Scoplaw

Guilty – But are they Pleasures?

Well Saturday, as part of my “at least a half day off” kick, I bought and read the last Harry Potter novel.  I stayed up late to finish it, forgoing the possibility of a morning ride with a group from a bicycle shop.  That’s probably just as well – I’d like to get a couple of 20s under my belt this week before attempting anything more ambitious. 

But, as to Harry Potter.  Ah.  I wanted to like it far more than I did.  While on some level, I wanted to be mindlessly entertained, I had also hoped that Rowling would use her big stage for something spectacular.  Instead it was kind of ho-hum.   Not very much was entertaining or profound.

I come at this from a slightly jaded angle, having read lots of fantasy and “young adult” literature.  I realize most of it is bad, but the high water marks (e.g., The Lord of the Rings, Earthsea, The Dark is Rising, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Prydain, The Wizard of the Pigeons) are really quite something.  Often times the climax of “young adult” literature that’s keenly written (not written “down” to those young adults) has a kind of beautiful and brutal transparency to it, often built on the theme of sacrifice – which is really a turning outward of the hero, the pinnacle of the bildungsroman.

This kind of sacrifice, often turning out well, but not by pure design or guarantee (Tolkien called it the “eucatastrophe”) is often seen in main character’s actions.   Sometimes you get to see it in secondary characters – as in The High King, when the hapless Rhun dies, or when Fflewddur Flam smashes his harp for a handful of firewood.  (Actually the body count in those last two books is rather appalling.)

Rowling, on the other hand, sort of attempts that, but it fails. 

I don't want to completely knock her or the series; she does a few odd and interesting things which I haven’t quite figured out how to articulate properly. 

First off, Rowling takes the whole mangled Victorian mess of “magic” – the black cats, the cauldron, the broomsticks, and simply goes with it, creating a parallel magic world within our own.  Other authors have, of course, worked with the idea of “magic under our noses” (e.g., Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising).  But I can’t think of one that simply just took the whole mass of “popular” witchcraft and ran with it (even if it became a bit cutesy at times.)

Second, Rowling never really has her characters develop much.  Yes they age, and sometimes switch alliances.  But by and large the characters in the book are more or less the same from start to finish.  You get some complexity added to the dead Dumbledore, some more tarnishing of James Potter, some bolstering of Snape, but really – does anyone really grow into anything but more adult versions of themselves?  I’d submit that Rowling uses many characters to show the different faces of vice and virtue – the evil that is Pettigrew is not the same as the evil that is Bellatrix or Lucius Malfoy.  There are many parallels to be drawn between the characters – Draco might be like a young Snape or a young Dumbledore. . .but we never get to see the transformations happen.  Pettigrew is Pettigrew.  Snape is Snape.  Harry is Harry.  Unfortunately the result is like wind-up toys – Rowling sends all the characters marching against one another and we see what happens as each interacts. 

(Interestingly, Nevelle Longbottom might be the character that develops the most.  But Harry is as Harry does – it’s hard to see the Harry from the first book being in the same circumstances as the Harry of the last book, but you know he’d make the same choices for the same reasons.)

I think that mechanistic, non-transformative element was the most offputting part of the last book.   There’s a certain forced quality to the way the plot unfolds, a kind of rule-boundness to the magic, as though it were a video game or something.  If only Voldemort had defeated Malfoy, things would have turned out differently.  Sigh.

I think this kind of mechanical writing is most evident in last battle, which seemed only to “sort” the characters into the virtuous and non-virtuous.  There was one point where the house elves were slashing at the ankles of the death eaters and I realized that I couldn’t “see” the scene anymore.  It was just a naming of each character and a few lines about whatever good thing they were doing on the side of right.  I don’t recall anyone screwing up or panicking and running – it all just seemed unreal.   Or perhaps it seemed like a movie script.  We’ve got to include Trewalny with her crystal balls. . .

And the epilogue – eh.  Again, just just-rewards and all that.   There seemed to be no consequence to any of the preceding thousands of pages – no idea as to what changes (if any) had come about from the events we read about.  And it’s that kind of clinging to an idealized vision/pattern that undoes Rowling in the end.  You get the feeling she does not want the books to end, or that she’s unable to change the world she created – the pattern continues with new kids, but we never really learn what it costs to keep it going, or if it’s valuable.   

The final line of the book seemed to have odd echoes to Tolkien’s understated last line in The Lord of the Rings.

Rowling:  "The scar had not pained Harry for 18 years. All was well."

Tolkien:  He (Sam) drew a deep breath. 'Well, I'm back,' he said."

Of course, Tolkien’s is prefaced on Sam returning alone – Frodo, who actually feels the pain of his scars, his burdens and experiences, has left the Shire for good after this exchange with Sam.

‘But,’ said Sam, and the tears started in his eyes, ‘I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire, too, for years and years, after all you’ve done.’
    "So I thought too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. But you are my heir: all that I had and might have had I leave to you. And also you have Rose, and Elanor; and Frodo-lad will come, and Rosie-lass, and Merry, and Goldilocks, and Pippin; and perhaps more that I cannot see. Your hands and your wits will be needed elsewhere. You will be the Mayor, of course, as long as you want to be, and the most famous gardner in history; and you will read things out of the Red Book and keep alive the memory of the age that is gone, so that people will remember the Great Danger and so love their beloved land all the more. And that will keep you as busy and as happy as anyone can be, as long as your part of the Story goes on."

And that kind of understanding is really the difference between a mature work of Fantasy, and what Rowling wrote. 

Dragons and the Parole Commission

Man.  Bloging’s been tough lately.  Either I’m in crunch mode or I’m recovering from crunch mode.  In random news I've been doing a lot of "secret project" writing.  I've been shaking the job tree.  I've been reading for 4 classes in addition to clinic (this takes up most of my time).   I got back on the bike and have been doing some commuting riding when possible.

But to book end these activities:

Crunch:

I had my second parole revocation hearing.  I don't want to say too much about this one.  It turned out OK, but involved massive prep work that wasn't used at all.

