On Literature by J. Hillis Miller, (#6, Nonfiction)

J. Hillis Miller tackles some pretty interesting questions in this little pocketbook. Why should we read literature? What is literature? Why is literature dead? How should we read literature? Why have we always read literature? I really like his answer to the question of why we read literature. The way he writes about the kindling of the passion for reading makes me think of my own delight in immersing myself in books when I was a child, something I carried on into adulthood.

The first book, the first piece of literature I ever read, was Anne of Green Gables. I was six. The book was about 300+ pages long, yet I was determined to read it. I think it had something to do with watching the movie on television or hearing about the story from a friend. Whatever the reason, I committed myself to the task and even though it took me a year, I read it. I don't know what my next book after that was, or what I read in between, but after that, I was hooked. Devouring books became an obsession and I lived book to book as a child.

Miller's On Literature is a book for my Politics and Economics of the Canon class although I might have read it of my own accord, because the writing is nice. I like his argument--that human beings have an innate need to immerse themselves in the other world, an alternate reality that books create with their words on the page. And even though literature is dying, as a result of the new media, the new theories that take away the authority of language in a text and replace it with analyzing the race, class, and gender representations in novels, there will always be a place for reading stories and escaping.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (#3, Classic)

Would you rather be selfish or selfless? Conventional thought teaches us that selfish = bad and selfless = good. But, in Ayn Rand's popular novel, The Fountainhead, she creates the utter evil character, Ellsworth Toohey, who preaches selflessness from beginning to end, and the utter heroic character, Howard Roark, who admits he is too egotistical to have a statue symbolize him because he does not wish to be the symbol of anything.

The Fountainhead is built from Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, defined as rational individualism. She says, "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

Personally, I am not sure whether Objectivism would work in reality, but in theory I think it's a great philosophy. It may be cliche, but I found the following quote about Objectivism, and being the "sunshine" that I am I really like it and would like to believe in it: "Objectivism is optimistic, holding that the universe is open to human achievement and happiness and that each person has within him the ability to live a rich, fulfilling, independent life. " --William Thomas

The Fountainhead is a great book. I truly enjoyed reading every long, tiny print, 704 pages of it. I recommend it freely. Whether you buy into Objectivism or not, it is worth reading.

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion (#5, Contemporary Literature)

My first Joan Didion piece, aside from half an essay in Slouching Towards Bethlehem that I skimmed during Newswriting one class period, I must say I was disappointed. I don't really know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn't what I found. This book has an introduction, which should have tipped me off that it might not be such an easy, breezy read but I resisted reading it until after I finished the novel. And good thing too, seeing as how David Thomson gives away the entire book.

Play It As It Lays is a sparse and at times confusing book that tells the story of Maria Wyeth, a character that you just want to shake sometimes. The lean prose forces you to speculate on things which is also interesting but sometimes you need answers. Sometimes you want to know exactly what is going on. But then it wouldn't be a classic, and it wouldn't be considered a piece of literature. This novel is reminiscent of The Great Gatsby and other books that comment on the moral decline of society.

But you will not find a Jay Gatsby here. Maria is a cold character, whose personal tragedies fail to summon even the slightest twinge of sympathy. At the end I wasn't rooting for Maria. I wasn't rooting against her either but the indifference I felt toward her character is perhaps worse than had I secretly hoped for her literary demise. This may be the first and last piece of Didion fiction I will ever read, I haven't decided yet. The entire collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem sits on my shelf, though, waiting.

Lost and Found by Carolyn Parkhurst, (#4, Reader's Choice)

Carolyn Parkhurst's Lost and Found left something to be desired. When I got to the last page, I asked myself, "Is that it?" For a book of this nature to not deliver a satisfying ending is almost unspeakable. This is bestselling fiction, and I think one of the main draws of reading a book that everybody reads is an ending that is predictable in that it delivers the answers to all of your burning questions.

I can't give this novel a glowing review because it tries to do too much. I don't think you can parade as a light-hearted romp through reality-tv land and then get ultra serious. What's the fun in that? Lost and Found tells the story of seven teams on a reality game show, much like the Amazing Race but with some modifications to the game. Contestants run around to all these different countries in teams of two and track down specific items that they must then lug around for the rest of the game. The twist is that all the players have secrets that the producers hope to reveal over the course of the game. There were not many clever plot twists on Parkhurst's part and the novel was more tell than show, mostly because of the split narration between six of the contestants.

