summer reading

this post serves three purposes:
1. showing off
2. recommending / derecommending literature (this actually helps YOU in your quest to efficiently read everything in the world worth reading) (but it doesn't justify showing off) (my apologies)
3. enough analysis / summary / comprehension to feel like i haven't totally mentally slacked off this summer

so i go back to school in five days, and i'm very on-the-fence about it. i always get excited about change, but i always get sad about change. i feel like i am the rope in a tug-of-war - except a tug-of-war between two very strong men, men so strong and so equally matched that the rope doesn't move (i am thinking about this, and i supposed the strong part doesn't really matter.... the men could very easily be total weaklings. or strong women. or weak women. or squirrels. it doesn't matter as long as they are equally matched. but this is a post about literature, not about physics, so onwards). this is nice because i feel emotionally stable, but it's not because things aren't happening; it's because things of opposite forces are happening. this is high-competition tug-of-war.

anyways, i've done quite a bit of free reading this summer. it is important to note that only a few of these books were actually on my list. no wait, i lied; half of them were. whatever: the list isn't important; reading is. the following list are the books i read this summer and a few comments on each of them.

1. The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

when i went to college, we were required to read Manalive by GK Chesterton over the summer, who, before that point in my life, i'd never heard of. so it confused me when every single kid in the Torrey Honors Institute raved about The Man Who Was Thursday as his or her favorite book ("oh my gosh the ending is so crazy!!!"). i read two pages, couldn't get into it, and refused to touch it for another year. after i read it, i had to call everyone i knew who'd read it and ask what the "plot twist" they all raved about was. i couldn't tell if i'd missed it or just saw it coming or what. i chalk this naivete up to the fact that my emotions and expectatinos towards the book were tweaked by pre-reading commentary from everyone else i know, but i enjoyed The Man Who Was Thursday regardless. GKC has this talent of spinning a crazy, million-mile-per-hour-paced tale but still quenching it with the honeyed drippings of a philosophic, socio-conscious thinking and feeling soul. i recommend asking Chloe Cuffel to point out her favorite line, since it's mine too, and i don't want to be a poser.

2. Christy by Catherine Marshall

this is a girl book that has been on my shelf, up there unopened with things like Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights, for probably twelve or thirteen years now (i feel old saying that, but remember that i started reading chapter books in like kindergarten). it's about a young woman in the olden days (when i say that i mean.... when there were trains. slightly more modern than Laura Ingalls Wilder & co.), who goes up to the rough-and-tough mountain towns as a teacher and it's a big adventure and she changes lives and makes her way and falls in love, etc. i cannot lie, these are my favorite stories. of course i cried in the end, when Christy falls in love with the rough-around-the-edges mountain man instead of the clean-cut-and-possibly-perfect church boy and it's this whole tale of redemption and the mountain man is actually a doctor and now that he's opened up to someone after the trauma of losing his first wife, he can go save lives now.... sigh.

3. The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment by Tim Challies

Tim Challies will actually be our keynote speaker at the 2009 Christian Web Conference, of which i am the Event Production Director (i am far more stoked about this sweet title than i am about the countless hours i've spent reserving rooms and ordering conference supplies). i bought two of these books, one for Matthew and one for myself, because Matt did a paper project on spiritual disciplines (fasting, prayer, sabbath, solitude, uhhh, some other ones i can't remember, etc), and i am always very interested in the subject of discernment (one of my spiritual gifts, according to several xeroxed spiritual gifts assessments). we read it by chapter and did the study questions in the back together and it's not like... an overwhelmingly wonderful work of literature, but it's a very thorough look on the subject of discernment in the Christian life. though a small work, The Discipline... is an important work, with solid thinking and clarity that calls us away from ignorance so that each action, claim, and decision we make are better and closer to truth. anything that helps Christians look less like irrational idiots gets an A in my book.

*side note: in the other room, my father and brother are watching a show on feral children. i thought that was worth mentioning. and this is only because they are waiting for me to finish blogging so we can begin season four of The OC together.

4. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Matt got this for me for my birthday; i guess it was required reading for him in high school but i'd never heard of it before (Barbara Kingsolver took up all the space on the summer reading list). half of it is the author's account of his time in WWII concentration camps, the other half are his theories / musings / weighty observations and decisions and statements about living in light of his experiences. i read stuff like this, and i think, "if this is published, why isn't the world a better place?" essentially Frankl's thesis is: those who have hope in something can survive anything, and those who lose hope die as a result. surrounding this Frankl creates a thorough outline of human nature at its best and worst. i read this during my breaks during my first few sessions of teaching swimming lessons, so there's a lot from it that i retained but don't remember as being directly from the book; i'll have a thought and think "where did i read that?" and after thinking hard enough, i can usually track it back to Man's Search for Meaning.

5. Fredy Neptune by Les Murray

Les Murray is another author i'd never heard of until one of my professors mentioned him in class, saying Murray is renowned worldwide as "the best poet alive today." his website contains an extensive amount of his poetry; i snagged Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse on amazon.com for a buck or two (plus $3.99 shipping and handling.... ahhhh that kills me). so it's a couple hundred pages of stanzas; the only thing i have to compare it to structurally, from my reading history, is like... The Iliad or The Odyssey or Faerie Queene. but it's nothing like that. it's historical (i think both its plot World Wars), international (set in Germany, Australia, Japan, America), and amazing. i find myself in agreement with Murray's acclaim, shocked by the pace of the book in combination with it's form. he fits so much into each stanza, and his wordplay is like nothing i've seen before - part of it has to do with the fact that Murray is Australian, and the rest of it has to do with the fact that he's a master of language. storyline is sweet: freak traumatic accident results in superhero with leprosy set in the normal world of people good and bad. my favorite part? a happy ending. a solid ending. UNLIKE that in the following book...

