Listen to the Lion

My 20 favorite CDs of 2009

1. Van Morrison Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl (Listen to the Lion)

2. Levon Helm Electric Dirt (Vanguard)

3. U2 No Line on the Horizon (Interscope)

4. The Del McCoury Band Family Circle (McCoury Music)

5. The Swell Season Strict Joy (Anti)

6. Dailey & Vincent Brothers from Different Mothers (Rounder)

7. Imogen Heap Ellipse (RCA)

8. The Black Crowes Before the Frost (Silver Angel/Angelus)

9. The Avett Brothers I and Love and You (American)

10. Steve Martin The Crow (Rounder)

11. David Gray Draw the Line (Mercer Street)

12. Lyle Lovett Natural Forces (Lost Highway)

13. Bebel Gilberto All in One (Verve)

14. Alejandro Escovedo Real Animal (Back Porch)

15. Neko Case Middle Cyclone (Anti)

16. The Felice Brothers Yonder is the Clock (Team Love)

17. Ben Harper & Relentless7 White Lies for Dark Times (Virgin)

18. Ricky Skaggs Solo: Songs My Dad Loved (Skaggs Family)

19. Dave Rawlings Machine A Friend of a Friend (Acony)

20. Bob Dylan Together Through Life (Columbia)

Time's All-time 100 novels: "A Passage to India" by E.M. Forster

I actually read A Passage to India about a month ago and am just getting around to writing about it, which may tell you a lot about the effect it had on me.

 

It’s not a bad novel at all, containing some useful descriptions of India in the 1920s under British rule and some somewhat interesting characters. The plot and how it plays out, however, are both reflective of and, since this was published in 1924, probably responsible for, many of the stock liberal attitudes toward interactions between Westerners and whatever cultures they happen to come in contact with.

 

A Muslim doctor is accused of attempting to rape and English lady on a trip to some caves outside of town, but her story is, of course, suspect. The English authorities are depicted as idiotic functionaries, expect for one man who champions the doctor’s cause. You can probably guess how it plays out, but it’s not as clumsy as it could be and not a bad read at all, earning it an unremarkable three stars out of five.

 

5 stars

All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren

Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

1984 - George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

4 stars

The Assistant - Bernard Malamud

Atonement - Ian McEwan
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis

On the Road - Jack Kerouac

Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

3.5 stars

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

3 stars

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

A Passage to India - E.M. Forster

Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

 

2 stars

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

1 star

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

Dusty Springfield singing Van's "Tupelo Honey"

Time's All-time 100 novels: "Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston

As someone who has been a libertarian since about the age of 17, I have often heard Zora Neale Hurston mentioned as a fellow traveler in the movement and seen Their Eyes Were Watching God on sale in catalogues put out by Laissez Faire Books and other liberty-loving booksellers. After finally reading Their Eyes as part of my quest, I must say I'm a little disappointed that the pro-liberty message wasn't stronger.

 

But there are some strong elements to this novel, most notably that blacks are portrayed as a diverse people whose individuals act on their own beliefs about self-interest, not as cookie-cutter props simply there to convey a message. Richard Wright criticized what I think is another strong point of the book, namely the accurate Southern black dialect that Hurston uses for dialogue. Wright thought it sent the wrong message to whites, but it actually makes the book better by showing things as they are and not what someone wishes they were. Also, if my high school reading of Native Son (which I will re-read for my quest) is accurate, Wright failed miserably in his characterization by depicting individuals that are bound by fate, not directed by their reason. Hurston also dealt with the issue of how blacks of different skin tones relate to one another, which angered some.

 

That said, the overall plot strength of Their Eyes isn't that strong, which is why I give it three stars out of five.

 

5 stars

All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren

Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

1984 - George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

4 stars

The Assistant - Bernard Malamud

Atonement - Ian McEwan
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis

On the Road - Jack Kerouac

Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

3.5 stars

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

3 stars

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

 

2 stars

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

1 star

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

Time's All-time 100 novels: "Atonement" by Ian McEwan

I was pleasantly surprised by this one, going into it and through the first 50 pages or so thinking it would be a rather boring slog. I’m not sure why I thought that. Perhaps it was the cover of the book featuring a fountain in front of a big, old English house. Perhaps it was McEwan’s technique of psychological realism, in which the narrator explores the inner motivations of his characters through exposition rather than dialogue or action.

 

After all, I liked Brideshead Revisited, also taking place in a big, old English house, and McEwan’s writing skill was so great that the expositions, which I regularly don’t care for, were insightful and believable enough to keep the story moving, even though McEwan occasionally backtracks to explore how multiple characters viewed the same event.

 

The plot is simple enough, with 13-year-old Briony Tallis walking in on a sexual liason between her older sister Cecilia and a friend of the family named Robbie and mistaking it for a sexual assault. Later, a cousin of the Tallises is raped, and Briony gives evidence against Robbie, sending him to prison for a few years.

 

Flash forward to the early days of World War II, and Robbie is fighting in France, and both Briony and Cecilia are estranged, though both serve as nurses at separate hospitals. Briony, having grown up, realizes what she’s done and wants to make it right somehow.

 

Going all metafictional on us, McEwan reveals that Atonement was written by Briony for precisely that purpose, explaining why she did what she did and making Cecilia and Robbie heroes for making sure their love survived through imprisonment and war. Or did it?

 

The final section has Briony writing as a 77-year-old in 1999, having finally completed Atonement and waiting for all the principals to die so it can be published without risk of libel. (The United Kingdom has a far less-developed sense of freedom of speech and of the press than the United States has.) This section is a bit of a come-down, but necessary to explain the metafictional device. Now I’m going to watch the 2007 movie version to see if it measures up to this substantial and satisfying work. A solid four stars out of five for this one.