Recovery from Crunch

I rented Eragon.  It's awful.  Painfully awful.  The movie was execrable, despite decent CGI and not-bad performances from Malkovich, Jeremy Irons and some otherwise good British character actors.  The pacing was clunky and contrived, and the "high point" stirring speeches and heroic sacrifices seemed oddly rushed and contrived.  As there was no real sense of importance to these moments, they came off as bathetic. 

The book itself was a kind of patchwork monster – the basic superficial Tolkien racial-skeleton of humans/elves/dwarves/orcs, put through a farmboy cum messianic hero plot that seems, at times, a pastiche of Star Wars, The Belgariad, The Dragonbone Chair, LeGuin and some others.  Nonetheless the book worked.  If it wasn't always seamless (mostly due to the difficulty in joining the established archetypal elements that the book drew on – more on that in a sec.) at least it took itself seriously enough to try to tell a good story and to have that story make sense.  And for an 18 year old (?) author, it's an awfully impressive beginning, for all its heavy leaning on other works.  I’ll read Eldest if I can find a cheap copy and give it a chance to slip out from Tolkien's shadow. 

**
A quick thought on Tolkien (I did a post on TLOR movies and the Narnia adaptation a while ago).

Tolkien built his world from the ground up.  Sure, he ladled in what seems to be the entire western cannon from the Norse sagas to the Arthurian stories to Cervantes and the Song of Roland, but there’s a strong internal consistency to his vision. 

For example, the Tolkien elves are the perfect craftsmen.  They possess long life, refined senses, and an aesthetic that’s influenced by a close tie to the creating god (in Tolkien’s mythology the elves were the first born of the mortal children of the gods – they lived in the blessed realm and learned at the knees of the gods.)  What this means is that the elves are slow and subtle builders whose weakness is an attachment to the things they’ve made.  Elves don’t like change.  The elven king Feanor refused to surrender some things he’d invested a great deal of time and self in, even though it was inarguably for the greater good, a good that *directly enabled* him to make these things in the first place.  This and subsequent acts of possessiveness set the elves towards their doom of fighting Sauron, without the gods aid, in middle earth.  (I’m condensing here, but that’s basically it.)

Now, prior to Tolkien, we don’t have “elves” like this.  They’re just not there.  (Yes, there is the Nordic strain, with Freyr and all that, but that kind of elf is just as realized as Tolkien’s and just as alien to contemporary fantasy with, perhaps, the exception of Tad William's work). 

The point I want to get at is that through popular culture and post-Tolkien fantasy story, we get an archetype of “the elf” – tall, slim, straight hair, impeccably dressed in green and grey along a vaguely Celtic/New-agey aesthetic.  The elf becomes a stock element that a fantasy world ought to have, just like dragons and dwarves and a rural pastoral setting that produces unlikely heroes. And, like dragons, the elves begin to pick up fixed biological characteristics. . pointy ears, long life, and high aesthetic, just as all dragons must breathe flame and fly.  But issues of good and evil. . .well, *those* become malleable.  In many post-Tolkien fantasies dragons become misunderstood beasts, just trying to make it in the fantasy world as sharks and wolves do in ours.  Elves begin to become creepier, non-human, instead of being a kind of perfect human, or more accurately, a human perfected.  Perhaps some of creepiness draws off the celtic sidhe – the mischievous dark host who play cruel and deadly tricks on man.  But all to often in contemporary fantasy the elves seem to have lost their way – no one quite knows what to do with them, they’re either distant and stiff little do-gooders doling out gifts or almost vampiric figures lamenting the short lived humans around them who keep mucking up their nice digs.  You get a sense of this contemporary elf in Peter Jackson’s treatment of Elrond the bitter human-hater.  Ironic, because in the books, Elrond is Half-Elven – his dearly loved brother Elros chose the human half of their heritage and died young, while Elrond choose the elven half and lived long. 

In short, I’m suggesting it’s a problem.  A lot of bad fantasy falls in love with the surfaces of things.  The author thinks – hey, it’s great to have beautiful elves running about, speaking in antiquated languages, and hacking up orcs (gotta have those dehumanized enemy figures) with supernatural skillful sweeps of their enchanted blades; it makes for fantasy.  So we get that without any understanding of what an elf *is.* 

Now I’m not saying we need all bow down to Tolkien (I wish more authors *wouldn’t*, actually.)  But if you’re going to have elves, then have them be elves – elves from the bottom up, consistently acting like elves ought to act in your particular fantasy world.  Not elves for elves sake. 

Quick note on something in the Post Below.

Bookbinding – another odd skill of mine.  A “Jewel book” is a one way of referring to any small book you might tuck in your pocket – these books are about half the size of a standard paperback and are great for traveling.  They’re more commonly called “miniature books.” 

Classically, books that fall into this category might include the  quadrasegisimo-octavo (2½ x 4) and the sexagesimo-quarto (2 x 3) which sound like complicated Italian musical directions.

If you’ve ever seen one of these, it’s most likely been an antique small prayer book or "thumb Bible."   For those like myself who prefer other reading on the road, Shambahala, a favorite Boston press of mine, puts out a series of “pocket classics” – of which my small Emerson is an out of print title.  It has 17 poems and essays in full, including my favorites: Nature, Self-Reliance, The Divinity School Address, The Poet and Circles.  It’s 3 x 4-1/2 x 1/2 and is pretty tough, being glue and stitch bound with a plastic-like cover. The font is standard 12 point - but most of the size savings come in at the margins, which are pretty much non existent. When the batteries die, when you’re camping out in some eastern European bus station, it’s nice to have Ralph along with you – in a package smaller than your average wallet.  They also make for pretty cool gifts.  Especially if you know someone who speaks German.  Another great place to buy from is Stone Street Press - though they only have a few miniatures, the overall quality of McCormick's work is excellent.

