04.23.09
Fav Five
First edition cover, 1935
A question has been bouncing around Facebook for a while asking people to pick their five favorite novels. This is an impossible task, of course, for anyone who loves books as much as I do. I anguished over this question for quite some time, not because I felt the pressing need to answer it on Facebook (I still think Facebook is a huge waste of time, and this after my second time trying it), but because I really wanted to see if I could do it.
I finally narrowed the field to my five favorite novels that made me want to write. This allowed me to cut out armloads of books that were great and powerful and enjoyable and important to me for various reasons, but that I discovered later in life, after my most impressionable years had passed. Regardless, it’s not an easy task, no matter how you categorize the books, especially if you obsess over things the way I do. So here are my fav five, not in any particular order (plus two runners up because I didn’t have the heart to cut them out), almost certainly subject to change at any moment:
Fav Five:
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
Lord of the Rings Trilogy, J.R.R Tolkien (yeah, I’m counting this as one)
Runners Up:
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
Of further interest…
Modern Library’s list of the 100 best novels, flanked by the Reader’s list.
NY Times list of the best American fiction of the last 25 years.
The pros and cons of Catcher: an interesting look at this controversial novel.
Read Frankenstein for free!
Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (illustration from the 1831 edition)
04.15.09
Philosophy on the Big Screen
I was thrilled to see the thought-provoking documentary Examined Life at the Dryden Theatre, a film by Astra Taylor, a young Canadian/American filmmaker. The premise was pretty simple: what happens when you allow modern-day philosophers to talk to us about some of their big thoughts? Rather than a typical interview-style documentary where someone asks a question and someone else answers it, and then there is another question and another answer, etc., Taylor gives her nine subjects space to run with their own scattered thoughts and ideas while just letting the camera roll.
Okay, I realize that the film sounds dull, and although it was occasionally boring, it was about as exciting, mind-bending, and just plain odd as an all-talk-all-the-time movie can be. Cornel West was the most impassioned, Slavoj Zizek the craziest, and Pete Singer one of the more interesting interviews, at least in my opinion, but I think individual responses will vary. It’s a film that you really need to see two or three times to wrap your mind around some of the concepts, and of course it helps to be in love with the idea of philosophy to begin with. This film premiered at the Toronto International Film Fest in 2008, and a companion book is scheduled for publication by The New Press in 2009. Highly recommended.
Last week I also took the opportunity to see the play Love in the Title by Hugh Leonard. It’s a great premise for a play. Three women from different eras: a grandmother, mother, and daughter, spend an afternoon together in a meadow in Ireland, but the magical twist is that the grandmother is a young woman of 20, the mother is 30, and the daughter is nearing 40 years of age. So in essence, the story is set simultaneously in 1932, 1964, and 1999. Leonard never tries to explain the anomaly of how these women came to be together out of their own times (thank you!); rather, he just runs with the characters, offering the audience an intriguing look at love and morals across generations and unresolved conflicts between mothers and daughters. Is it a comedy? That’s how it’s advertised, but the production I saw, despite moments of levity, seemed more of a drama. I’m sure direction makes a difference here. The play slows toward the end, and I wanted it to resonate more, but it’s worth seeing if you get a chance. Recommended.
Of further interest…
The many plays of Hugh Leonard.
The Examined Life trailer will give you a taste of this very intriguing film.
Zeitgeist films: Examined Life and other movies.
Astra Taylor
04.07.09
While Waiting for My Hometown to Get Warm…
Okay, it has been a long winter. Although most of the snow disappeared about a month ago, Rochester is still entertaining temperatures in the 30s and 40s, and I’m frankly weary of it. Today it took me twice as long to drive to work because of an unexpected run of ice and snow. So here’s some stuff I’ve been doing to turn up my nose at the lousy weather….
Last week I went to the local production of Paul Alexander’s Edge, presented by Method Machine. This is a one-woman show about poet Sylvia Plath’s last day of life. It’s an incredibly well-written, nicely-imagined play, and I learned quite a bit about Plath and her uber-rotten hubby Ted Hughes and the events that led to her suicide in 1963. In the Rochester incarnation, Marcy Savastano delivered a truly fantastic performance. The run is finished here, but if you ever get a chance to catch this show somewhere, someday, jump at it. Highly recommended.
I listened to the audio book version of Peal S. Buck’s The Good Earth. I wept like an idiot at the end of it just as I did when I read it years ago for the first time. It still amazes me that Buck so perfectly nailed the male mind with her main character Wang Lung. The story has such incredible depth and range and force. Some books just plain deserve the Pulitzer; this one nabbed it in 1932 and is still deeply affecting today. (What does the “S” stand for in Buck’s name? Sydenstricker!) Read the novel or listen to it, take your pick. You can’t go wrong. Highly recommended.
I set about reading Jose Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ with some trepidation. I’m not a big fan of religulit, but Saramago’s journey into the mind of Christ is worth putting aside whatever misgivings you might have. Saramago pulled me right in with his imagined immaculate conception scene, and once I started reading the book it was hard to put down. You would have thought I didn’t know how it ended, fer chrissakes. The scene near the end of the novel where Jesus and God and the devil have a heart-to-heart in a row boat is absolutely brilliant. This won’t be for everyone, but it will do strange and wonderful things to the mind of anyone who has been rasied Catholic. Recommended.
Not everything I’ve been reading has been good. A friend at work handed me her copy of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards. I had loaned her my copies of Bad Monkeys and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and she’d loved them both, so I figured, well, what the heck, I owed her one. I can’t say it’s badly written, but I think it’s a lot like reading a year’s worth of Woman’s World Magazine. Not cool.
Of further interest…
Edge in Rochester, presented by Method Machine, starring Marcy Savastano. Here is the NY Theatre review.
The Good Earth, yeah, okay, this was an Oprah book.
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ is “irreverent, profund, skeptical, funny, heretical, deeply philosophical, provacative and compelling,” says Bob Corbett of Webster University. Read more.
