A List: Thomas Hardy--Far From the Madding Crowd........136/353
B List: Burton--Anatomy of Melancholy.............................758/1,132
C List: Gillian Flynn--Gone Girl...........................................418/419
This is the last of the three Hardy books on the A-List, and the only one that I had heard of previously. I suspect it is going to end up as the best of the three. The characters seem to more vitally represent the ideas they are meant to represent, and the depiction of the rural life also seems more intense and detailed, in the character of his most celebrated books. I say seemed because I know I am influenced by prevailing opinion and find it difficult to trust my own judgment in these matters anymore, though I hope I have read enough that if something strikes me as better than it is supposed to be that I can recognize the sense in myself--indeed I believe I did something of this sort with Dreiser, which played against the expectations I had going into it. These Hardy books are generally playing to form in that regard.
One of Hardy's great themes in this and other of his books is the way that the rhythms of rural life remain largely the same as they had been for centuries, though in London and other cities thirty years past is ancient history. Masterful shepherds and others skilled in the timeless knowledge of the village, malting, cider-making, and so on, are indispensable men, and the books (Far From the Madding Crowd was published in 1874) are written as if they always will be, though Hardy himself would live well past the time when this was true.
The sheep in this book are constantly at threat of dying from disease or bloating or stampeding off cliffs or otherwise being killed by one means or another, and it is no minor skill in itself to keep them alive long enough to even be able to exploit or slaughter them. I always like to be cognizant of the reasons why our forefathers were so much less romantic about animals than we seem to be.
The Anatomy has grown by one page since last month. That is because my copy of the book is divided into 3 volumes, each of which begins on page 1, and I made an error in adding them the last time. While there are parts of it that I do like, on the whole I have to admit it really is a slog, and it could be considerably shortened. I pride myself on being able to still concentrate on blocks of dense 17th century prose with sentences that go on for half a page when I need to, but this book I find does test me. When Burton is making a list of the twenty-seven different varieties of lust, with accompanying examples and quotations from ancient and medieval authors, most of which are in Latin, there are times where I am overcome by the sense that, all right, the point has been made. But people--granted, mostly unmarried or at least childless men well into middle age--love this book. This is my second time reading it, and it is obvious that I am never going to be able to appreciate it at any very high or satisfying level.
I am almost done Gone Girl, obviously. Didn't care for the ending. Certainly didn't care for the main character, who was awful. There was a lot of emphasis on how brilliant she was, and how superior mentally to her husband and basically all of the men of her generation, but she certainly did not put this genius to any productive or admirable means. It was not clear to me how much the author sympathized with her plight, and the neurotic, endlessly dissatisfied type of intelligent woman whose ranks in our society seem to be ever growing, at least in the most socially competitive areas of it. People mistake male revulsion against this type of character as a revulsion against, or fear of feminine intelligence. I think it is more a revulsion against neuroticism, which in many instances seems to be a product of....
The update posts are subject to a strict time limit and I must stop now. Hence the (even more than usually) rough nature of the thoughts.
I did manage to read out on the porch today (66 degrees!). However it is getting cooler by the day, and I doubt I will make it to the end of the month, though that remains my goal.
Showing posts with label my generation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label my generation. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
Mestember Update
I am a little late with the update this month, because I was celebrating the holiday the past two days.
A List--Thomas Hardy--The Woodlanders 247/379
B--Robert Burton--The Anatomy of Melancholy 320/1,131
C--Gillian Flynn--Gone Girl 139/419
*D*--Paolo Ruiz--The Fault Line: Traveling the Other Europe From Finland to Ukraine 170/253
This current group is a bit too much, mainly because of "B". Even keeping up a very modest pace of 15-20 pages per day in it is wearing me out, given everything else I have to squeeze in in the course of a day.
