Poor Knox cringes and begs for mercy. "Please, sir. I don't like this trick, sir." But Fox refuses to relent. "Here's an easy game to play," he whispePoor Knox cringes and begs for mercy. "Please, sir. I don't like this trick, sir." But Fox refuses to relent. "Here's an easy game to play," he whispers - but his wordplay is more than games. It's an assault on Knox's very sanity, and as the book progresses he slowly, cruelly tears the fabric of reality away from the defenseless Knox. An unending series of nightmare images parade by, reminiscent of brainwashing scenes in dystopias like 1984 and Clockwork Orange.
[image] a giant crow sews Knox into a box
[image] on the next page Fox tries to get him to chew the blue goo
Fox in Socks has been called Seuss's greatest tragedy. Its ending is irredeemably bleak. Fox succeeds in driving Knox mad - but in a final twist, the now-lunatic Knox turns against his tormenter and viciously murders him.
[image]
"Thank you," gibbers the raving Knox, "For a lot of fun, sir!" as the battling tweetle beetles advance on the trapped fox.
Make mad the guilty, and appall the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears. - Hamlet II.ii...more
The Three Musketeers lacks the weight of Count of Monte Cristo; that book is, I think, deeper than it's given credit for. This book is not. So all it The Three Musketeers lacks the weight of Count of Monte Cristo; that book is, I think, deeper than it's given credit for. This book is not. So all it can aspire to is to be one of the most entertaining books you'll ever read, and that it is.
There's a scene right near the beginning where our hero meets, and manages to schedule duels with, all three Musketeers in a row. He's forced to apologize to them when they all come together, since only one will be able to have the pleasure of killing him. It's about as much fun as you can reasonably be expected to have reading a book.
And that's before the plot even gets going! Soon you will be whirled off into a surprisingly deep web of intrigue and mayhem. Poison-filled rings, forged letters, betrayals, secrets, prostitutes, and at the center of it all, the unmatched Milady, the best femme fatale since Lady Macbeth. There is no villain in Count of Monte Cristo, or in anything else, on the level of Milady
So now I've read two books by Dumas, and why isn't he my favorite author? Are the rest of his 5000 books this good? If they're even half as good...why do we read anything else?
Translation: the consensus gold standard is Richard Pevear - yes, of Pevear & Volokhonsky - and it does read very nicely. (Also, check out that awesome cover.) My one complaint is that it's footnoted all to hell; every character who pops up for one line gets a full explanation, like, "This may be based on this minor character from history who you don't care about, although that person was ten years old at the time, but he went on to become Viscomte of some bullshit or other." Almost none of it is interesting or important. It's like having a history nerd standing behind you all the time. Still, though, I hear too many other translations mist over the sex, of which there is plenty, and we wouldn't want that....more
The 18th century is a tough nut to crack. Its mostfamousbooks are boring. It's an explosively smutty era, but even most of the smut isn'tthatgreatThe 18th century is a tough nut to crack. Its mostfamousbooks are boring. It's an explosively smutty era, but even most of the smut isn'tthatgreat. But there are a few weird gems that slip through the cracks: the furious Candide; the sensational Monk; and the masterpiece of smut Dangerous Liaisons.
Epistolaries were big back then, and LaClos makes better use of letters than anyone since Shakespeare; it'll take Wilkie Collins to match him. The letters are the plot, making this metafiction; their content and their incriminating existence shape and drive the action. This is the best advertisement for Snapchat I've ever seen.
It's known as an immoral novel, and it was banned almost immediately and permanently, and you could think of it as an anti-Pamela: where those letters were supposed to be a guide to a virtuous life, these are a master class in corruption.
The filth is one reason it's fun, but the reason it's great is its terrific character insight. Valmont and, most of all, the inimitable Merteuil are perfectly, subtly, carefully drawn; their (view spoiler)[tragic (hide spoiler)] arcs clearly laid out and never escapable. They say a lot on paper; they say more between the lines. You root for all of them. Even the (view spoiler)[
casualties(hide spoiler)] minor characters are fully fleshed out and sympathetic. It's bizarre that LaClos only wrote one book; he seems perfectly in control of every sentence. This is a page-turner, a thriller, a gamechanger, and one of my favorite books.