I used to make my own very small books (collections of poems mostly, mine and others, with some blank pages left for notes) for travel.  I used old acid free typing paper, a laser printer set to 10pt Arial, and stitched them by hand.  Now - alas - my project time is vastly diminished.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.  Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
--Self-Reliance

Books

What interests me about other people's books is the nature of their collection. A personal library is an X-ray of the owner's soul. It offers keys to a particular temperament, an intellectual disposition, a way of being in the world. Even how the books are arranged on the shelves deserves notice, even reflection. There is probably no such thing as complete chaos in such arrangements. - Jay Parini

A room without books is like a body without a soul. - Marcus Tullius Cicero

A house without books is like a room without windows. - Horace Mann

I’ve mentioned a few times that I sold off or given away a huge chunk of books over the years.  Some, I miss – the compact OED (though I kept the magnifying glass), the facsimile copy of the Kelmscott Chaucer, the collected Lovecraft, all my Twain.  But these are easily found in libraries or online and no longer break my back when I move. 

What I have left is the “essential” stuff.  Either I use it often, can’t find it on-line, or it’s small and light enough not to have given up.  I try to always hold onto out of print

What follows is a quick skim of those books, squinting over my coffee and glowing screen, cross room, not nearly accounting for all.

Poetry Reference: the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the Longman’s dictionary of Poetic Terms, a word menu (sort of a thesaurus), the Oxford companion to the English Language, a rhyming dictionary, a dictionary of literary terms, a dictionary of philosophical terms, Strunk and White.

Poetics: Some of the above quality, as most of those “dictionaries,” like the Longman’s, contain fairly long essays on various terms and ideas.  Thus, they’re all closer to the encyclopedia end of the spectrum.  Also – Dobyn’s “Best Words, Best Order,” Kunitz’s “A Kind of Order, a Kind of Folly,” the Biographia Literaria, Levertov’s “The Poet and the World,” Early Celtic Versecraft, the Book of Forms, Oliver’s Poetry Handbook, Todorov’s “Introduction to Poetics,” Aristotle’s “Poetics,” “Six Nomenclatures,” and of course, Nim’s “Western Wind,” which is reference, poetics, and anthology between two covers. 

Poetry Anthologies: New Oxford English Verse, Digerati, Into the Garden, The War Poets, An anthology of baseball poems.

Individual Poetry: about 75 books. 
Older: Dante’s Comedy, Beowulf, Milton’s complete, Li Po and Tu Fu, Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, Yeats, Lorca, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Rilke, Rochester, Sturrlson, Whitman, Bahso, Hopkins.
Contemporary: Levis, Weigl, Dobyns, Hayden, Lux, Jarrell, Bishop, Collins, Roethke, James Wright, Galvin, Szymborska, Joan Larkin, Phillip Larkin, Neidecker, Ni Domhnaill, Fanning, Jarrell, Matthews, Stafford, Gilbert, Fearing, Louis, Olds, Stanford, Howe, Reed, Hendricks.

Book Binding: Dover’s Hand Bookbinding, Morris’s Ideal Book, Japanese bookbinding, Hudson Thames Bookbinding Manual – a smattering of paper-making books.

Foreign Language: O Siadhail’s “Learning Irish,” Spanish-English Dictionary, Gearr-Fhocloir Gaeilge Bearla, “A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary”

Myth/Proto-fantasy/Early Fantasy: Kenneth Morris – “Dragon Path,” Over Nine Waves, Gregory’s “Gods and Fighting Men,” Ovid, The Rackham Illustrated Tales from Shakespeare, two versions of the Arabian Nights, “The Man Who Was Thursday,” Joseph Campbell.   

“Childeren’s or Young Adult:”  Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, some Tolkien, some Irish Language children’s books, McKinney, Garth Nix - really these are good enough to be read by adults.

Fantasy Essays:  Fantasists on Fantasy (tremendous and hard to find), Letters of Tolkien, LeGuin’s “Language of the Night,” Yolen’s “Touch Magic,” Fliger’s “Splintered Light”

Fantasy: Tolkien, Bujold, Wells, Heinlien, Kenneth Morris, McCaffery, Tad Williams, Hambly, Sean Russell, Robin Hobb, Card (only Ender’s Game), Dave Duncan, David Eddings, Patricia Mckilip, Jack Chalker, Randall Garrett, Megan Linholm, Peter Beagle, Walter Miller (A Canticle for Lebiowitz), Evangeline Walton, HP Lovecraft, Kenneth Robeson (Doc Savage)

Law: about 25 books – Constitutional Law, Criminal, Criminal Procedure, Environmental Regulation, Evidence, Civil Procedure, Insurance Law, Environmental Law Statutes, DC Criminal Code and Rules, FRCP, History of Legal Education, and about 1.5 feet of photocopied articles, essays, cases, guides, and course materials.  The course materials are now being scanned in (as images!! ack!!) so I have a significant amount of my hard drive and backup, instead of on my shelves.  Law books don't really function like my other books. 

Odd: (probably the most interesting category on anyone’s shelf): Emerson’s essays, Astronomical guide, Eastern Tree guide, the I Ching, “The Prince of Providence,” The Beak of the Finch, Land Navigation Handbook.

Notables: 
1st Editons: Heinlein’s Job: a Comedy of Justice,  Lindholm’s Wizard of the Pigeons, Shippey’s Tolkien, and various more contemporary books listed above.
Others: A signed Rubiyatt (1907, purple ink, gold leaf, 275 copies, Persian, transliteration, translation), 7 Limited Print hand-bound books of Irish Verse from the Stone Street Press (trans. Malachi McCormick), the first printing of Morris's "The Book of the Three Dragons," an 1830 edition of Sir Walter Scott’s “Lady of the Lake,” The Tenniel Illustrated “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” 1898 Andrew Lang version (illustrated) of the Arabian Nights, 1909 Rackham Illustrated “Tales from Shakespeare,” an 1800 printing of Columbia Dictionary of the English Language (with Grammar).  (I used to own an early Webster’s, but the Columbia is my favorite early American Dictionary.)
Signed books from: Lux, Kunitz, Howe, Stafford, Yolen, McCormick, Hendricks, Cantwell, Lindholm and others.

Everybody Loves Fantasy

Well – the response to the Fantasy reading posts has been interesting.   I think I'll try to write something more on the LOTR films later today - I'll also try to unify and add to that list below.  I've left off some rather obvious books including the magnificent  "A Wrinkle in Time" by Madeleine L'Engle.