The A list is in the midst of a run of three Hardy books right now, the first two of which I assume to be considered minor as I had not heard of them before. The Woodlanders, after an intriguing start, is looking like it is going to live up to this designation. It is still not bad, but it is very similar in character with all of the Hardy books as well as many other 19th century English novels. It calls to mind Adam Bede in particular. There is more of a sense in Adam Bede of there being an ultimate purpose in life of what might be considered a spiritual nature that is worth being mindful of that makes it the more successful book, I think. The Eliot characters run into difficulties because they deny or lose sight of this purpose, while the Hardy characters' problems stem from the circumstance that they have no comparable sense of purpose or who they even are in the first place. The professorial editor of the relatively recent Penguin edition I am reading, with the usual pedantic overkill* characteristic of modern authorities on literature, notes that Hardy was influenced by Darwinism and related developments in scientific understanding at the time he was writing this book, and the psychological break of the most sophisticated characters with any spiritual relation to existence stands out.
Burton, whom I have read before but who has come up on this other list I have started late in life and am determined to read all the way through as far as possible, I will deal with in a big posting when I finish him, which probably won't be until November.
Gone Girl was the winner of one of my goofy contests and while I felt obligated to start it I am not sure I am going to read it all the way through. I will give it credit that it is mildly more intelligent than the run of genre books or best sellers, and I suspect that the characters, while shallow and completely uninteresting in themselves as literary creations, are in some way representative of people in my generation, whom I am fascinated by, as stupid and sensually stunted and existentially confused as they are, because I have been judged by most of them to be even less adequate in these areas relative to what an acceptable human being would be than they are, and more or less rejected by them. There are also a number of mildly evil and probably repressed thirty-something MILF characters I am interested in, to see if they will do anything sexual. All of the characters in this are supposed to be well above average in looks, and to have been active and capable participants in the sexual arena during their single youth; the female protagonist is recorded as having had twelve sex partners, and it is implied that if her husband has not had this many, he easily could have. However, as in most instances where my generation is involved, all of this is completely unsexy, all of these experiences add up to little more than so many statistics and detached, almost robotic connections made with people displaying adequate desirability. None even of the married couples evince the slightest hint of feeling actual love for anyone, or even the kind of real respect that in the absence of torrid passion still indicates the presence of some affection.
I picked up the Ruiz book at the library because I was feeling a little uninspired by the combination of things I was reading otherwise, and weighed down by the Burton (though that has begun to pick up in the last few days. For a while there I was finding myself unable to read more than a couple of pages without nodding off in my chair), and I had not read a travel book in a while. Ruiz is a journalist born in 1947, Italian by nationality, though he likes to emphasize that as a native of Trieste, which is famously located at the point where the Slavic, Latin and Germanic cultures of Europe meet, and belonged to the Hapsburg Empire prior to 1918, he is most comfortable in places where multiple peoples and traditions co-exist more or less side by side. He hates nationalism, though his real antagonism is directed towards the EU, which he sees as standardizing and sucking the soul out of the Europe he loves. (and obscenely fixated on money-making, even more[?]) He undertook this trip in 2007, Starting above the Arctic Circle on the border between Norway and Russia, and progressing south, loosely along the border between the EU and that part of Europe that remains outside, which thus far means Russia (he is in Vilnius, Lithuania, at the point of the book that I have reached). While I am interested in the reasons for his sourness towards the new Europe, I think it overly colors his reactions to everything he sees. It is refreshing to experience the kinds of old-fashioned hospitality and cooking and handicrafts and habits and so on that he finds in Russia--I felt something of this when I was in the Czech Republic back before they joined the EU--but whenever this is counteracted by anything he associates with a western influence, such as cell phones, tourism, "androgynous Western women", fast food, and the like, his reaction is uniformly negative, and there is nothing that might be associated with the modern west, other than possibly some aspects of its tendency towards cleanliness, for which he can express any approval. At one point while in an Eastern train station he sees some Polish children reading books and laments that 'one never sees this in the west anymore.' I mostly agree with these sentiments, though I find him a little sententious in his negativity--he has more than a little of the "I am the only Westerner who still possesses a working mind and an identifiably human soul" about him, and I suspect his views of the comparative soulfulness and vitality of people outside of the west are probably a little too rosy, so while I will certainly finish the book, it has already been established for me what kinds of impressions the rest of the trip will likely bring.