Translation notes: Helen Constantine's recentish one for Penguin got good reviews in my research, and I totally loved it. The voices are distinct; the language is readable without being distractingly modern. The introduction is more or less total bullshit.
Adaptations: I just re-watched Cruel Intentions last night and it's still good trashy fun, but it doesn't do a very good job of adapting the book. The biggest problem is Valmont: the movie plays him too sympathetically, and Ryan Philippe is not at all good enough for the role. And it flubs the ending. Sarah Michelle Gellar is adequate. Selma Blair seems to be acting in a different movie - a broad slapstick comedy - but it's entertaining, and Cecile isn't taken very seriously in the book either so that works out fine. Reese Witherspoon is good but her breasts walk away with every scene they're in. That's one of the all-time great cinematic portrayals of breasts.
It's been a while since I've seen the 80s Dangerous Liaisons with Glenn Close, Malkovich and Uma Thurman; I remember it being really good but weren't the former two like way, way too old for those roles? Both were around 40....more
In David Foster Wallace's posthumous essay collection Both Flesh and Not there's a little piece called "Five Direly Underappreciated US Novels > 1960,In David Foster Wallace's posthumous essay collection Both Flesh and Not there's a little piece called "Five Direly Underappreciated US Novels > 1960," and Wallace goes off on paragraph-long defenses of some books he likes - "Bleak but gorgeous," he says of Omensetter's Luck, "like light through ice." But when he gets to Blood Meridian there's just this one line under it:
"Dont even ask."
Unfortunately everyone did anyway and this book, where you can identify the good guys as the ones who haven't actively killed any babies or puppies yet, is considered a Great American Novel by people who are probably no fun at parties at all.
Based on a true story about how everyone is terrible and life is torment, and also this guy's diary which sounds like a joy, Blood Meridian has more in common with Inferno and Paradise Lost than any specifically earthly matters. It feels more like a tour of Hell than of the Southwest circa 1850, and the monumental Judge Holden is the best Satan since Milton's, a relentlessly amoral force who insists on only two things: war and science. Like Milton's Satan, he gets all the best lines:
Whatever exists without my knowledge exists without my consent...Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.
By the way, and watch what happens next:
What's a suzerain?
A keeper. A keeper or overlord.
Why not say keeper then?
McCarthy does that after many of the Judge's speeches - just poking at them, and poking at his own tendency toward high-falutin' language while he's at it. No one forgets the horror of this book, but almost everyone forgets that it's funny.
But McCarthy does share Milton's terrible force and authority with language. (And, while we're making comparisons, David Foster Wallace's tendency to play "fuck you" with a thesaurus.) What I learned about how to read him: a) do it slowly; b) don't worry overmuch about all the words you don't understand. (Although it is nice to read on a Kindle so you can look at least some of them up.) And take some pleasure in the moments when McCarthy describes "a urinecoloured sun," or "a solitary lobo, perhaps gray at the muzzle, hung like a marionette from the moon with his long mouth gibbering."
Yes, this is a brutal book. Tough to read. But it's very good. And I don't even mean that sort of book where you're like ugh, I guess it's good, I wish it was also enjoyable to read. You do get that feeling sometimes, but it fades as you go. By the end, the weirdest thing happens: as the climax hits you're actually excited. You're hoping the good guys, such as they are - less bad? - win. (view spoiler)[Obviously they don't, but they do lose in what I found to be a tremendously satisfying and right-feeling way. (hide spoiler)] Of all things, this book made me sad to realize I was near the end of it.
I'm not sure this is a Great American Novel, just because I'm not altogether convinced it takes place in America. This America looks a lot like an Inferno. But it is great....more
Wilkie Collins, a polyamorous laudanum addict, invented a genre called the sensation novel with Woman in White. He took Gothic stories away from theirWilkie Collins, a polyamorous laudanum addict, invented a genre called the sensation novel with Woman in White. He took Gothic stories away from their ghost-filled castles and directly into what he called "the secret theatre of home": "Collins and his fellow sensationalists [Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, Charles Reade and Rhoda Broughton] re-mapped the 'knowable communities' within which writers such as George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant plotted their fictions as territories that were unknowable, or at least dangerous to know" (Penguin Read Red intro). Unsurprisingly, this has been a big hit with generations of people who dislike their spouses.
And it's a terrific book. The titular woman shows up almost immediately to hook you in; after a brief slow-down to set the stage, around a third of the way in the tension ratchets up and never lets go again. It's incredibly gripping, and there are no plot holes. It features several brilliant characters: Miss Halcombe, the brains of the affair (and also, as Collins tells us at considerable length, the ass*); the hypochondriac Fairlie; and, of course, the illimitable Fosco, one of the most memorable creations ever.
It's set up as an unusual epistolary: testimony from a number of sources, as if for a legal proceeding. The switching of narrators allows Collins to play a bunch of daring tricks: at one point a character suddenly intrudes in another's diary, confessing that he stole and read it, and commenting on her version of events.
And, of course, it lets Collins experiment extensively with the idea of the unreliable narrator. At least three passages are overtly untrustworthy (Fairlie, Mrs. Catherick and Fosco are also the most entertaining narrators); and since Collins obviously meant for us to understand that, might it not follow that the rest of the narrators are equally untrustworthy? Major spoilers: (view spoiler)[Hartright takes forever in his attempt to save Percival's life. Is it possible that he was stalling? Was it really impossible for him to go to the police? Does he bear some responsibility for Fosco's murder? In each of these cases, Collins gives him an excuse: no townspeople thought of better ways to save Percival; Mr. Kyrle insists that he has "not a shadow of a case"; the scarred man picks up on Fosco's identity as Hartright does. I'm not convinced that we're supposed to believe Hartright is lying to us, but I do think we're supposed to think about it. (hide spoiler)]
*Collins was wonderfully against corsets, and unapologetically an ass man: "I too think the back view of a finely formed woman the loveliest view." (Letters of Wilkie Collins, Vol. II, p. 534; ganked from an endnote in my edition)
Edition review: the Penguin Read Red edition is fantastic. Great intro and great endnotes. The Kindle version I bought did a superb job of linking to the endnotes (something often neglected in Kindle editions), and it's only $4.75....more
There's all this debate over why Satan is so appealing in Paradise Lost. Did Milton screw up? Is he being cynical, or a double-secret atheist? And whyThere's all this debate over why Satan is so appealing in Paradise Lost. Did Milton screw up? Is he being cynical, or a double-secret atheist? And why is God such a dick?
But no one asks whether, say, Shakespeare screwed up in making Iago so much fun; they just give him credit for writing an awesome villain. And that's all Milton's doing. Satan is tempting for us because Satan is tempting for us. That's the point of Satan! If Milton didn't make him as appealing as possible, he'd be doing Satan a disservice. And Eve, for that matter.
Similarly, God's a dick because God's a dick. You've read the Old Testament. He's not exactly all flowers and hugs there either. Again, Milton's just being true to his characters, and writing a great story while he's at it.
There鈥檚 slightly more to it than that, yeah. For example: it's hinted a little that God sets Satan up to fall. He gives a stern warning that anyone who disobeys him or his son will be cast out of Heaven. But since there's no sin or evil at the time of his speech, why give the warning? Isn't that like saying "Don't touch these cookies while I'm gone" to a kid who didn't realize there were cookies until you pointed them out?
Here鈥檚 my advice to people considering reading Paradise Lost: read the first two books. It starts with a bang, and it鈥檚 pretty amazing for a while. It slows down a bit in books III - VII, so if you鈥檙e not totally sold in the first two books (I was), you can either quit altogether with a fair idea of what Milton sounds like, or skip to books IX and X. IX is the actual temptation and fall (especially fun if you鈥檙e a misogynist), and X is an astonishing sequence where Adam and Eve contemplate suicide:
"Why am I mocked with death, and lengthened out To deathless pain? How gladly would I meet Mortality my sentence... his dreadful voice no more Would thunder in my ears." (Adam, X.774 - 780)
鈥淲e鈥檝e totally mucked this up, and our kids are gonna justifiably hate us because we got kicked out of Paradise, and maybe we should just quit while we鈥檙e behind.鈥�
But really, the whole thing is worth it. Took me a while 鈥� it鈥檚 intense stuff, so I found that I had to read a book and then chew on it for a while to process it before moving to the next one 鈥� but it鈥檚 cool.