My New Recommended (Mostly High Fantasy) List with Additions

First, the two that shaped the contemporary genres more than anyone:

Tolkien – Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion
HG Wells – The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man

Andre Norton – Witchworld.
Anne McCaffrey –Harper Hall Series (Dragonsinger; Dragonsong; Dragondrums)
Barbara Hambly – Darwath Series (The Time of the Dark; The Walls of Air; The Armies of Daylight; Mother of Winter; Icefalcon's Quest) Dragonsbane; The Ladies of Madrigyn
Brin – The Postman
C.S. Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia (The Magician's Nephew; The Lion; the Witch; and the Wardrobe; Prince Caspian; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Horse and His Boy; The Silver Chair; The Last Battle)
Douglas Adams – Hitchhiker’s Guide
Frank Herbert – Dune (only the first), The Jesus Incident
G.K. Chesterton – The Man Who Was Thursday
Garrett and Heydon – The Gandaralla Cycle
Garth Nix – Sabriel
George MacDonald – The Princess and Curdie, The Princess and the Goblin
Guy Gavriel Kay - Sailing to Sarantium
H.P. Lovecraft – Selected Works
Harlan Ellison – Deathbird Stories
Harry Turtledove – The Misplaced Legion
James Tiptree – Brightness Falls From Air
Kenneth Morris –The Dragon Path
L.M. Bujold - The Curse of Chalion
Lloyd Alexander – Prydain Chronicles  (The Book of Three; The Black Cauldron; The Castle of Llyr; Taran Wanderer; The High King)
M. Lindholm – The Wizard of the Pigeons
Martha Wells – everything she’s written thusfar.
Miller – A Canticle for Leibowitz
Neil Gaiman –Sandman (graphic novels)
Orson Scott Card – Ender’s Game
Patricia McKillip – Riddlemaster (The Riddlemaster of Hed; Heir of Sea and Fire; and Harpist in the Wind) 
Peter Beagle – The Last Unicorn
Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle
Robert C. O'Brien – Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
Robert Heinlein – Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert Silverberg – Lord Valentine’s Castle, Gilgamesh the King
Robin McKinley – The Hero and the Crown
Sean Russell – Moontide and Magicrise
Stephen R. Donaldson -- Mordant's Need (The Mirror of Her Dreams; A Man Rides Through)
Susan Cooper – The Dark is Rising (Over Sea and Under Stone; The Dark is Rising; Greenwitch; The Grey King; Silver on the Tree)
Tad Williams – Tailchaser’s Song
Ursula K. Le Guin –A Wizard of Earthsea; The Tombs of Atuan; The Farthest Shore; Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea
Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle
William Gibson – Neuromancer

In the first list, I deliberately left off Pullman, Peake, Dunsany, Eddison, Howard, Pynchon, Vance, Leiber, White, Jordan, Martin, Eddings, Feist, Hobb, Pratchett, Anthony, Slavatore, Brooks, Dickson, Donaldson, Stephenson, Tepper, May, Rice, Moorcock, Verne, Cherryth, Weis/Hickman, Resnick, Eddings, Robinson, Duncan, Banks, Brust, Rowling, et al., all of whom I've read to some extent.

There are some good stories in the “off” list, but I’m really not into the endless outline/formula writers (Jordan, Martin, Eddings, Williams), nor do I like the melodrama of Feist or Hobb, and the punning stuff (Pratchett, Anthony) bores me.  Actually, the endless outline writers kind of offend me; take 3-6 rather boring and clichéd narratives and weave them in and out.  Then there are those who were promising but just leaned too heavily on other things – Pullman, Salavatore, Brooks.  And those like Orson Scott Card who write one brilliant book (Ender’s Game – everyone should read it) and crank out thousands of pages of absolute crap afterward. 

Books I haven’t read that you lot have recommended (and which I will be thus checking out):

Alfred Bester  - The Demolished Man
Dan Simmons – Hyperion
MJ Engh - Arslan
John Crowley – Little Big
Marie Jakober - The Black Chalice

Then you get things like Asimov’s Nightfall – a very important work insofar as it influenced other writers, but perhaps not worth reading on it’s own (hell, I’ll put it in, it’s short).

Early Fantisists you might want to check out

Lord Dunsany – The King of Elfland's Daughter
E.R. Eddison – The Worm Ouroboros
Charles Williams – War in Heaven
William Morris – Anything

 

Also, a new post in reponse to all your comments below: 

Tolkien: I think LOTR is absolutely worth re-reading – both for craft-hunger as a wonderful example of how to write prose with an aural air to it (read some of the passages aloud – they’re stunning), and because the book offers a sense of profound solace and rightness as it hews to Tolkien’s theory of the eucatastrophe (or “joyous catastrophe,” which goes beyond the dues ex machine, in that it’s both “good” and “catastrophic.”  I put quotes around those because it’s debatable how “good” the ending of the book is (most of the heroes cannot enjoy what they’ve won) and how “catastrophic” it is, in that the world endures but is fundamentally changed (or as much of a fundamental change as the Victorian age to the Modern age – things pass away, new things arise.)  The movies almost entirely miss this.

Donaldson: I also found the Covenant series unpleasant, although I read through all the books.  There were a couple of great moments in there, which I touched on.  I do like, in a craft sense, the concept of the anti-hero being so completely realized, but a hard read.  Rik had a great call with Mordant’s Need – that’s an interesting duology and is very much Donaldson.  I think Covenant is a more ambitious and deeper reaching book, but I’m still keeping it off my list due to the problems with the scope of the book (endless blather) and it’s fundamental unpleasant-to-read nature.
Here’s an interesting quote by Donaldson (which applies to poets as well?): “I believe that as a group we sf/f writers are saner than mainstream writers. We concentrate on storytelling, and I believe that storytelling is actually good for us. In addition, in this field the storytelling tends to be about small people who become bigger instead of about small people who become smaller, which is usually the case in mainstream fiction. Our kind of storytelling relieves internal pressure. And we seem to feel that it’s possible to have constructive endings instead of destructive ones. As a result, I find that my peers are (very broadly speaking) nicer and happier people than the mainstream writers I know.”

