Silas Marner is about a lonely weaver who moves to a small town after he was falsely accused of a crime in his hometown. His new neighbors are superstitious and wonder why he’d move there – and they treat him accordingly. He finds solace in the gold he saves from his weaving, hiding it under his floor and counting it every night. Until someone steals it. After that, he’s miserable; everyone thinks he’s crazy. Then, one night, a child appears at his hearth. He soon discovers that the child’s mother lies dead outside. Silas decides to keep the child and raise her as his own. Turns out that the child’s real father (spoiler!) is a rich man in the town, but said rich man doesn’t want anyone to know that he’d been married and had a child with a poor woman before he’d married someone closer to his social stature. And I guess I shouldn’t go too much farther with the plot, or you’ll be pissed at me if you read the book.

Because it’s good, and it’s worth reading. I really enjoyed Silas Marner, though it was a bit slow going. There were some spots that seemed to go on forever. I know why Eliot put those scenes in, but I wish she’d kept them a little shorter. This novel is also my first experience with George Eliot. When I was in college, I shunned anything related to the Victorian (which also explains why I did so badly on the Lit GRE back in the day). I didn’t even read A Tale of Two Cities or Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre until after I’d finished my English degree. Which is absolutely crazy. I’d always assumed I’d hate them. Okay, I didn’t especially like Wuthering Heights, but alas.

Anyway, Silas Marner is good, and you should give it a read if you haven’t already. It’s a pretty stereotypical Victorian novel – and a short one. I’m going to give George Eliot another try soon, though I’m a little concerned that if her longer novels are as slow in parts, I might not end up finishing them.

(Also, check out In the process of reading: Silas Marner.)

After a couple of bad experiences with pop fiction, I’ve wound my way back to where I’m comfortable: good ol’ fashioned schoolin’ books. Like Silas Marner, which I was never assigned in college (nor was I assigned any George Eliot, at all, but that’s another story for another day). The novel, though really good so far, is a slow read. I think it’s Eliot’s style, about which I’m not complaining. It’s just taking me longer than I thought it would.

So, in the meantime, I thought I’d read a bit about George Eliot because, well, I avoided Victorian-related classes in college because I was sure I would hate them. Which, I guess, is not the case. Anyway, after reading the Wikipedia article (I know), I found a lovely essay Eliot wrote called “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” in which she complains about the female writers of her day. It’s actually pretty funny. She says that there’s a common misconception that poor ladies write novels to pay the bills, and that should make up for at least a bit of their general crappiness. That’s not the case, though: it’s usually rich, idle women doing the writing, and they’re “inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains.”¹ They suck at writing and at life: “[T]heir intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they have seen and heard, and what they have not seen and heard, with equal unfaithfulness.” ² There are, of course, women who actually can write (“Happily, we are not dependent on argument to prove that Fiction is a department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully equal men.” ³), and of course Eliot counts herself in that number, though it appears that she fit into the idle class, too. No mention of that, of course. But I digress. She says that one of the most significant reasons for so much shitty output from female writers is that, unlike playing a piano, you can write badly and not know it because writing is so freeform:

No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements.  Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements—genuine observation, humor, and passion.  But it is precisely this absence of rigid requirement which constitutes the fatal seduction of novel-writing to incompetent women.  Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their power of playing on the piano; here certain positive difficulties of execution have to be conquered, and incompetence inevitably breaks down.  Every art which had its absolute technique is, to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of mere left-handed imbecility.  But in novel-writing there are no barriers for incapacity to stumble against, no external criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery. ⁴

I need to read more about authors. I’ve never had an interest in history (again, I know), so I’ve shied away even from Wikipedia articles. When I was in college, getting me to read the biography blurb in a Norton Anthology before reading the actual piece was like pulling teeth. And the essays in the back? Yeah, right. Thus, I’ve read a lot, but I don’t know anything about who wrote anything. I have a feeling I’m missing out.

Anyway, on to Ethan Frome, which I absolutely loved. As far as I know, this is the first of Edith Wharton I’ve read, English degree and all. And I’ve been missing out. It’s fantastic. This is the kind of book I’ve been needing to read – it’s like rehab for pop fiction.

Ethan Frome is about, well, Ethan Frome. He’s 28 and married to a horror of a woman named Zeena, who makes herself the center of attention by playing sick. For the past year, Zeena’s destitute cousin Mattie has been helping out around the house for room and board, though she’s not especially “handy.” Over the course of that year, she and Ethan have fallen in love, though they don’t act upon it until Zeena goes out of town for a day to see a new doctor. Ethan and Mattie spend the day together, and they kiss. Zeena doesn’t like Mattie, and she’s jealous of Mattie’s relationship with Ethan, so she devises a plan to get rid of her: she comes back from the doctor claiming that he said she must hire a maid and do absolutely no housework. She insists that Mattie leave the following day, and though Ethan tries to come up with something, he can’t really do anything about it. I guess I shouldn’t spoil the end of the novel, though I’ll give one clue: (again, spoiler! spoiler!) Rosebud. And I giggle.