 

5 stars

All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren

Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

1984 - George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

4 stars

The Assistant - Bernard Malamud

Atonement - Ian McEwan
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis

On the Road - Jack Kerouac

Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

3.5 stars

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

3 stars

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

 

2 stars

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

1 star

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

Time's All-time 100 novels: Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited" and William Golding's "Lord of the Flies"

The most important thing to know about Evelyn Waugh is that he is a man, in spite of his given name. The second thing to know about him is that he is Catholic, a fact that informs most of his work, especially Brideshead Revisited. Brideshead is about an aristocratic, dysfunctional Catholic family seen through the eyes of an agnostic family friend, Charles Ryder, who is constantly surprised that a family can be both thoroughly dysfunctional and thoroughly Catholic at the same time, since, in his eyes, the dysfunctional part - which includes alcoholism, adultery, separation and a strongly hinted bit of homosexuality - automatically means they are hypocritical or just plain silly when paired with the Catholic part.

 

Orwell apparently said that Waugh was "about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions," the untenable bit, presumably, being his Catholicism and fundamentally conservative view of the 20th century. But if you can accept the fact that reasonable people can believe in, and long for, God, then you can appreciate the beauty, the humor and the subtelty of what happens to the characters in Brideshead, especially the narrator Ryder.

 

Lord of the Flies, another on Time's list of books that I somehow escaped reading in school or college but had always meant to read, explores the darker side of human nature. Sadly, it was a bit of a letdown. Once you know the premise of the book - that a bunch of boys end up alone on an island after their plane crashes, killing all the adults on board - you can guess where it goes from there.

 

Things start out OK, with the boys forming a government and dividing up the labor needed for survival, but it soon collapses into a Hobbesian nightmare. Give Golding credit for writing the book, but I can't help but think it could have been done much better. Nothing was particulary moving, insightful or menacing.

5 stars

All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren

Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

1984 - George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

4 stars

The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis

On the Road - Jack Kerouac

Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

3.5 stars

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

3 stars

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

 

2 stars

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

1 star

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

Time's All-time 100 novels: Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange"

Really an exhilarating read, both for its style and content. As for the former, the narrator is Alex, a 15-year-old gang leader at the beginning of the story who speaks a dialect called Nadsat, a mix of English, Russian and Cockney rhyming slang.

It's a highly effective way of getting inside the protagonist's head, which is where the drama of this book is played out. After his arrest for an act of "ultraviolence" that turns into a murder, Alex is conditioned, through the use of drugs in combination with violent and pornographic images, against his former behaviors.

The question, posed by Burgess in a non-pedantic manner, is whether society and/or the individual is truly better off if anti-social activity is banished through the absence of free will.

A Clockwork Orange is also darkly humorous, further enhancing its status as a stylistic and moral masterpiece.

I'm now exactly 25 percent of the way through my quest.

5 stars

All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren

Animal Farm - George Orwell

The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

1984 - George Orwell

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

4 stars

The Assistant - Bernard Malamud

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis

On the Road - Jack Kerouac

Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

3.5 stars

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

3 stars

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

2 stars

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

1 star

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

Time's All-time 100 novels: Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart"

After The Crying of Lot 49, anything would be a great read, but Things Fall Apart was pretty good regardless of its position in my literary quest.

Achebe tells the story of a Nigerian Ibo village through the life of Okonkwo, one of its greatest men. As the title suggests, things don't exactly go well for Okonkwo or the village. A tragedy befalls him and he has to go into exile for seven years, only to return to find that white and African missionaries have established a church, which aids in the village's disintegration.

Achebe is great at description; how the village looks, smells and operates is made richly clear. And he is even better at showing how a man of initiative in some things can be bound by tradition, convention and the consequences of his own decisions.

5 stars

All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
1984 - George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

4 stars

The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

3.5 stars

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

3 stars

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

2 stars

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

1 star

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

Time's All-time 100 novels: Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49"

The Crying of Lot 49 is one of two Pynchon novels on Time's All-time 100 novels, and reading it makes me wonder if I can possibly make it through the other entry, Gravity's Rainbow, especially since Crying is supposed to be Pynchon's most accessible work.

Crying has no plot, no characterization and, as far as I could see, little of the witty wordplay that's supposed to be its main attraction. It's 150 pages of sheer, ineffable gibberish.

I defy anyone to make a case to the contrary.

5 stars

All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
1984 - George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

4 stars

The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett

3.5 stars

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

3 stars

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

2 stars

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

1 star

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

Time's All-time 100 novels: Bernard Malamud's "The Assistant"

After my bouts with Harper Lee and Judy Blume, this effort from Bernard Malamud was quite a morale booster.

The Assistant is about a early 1950s Jewish Brooklyn grocer, his daughter, and an Italian-American drifter who, by a weird circumstance that is artfully revealed in the book, comes to work for the father and then fall in love with the daughter.

Malamud does a great job explaining what the characters are thinking and then backing that up with how the characters behave and speak. The relationship triangle stays complicated throughout the book, but it all makes sense as each character is doing what he, or she, thinks best to serve their individual goals and values. None of the characters here are bound by fate or are one-dimensional.

I still prefer Malamud's The Natural, a truly magical 5-star effort, but this one is a solid 4-star pick on the Time list. I have more strength now for my quest.

5 stars

All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
1984 - George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

4 stars

The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett

3.5 stars

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

3 stars

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

2 stars

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons