I’ve had East of Eden on my list for a long time. Back in high school, like almost every other kid, I had to read The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men. I enjoyed Mice but found the tale of the Joads lacking in some way (maybe, because as my grandfather put it, The Grapes of Wrath is “such a downer“).

Anyway. Here I am in my thirties with that essay about the dusty Depression and the Joads’ journey to California far behind me, and there is East of Eden sitting on my bookshelf. And I’m going to admit that I was hooked right from the first page.

I don’t really understand why we think The Hills provides us with plenty of drama when there’s something as well written as a Steinbeck novel to fill the necessary quota of lying, cheating, whoring and murder. I mean, seriously, this book has it all, plus some Biblical allegory (I’m not giving anything away when I say “Cain and Abel”).

The story begins with Adam and Charles Trask, two brothers from different mothers, who spend their growing-up years, respectively, trying to dodge and trying to attract their father’s attention. Of course some resentment simmers – really simmers – and eventually Adam leaves the farm to wander the countryside, join the army, do time in jail, and other things.

No sooner does he come back to mend fences than Cathy enters the picture, and tears the two brothers apart again. Cathy’s not the type of girl you really want to get involved with, for various reasons I won’t go into here, but that doesn’t stop Adam, who marries her and takes her out to California to start a new life. Also, to get away from Charles, who thinks the whole Cathy situation is bad news.

Turns out Charles is right, and Cathy is bad news. And in the end, Adam ends up raising his twin sons, Aaron (sorry, Aron) and Caleb (Cal) on his own, with the help of his Chinese, um, manservant, Lee. Of course Cal and Aron have a contentious relationship, too, so the whole Biblical situation repeats again, only without anyone swinging a hatchet at anyone’s head this time. And as they’re growing up, Adam makes a fortune and loses it, and the boys find out some pretty unsavoury things about their mother (though we learn all the really unsavoury things, and they just learn one or two of them).

So, see? Drama, cheating, lying, murdering. And in the midst of it all are some really fantastic characters, like the Trasks’ neighbour, Samuel, who likes philosophical discussions, and Samuel’s wife, Liza, who’s as practical as they come. And Lee, who hides his brilliant intellect and perfect English behind a stereotypical facade, speaking in pidgin English and wearing a queue. Suffice it to say that thanks to the plot and all these interesting people, I couldn’t put the book down. I devoured it. And if you pick it up, I promise you will, too.

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Get it – corrections?

I don’t know why I thought that. I think I had it mixed up in my head with The Reader or something, which isn’t about jail but is fairly bleak, and so I had this sort of POW, Holocaust thing attached to it, rather than the satire it is. I finally found out it wasn’t about jail, and I really wanted to read it. And then I read that Franzen told Oprah to go take a flying leap when she wanted to add this book to her Book Club, and I really wanted to read it. Especially when she called him ‘elitist, so there.’ (I don’t know about the ’so there.’ It’s implicit, if you ask me.)

So anyway. The Corrections is not about jail, The Corrections is about a dysfunctional modern family. “Is there any other kind?” you ask. Well, no, probably not. But a book about a perfectly functioning family would be a very short book. It would also be total, total fiction. And boring.

The story starts with Chip Lambert, a college professor who is toiling away at a screenplay that he at first believes is brilliant but rapidly realizes, after giving it to a high-powered movie exec, probably isn’t. It’s a stack of paper he desperately wants back in order to make the titular “corrections” that he believes will save the story and, for once, allow him some success. Chip has a few issues with the media and society in general, and spends most of his days trying to get his students to realize that pop culture is filled with Corporate Agendas and Hidden Messages. His students don’t appreciate Marshall McLuhan or Noam Chomsky as much as Chip does, though that doesn’t seem to stop Chip from starting an affair with one of them. Long story short, everything self-destructs, Chip loses his job and ends up working in Lithuania.

Meanwhile, his parents, Enid and Alfred, are facing their own issues. Alfred is struggling with the onset of Parkinson’s disease and dementia, and Enid is struggling with her embarrassment and inability to deal with a future that doesn’t match her vision of twilight years spent surrounded by a loving family.

But it doesn’t stop there. Chip’s siblings are also battling personal demons and lives filled with upheaval. His brother Gary is, despite appearing to have everything, hopelessly depressed. His sister Denise, who seems, on the surface, to have everything under control, has made some seriously questionable decisions (the kind you think only Chip could make) that have left her life in ruins.

What it all seems to boil down to for the Lamberts is a the modern family’s impossible search for happiness. Their relationships are often empty and unfulfilling, their lives filled with stuff. The book traces the family from the early days of Enid and Alfred’s courtship, through Chip, Gary, and Denise’s childhoods, to the “one last Christmas” Enid is dying for them to spend together. In the meantime, Franzen fills in the corners with disquieting accounts of big business, whose benevolent message, as usual, hides something deeper.

