Lays--Joan Didion
Portnoy's Complaint--Philip Roth
Possession--A.S. Byatt
The Power and the Glory--Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie--Muriel Spark
Rabbit, Run--John Updike
Ragtime--E.L. Doctorow
The Recognitions--William Gaddis
Red Harvest--Dashiell Hammett
Revolutionary Road--Richard Yates
The Sheltering Sky--Paul Bowles
Slaughterhouse-Five--Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash--Neal Stephenson
The Sot-Weed Factor--John Barth
The Sound and the Fury--William Faulkner
The Sportswriter--Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold--John LeCarre
The Sun Also Rises--Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God--Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart--Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird--Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse--Virginia Woolf
Tropic of Cancer--Henry Miller
Ubik--Philip K. Dick
Under the Net--Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano--Malcolm Lowrey
Watchmen--Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
White Noise--Don DeLillo
White Teeth--Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea--Jean Rhys

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

i have never understood why Interpreter of Maladies won the pulitzer. with a few exceptions, the whole thing just felt so blah to me.

I just finished reading Blood Meridian - you should give it a try. it's totally gruesome but absolutely mind blowing, i thought. it does require a good deal of concentration but is absolutely worth the effort.

I read All the Pretty Horses a couple years ago and absolutely loved it. I've been meaning to read more Cormac McCarthy since then, but haven't gotten around to it. I'm glad to hear that Blood Meridian--I'll definitely have to check it out.

Only 11 out of 100 for me. 10 of them you read as well. Funny.

I like your journal.

Also, 1923 is the year after James Joyce published Ulysses. That's probably why they chose that year as the starting point.

Actually, after making this post I learned that 1923 is the year that Time was first published, so I suspect that's why they chose it for their book list. Although, who knows? Perhaps they just really didn't want to include Ulysses.

Thanks for the compliment. Can I ask how you found me?

I wish I remembered how I found you. I was noodling around in livejournal the other day, and I left the browser open on this entry.

Then I left town and came back. I saw this entry, read it and liked it, and commented.

Well, glad you liked it anyhow. Thanks for stopping by; feel free to add if you'd like.