There was a golden quote I forgot to insert in my post about Dreiser, regarding Clyde's early love interest, Hortense Briggs, who played him for the chump that he was:
"As Hortense well knew Clyde was pressing more and more hungrily toward that ultimate condescension on her part, which, though she would never have admitted it to him, was the privilege of two others."
I guess this reads as one of those clunky, unliterary Dreiserian sentences, but the universal truth embodied in the content carries the day, as it often does with him.
*Have I ever told you how much I hate the scholarly footnotes in modern editions of classics? First of all, of course, they have to make a note on every historical or literary factoid that presents itself, the assumption apparently being that the average reader nowadays is a complete moron. Hence we have footnotes for the likes of the writing on the wall, the apple of discord, Baden, and other formerly commonly known references. We also get the obligatory explanation that phrenology is a pseudo-science, with the implication that if our literature professor-guide had been alive in 1886, she would have seen right through its idiocy. She also implies that Hardy thought of it in 1886 in exactly the same way that she is thinking of it in 2010 or whatever, which I doubt. There is also a reading of why Hardy has his rustic characters mangle biblical passages that owes too much, I fear, to contemporary academic loathing both of the rural poor and the Christian religion. But I have to end this post.
A List--Thomas Hardy--The Woodlanders 247/379
B--Robert Burton--The Anatomy of Melancholy 320/1,131
C--Gillian Flynn--Gone Girl 139/419
*D*--Paolo Ruiz--The Fault Line: Traveling the Other Europe From Finland to Ukraine 170/253
This current group is a bit too much, mainly because of "B". Even keeping up a very modest pace of 15-20 pages per day in it is wearing me out, given everything else I have to squeeze in in the course of a day.
The A list is in the midst of a run of three Hardy books right now, the first two of which I assume to be considered minor as I had not heard of them before. The Woodlanders, after an intriguing start, is looking like it is going to live up to this designation. It is still not bad, but it is very similar in character with all of the Hardy books as well as many other 19th century English novels. It calls to mind Adam Bede in particular. There is more of a sense in Adam Bede of there being an ultimate purpose in life of what might be considered a spiritual nature that is worth being mindful of that makes it the more successful book, I think. The Eliot characters run into difficulties because they deny or lose sight of this purpose, while the Hardy characters' problems stem from the circumstance that they have no comparable sense of purpose or who they even are in the first place. The professorial editor of the relatively recent Penguin edition I am reading, with the usual pedantic overkill* characteristic of modern authorities on literature, notes that Hardy was influenced by Darwinism and related developments in scientific understanding at the time he was writing this book, and the psychological break of the most sophisticated characters with any spiritual relation to existence stands out.
Burton, whom I have read before but who has come up on this other list I have started late in life and am determined to read all the way through as far as possible, I will deal with in a big posting when I finish him, which probably won't be until November.
Gone Girl was the winner of one of my goofy contests and while I felt obligated to start it I am not sure I am going to read it all the way through. I will give it credit that it is mildly more intelligent than the run of genre books or best sellers, and I suspect that the characters, while shallow and completely uninteresting in themselves as literary creations, are in some way representative of people in my generation, whom I am fascinated by, as stupid and sensually stunted and existentially confused as they are, because I have been judged by most of them to be even less adequate in these areas relative to what an acceptable human being would be than they are, and more or less rejected by them. There are also a number of mildly evil and probably repressed thirty-something MILF characters I am interested in, to see if they will do anything sexual. All of the characters in this are supposed to be well above average in looks, and to have been active and capable participants in the sexual arena during their single youth; the female protagonist is recorded as having had twelve sex partners, and it is implied that if her husband has not had this many, he easily could have. However, as in most instances where my generation is involved, all of this is completely unsexy, all of these experiences add up to little more than so many statistics and detached, almost robotic connections made with people displaying adequate desirability. None even of the married couples evince the slightest hint of feeling actual love for anyone, or even the kind of real respect that in the absence of torrid passion still indicates the presence of some affection.