The “corrections” in the book refer to far more than the editing of Chip’s screenplay. Every Lambert is trying to “correct” something – unhappiness, loneliness, missed opportunities. Each other. In the end, we can realize it’s an impossible task, even if they can’t.

So totally not about jail.

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I’ve wanted to read Howards End for a long time. I saw the Merchant-Ivory movie in the 90s, and I loved the story, but for some reason shied away from the book. I’m so glad I finally picked it up. Forster wrote it in 1910, before the First World War, but I found it in many ways a very refreshing read. There were things he wrote about – the rampant development in London, the isolation people felt from their neighbors – that resonated with me in ways I didn’t expect.

The story follows the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, who live in Wyckham Place with their brother, Tibby. The Schlegels are “intellectuals” – they are not wealthy by the standards of their circle, but they enjoy going out to concerts, reading, and discussion topics of Great Social Importance with their friends. The story begins when Helen Schlegel goes to stay with the Wilcoxes, a wealthy family the sisters met on vacation, at their country home, Howards End.

The novel chronicles the relationship between the two families, starting with Helen’s (extremely) brief affair with one of the Wilcox sons, the subsequent fallout, and the relationship that develops, awkwardly at first, between Margaret and Mrs Wilcox. Knowing the Schlegels are going to be evicted from their home (to make way for a complex of flats!), Ruth Wilcox leaves Howards End to Margaret, someone who appreciates the beauty of the place as she does. When Ruth passes away, her family conspires to keep the property within the family – not because they care for it as much as Ruth did, but because it’s a financial asset to them.

(OK, whoops, I didn’t mean to hit ‘publish’ there. Not done!)

Of course, you have to know hiding this information from Margaret could not possibly end well, and it certainly doesn’t, especially since she ends up marrying Henry Wilcox. Meanwhile Helen has an unfortunate entanglement with Leonard Bast, who is trying to work his way up in the world as a clerk. Forster neatly illustrates the divide between the classes with the Wilcoxes, Schlegels, and Basts and makes some interesting comments on the blurring boundaries of the new twentieth century.

As I said above, even 100 years later this book holds a surprising relevance, as the Schlegels lament the rampant greed and consumerism that seems to color their social circle. They seem to be searching for meaningful relationships and connection in a society that’s slowly steering towards the impersonal and disconnected. One can only wonder what they’d think of Facebook, condo complexes, and front-drive garages.

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The Awakening is about Edna Pontellier, a woman living in New Orleans at the turn of the century. At the start of the book, Edna is a dutiful wife and mother, away with her family on a vacation. But right from the beginning, something isn’t quite right with her world. You get the sense that even in her comfortable life, in an idyllic setting, Edna isn’t happy. She chafes against her role in society.

The novel caused a lot of controversy when it was published in 1899, and it’s not hard to see why when you read it. Even today, some of the reviews on Amazon.com point to Edna’s behavior as “selfish.” I guess on many levels it is – she abandons her role as wife and mother, stops taking visitors, keeps questionable company, and indulges her passions for art. She doesn’t fit the mold, and it seems to unnerve everyone… including Robert Lebrun, the young man with whom she falls in love and, in many ways, the person who sets her transformation in motion.

I’m going to admit right here that I was unsettled by the ending. Enough that I had to look for spoilers on the internet to see if I’d interpreted it correctly. I can’t decide if the ending is the only way it could end, or if I feel cheated by it, or both. I do know that that the book in general made me ponder, as great books always do, how much and how little has changed in 100 years.

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For years I picked up this book and put it back on the shelf. I don’t know quite what kept me from reading it. I think I was a afraid it was going to be uppity CanLit, all anti-heros and oppressive themes. Or that the tiger would talk, a la the movie Beethoven. In the end, I chose it because the grade 8 and 9 Language Arts classes Mike was student teaching were reading it, so he read it. He’s not what you’d call an avid reader of literature, so for him to say he really liked it made me think it must have been worthwhile. It was!

The book tells the story of Pi Patel, a boy from Pondicherry in India. Pi (which is short for Piscine), is the kind of kid who likes to think about things. The first part of the book deals largely with how he remembers his childhood, and explores themes of religion and spirituality a-plenty. Pi is fascinated by Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism, and there’s a great scene that explores whether one can practice all three or follow only one. Pi’s parents are zookeepers, and he also spends a lot of his childhood learning about animal behavior.

The second part of the book follows Pi as he floats in a lifeboat for 227 days, his only companion a Bengal tiger. (I’m going to say right here that I think this is what made me avoid the book for a long time. It shouldn’t have put me off.) Pi, who only ever “wanted to know God”, begins to do things he never imagined he’d do, just in order to survive. Some of them, like eating meat, fly in the face of his beliefs.

I’m not going to spoil the plot (like Wikipedia! booo), but I will say that a shipwrecked main character has a lot of thinking to do. And even though there’s a lot of “boy vs tiger’, the book doesn’t get bogged down. Martel uses some fascinating devices to convey the sense of the empty days Pi experiences. Pi makes list after list – of his surroundings, of his behavior, of the things he sees and does. He also manages to create a set of beautifully rounded characters, whether they’re human, tiger, orangutan or hyena.

I think what I liked best about the novel is that it lends itself to a range of interpretations. I came away with a different set of ideas about it than Mike did, for example. When we talked about the book we both found we had opposite impressions of what happened in the end. We both had wildly differing ideas about whether the tiger was real at all, and what the book was trying to say.

I didn’t set out to tag these novels as good or bad, but I’m going to channel Siskel and Ebert for a second and give this one two thumbs up. It made me think, it was beautifully written, but it also entertained me. I devoured it, much the way a shipwrecked tiger might devour a giant fish.

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Her theory, when faced with the inability to write, was that she could read her way out of it. She started out with the intention of reading 275 novels (I know!), but admits she had to pare it down because she’s “a slow reader.” (I cannot tell you how relieved I felt when I read that. Truly.) She read all kinds of books, from The Decameron, which is often called the first novel, to works by modern writers. She wasn’t trying to make a list of the best – it was just a list of books she’d read.

I’ve been finding this book quite inspirational in ways I wasn’t expecting. I often feel like I’m not as well-read as I should or could be, and I know I’m not alone in this. How can you read everything? Impossible. I’m also afraid, sometimes, of not liking something I’m reading. I found it refreshing to discover that Jane Smiley doesn’t like everything she reads, either, and that sometimes sticking with something you don’t like has its own rewards in the end, the same way bailing on A Christmas Carol after 50 pages might bring its own sweet relief (followed rapidly by guilt. Oh, the guilt.).

The book contains Smiley’s own list of 100, and there are some great books on there. I was pleasantly surprised to discover I’d read more than a few of them, and that some were even favorites of mine. There were a few I’d not encountered, and others I’d heard of but never read. They now have a place on my ever-expanding reading list.

Since it’s the start of a new year, I figured there was no better time to tackle another self-improvement project. So I’m going to start reading my own 100. And I’m going to write about them here. I’m no book critic, and I’m no English Lit major, so I’m hoping I don’t sound completely clueless when I document my impressions for the whole internet to see. All I want is to cross a few books off my list, and maybe discover a few new favorites along the way. I’m not going to read the list from the book, but there will likely be a few similarities here and there. And I’m not going to stick to “classics”. It’s good enough for me that it be a novel. If you have any suggestions for me, feel free to post them here.

So here goes! Page one…

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The Art of Dramatic Writing, by Lajos Egri. I keep running across references to this as a great book for anyone who writes fiction, plays, or screenplays. Since I’ve abandoned plays for something with more narrative (read: room to ramble), I thought I’d give it a try. It is, according to some, the bible on character motivation. So we shall see what happens to both my motivation and that of my characters.

Grammatically Correct: The Writer’s Guide to Grammar, Punctuation, Spelling, and Usage, by Anne Stillman. So now, when someone asked, “But is that grammatically correct?” I can pull out yet another book and tell them ‘yes’ or ‘no’. I mean, when I’m not sure. It’s like having a safety net, so I can walk the tightrope in the Smart Olympics and not get booed out of the center ring. (How many metaphors were there in that sentence? Four? Whoa. I should ease up on the diet Pepsi.)

Nobody Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog, by Margaret Mason. Lucky for you! Thanks to this book, I should never have to begin a post with “I can’t believe how long it’s been since I wrote in here…” again. Phew! And they’ll all be riveting! Really! Well. Maybe not all of them. A hundred, for sure.

I’d better get reading. And doing my Hundreds.

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Althought I spend my entire day in front of a computer (and sometimes my night, too, if the muse ties me down), I am, at heart, old-school. I love holding a book in my hand, curling up in a comfy chair with a cup of tea or a glass of wine. I like the smell and feel of paper under my fingertips. I like turning the pages, and needing a bookmark.

Readng online is just not the same. Studies have proven this, so I know it’s not just me. People scan. They look for bullets and numbers and headlines. Short paragraphs. Something to click. I break a lot of the rules in here because, hell, I can, but I spend most of my day cutting things into chunks that follow “best practices” and looking for ways to work a call-to-action into a paragraph.

Guys like Keats? No call to action. No chunking. He’d probably spin in hs grave at the thought of bullet points in his poetry (did they even have bullet points back then?). I’m pretty sure his skin, if he had any, would crawl at the idea of a Yahoo! ad appearing at the bottom of one of his poems. I mean, I’m assuming. If I were a Great Poet, mine probably would.

This is a long-winded way of saying that, after reaching e-mail 7 of 21 of Keats Poems via dailylit.com, that it is not working for me. I get these messages every day, and I end up scanning them the same way I scan meeting requests or e-newsletters. So I’ve come to the conclusion that in the end, I’m not really broadening my literary horizons at all by reading him this way. And that there are some things that should not involve a mouse, a screen, or an inbox.

It was a nice try, but I’m going back to good old-fashioned paper for this one, thanks.

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