It’s a depressing novel about forbidden love: Ethan is already in a miserable marriage, and, then, once he finds a wee spark of happiness, everything goes to hell in a hand-basket. Which really isn’t a spoiler because the very beginning of the novel explains how miserable Ethan is. Though it’s under 200 pages, Wharton thoroughly explores the characters and their motives, and that’s what makes it such a great read. It’s not an expansive world like those of most of my favorite novels, but a more personal and intimate one.

Wharton is on my shortlist. I’ll read another of her novels really soon because I enjoyed this one so much.

Bonus: If you like Ethan Frome and you’re a fan of 1950s pop fiction, find a copy of Mr. Whittle and the Morning Star. It’s a treat!

So why can’t I get through this book?

I really have no idea, but I’m almost two weeks in (and behind schedule for my 50), I’m only 40% through, and now I’ve lost interest. I even thought about scanning through the rest of the novel just to see what happens, but I don’t even care enough to do that. I guess my biggest problem with it is the part I should enjoy: all of the literary references. And they were great for a while, but at the point where I stopped, that’s all there is. Nothing’s happening but a list of authors and books and ideas. It’s like the Ready Player One of literary references, and I’m bored.

I’ve also been very busy. I got married on Tuesday, and Palmer and I are looking into buying a house soon. Books aren’t exactly at the top of my list right now. And the tight 50-book schedule is kind of wearing on me. I got through more than half of them last year before I had a job and before I got engaged, moved in with Palmer, and got married. Trying to read through books so quickly has made me choose books that are shorter than I want, and I have to read them so quickly that I don’t really enjoy them. Which makes me think it might be a good time to say, well, if I don’t read 50 books this year, that’s okay. I’d rather enjoy what I do read.

So I’ve put down The Marriage Plot, for now, anyway, and picking up Ethan Frome. I don’t think I’ve ever read any Wharton, and I’ve been meaning to for a long time. I’m trying to convince myself that it’s okay not to read it really quickly and that I don’t need to catch up to my schedule. We’ll see what happens.

Here’s the list:

1. Life of Pi: I tried reading it several years ago and failed. Maybe I’ll give it another try. I’ve heard it’s really good.
2. Cloud Atlas: My favorite book of 2010 – not that I read many books that year. It’s very Murakami-ish and very long. A movie version should be…interesting.
3. The Hunger Games: I read the trilogy last year and loooooved them. I’m really excited about this movie. The trailer looks good.
4. The Great Gatsby: I haven’t read it in a few years, but it’s one of my favorite novels. I’m not sure what to think about this movie because I don’t know how they can top the Robert Redford version. Also, I hear they’re shooting it in 3D, which sounds stupid.
5. Cosmopolis: Ahhh, DeLillo finally gets a book on the silver screen. Why couldn’t it be a good one? I didn’t like Cosmopolis at all.
6. The Hobbit: How can you not love The Hobbit? I just hope it’s as good as The Lord of the Rings movies.
7. The Wettest County in the World: Haven’t read it, hadn’t heard of it. No idea on this one.
8. Anna Karenina: tl;dr. I know I should. It’s been on my to-read list for quite a while. I don’t really care about the movie, though, because it’ll be like those Austen and Dickens movies I can’t stand.
9. The Perks of Being a Wallflower: The book is okay, I guess. I’ll probably see the movie once it comes out on DVD.
10. Great Expectations: See #8.

All of this means I might go to the theater a few times this year. I think I went once last year – I’m not a movie person. I’ll take a book any day. It’s just strange that I just read the novels to so many adaptations coming out this year.

And, now, there’s The Hobbit. I discovered Tolkien late: I read The Hobbit sometime around 2003 or 2004. I think I’d passed them up when I was younger because I thought they were so long. Except they’re not. When I was ten or twelve, I bought a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, but I didn’t get very far into it. I’m not sure why I bought it – I guess one of my friends read it – but I remember being at the Waldenbooks in Pierre Bossier Mall and pulling it off the shelf, marveling at how long and adultish it looked.

I didn’t read The Lord of the Rings until a few years after I’d completed The Hobbit, and the first movie, or so, was out. It took me about three months to get through them, though I really loved them. I got a nice hardbound set from the Thrifty Peanut the other day, only to discover that they’re moldy. Good thing I work in a library and know how to deal with moldy books. Denatured alcohol and sunlight, in case you’re wondering.