Tad Williams:  I’ll put Tailchaser’s Song on the list as well.  It, like Mordant’s need above, is, on some levels, a lesser story than “Memory, Sorrow, Thorn,” but it’s also one that I’d rather recommend.  I think Flashes is dead-right about Williams having difficulty resolving his tensions.  However, I think that in MST Williams ought to get kudos for making his elves (again, Tolkien echos) actually immortal, with all the burdens and weariness that apply – they genuinely do seem to be “of fairy,” in that they’re recognizable but alien, creepy.  Tolkien’s elves are generally “outside” the story, except for Legolas, who is a very young elf, born in Middle-Earth, having never seen the light of the trees (Valinor).  The elder elves, like Elrond and Galadriel, have their own worries and are not, in a sense, fully “there” in the story.  Given that Galadriel is one of the kin-slayers (she’s a penitent murderess banished from Valinor) and that Elrond is only a half-elf (again, never having seen Valinor) we can see Tolkien carefully constructing his world so that we don’t have a sense that it’s simple “pure good” v. simple “pure evil.”

CS Lewis:  Narnia isn’t for everyone (Tolkien hated it): allegorical, breezy, disunified, but for all that it works for me.   

Pratchett (et. al.): I’m sorry, but while I went through a phase where I loved the lighter stuff, largely because the jokes and plot center on the more surface level of language, for some reason I now just can’t read it.  To me it seems to be about cleverness v. deeply (emotionally) satisfying story; it seems a harder and finer thing to do the latter.

Alexander:  The Prydain books are hard for me; he’s clearly writing all over the map children’s books at many points, but there are all these wonderful fantastic nuggets (like the witches asking for a memory of a perfect summer day in exchange for something) that really do strike at the heart of why we’d read and write fantasy (because, on some level, one can objectify and symbolize what we value and thus explore it more fully.)  I think both “The High King” and “Taran Wanderer” are of a different nature than the Castle of Lyr and the Black Cauldron; more adult, more realized.  It’s as though he decided to go in a new direction, almost like how Tolkien seems unfocused up to the point where the Fellowship actually forms, whereupon the story seems to become something else, as it becomes something else again in Moria.   Again, although there are obvious Tolkien echoes throughout Prydain, including the close, there are still those moments which are completely Alexander’s own; the free Commots, Fflewddur’s sacrifice of his harp, Coll’s death, Annlaw Clay-Shaper.  So – yes.  On the list.

As to Lindholm v Hobbs (I realize they’re the same person, Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden).  Hobbs’ Assassin series is melodramatic; stock characters, blatant and heightened emotional appeals to clichéd emotions, one-dimensional characters not quite behaving as they ought so that the plot snakes it’s way forward.  Basically, the realistic element of internal fidelity/consistency (you poets should know what I’m talking about) gets lost because the author wants to take the reigns and “make” the story do certain things.  That's just off-putting to me.  Perhaps it's not that bad for non-writers.

A good author/poet is kind of like the Deist conception of God.  They make the clockwork of their universe then they set it in motion and watch what happens.  If the clockwork is poorly made, it requires a lot of miraculous nudging.  If the clockwork could work but the god wants certain things to happen, there’s also miraculous nudging. 

Hobb’s world is ultimately interesting (I like ideas/settings of the Liveship Traders myself) but one in which she plays too much, is too headstrong.  However, in The Wizard of the Pigeons, Lindholm manages to straddle the line between madness and magic for much of the book in a kind of Fisher-King-esque way. 

As long as we’re on Fantasy. . .

I thought I’d blog about Fantasy and the new Narnia film.  As many of you know, I’m a fantasy junky.  More properly, I’ve always been fascinated with the fantastic in literature, which isn’t quite the same thing as the Fantasy Genre.  The fantastic can quickly swell to encompass most fiction, depending on how you want to draw the lines.  If we view “fantasy” as anything which contains something that “is not real nor factually accurate” then we’re looking at a slew of works that would include the Bible, epic myth (Gilgamesh, Homer) all the way up through Dickens and Twain to The Wasteland and Star Wars; in fact, if we wanted to include authorial “bias” as coloring the material via selective interpretation we could include most major contemporary news sources.  That’s not so far a stretch as it might first seem – clearly, the ever-changing story for our current involvement in Iraq is chock full of things that are not real, factually accurate, and which the average person of reasonable intelligence simply would not believe on it’s face.

One quick way to distinguish Fantasy (the contemporary genre) from the fantastic in literature is that Fantasy asks you to temporarily believe something that’s empirically untrue or unproveable about the *structure* of the world insofar as the reader is able to temporarily adopt “a willing suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge) that in part depends on the seamless texture of the fantasy world.  This quick definition works for me in that it excludes religious tracts (viewed by the non-believer as “fantastic”) and most fiction (which exists in “the real world” but is populated by made up characters).  Instead Fantasy asks you to accept the idea that the sun is green, and under it, people are going about being people.   If the fantastic world is wrought in a seamless and internally consistent way, the reader can ride along on the bubble of their disbelief, enjoying the story for its own sake.  Tolkien’s work is a fantasy in that it contains Hobbits and Ents, and is convincing in that they behave (always) like Hobbits and Ents.  The curtain is never accidentally or deliberately pulled aside.  If a Hobbit were to become un-Hobbit-ish, then we’d have a problem, but it’s a measure of genius to be able to completely transform characters as Tolkien does while having them remain true to the cultures which produced them.

In many ways, modern High Fantasy was invented by Tolkien, who injected realism and symbolic resonance (which he termed “applicability” as contrasted to clunky “allegory”) on a hitherto unknown scale into fantasy literature.  It didn’t hurt that he was able to weave in symbols and themes from all over the “western” tradition – Le Morte D'Arthur to the Green Knight, the Bible to the Kalevala, MacBeth to Homer, Oedipus to Beowulf (which Tolkien was pretty much singly responsible for changing critical opinion on via his essay “The Monsters and the Critics.”