Having read this, I feel like I wasted one of my fifty on something less than satisfying. Let's hope my next read, Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays, is a little better.

Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland (#3, Reader's Choice)

Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland was a leap for me. I found out about him on another book-blogger's page and decided it might be interesting to read a book where the main inciting incident is a school shooting. Overall, I would give this book a B+. Coupland tells a wonderful story, with those great little twists in plot that have you sighing and screaming at the same time. His writing is also beautiful at times, but only when the narrator is male. I had some problems with his female narrators. Both Cheryl and Heather seemed too much like the stereotypical whiny female and finishing their chapters became a chore, even though Cheryl's chapter is supposedly the most interesting since she narrates her own death in the school shooting.

I also didn't know what to make of the rampant religion, which in the beginning turned me off and made me almost not read the book. But once you get past that first chapter, Jason takes over and the story really starts to emerge in the wake of the school shootings. Coupland does a great job of taking his characters through a horrible tragedy and then shows us what the aftermath might be like. And while I thought Cheryl was supposed to be the focal point of the novel and the figure that haunts you well after the book has been read, I think I was wrong. Jason is this figure, because it is his story that lingers, his losses that you feel when the novel comes to a close.

Marley and Me by John Grogan (#2, Nonfiction)

I am an animal lover, pure and unwavering. People laugh when I tell them I wrote my personal statement for Law School about sheep, chickens, cats and dogs. But I am not ashamed, I am a product of my life alongside all creatures great and small. (Yes, I also read all the James Herriot books) Armed with this information you would probably guess that I enjoyed reading Marley and Me. And, yes, I did.

I had my hesitations as I started the book. The writing is technically good, John Grogan is a well known newspaper columnist, but I found myself overly critical of what I imagined my writing would look like if I were to write a book. But, when I continued reading my criticism disappeared as Grogan won me over with his ability to tell a story about Marley that had me laughing out loud and visualizing that dopey lopsided grin of a dog who has already forgotten the trouble they caused moments ago.

The book is hilarious. The book is sad. The book is poignant. It may not be a breakthrough novel that will fill English class book lists, but for Grogan it was more than just a book about a dog. At the end he says, "It was an amazing concept that I was only now, in the wake of his death, fully absorbing: Marley as a mentor. As teacher and role model. Was it possible for a dog--any dog, but especially a nutty, wildly uncontrollable one like ours--to point humans to the things that really mattered in life? I believed it was. Loyalty. Courage. Devotion. Simplicity. Joy." I agree.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, (#2, Contemporary Literature)

Think The Island crossed with Prep. That is how I would describe this book. Ishiguro grabs you in the first paragraph with the simple word carer. What the hell is a carer? It was this question that made me read on, and on, and on. There is strangeness throughout, along with gaps that need to be filled and questions that need to be answered. I read on because I was compelled to do so by the narrator. Kathy H. hooked me into her little world and I was powerless to put the book down. And I guess that is what we might call a good book? I suppose so. But I feel like when I cruise through a book, hell-bent on reading just to know the answers the book promises to deliver, I feel cheapened. Can you really enjoy a book you just devoured? I read like a starved person, scarfing down the words on each page as though I was not sure when my next meal of gripping fiction would come along.

This type of story, this genre crossing, is exactly the type of novel I gravitate towards. Not marketed as science fiction, this book comes as a surprise as you think you will be reading about normal things. But you have been fooled and you soon realize this as Kathy talks about the shaded nature of things at the boarding school she attends in the countryside in England. You realize at about the same time as Kathy that things are indeed rotten in the state of Denmark.

There was one thing that annoyed me at times, though, and that was the narrator's voice. Kathy tells the story of her life, and it is the blind acceptance of her fate that gets too much to handle at times. In fact, all the characters are guilty of this. Not one of them does what seems like the obvious thing to do. As a reader you can't help but have that reaction. Mine was that they needed to ask questions, they needed to demand to be told what was going on and then be able to decide what to do for themselves. But that was the beauty of Ishiguro's novel. None of the characters did this and the novel remained satirical, disturbing and utterly distressing.

Next up is Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland.