The Catcher in the Rye

by J.D. Salinger

The Background:

The book found me, quite outside my ability to explain.

The Rundown:

Holden Caulfield; a young adult from an affluent New York / New England family, utterly lost, unwittingly saved. Holden narrates with a take-your-shoes-off, grab-a-beer attitude. He’s left his prep school (he hates it), and encounters a great cast of characters in bars and hotels across Pennsylvania and New York on his way home. His sister Phoebe, younger than him – perhaps in her purity, a foil for his bitter angst – is his catcher, in the rye of his life.

Impressions:

Masterpiece. The story wasn’t any kind of crazy epic, like Les Miserables. It was strong though; simple yet layered, short temporally yet long on insight, straightforward in its telling yet tortured in its implications. I would say that this is the first time I have read a story with a powerful negative space. It was a delight to all five senses.

The Score:

skillful narration: 10/10
compelling characters: 10/10
marvellous plot: 8/10
engaging the mind: 8/10
engaging the heart: 7/10
bonus pts for very skillful colloquial narration: 8
bonus pts for Phoebe: 9

Overall I award this book 6 golden geese on a golden pond

Jude the Obscure

by Thomas Hardy

The Background:

Gregory Miller from back home recommended this to me, about 9 months ago. He had just returned from studying literature abroad in Ireland, and in our literary-style conversations, he just happened to cite Thomas Hardy as a favorite author. He was able to vouch for Tess of the D’Ubervilles, but on short notice, I was able to procure this title only.

The Rundown:

The beginning was a wistful tale of Jude, a childhood dreamer with a college professor for a hero – whose dreams last just long enough to be smashed as he discovers the cruel truth about heroes, and the world he inhabits. He ran away from his Auntie, and was soon married to Arabella (a little harlot of a girl), whom he very quickly separated from. While he was pursuing some sort of education, he became enamoured with Sue (a cousin of his), and they had little escapades into the hills, and before long she married his childhood hero, Professor Philloston. Significantly older fellow. All the while it was very awkward between her and Jude, because they really never stopped making out in the hills, and she never really believed in marriage – or at least in the idea of sole fidelity – until she broke down and pleaded for a separation so she and Jude could go off into the hills and roll in the hay for as long as they pleased. Before long Sue lost her children to a tragic murder, whereby she was terrified by this supposed divine retribution, such that she returned to her husband Philloston, who accepted her back graciously, if not somewhat incredulously. Jude died in the end.

Impressions:
The beginning, where Jude was a childhood dreamer, wanderer and adventurer, was carefree enough. As soon as he got involved with Arabella, I became incredibly disappointed in his character. As soon as he got involved with Sue, much the same happened again. The problem with Sue and Jude was, they were so incredibly awkward around one another. Sue was caught up redefining morality to suit her – though the problem for her was that she was ultimately an unstable pleasure-seeker, tossed by the winds of animal desires, and neither Philloston nor Jude ever really understood to the point they should have. I thought they were going to hit some kind of critical mass of self-inconsistency. For all their progressive theories of morality, throwing off the shackles of the church at that time, they certainly had the poorest grasp on interpersonal morality. That Jude died only at the end had to have been torture to him. It certainly was torture to me. In fact I hated the characters for mixing themselves up in all that, and myself for having to read it.

I can vouch only that this is a great work of literature, and that it is very painful, though not from any deficiency of writing. The pain stems from the headache in having to follow Jude blindly trudging from birth to death in ignorance. Although.. (wistfully) .. I suppose that’s all of us.

The Score:

skillful narration: 7/10
compelling characters: 5/10
marvellous plot: 5/10
engaging the mind: 3/10
engaging the heart: 4/10
bonus pts for birth-to-death scope of Jude’s life: = 3
bonus pts for the Tavern Scene: = 3

Overall I award this book 3 silver-paged Latin and Greek grammars.

The Demolished Man

by Alfred Bester

The Background:

Kyle Myers recommended this to me maybe 9 months ago. I was a little wary, but this was no slouch of a book.

The Rundown:

Ben Reich is the CEO of one of the largest transnationals, in an age of enlightenment, wherein crime has been virtually abolished through the proliferation of people who can read your mind and prevent crimes long before they happen. Except he has murderous intent – and he plans to pull off the first real murder in centuries, by beating the system at its own game.

Impressions:

It’s pretty good. I’m not convinced that he alone could have gotten away with murder, but I was delighted at how completely psychopathic he was. The book fell prey to one of the worst follies of sci-fi: using cutesy future-lingo that really grates on the ears and (for me) adds nothing to realism. The mechanics of reading minds seemed very thought-through – though I could be wrong. The best and most satisfying part was Demolition.

The Score:

skillful narration: 6/10
compelling characters: 7/10
marvellous plot: 7/10
engaging the mind: 5/10
engaging the heart: 5/10
bonus pts for visually intricate TP patterns: 4
bonus pts for the Man with no Face: 6

Overall I award this book 4 gold plated XXth Century knife-pistols.

The Little Prince

by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Background:

It’s one of those books you’ve always heard about, but you might have never read. As in my case. Now, to be fair, I didn’t read Le Petit Prince of course, because I know no French. Although this would be an excellent way to learn.

The Rundown:

It’s a novella, ostensibly for children, though a child who can grasp the depth and breadth of this little book is no child. It is the account of the author having crashed in the vast desert, and of meeting a little prince: a child traveller on a quest to protect the one important thing to him in his universe, who tells the story of the many worlds he has traversed, and the curious people he has met. It’s a little mushy at the end, but certainly the many profound observations, punctuated by even more profound observations, carry the story through like the journey of the prince: with a smile, never quailing at staggering truth, nor batting an eye at deep mystery.

Impressions:

Immaculate.

The Score:

skillful narration: 10/10
compelling characters: 6/10
marvellous plot: 8/10
engaging the mind: 10/10
engaging the heart: 10/10
bonus pts for staggeringly short chapters: 7
bonus pts for the fox: 8

Overall I award this book 6 laughing desert wells.

Carry Me Down

by M. J. Hyland

The Background:

Saw this in a Barnes and Noble early this winter, noted it, and paperbackswapped for it.

The Rundown:

First person account of a neurotic little adolescent 11-year-old boy, obsessed with the lies people tell and being able to detect them, to the point where he nearly destroys his family.

Impressions:

It’s a page turner – the narration carries you right along, the characters are enjoyable (especially that badass substitute teacher Mr. Roche!).  The atmosphere drips thick with anxiety, awkwardness and suspicion – this poor kid has a normal enough home, but is having trouble making the transition to adulthood, in that he craves the parental affections of his parents, while they are treating him as an adult before he is ready, with all the distance, formality, and relational complexity that it entails – and of course no one recognizes that this is the dynamic.  The kid almost goes crazy, unable to handle being lied to in millions of small insignificant ways.

It’s not just about the kid either. The other characters are very well fleshed out, and the story isn’t just some case study, the story is like the story of every one of us, our small day to day existence, and all the insignificant things that are the engine of our lives and that define who we are. I loved every chapter, every page.

The Score:

skillful narration: 10/10
compelling characters: 8/10
marvellous plot: 5/10
engaging the mind: 7/10
engaging the heart: 7/10
bonus pts for a beautiful depiction of childhood mental life: 5
bonus pts for Mr. Roche: 8

Overall I award this book 5 golden model-train stationmaster figurines.

The Sound and the Fury

by William Faulkner

The Background:

I purchased The Sound and the Fury at Denver International Airport 3 or 4 years ago. My brother Dave gave me the ghastly rundown since he had already experienced it, so I knew this one was going to score high, one way or the other. Yet time passed, and I never touched it. I even unwittingly lent it to Amanda for a year, who returned it despairing of how ungainly it was.

Years came and went; this past Christmas I visited Dave and Allison, and I still hadn’t read it, and it was so shameful to me that I couldn’t look Dave in the eye anymore, so this January I dug in.

The Rundown:

It’s set in Mississippi, both in 1910 and in 1928. It’s divided into four sections, according to narrator: Benjy, Quentin, Jason and Dilsey. It was at least as crazy as I knew it was going to be.

See, Benjy’s section was a good read, but it was really difficult to form the “bigger picture” of what was happening because of how he told his story. He’s a mentally handicapped man whose narration is very flighty and out of chronological order. This chapter gives you a lot about his family the Compsons.

Quentin is Benjy’s brother – he’s in university and he went off the deep end somewhere. He doesn’t even think right. He’s obsessed with protecting his sister, and at some point he snaps, because most of his section (and it’s the biggest section) is unreadable, not least because it’s mostly stream-of-consciousness blend-together-every-thought-and-word-oh-look-a-birdy-sorry-i-got-distracted mumbo jumbo. In fact I got about thirty or forty pages in, confirmed that the rest was more of the same, and skipped directly to his brother Jason’s part.

Jason’s part was written like Benjy’s (that is, it’s readable), but Jason is by far the cruelest bastard in the book. That makes him my favorite. He’s both a family man and an angry little sociopath who steals money from women. Plus he owns slaves and you can see him power tripping everywhere. It was great. So, the three of them are all siblings, and their family is one of those old-money turn-of-the-century falling-apart-from-the-inside-out Southern plantation-type homes. It’s great dynamics.

Dilsey is their family’s head Negro servant; she’s sort of the more matriarchal and respectable figure within the family dynamic, since Mrs. Compson Sr. herself is kind of a flake. Her section is narrated third-person, whereas the others were narrated first-person; we’re not really privy to her internal life, whatever that may consist of, but she’s outgoing and firm enough to be an excellent character. Her character was a good “cooldown” character because the storytelling was the most normal. In this section, the sister eventually smashes a window and runs away from her crazy family with some equally dubious boyfriend, and we don’t see her again. Good luck.

Impressions:

Intense. Rambling. I really didn’t want to finish it; the storytelling wasn’t that engaging. I couldn’t draw out of it any kind of thought-provoking themes, it was kind of dry in that regard. The story was just enough to keep me from starving I’d say.

The Score:

skillful narration: 6/10
compelling characters: 8/10
marvellous plot: 2/10
engaging the mind: 5/10
engaging the heart: 5/10
bonus pts for being literarily inventive: 7
bonus pts for Jason: 7

Overall I award this book 4 golden smashed bedroom windows.