In book VIII, if you鈥檙e cosmologically minded, Milton lays out the whole universe. Like Giordano Bruno, he understands that our earth is a tiny speck in the universe, and he gets that all the stars are suns like ours, and therefore could have planets like ours around them. He also thinks they might be inhabited; our species might not be God's only experiment. Elsewhere, other Adams and Eves may have faced the same test of the Tree of Knowledge - and they might have passed it. Isn't that an amazing thought?
In books XI and XII, Michael tells Adam sortof all the rest of the stories in the Old Testament, which of course boil down to:
鈥淪o shall the world go on, To good malignant, to bad men benign, Under her own weight groaning.鈥� (XII 537 鈥� 539)
That鈥檚 your fault there, Adam. Nice work.
He rushes through them though, and it makes me wonder whether Milton had originally intended to retell the entire Old Testament but got bored or intimidated or something. That would鈥檝e been remarkable. Certainly Paradise Lost is better literature than the Old Testament is, and significantly more coherent.
It's also better literature than almost everything else. Second-best poem by a blind guy ever. ...more
The thing with Othello is that he's a fuckin鈥� idiot and he sucks. There's this towering scene, Act 3 scene 3, it鈥檚 the centerpiece of the play. Iago'sThe thing with Othello is that he's a fuckin鈥� idiot and he sucks. There's this towering scene, Act 3 scene 3, it鈥檚 the centerpiece of the play. Iago's convincing him that his wife Desdemona is cheating on him with Cassio, and he has this whole complicated plan worked out involving handkerchiefs and innuendo, but he needs none of it: at the first drop of poison in his ear, Othello's like,
"Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore. Be sure of it, give me the ocular proof."
[image] Mekhi Phifer and Josh Hartnett in 2001 high school Othello, I love this version
He's like ooh, show me. Iago's all, it can鈥檛 be this easy. "Beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster."
But it is! Othello careens totally off the rails: "I had been happy if the general camp, Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body, So I had nothing known."
He instantly believes the worst, and then he makes it entirely about him, right? "She could have fucked the whole army - it's the part where I found out that hurts." Othello sucks.
Top Five Worst Husbands 5. Othello (would also accept the Duke of Cornwall from Lear) 4. Heathcliff 3. Agamemnon 2. Humbert Humbert 1. Tie, Bluebeard & Shahryar (that's Scheherezade's husband from Arabian Nights; I had to look up his name)
If there's a problem with Othello it's that, it's what an irredeemable dickbag Othello is. He sounds great. He's maybe my favorite Shakespearean character to read. Try it, read some out loud: everyone sounds like Shakespeare but him. But he has no real character arc, and that鈥檚 frustrating. He talks big but he's flimsy.
Only one thing happens here: Iago subverts Othello. There are none of Shakespeare鈥檚 characteristic parallel, wandering subplots, which is mostly a good thing. Othello is his most focused work. It's as close as he comes to classic Greek tragedy. One - thing - happens.
[image] Lawrence Fishburne in Branagh鈥檚 1995 version
Right, so on to that one thing: Iago. He's Shakespeare's best villain ever, the apotheosis of a certain thing Shakespeare loves to do, what James Earl Jones called "motiveless malignity." He tosses motives around - he thinks Othello fucked his wife? - but he doesn't really go into it and you don't get the sense he really cares any more than you do. Motiveless malignity. Iago gets compared to the personified Vice character in old morality plays, who was (of course) always the most fun. Vice for Vice's sake. He snickers to the audience. He's the one who connects with us; no one else is paying attention.
Iago works in darkness. He's enshadowed at the beginning, and in most of his key scenes. He works by suggestion and sudden moves from alleys. There are maybe hints of gayness? In 3.3, as "proof" of Desdemona's infidelity, he says he shared an army cot with Cassio and in the middle of the night Cassio started dreaming, called him Desdemona, and frenched him. It's not less weird than it sounds.