This element of realism, in the literary sense, is primarily expressed by treating characters in an everyday, accurate, “realistic” manner.  Realism is often contrasted with Romanticism – which treated subjects in an “ideal” and highly stylized way.  Tolkien was perhaps the first fantasist to worry about having an accurate chronological arc for his stories and concern himself with the mundanities of how much food his characters had to carry on their journeys.  This set Tolkien apart from Dunsany, William Morris, George McDonald, E.R. Edson, Kenneth Morris, and other early fantasists.  Dunsany, for example, is a consistent but florid writer; everything is bejeweled.  Tolkien also was deeply concerned with the origins of the viable languages he invented for his characters (and act I *still* can’t believe gets such little critical shift – it exceeds Blake’s myth-building and receives one one-hundredth of the critical attention.) 

While you can lop of “Sword and Sorcery” fantasy writing as a sub-genre, it’s hard to distinguish it from High Fantasy, and particularly hard to distinguish it from Tolkien (as is so much contemporary writing) in the sense that Tolkien codified a lot of the archetypes: you don’t see the “Germanic dwarf” showing up all that often after LOTR – instead you see the “Tolkien dwarf” dominating the landscape.   Some of this came through the Role-Playing-Game (RPG) movement, the most popular of which was Dungeons and Dragons.  D+D pretty much assumed the Tolkein paradigm whole-cloth, although it tried to sweep in other mythos.  Books, modules, short-stories written out of this mentality reinforced the standard Tolkien-esque fare (although like a degrading photocopy of a photocopy, the archetypes became less and less sharp as time passed.)  In fact, the genre conventions became so strong that one of the most popular type of sub-genres rests on mocking or subverting those conventions (without exploring new territory.)

Tolkien has also created some of the seminal lines of thought (insofar as they apply to analyzing the fantastic – his essay, “On Fairy-Stories” is a must-read for anyone seriously interested in fantasy literature.  Perhaps the subject for another post.

I’m not one of those people who often see fantasy films without reading the books (or the comics) beforehand, basically just because I tend to read a lot.  Thus, it’s kind of hard for me to separate the film from the story on which is was based.  Sometimes you get a really good film (or a bad film) out of a bad story, sometimes you get a good film (or a bad film) from a good story.  I think it’s hardest for a filmmaker to take a really good story and make a good film out of it.

Tolkien’s LOTR is a case in point:  I’d rate those films as A, B, B-, as films and A-, C, and F as *interpretations* of the book.  (LOTR is one of the great novels of the 20th century, and it’s not that way because Tolkien needed to rewrite 80% of his dialogue or cast Gimli as a comic side-kick. )  I remember covering my eyes and cringing during most of the third film. Midway through the film I just completely gave up on it. I actually laughed aloud when Shadofax knocked Denethor back onto the pyre (how cheesy can you get?)

I hated the ending of the third film. The scourging of the shire is such an important element in the final book, largely because it speaks to “real life.”  How many veterans serve abroad out of love for their country, then return to find things have not stayed the same, that petty dictators are easily set up? When you start removing stuff like this from the story, you push it closer to the original dismissive stance taken by critics of LOTR -  that’s it’s merely “escapist fantasy” with no relevance to how we live our lives.

Mostly, I hated the dumbing down of the language – it’s not like the dialogue *needed* lots of “improving.”  Compare Aragorn’s simple speech at Helm’s Deep with the awful “This is a good sword” speech from the film.

Compare Eowyn’s eloquent defiance of the Nazgul with the awful action movie dialogue lines from the film:

NAZGUL: Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!

DERNHELM/Eowyn: But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn I am, Eomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.

V.

Witch King: You fool. No man can kill me. Die.

Eowyn: I am no man.

Then the pathetically cliched Lifetime moment between Eowyn and Theoden (not in the book):

Theoden: I know your face... Eowyn. My eyes darken.
Eowyn: No, no. I'm going to save you
Theoden: You already did... Eowyn..

ARRGH!

The characters didn’t *need* to have these odd Hollywood personas tacked on to them (e.g., Aragorn as self-doubter, Gimli as the comic side-kick, Legolas as a bad-ass action hero).  Hopefully, in 20 years time or less, someone will do justice to LOTR with a series film that stay relatively close to the nuances of the story.

I think one of the tragic aspects of the film is that Jackson had so distorted the characters by the end, it was impossible to think of Jackson's Gimli or Legolas having the following exchange:

You may think them wonderful, but I have seen a greater wonder in this land, more beautiful than any grove or glade that ever grew: my heart is still full of it. 'Strange are the ways of Men, Legolas! Here they have one of the marvels of the Northern World, and what do they say of it? Caves, they say! Caves! Holes to fly to in time of war, to store fodder in! My good Legolas, do you know that the caverns of Helm's Deep are vast and beautiful? There would be an endless pilgrimage of Dwarves, merely to gaze at them, if such things were known to be. Aye indeed, they would pay pure gold for a brief glance!'

'And I would give gold to be excused,' said Legolas; 'and double to be let out, if I strayed in!' '

You have not seen, so I forgive your jest,' said Gimli. 'But you speak like a fool. Do you think those halls are fair, where your King dwells under the hill in Mirkwood, and Dwarves helped in their making long ago? They are but hovels compared with the caverns I have seen here: immeasurable halls, filled with an everlasting music of water that tinkles into pools, as fair as Kheled-zvram in the starlight. '

And, Legolas, when the torches are kindled and men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! then, Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from dark pools covered with clear glass; cities. such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into the dark recesses where no light can come. And plink! a silver drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in a grotto of the sea. Then evening comes: they fade and twinkle out; the torches pass on into another chamber and another dream. There is chamber after chamber, Legolas; hall opening out of hall, dome after dome, stair beyond stair; and still the winding paths lead on into the mountains' heart. Caves! The Caverns of Helm's Deep! Happy was the chance that drove me there! It makes me weep to leave them.' '

Then I will wish you this fortune for your comfort, Gimli,' said the Elf, 'that you may come safe from war and return to see them again. But do not tell all your kindred! There seems little left for them to do, from your account. Maybe the men of this land are wise to say little: one family of busy dwarves with hammer and chisel might mar more than they made.'