I picked up the Ruiz book at the library because I was feeling a little uninspired by the combination of things I was reading otherwise, and weighed down by the Burton (though that has begun to pick up in the last few days. For a while there I was finding myself unable to read more than a couple of pages without nodding off in my chair), and I had not read a travel book in a while. Ruiz is a journalist born in 1947, Italian by nationality, though he likes to emphasize that as a native of Trieste, which is famously located at the point where the Slavic, Latin and Germanic cultures of Europe meet, and belonged to the Hapsburg Empire prior to 1918, he is most comfortable in places where multiple peoples and traditions co-exist more or less side by side. He hates nationalism, though his real antagonism is directed towards the EU, which he sees as standardizing and sucking the soul out of the Europe he loves. (and obscenely fixated on money-making, even more[?]) He undertook this trip in 2007, Starting above the Arctic Circle on the border between Norway and Russia, and progressing south, loosely along the border between the EU and that part of Europe that remains outside, which thus far means Russia (he is in Vilnius, Lithuania, at the point of the book that I have reached). While I am interested in the reasons for his sourness towards the new Europe, I think it overly colors his reactions to everything he sees. It is refreshing to experience the kinds of old-fashioned hospitality and cooking and handicrafts and habits and so on that he finds in Russia--I felt something of this when I was in the Czech Republic back before they joined the EU--but whenever this is counteracted by anything he associates with a western influence, such as cell phones, tourism, "androgynous Western women", fast food, and the like, his reaction is uniformly negative, and there is nothing that might be associated with the modern west, other than possibly some aspects of its tendency towards cleanliness, for which he can express any approval. At one point while in an Eastern train station he sees some Polish children reading books and laments that 'one never sees this in the west anymore.' I mostly agree with these sentiments, though I find him a little sententious in his negativity--he has more than a little of the "I am the only Westerner who still possesses a working mind and an identifiably human soul" about him, and I suspect his views of the comparative soulfulness and vitality of people outside of the west are probably a little too rosy, so while I will certainly finish the book, it has already been established for me what kinds of impressions the rest of the trip will likely bring.
There was a golden quote I forgot to insert in my post about Dreiser, regarding Clyde's early love interest, Hortense Briggs, who played him for the chump that he was:
"As Hortense well knew Clyde was pressing more and more hungrily toward that ultimate condescension on her part, which, though she would never have admitted it to him, was the privilege of two others."
I guess this reads as one of those clunky, unliterary Dreiserian sentences, but the universal truth embodied in the content carries the day, as it often does with him.
*Have I ever told you how much I hate the scholarly footnotes in modern editions of classics? First of all, of course, they have to make a note on every historical or literary factoid that presents itself, the assumption apparently being that the average reader nowadays is a complete moron. Hence we have footnotes for the likes of the writing on the wall, the apple of discord, Baden, and other formerly commonly known references. We also get the obligatory explanation that phrenology is a pseudo-science, with the implication that if our literature professor-guide had been alive in 1886, she would have seen right through its idiocy. She also implies that Hardy thought of it in 1886 in exactly the same way that she is thinking of it in 2010 or whatever, which I doubt. There is also a reading of why Hardy has his rustic characters mangle biblical passages that owes too much, I fear, to contemporary academic loathing both of the rural poor and the Christian religion. But I have to end this post.
Friday, September 5, 2014
Eugene O'Neill--Ah Wilderness! (1933)
Famous for being the happy Eugene O'Neill play--the only one, apparently, that can be thus described. As I noted in my last posting, I am in a stretch of shorter readings for this list, and Ah Wilderness! clocks in at a breezy 141 pages. From the IWE introduction:
"Among O'Neill's most popular plays, Ah Wilderness! deserves a special place as the easiest for any amateur group to produce. Its characters and sets are conventional and it is over at a convenient hour. It has a happy ending."