We like Iago because he's fun and he's not an idiot, and this is a play mostly populated by idiots - Othello, Roderigo, Cassio, omg is Cassio a chump. The only other characters with any sense are the women: Desdemona, the sex worker Bianca, and Iago's wife Emilia, the actual linchpin of the play. Shakespeare's women are often powerful. Here鈥檚 my favorite part with Desdemona: Othello gets called off to war on their wedding day and he鈥檚 like oh, man, bummer, see you when I get back, and she鈥檚 like fuuuuuuuuck that, I'm coming too! 鈥淭he rites for why I love him are bereft me,鈥� she complains. I was promised sex! That was the point! Where is the sex? You鈥檙e not getting rid of me until you sex me!
[image] Carver from The Wire and Marianna Bassham in 2010 Othello on the Boston Common, which I got to see and it was fun
Later on, she will feel differently about the other sex. 鈥淥h these men,鈥� she cries, 鈥淭hese 尘别苍!鈥� Emilia agrees:
They are all but stomachs, and we all but food: They eat us hungerly, and when they are full They belch us.
And the ending is as painful as anything Shakespeare's ever written. Watching Desdemona beg for life:
D: But half an hour! O: Being done, there is no pause. D: But while I say one prayer! O: It is too late.
It's wrenching.
So that鈥檚 part of what the play鈥檚 about: these men, these men, these men and their posturing and their dicks. How weak they are, and what chumps. 鈥淭hou hast not half that power to do me harm,鈥� says Emilia optimistically in the final act, 鈥淎s I have to be hurt.鈥� But it鈥檚 a lot of harm....more
If you haven't read Marlowe, I recommend him. He's more lurid and over the top than Shakespeare, and nowhere near as subtle - well, not subtle at all,If you haven't read Marlowe, I recommend him. He's more lurid and over the top than Shakespeare, and nowhere near as subtle - well, not subtle at all, if we're being honest - and he's not as good, but then it's a little uncool to compare anyone to Shakespeare. He is good.
Sucks to be this guy, really. He was very popular in his time, and then along came Shakespeare and whammo, he's a footnote. It's not Marlowe's fault he was the guy right before The Guy.
Anyway, if you want to see how the two compare, a perfect way to do it is to read this play and then The Merchant of Venice, which is a retelling of the same story. Merchant gets you inside Shylock's head, making you sympathize with him, trying to get you to understand how he ends up acting the way he does (more or less). This play? Not so much. Here, Barabas the Jew is just a cackling, scheming villain. No character development whatsoever: just dastardly deeds all the way.
And let's not dodge the elephant: it is terribly anti-Semitic. Merchant of Venice is fairly anti-Semitic, but it does show you how unjust the world was for a Jew of the time. Jew of Malta is not as interested in that. So brace yourself, there. Or don't read this play at all; I wouldn't blame you.
But you do root for both Barabas and Shylock, because they're both super fun. They capture your interest. And Barabas, with his infernal machines and traps and poisons, is a highly entertaining villain.
So what you'll get here is, from Shakespeare, a nuanced look at how society (and general villainy) conspire to produce a villain, and from Marlowe, woo! Murder! Merchant of Venice is better; Jew of Malta is...well, I'm not sure I can say it's more fun. But it's pretty fun....more
Edgar Allen Poe may have invented the detective, but Arthur Conan Doyle made him good. With Sherlock Holmes he took the crucial step that Poe missed: Edgar Allen Poe may have invented the detective, but Arthur Conan Doyle made him good. With Sherlock Holmes he took the crucial step that Poe missed: he made the mystery solvable.
[image] This image, like the rest, is from
The thing that makes Holmes' cases so much fun is that they make sense. They have clues; you can follow along. When Holmes makes his amazing deductions, he surprises you but you don't feel cheated. You feel like he's legitimately smarter than you.
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Holmes is one of literature's greatest dicks, and these stories are perfect little self-contained puzzles.
Which ones should you read first?
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(For what it's worth, I like the Sherlockian list - the right circle - better than Holmes' own choices.)...more
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