6. The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace (SPOILER ALERT. SORRY)

i spent nine hours reading this on my flight to Japan, only to have it end not only mid-plot but also mid-sentence. infuriating. i have since developed a literary theory on authorship and the ability to finish a plot, which, if you ask, i will turn into a blog post. mostly it's infuriating because Wallace is a great author, and it seems a waste to do that, even for postmodern purposes. regardless of this, TBOTS (as i have so affectionately nicknamed it... pronounced tee-bots) provided a revealing understanding of DFW as a [suicidal] man and author, historically, since it was his first work of literature. i obviously have more thoughts on this since i have spent the better part of a year thinking about Infinite Jest, but for now i'll just leave it at: heads exploding is a strange motif across all DFW's works and i believe a fitting analogy to the sentiments of a chemically depressed genius. aside from all that, TBOTS also caused me to wonder about the editorial process: who lets that happen? who lets that go to press? why? ... and i still don't know. makes me sad that the world of publishing lets things incomplete (in plot, or in amount of truth/beauty) out just to make money. society is influenced by its literary content, and if that content isn't.... you know, STELLAR, then you get less-than-stellar people in society. same with TV i suppose, but reading TBOTS caused me to think about the editorial role in shaping the morality of culture.

7. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

i read this because a) it's my dad's favorite book and b) its chris munekawa's favorite book and c) they were reading it at Torrey Berkeley this summer and i didn't go but wanted to feel like i did. the best book i have ever read in my life. changed my life. read it. the end.

8. Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck

i read this right after East of Eden and i was impressed at Steinbeck's ability to change voice so dramatically between works. Tortilla Flat, with its drunken, well-intentioned cast of loose and low-class Mexican-American Californian citizens, is funny, but also very poignant on the subject of friendship (which strikes me deeply at this point in my personal life). my favorite part about the characters is their logical processes - so much of the dialogue feels like Platonic dialectic syllogism, but with intoxicated uneducated superstitious scruffball men instead of pretentious Greek erudites. the decisions made by this logic (both right and wrong, both good and bad) drives the plot. Tortilla Flat is quirky like i didn't expect, especially after reading East of Eden. much shorter, also (100ish pages compared to 680something), and it just feels better to be able to go through a book at that pace (and without your hand cramping up).

9. Shogun by James Clavell

this one, however, is a hand-cramper. i've never read a "boy book" like this before (one with war and/or history), and it was exhilarating. Kill Bill meets 19th century Japan meets John Smith from Pocahontas. i read this because a. my grandpa gave it to me before i went to Japan (though i felt too politically incorrect to take it on the airplane with me) and b. it's on the list of 15 Best Long Books that Matt clued me in on and i realized i had a head start on and decided to tackle. content-wise, Shogun threw me for a loop because it spent so much time developing these characters, and then got them killed. all the authors talk about it, but Clavell is the first person i've witnessed actually sacrificing characters for the greater good of the story (in book form. they sacrifice characters like this all the time on The OC!!!).

10. White Noise by Don DeLillo

White Noise is standard reading for most postmodern lit classes (which are only offered once a millenium at Biola). i first heard of DeLillo at the same time i heard of Wallace (after reading Chris Bachelder's U.S.! which is still one of my all-time favorite books), but it's taken me until now to get to his actual works. while reading White Noise, people kept coming up and asking me if it was the book version of the 2005 horror movie. it's not, but what it is is a muddly, unexclamatory concrete-noun studded postmodern account of a futuristic toxic material spill meant to give image to existentialism. it's essentially about death. it's very reminiscent of DFW's writing in the habits of the characters, but not in the tone or mood, which is strange since the writing is relatively similar. where Wallace uses really big sophisticated words and ideas, DeLillo throws in lists of common nouns, which is characteristic of a dictionary and not necessarily a great author (though DeLillo is pretty famous - i'll have to investigate more before i form a more solid opinion). if i were a book critic, i would say something like "just like on TV, when you hit White Noise, you just change the channel."

11. On Writing by Stephen King

both Matt's room David Schmidt and a blogger who i'm 98% sure is my friend Erin mentioned this book in the recent months of my life. Schmidtty actually said it'd change my life. well, it didn't, but i read it anyways. my all-time hands-down favorite book about writing is Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and, if i'm honest, On Writing doesn't hold a candle to that. Stephen King is cool because he knows what he's talking about - he's probably one of the most acclaimed and renowned authors of this era - but it's because of this that he's intimidating and therefore that i can't seem to take him seriously. On Writing is about his quest of the word and pen, not mine. Stephen King tells you how to schmooze, Anne Lamott tells you how to live. i felt like i was reading a book by Bill Clinton or Michael Phelps or Lance Armstrong, a feeling i don't like (this feeling is largely influenced by my feelings towards money right now). you can see the difference just by looking at King's recommended reading list at the end of the book: guaranteed that at least 80% of those books have been made into movies. i could go off on this like i could go off on my thoughts regarding TBOTS, but it's another issue entirely. regardless, On Writing did give me a lot to think about in terms of writing story, plot, etc. the life of a writer stresses me out but the craft entices me. and so i am glad that other people do it and the fruits of their labor enrich my lazy summer days.

...

so that's a really shallow glance at my summer reading. my favorite part about reading is how you always seem to read a book at the appropriate time, so that it pushes your life forward with just the momentum that you couldn't have gotten on your own.

i also finished The OC, the entire series, on Sunday. and though i ignored all sorts of people and plans in doing this, i don't entirely regret the pop-culture, mind-numbing media experience. i wonder who would win in a celebrity battle: Clark Kent and Lex Luthor from Smallville or Ryan Atwood and Seth Cohen from The OC.

thoughts?