My 1960s-era Modern Library copy (cast off from the Trenton (Michigan) High School library), was marked up with an actress's notes for the role of Essie, the mother of the family. The aroma of decades old cigarette smoke still emanates deliciously from the pages, which is entirely suitable and welcome to me, given the nature of this list and my motivations for taking it up in midlife, The play itself has a nostalgic aspect, being set on July 4th and 5th, 1906, and featuring young love as one of its main themes. The central family in the drama are a middle-aged husband and wife with six children (though only the younger four still live at home and feature in the play), who live in a spacious Victorian house in Connecticut (New London, most likely). Other than the circumstances that both the parents and children are about ten years further along than we are in age, and the father, who runs the local newspaper, is a man of substance and influence in the town, the situation bears a remarkable resemblance to my own family--indeed, they even share their surname with us. When I was sitting on my porch reading it in the languid last days of August I could almost feel as if I were in the scene, or that it was all taking place in the dining room just behind me. Doubtless all of this influenced my mood and opinion with regard to the play, which were positive.
One of the reasons I was eager to embark on this particular list was all of the American literature that is on it between the Civil War and World War II that was once famous and alive in the general culture (or at least the literate parts of it) that has been forgotten or ceased to be as important. I find that I like a lot of that stuff, and always have. If you subscribe at all to generational theory, Eugene O'Neill's place in the saeculum lines up almost identical to mine (in the theory, generations last approximately 20 years, and there are four generational archetypes; Eugene O'Neill was born 82 years before I was, into the Lost Generation, the last 'nomad' cohort). Generally I don't think of myself as having much in common with Eugene O'Neill, but he was about the same age as I am now when he wrote this, and it was similarly in the midst of a period of difficult economic times and major transitions in the social and economic bases of life. That is about the extent of my insight as to why he suddenly broke from form and wrote a mildly nostalgic comedy--the only such effort of his career--in his mid-40s.
Being Eugene O'Neill even in his light play there is an alcoholic character whose behavior and issues are extreme and disturbing by our standards, and there is a whole long scene set in a dive bar among tarts and tough talking Mickeys. He can never get away from that world entirely.
George M Cohan as Nat Miller in the original production of Ah Wilderness!
The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge
The magic words from this book brought up a deluge of recent best-sellers, which produced a high-scoring and competitive challenge with a (to me) surpise winner.
1. John Sandford--Field of Prey.......................................................................2,972
2. Harlen Coben--Six Years..............................................................................2,798
3. Dale Carnegie--How to Win Friends and Influence People.........................2,306
4. J.R. Ward--Lover at Last..............................................................................2,138
5. Cassandra Clare--Clockwork Princess.........................................................1,919
6. Rick Riordan--The Lost Hero.......................................................................1,833
7. John Grisham--The Confession....................................................................1,665
8. Joel C. Rosenberg--Damascus Countdown.................................................1,568
9. Garcia & Stohl--Beautiful Darkness............................................................1,334
10. James Dashnel--The Scorch Trials............................................................1,326
11. Keith Richards--Life.....................................................................................991
12. Michael Connolly--Reversal........................................................................863
13. David Nicholls--One Day............................................................................622
14. Michael Crichton & Richard Preston--Micro..............................................592
15. Clive Cussler--The Striker...........................................................................591
16. C.J. Box--Breaking Point............................................................................556
17. Becca Fitzpatrick--Crescendo.....................................................................468
18. Bella Andre--Always on my Mind...............................................................341
19. J.R. Ward--Crave........................................................................................249
20. James Rollins--The Sixth Extinction..........................................................169
21. Tracie Peterson--A Sensible Arrangement.................................................140
22. Nicole Krauss--Great House......................................................................137
23. Peggy Hesketh--Telling the Bees................................................................106