Anyway, I’m not going to rehash the plot of The Hobbit because you’ve probably already read it. If you haven’t, and you’re thinking, tl;dr, check out the Rankin/Bass animated version (they also did The Last Unicorn, which I love and which made me unable to watch a movie with Mia Farrow in it without thinking the unicorn was talking). Turns out you can watch the whole thing on Youtube. Here’s the first part:

At some point in the near future, I’m probably read The Lord of the Rings again. It’s one of my favorite books. Here, of course, I’d count it as three because it’s really long, and I have 50 books to read. If you haven’t read it, you should. If you have kids around 10 or 12 (or older!), you should introduce them, too. I wish I had caught on earlier.

Ready Player One is set in 2045, after we’ve used up most of our fossil fuel, and the world is a pretty miserable place. The protagonist, Wade, lives in the stacks, a literal pile of trailers. He spends most of his time playing a game that’s a mix between Second Life and Warcraft, called OASIS, as does everyone else in the world. The creator of OASIS, a very wealthy man, has just died. He didn’t have any heirs, so he created a contest within the game for his company and his money. It’s an easter egg hidden behind three gates that have to be opened with three keys within the game. Obviously, everyone wants to win, and there are thousands of players after that key. They call themselves gunters. There’s also a huge corporation, IOI, after the prize, but they want to take over OASIS for monetary gain. And they’re evil. Anyway, five years pass after the game begins, and lots of gunters have begun to lose interest, thinking that the easter egg is too well hidden for anyone to find. Then Wade finds the first key, and the race begins to find the egg. There’s also a stupid love story subplot.

The general plot is good: it’s the details that annoy me. Halliday, the creator of Oasis, was obsessed with the 1980s, and to understand the clues to where the keys are hidden, one would have to know everything about Halliday. And it’s all 80s references. If it’s pop culture, and it happened in the 80s, Cline worked it in somewhere. It just doesn’t end. At one point early in the novel, Wade has to supply the dialogue for all of the movie WarGames, and we hear too much of it. Later, he has to survive an entire videogame. We hear too much about that, too. By the time I was halfway through the novel, I was downright angry.

It also didn’t help that Ready Player One invaded my dreams. I hate it when novels do that, even if they’re really good. I spent one night in a sort of twilight state calculating how to get those keys, and the next night, last night, I could hardly sleep at all. What I learned from this experience: no scifi novels at bedtime. Not that I read many scifi novels, anyway.

Other than the 80s overload, Ready Player One is a decent novel – if you like pop fiction (I don’t) and if you really like the 1980s. I still think it belongs in the YA section.

That said, I’m not saying the novel is bad or that DeLillo isn’t a fantastic writer. Because it’s not, and he is. Great Jones Street is the “least interesting and most plotted of DeLillo’s Novels,” according to Michael Oriard. I’m not sure that I agree. Surprisingly, I generally enjoyed Great Jones Street this time around.

It’s about a jaded rock star, Bucky Wonderlick (supposedly modeled after Bob Dylan). As with most of DeLillo’s protagonists, he’s surrounded by media, which is imposing an identity on him. In this case, he’s supposed to commit rock star suicide. Instead, he holes up in his girlfriend’s apartment, trying to escape the music industry and his fans. But he can’t really escape, and he becomes involved with a superdrug, and he’s swept up into chaos again.

It’s really not a bad novel, but one read was enough. The vast majority of DeLillo novels (I’ve read most of them) follow a general formula, and they all sound the same. I hear all of his novels like Michael Douglas is reading them to me. All of the characters follow the same speech patterns, which isn’t terrible: my favorite thing about DeLillo is his writing style. It’s beautiful. Here’s the first paragraph of the novel:

Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public’s total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public’s contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity–hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.

Michael Douglas read it in your head, too, didn’t he.

What having read this book yet again means to me is that I have to start on chapter two of my thesis tomorrow. Meh.

If Great Jones Street seems interesting to you, give it a try. If DeLillo sounds interesting, read White Noise first. It’s so much better.

Happy 2012, everybody!

So here we are at the beginning of a new year. As always, I made a few resolutions, but before I get to them, let’s see how I did on last year’s.

1. Use the Nikon more. Well, I definitely failed on that one. I think I used my Nikon even less in 2011 than I did in 2010. So it goes.

2. Cookies once a week. My goal, here, was to make cookies less often, and I certainly did that. I probably made fewer than 15 batches of cookies this year, which is a huge change. I think I’m ready to dispense with this one. You can never have too many cookies.