'No, you do not understand,' said Gimli. 'No dwarf could be unmoved by such loveliness. None of Durin's race would mine those caves for stones or ore, not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of blossoming trees in the spring-time for firewood? We would tend these glades of flowering stone, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap -- a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day -- so we could work, and as the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock. And lights, Legolas! We should make lights, such lamps as once shone in Khazad-dym; and when we wished we would drive away the night that has lain there since the hills were made; and when we desired rest, we would let the night return.' '

You move me, Gimli,' said Legolas. 'I have never heard you speak like this before. Almost you make me regret that I have not seen these caves. Come! Let us make this bargain-if we both return safe out of the perils that await us, we will journey for a while together. You shall visit Fangorn with me, and then I will come with you to see Helm's Deep.'

‘That would not be the way of return that I should choose,' said Gimli. 'But I will endure Fangorn, if I have your promise to come back to the caves and share their wonder with me.'

**

Some films I think did a really good job as both films and adaptations:

The Neverending Story, The Princess Bride, The Harry Potter Series.

I have to put The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe in that category; it was a very good film adaptation that stayed close enough to the essential elements of the book to make it not disappointing.  I’d give it an A-. 

LWW as a film was pretty clever, starting with the backstory (The Battle of Britain) being brought overtly into the story.  I wonder how the average viewer will see LWW – given that it’s hard not to see the influence LWW has had – certainly in the Harry Potter stories, which is famous for sweeping other themes into itself.  For example, the Penivese children in the vast sprawling mansion with the kindly Professor (Diggory) echo Hogwarts and Dumbledore.   Further, Narnia and Potter both mix their fantastic creatures (dragons and centaurs and unicorns and fauns) without much explanation (Lewis’s dwarves are decidedly Germanic, while his centaurs are Greek).  Although Lewis provides a creation myth in The Magician’s Nephew (and also details who the Professor is and how the Wardrobe came to be built), his story is one of agency which pre-supposes fauns and whatnot.  (By contrast, Tolkien provided a consistent and concrete explanation in the Silmarillon.)    

The most disturbing element was the battle scenes, which are becoming endemic to fantasy – as though modern fantasy film was infected with kick-ass-ness, a kind of martial proving of ideas that surely must appeal to the contemporary insecure American.  We prove our righteousness upon the body of our enemies.  Narina, in that respect, is pulled from the orbit of the books, which is about the inner strength to *resist* temptation, into a rather materialistic ass-whooping.

Also, it’s hard not to view the Stone Table scene in the book as being somewhat legalistic rather than mystic (i.e., somewhat formulaic in the elements it marshals).   Alsan triumphs through what seems like legalistic trickery instead of something that just appeals to a sense of “rightness.”  I suppose a more obvious perversion would be the griffins “bombing” the Witch’s army with rocks – a clear parallel to the German bombers over London in the opening scenes.  What, I wonder, are we supposed to walk away from that moment thinking?  That the “techniques” of the enemy are validly stolen and employed in one’s own cause, provided that one is on the side of “good”?  I think the original book is far more to the point – that the children are shorn from the modern world and go through a process of assimilation into Narnia - and as far as I recall the books are filled (forgive me,  I last read them 8 years ago) with references to the transformative Narnian air, and the more overt breath of Aslan.  In that sense they’re spiritually essentialist (or fundamentalist? – ack, the word choice) insofar as they make the moral struggle more overt, more top-level.  The Narnia of the books is a world where, if there’s an option to torture a person for knowledge they may not have, there might be some bluster, but the essential rules of conduct among beings preclude such activity. 

Hmm.

Zelazny = Crack

I’m reading the Amber series, given to me for Christmas, and it’s fascinating to note the structural parallels between Gaiman’s Endless and some other works like Robin Hobb’s “Assassin” series (and no, it’s not just the first person).  There are other series that draw heavily on each other: Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” and Nix’s “Tower” series, most immediately spring to mind.  However interesting these parallels are, they begin to comprise what I think of as the English Major Crack response, where I read the book without actually enjoying it, though I do spend my time analyzing and “digging.”  And for What?  (Which means, “To what End?”, a.k.a., “Why?”)  I think it’s just trained into me.  There’s honestly no reason for me to stick with a book that I don’t like, a book where I keep thinking, 200 pages in, “Soon, it will gel soon,” a book that I would not recommend to anyone.  In some senses, this is the cart driving the horse – the contemporary publishing industry dictating what I ought to read, demanding, by its presence, it’s “thereness” in the landscape, that I respond, categorize, sift, judge, etc.  But, despite its difficulty, after however many years of academic indoctrination, I don’t have to play that game.  If someone asks me about the sci-fi/fantasy genre, I can just say, “I got 200 pages into the Amber series and decided to stop.”  No matter how illuminating it would be in terms of understanding threads I see in other authors.  No matter how crucial the linkage, it’s ultimately boring. 

I will put the book down and let the dust accrue. 

What I should be doing is a more serious review of a  more personally valuable work.

I should also put together a sci-fi/fantasy short reading list for anyone who is interested.  I used to have a detailed list of everything I’d read (and I read a lot), but that's too much of a pain in the ass to look for and I stopped updating in it 2000 or so.  Instead, I offer a short first-cut list of books that I found interesting enough to re-read:

First, the two that shaped the contemporary genres more than anyone:

Tolkien – Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion
HG Wells – The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man

Adams – Hitchhiker’s Guide
Andre Norton – Witchworld.
Barbara Hambly – Darwath
Brin – The Postman
Cooper – The Dark is Rising
CS Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia
Garrett and Heydon – The Gandaralla Cycle
Garth Nix – Sabriel
Gibson – Neuromancer
Guy Gavriel Kay - Sailing to Sarantium
Harlan Ellison – Deathbird Stories
Heinlein – Stranger in a Strange Land
Herbert – Dune (only the first), The Jesus Incident
Kenneth Morris –The Dragon Path
L.M. Bujold - The Curse of Chalion
Le Guin – A Wizard of Earthsea
Lindholm – The Wizard of the Pigeons
Lovecraft – Selected Works
Martha Wells – everything she’s written thusfar.
Orson Scott Card – Ender’s Game
Patricia McKillip – Riddlemaster
Peter Beagle – The Last Unicorn
Sean Russell – Moontide and Magicrise
Silverberg – Lord Valentine’s Castle
Miller – A Canticle for Leibowitz
Turtledove – The Misplaced Legion
Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle

I’ve deliberately left off Pullman, Peake, Dunsany, Eddison, Howard, Pynchon, Vance, Leiber, White, Jordan, Martin, Eddings, Williams, Feist, Hobb, Pratchett, Anthony, Slavatore, Brooks, Dickson, Donaldson, Stephenson, Tepper, May, McCaffrey, Rice, Moorcock, Verne, Cherryth, Weis/Hickman, Resnick, Eddings, Robinson, Duncan, Banks, Brust, Williams, Rowling, et al., all of whom I've read to some extent.