24. Chris D'Lacey--Icefire................................................................................102
25. Snyder/Albuquerque/King--American Vampire, Vol. 1...............................88
26. Raymond Khoury--The Templar Salvation..................................................81
27. Wanda Brunstetter--The Healing Quilt........................................................76
28. Ned Beauman--The Teleportation Accident.................................................68
29. Kermit Lynch--Adventures on the Wine Route.............................................44
30. Rae Mariz--Unidentified...............................................................................43
31. Canfield & Hendricks--You've Got to Read This Book................................39
32. George Gissing--The Odd Women................................................................29
33. Sara Yogev--Couples' Guide to Happy Retirement......................................25
34. Emily Eden--The Semi-Detached Couple & The Semi-Detached House.......4
(tie) Elizabeth Taylor--At Mrs Lippincott's..........................................................4
36. Enid Bagnold--The Squire..............................................................................3
37. Rose Macaulay--Non-Combatants & Others..................................................1
38. Erle Stanley Gardner--Case of the Curious Spinster......................................0
(tie) A.E.W. Mason--Dilemmas............................................................................0
(tie) Patricia Lee McComber--Love Lost..............................................................0
The winner is a thriller, another murder book set in the midwest. I don't want to read it. All these murder books strike me as being the same after a while. Maybe it has literary qualities: the author was a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner as a journalist before becoming an author of thrillers. If nothing else, I suppose I could learn more about professionalism and the qualities it takes to ascend to that class by reading him. But then again, if I haven't grasped the tenets of professionalism in work by this point of my life, it seems unlikely I will ever be able to do so. My library owns three copies of Field of Prey, but they are all currently checked out, so I might be able to skirt it.
There are a number of books I would have read on this list if they had won. I would have read the Dale Carnegie, probably the Keith Richards. I definitely would have read the Nicole Krauss book (isn't she one of those contemporary with-it Brooklyn literary people?), the old writers at the bottom, Gissing and Bagnold and Eden and Taylor and Gardner. But they didn't win, and I must move on with the master list.
"Among O'Neill's most popular plays, Ah Wilderness! deserves a special place as the easiest for any amateur group to produce. Its characters and sets are conventional and it is over at a convenient hour. It has a happy ending."
My 1960s-era Modern Library copy (cast off from the Trenton (Michigan) High School library), was marked up with an actress's notes for the role of Essie, the mother of the family. The aroma of decades old cigarette smoke still emanates deliciously from the pages, which is entirely suitable and welcome to me, given the nature of this list and my motivations for taking it up in midlife, The play itself has a nostalgic aspect, being set on July 4th and 5th, 1906, and featuring young love as one of its main themes. The central family in the drama are a middle-aged husband and wife with six children (though only the younger four still live at home and feature in the play), who live in a spacious Victorian house in Connecticut (New London, most likely). Other than the circumstances that both the parents and children are about ten years further along than we are in age, and the father, who runs the local newspaper, is a man of substance and influence in the town, the situation bears a remarkable resemblance to my own family--indeed, they even share their surname with us. When I was sitting on my porch reading it in the languid last days of August I could almost feel as if I were in the scene, or that it was all taking place in the dining room just behind me. Doubtless all of this influenced my mood and opinion with regard to the play, which were positive.
One of the reasons I was eager to embark on this particular list was all of the American literature that is on it between the Civil War and World War II that was once famous and alive in the general culture (or at least the literate parts of it) that has been forgotten or ceased to be as important. I find that I like a lot of that stuff, and always have. If you subscribe at all to generational theory, Eugene O'Neill's place in the saeculum lines up almost identical to mine (in the theory, generations last approximately 20 years, and there are four generational archetypes; Eugene O'Neill was born 82 years before I was, into the Lost Generation, the last 'nomad' cohort). Generally I don't think of myself as having much in common with Eugene O'Neill, but he was about the same age as I am now when he wrote this, and it was similarly in the midst of a period of difficult economic times and major transitions in the social and economic bases of life. That is about the extent of my insight as to why he suddenly broke from form and wrote a mildly nostalgic comedy--the only such effort of his career--in his mid-40s.