3. Cook healthier. I guess I failed on this one, too. I didn’t cook healthier, but I cooked less. That’s expensive and much less fun. I’ve been cooking a bit more lately, and I want to carry that into 2012.

4. Read fifty books. After my bucketload of fail comes a truckload of WIN! Somehow, I got my fifty books in – a day early, even! I’m trying it again this year, but more about that later.

I think my fifty books achievement offsets the others enough to call 2011 a good year for resolutions. Hell, it was a plain ol’ good year. I found my man and I got the most awesome job ever. Who could complain?

And now, onto this year’s resolutions. I’m keeping them fairly reasonable, so I might be congratulating myself again this time next year.

1. Read fifty books. Again. I should note that reading so much was easier last year, at least during the first half because I didn’t have a job. I spent three hours a day reading at Starbucks. Now I might spend a couple hours once a week because time is suddenly in short supply. I do have added incentive this year because I’m cross posting my book posts to a library blog, and I really want to keep up with it. That also means that I want to make my reviews a bit more reviewy, like not spending the whole review talking about why I don’t remember plot details.

2. Be more domestic. I fluctuate between housewife and couch potato, and I spent most of 2011 in the latter mode. I need to cook more and clean more. I have too damn many cats not to be cleaning something constantly, anyway.

3. Keep up with friends. I’ve always been bad about returning phone calls and emails, but I’ve been so busy this year that I’ve let it get out of hand. I have really awesome friends, and I need to keep in touch with them. I have people in Chicago, Lafayette, and Belfast who I’ve neglected for far too long.

Here’s the big one:

4. DEFEAT THE THESIS MONSTER . I think I finally have the right incentive to finish writing my thesis: I want to enroll in LSU’s MLIS program in the fall so Palmer and I can move to Houston after I claim (thesis-free!) master’s #2. After over a year, I finished the first chapter, so I only have two twentyish-page papers to go. I can do it! Right?

So there are my four. Think I can do it? I’m pretty sure I can. I think 2012 is going to be an awesome year.

I enjoyed the vast majority of them, and I enjoyed the experience of spending most of the year ahead of my quota, then playing catch-up at the very end. I wasn’t sure I would make it: I finished #46, Midnight’s Children, only a couple of days before Christmas, leaving a week to read four novels. Luckily, I found some good short ones. I’m looking forward to some longer ones this year, but I think I’ll try to stay away from the long and difficult. Rushdie does have some shorter novels.

Here’s my list from 2011, formatted like my 2010 list. Bold means I really liked it, and italics means I really disliked it. If it’s neither of those, it was good enough. I’ll use strikethrough for the few books I tried to read and gave up on.

• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Franny and Zooey
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
• Good Morning, Midnight
• Things Fall Apart
• Oryx and Crake
• The Satanic Verses
• The Hunger Games
• This Side of Paradise
• Popular Hits of the Showa Era
• Labyrinths
• Catching Fire
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Disgrace
• Mockingjay
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold
• Crime and Punishment
• The Grapes of Wrath
• Herzog
• Brideshead Revisited
• The Blue Sword
• The Year of the Flood
• Americana
• The Moviegoer
• Watership Down
• The Silent Land
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
• The Short Stories of Conrad Aiken
• My Life in France
• The Savage Detectives
• Cannery Row
• A Handful of Dust
• Sweet Thursday
• O Pioneers!
• The Lake
• Lullaby
• Everything that Rises Must Converge
• Cosmopolis
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret
• The Hero and the Crown
• The Devil All the Time
• The Book of Sand
• The Castle
• The Mysterious Benedict Society
• The Night Circus
• 1Q84
• Wise Blood
• Midnight’s Children
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• The Sense of an Ending
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower
• The Loved One

This list is much more impressive than last year’s. In 2012 I’m attempting another fifty and trying to put a more formal spin on things since I’ll be cross-posting to the liberry’s webpage (yay!).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I haven’t yet announced my favorite book of the year. Last year, it was David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, with Murakami‘s Dance Dance Dance as a close second. If you would have asked me then, I would have predicted that 1Q84 would top my list this year, but I didn’t like it half as well as I thought I would, though that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it. And, if you’ve been following my blog recently, you might expect Midnight’s Children, but no! It’s a close second to…

Drumroll please…

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Yep. The best book I read this year was the very first one. I think it’s My Very Favorite Book Ever. I’m not going to rehash my review here. The closest rival is, as I said, Midnight’s Children, but that’s because they’re so similar. I hope I find a book half as good as either of those in 2012.

So, that’s it. Out with the old, and in with the new, as they say. I have another fifty books ahead of me, and fifty-two weeks to read them. Wish me luck.