There are some good stories in the “off” list, but I’m really not into the endless outline/formula writers (Jordan, Martin, Eddings, Williams), nor do I like the melodrama of Feist or Hobb, and the punning stuff (Pratchett, Anthony) bores me.  Actually, the endless outline writers kind of offend me; take 3-6 rather boring and clichéd narratives and weave them in and out.  Then there are those who were promising but just leaned too heavily on other things – Pullman, Salavatore, Brooks.  And those like Orson Scott Card who write one brilliant book (Ender’s Game – everyone should read it) and crank out thousands of pages of absolute crap afterward. 

For those of you with a hankering for interesting contemporary fantasy, Martha Wells just might be the best current fantasy writer out there for my money.  Actually, my big trio, Sean Russell, Barbara Hambly, and Martha Wells have all slid somewhat recently.  Russell hasn’t yet proved he can escape Tolkien (as LeGuin pointed out, Tolkien crushed a generation of fantasists).  Hambly lost her way and became preachy, making some of the plots seem morality driven.   In her two most recent books, Wells has lost a lot of the tactility in her earlier novels.  I realize that there’s a huge subsection of readers out there who hate descriptive novels, desiring plot/dialogue, plot/dialogue, but, frankly, that bores me.  It’s also a lot more work to create a tactile world without over-describing.  Wells, in City of Bones, Death of the Necromancer, The Wheel of the Infinite,  (and to some extent The Element of Fire) succeeded at this.  Her plots and settings are also refreshingly unconventional, breaking with the standard medieval fare and dealing with worlds modeled on 17th, 19th, and 20th century socio-political/economic structures.  Main characters die.  She drops the hammer sometimes 1/3rd of the way into the book.  It’s good stuff really - a truly viable writer within the genre who takes intersting risks that ultimately pay off for the reader. 

HP Lovecraft

I love Lovecraft – and not because we both have a deep love affair with the city of Providence, Rhode Island. It’s not because of his style, which is easily parodied and now somewhat dated. It’s not camp-love, based on the predictability of his drab titles, the mindless lurking horror, etc. Nor is it a purely literary love, blind to his faults as an author. It’s not because he’s emerged as an oddly important historical writer, as something of the father of the modern American horror writers like Stephen King. In fact, without Lovecraft, there would be no X-Files (a good way to think of which is Holmes and Watson (Mulder and Scully - the parallels are numerous) lost in a Lovecraftian universe.)

No, my love for Lovecraft springs out of two fonts – his generosity and his self-improvement.

Most people don’t know that Lovecraft, in addition to being a pulp writer and the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, wrote literally tens of thousands of letters to other writers (a close correspondent was Robert Howard– author of Conan), most young and struggling writers. In a way, that circle of correspondence predates what’s currently happening on the internet with various writing groups and workshops.

While it’s easy to pick up on Lovecraft’s great class and race anxieties in his early works, (actually, one could just say he’s xenophobic), it’s just as easy to forget that Lovecraft, after much exposure to people of all classes, races, and religions, blossomed into an embracing human being by the end of his short life.

Here’s a classic short story: The Call of Cthulhu

Madeleine L’Engle

A friend of mine just sent me this link to an interview with Madeleine L’Engle. Yea! "A Wrinkle in Time" is such a great book – and a personally important one. I think there are kinds of “pivotal” books, especially if the right book catches you when you’re 8-10 years old. Sometimes it's just a line, sometimes just an idea the book rests on, sometimes it's the whole thing, nearly every word. Other big ones for the young Scoplaw included Susan Coopers “The Dark is Rising” series, Lloyd Alexander’s “Taran Wanderer” series, Tolkien (Hobbit, LOTR, Sillmarillion), C.S. Lewis’s “Narnia Chronicles,” Robert C. O'Brien’s “Mrs. Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH,” Anne McCaffrey’s “Harper Hall” series, Asmov’s “Foundation,” John Christopher’s “Tripods” series, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island,” Aesop’s Fables, George Macdonald’s “The Princess and the Goblin,” Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” and of course Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” which if you’re stuck at work, is a great escape (whole text of the book is on line). I’m sure there were more (I was a freakish reader as a kid), but it’s time for bed.

Book Meme

From Mother in Law: The instructions are to copy the list and put anything you've read in bold.

I decided to bold just the author if I had read something else by them.

I guess I'm just not a novel guy. I'm sure some of my former professors are rolling in their graves (or their offices, which, sadly, for many of them, amounts to the same thing.) If the list were about Poetry or Literary Theory on the other hand. . .

-Beowulf
-Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
-Agee, James - A Death in the Family
-Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
-Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
-Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
-Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
-Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
-Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
-Camus, Albert - The Stranger
-Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
-Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
-Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
-Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
-Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
-Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
-Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
-Dante - Inferno
-de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
-Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
-Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
-Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
-Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
-Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
-Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
-Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
-Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
-Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
-Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
-Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
-Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
-Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
-Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
-Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
-Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
-Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
-Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
-Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
-Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
-Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
-Homer - The Iliad
-Homer - The Odyssey
-Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
-Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
-Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
-Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
-James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
-James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
-Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
-Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
-Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
-Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
-Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
-London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
-Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
-Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
-Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
-Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
-Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
-Morrison, Toni - Beloved
-O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
-O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
-Orwell, George - Animal Farm
-Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
-Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
-Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
-Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
-Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
-Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
-Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
-Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
-Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
-Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
-Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
-Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
-Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
-Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
-Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
-Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
-Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
-Sophocles - Antigone
-Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
-Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
-Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
-Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
-Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
-Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
-Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
-Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
-Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
-Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
-Voltaire - Candide
-Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
-Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
-Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
-Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
-Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
-Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
-Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
-Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
-Wright, Richard - Native Son