Being Eugene O'Neill even in his light play there is an alcoholic character whose behavior and issues are extreme and disturbing by our standards, and there is a whole long scene set in a dive bar among tarts and tough talking Mickeys. He can never get away from that world entirely.
George M Cohan as Nat Miller in the original production of Ah Wilderness!
The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge
The magic words from this book brought up a deluge of recent best-sellers, which produced a high-scoring and competitive challenge with a (to me) surpise winner.
1. John Sandford--Field of Prey.......................................................................2,972
2. Harlen Coben--Six Years..............................................................................2,798
3. Dale Carnegie--How to Win Friends and Influence People.........................2,306
4. J.R. Ward--Lover at Last..............................................................................2,138
5. Cassandra Clare--Clockwork Princess.........................................................1,919
6. Rick Riordan--The Lost Hero.......................................................................1,833
7. John Grisham--The Confession....................................................................1,665
8. Joel C. Rosenberg--Damascus Countdown.................................................1,568
9. Garcia & Stohl--Beautiful Darkness............................................................1,334
10. James Dashnel--The Scorch Trials............................................................1,326
11. Keith Richards--Life.....................................................................................991
12. Michael Connolly--Reversal........................................................................863
13. David Nicholls--One Day............................................................................622
14. Michael Crichton & Richard Preston--Micro..............................................592
15. Clive Cussler--The Striker...........................................................................591
16. C.J. Box--Breaking Point............................................................................556
17. Becca Fitzpatrick--Crescendo.....................................................................468
18. Bella Andre--Always on my Mind...............................................................341
19. J.R. Ward--Crave........................................................................................249
20. James Rollins--The Sixth Extinction..........................................................169
21. Tracie Peterson--A Sensible Arrangement.................................................140
22. Nicole Krauss--Great House......................................................................137
23. Peggy Hesketh--Telling the Bees................................................................106
24. Chris D'Lacey--Icefire................................................................................102
25. Snyder/Albuquerque/King--American Vampire, Vol. 1...............................88
26. Raymond Khoury--The Templar Salvation..................................................81
27. Wanda Brunstetter--The Healing Quilt........................................................76
28. Ned Beauman--The Teleportation Accident.................................................68
29. Kermit Lynch--Adventures on the Wine Route.............................................44
30. Rae Mariz--Unidentified...............................................................................43
31. Canfield & Hendricks--You've Got to Read This Book................................39
32. George Gissing--The Odd Women................................................................29
33. Sara Yogev--Couples' Guide to Happy Retirement......................................25
34. Emily Eden--The Semi-Detached Couple & The Semi-Detached House.......4
(tie) Elizabeth Taylor--At Mrs Lippincott's..........................................................4
36. Enid Bagnold--The Squire..............................................................................3
37. Rose Macaulay--Non-Combatants & Others..................................................1
38. Erle Stanley Gardner--Case of the Curious Spinster......................................0
(tie) A.E.W. Mason--Dilemmas............................................................................0
(tie) Patricia Lee McComber--Love Lost..............................................................0
The winner is a thriller, another murder book set in the midwest. I don't want to read it. All these murder books strike me as being the same after a while. Maybe it has literary qualities: the author was a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner as a journalist before becoming an author of thrillers. If nothing else, I suppose I could learn more about professionalism and the qualities it takes to ascend to that class by reading him. But then again, if I haven't grasped the tenets of professionalism in work by this point of my life, it seems unlikely I will ever be able to do so. My library owns three copies of Field of Prey, but they are all currently checked out, so I might be able to skirt it.
There are a number of books I would have read on this list if they had won. I would have read the Dale Carnegie, probably the Keith Richards. I definitely would have read the Nicole Krauss book (isn't she one of those contemporary with-it Brooklyn literary people?), the old writers at the bottom, Gissing and Bagnold and Eden and Taylor and Gardner. But they didn't win, and I must move on with the master list.
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