Update: Little Black Classics

A couple of years ago I got, as a gift, a complete collection of the Penguin Little Black Classics. At the time I made a post about it, which I've updated below:

While I am familiar with most of the authors, the particular shorter works are often ones I've not read. Indeed, 62 I'd not read upon receipt of the collection. But when you instead look just at the authors I'd not ever read, it becomes a much shorter list, of only 28 (with two anonymous works):

Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Gunnlaugs Saga
Pu Songling Planning to read work in full: Tales from a Chinese Studio
Baltasar Gracian
Guy de Maupassant
Suetonius Read his work in full: Lives of the Twelve Caesars
Apollonious Planning to read work in full: Argonautica
Petronious Planning to read work in full: Satyricon
Johann Peter Hebel
Henry Mayhew
Hafez
Thomas Nashe
Mary Kingsley
Elizabeth Gaskell
Nikolay Leskov
C.P. Cavafy
Samuel Pepys
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Christina Rosetti
Ryunosuke Akutagawa Planning to read work in full: Rashomon and Other Stories
Giorgio Vasari
Shen Fu Planning to read work in full: Floating Life
Richard Hakluyt
Catullus
Katherine Mansfield
Sappho
Basavanna, Devara Daismayya, Mahadeviyakka, and Allama Prabhu
Dhammapada Planning to read work in full

Other works still to be read in full:

Darwin - Voyage of the Beagle
Melville - The Enchanted Isles
Chekhov - Selected Stories

But, beyond these work to read in full, I have now read all of the Little Black Classics, including the many authors I was already familiar with (Dostoevsky, Wharton, Basho, etc.). It was a fun journey, lots of good short stories, excerpts, and poetry. Some of it forgettable, some of it mediocre - but there were some nice gems in there.

So, as things currently stand, I've read 71/80 of the Little Black Classics, and it will probably be a while until I polish of the remaining 9 works, since I'm going to read the complete texts of each. 

I think I'll start with the Dhammapada - it's short, and I feel like I should've read it by now...

NaNoReMo 2020

My friend John Wiswell came up with the idea, some years ago, of making March 'National Novel Reading Month'. You pick a novel that's been on your shelf a long time, or some classic that you've always meant to get around to, and set yourself the task of reading it by the end of March.

Usually I pick older novels and always authors I'm unfamiliar with for this task. Unfortunately the oldest novel on my shelf, currently, is from 1900, so I can't pick any 19th-century works. That novel, however, did help me make my decision.

I've never read anything by Theodore Dreiser, who, at one point, was considered a major force in American literature. And I feel bad that I'm never in the mood to read his old works - two of which are on my unread shelf. (There's only one other author who has two unread books on that shelf, and that's Thomas Mann, but I'll get to him later this year, I'm sure.) The 1900 novel is by him - Sister Carrie - which made me decide to finally give him a go.

As such, I'm going to read the later Dreiser novel, An American Tragedy, from 1925, as it's considered better by most, and more of a 'classic'. It's also 814 pages in my edition, so. Yeah. Wish me luck.

Trains, Trains, and Automo-trains

Back in the day, I taught a class on Film Studies. It was a year-long course, the first semester covering the dawn of cinema to 1970, the second semester 1970 to present. (Roughly 50 years each, since our first feature film was 1924’s Sherlock Jr.)

As time went on, I realized, during the course, that a great number of the essential movies I’d picked dealt with trains.

We watched the influential American short, The Great Train Robbery, from 1908, while talking about early film development. 1924’s Sherlock Jr. also had a famous train stunt. 

Sherlock Jr.

We then watched Soviet director Dziga Vertov’s experimental documentary Man with a Movie Camera, from 1929, which has a famous train sequence, placing the camera on the tracks.

Man with a Movie Camera

The 30s and 40s were devoid of trains, and the shortest units (King Kong and Modern Times, followed by Fantasia, Casablanca, and The Third Man).

For the 1950s, the trains returned: we watched Pather Panchali, from India’s Satyajit Ray, which has a famous train sequence, as well as David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai – a film that revolves largely around the construction of a railroad during wartime. 

 Pather Panchali.

The Bridge on the River Kwai.

The Italian film from the 50s that we watched, Umberto D, ends with a climactic, suspenseful train sequence.

Umberto D.

For short films we watched Resnais’ classic documentary Night and Fog, which deals, in part, with the trains of the Holocaust. No other short films dealt with trains, though.

Into the 1960s the trains keep coming: Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, has, like Lean’s epic, the building of a railroad as the nominal subject matter that drives the plot. A Hard Day’s Night begins with a train journey and a musical number on the train.

Once Upon a Time in the West. 

A Hard Day's Night.

The films of the 70s and 80s were train-less. From the 70s: A Touch of Zen, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Apocalypse Now were watched. From the 80s: Mon Oncle D’Amerique, Blade Runner, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and Wings of Desire.

Probably each would’ve been improved with the inclusion of trains.

But just when the second semester seemed safe, we enter the 1990s, where we took a look at India again, this time Bollywood, with Mani Ratnam’s classic, Dil Se, in which a chance encounter at a train station sets the entire plot in motion – and which includes a famous train-themed dance sequence.

Dil Se.

For the 2000s we went to Japan, and watched Miyazaki’s classic, Spirited Away, in which the spirit worlds are linked by what? A train. The sequence of the protagonist sitting on a train next to a ghost is one of the most iconic images of the film.

Spirited Away.

In total, out of 34 feature films, 9 had important train sequences: nearly 30%. What can I say?

Further Thoughts on Culture and Canon

Entering the 20th century, only about 20% of the human population could read.

Since the population was 1.6 billion - one fifth of our current total entering 2020 - that means roughly 320,000,000 people could read. Those who were literate were connected to the millennia-old literary traditions: India, the Middle East, East Asia (China, Korea, Japan), and Europe. The latter had spread its literacy globally. Other literacies, like the Mayan, had gone extinct by 1900. But in the land where they'd once written Mayan glyphs, Spanish, a European literacy, had come to dominate. Likewise, English traveled to Great Britain's commonwealth and colonies, and French migrated to places like French Indochina. 

These core literacies were, in the late 18- and early 1900s, just starting to be shared and exchanged, and translated, globally. Chinese classics didn't get translated into English until the 1840s - despite both civilizations having literary traditions thousands of years old. And of course, much of the translation done in the 1800s is horribly inadequate for today.

Take, for example of these inadequacies, English translations of even close neighbors: such as Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, from the French. Victorian sensibilities led to whole sections of the work being deemed "untranslatable" on account of being too bawdy. Similarly, Thomas Bowdler famously "cleaned up" Shakespeare to be less offensive, and these translation and publication practices continued well into the 20th century, often earning the term 'Bowdlerization'. Only recently have these issues begun to be addressed.

Classic texts were part of all of the world's major literacies, and even with lousy translations, by the early to mid-20th century, a rough Canon of material, globally important, could be formed. From China you had texts like The Analects of Confucius, Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and Journey to the West. India provided the core texts of both Hinduism and Buddhism, and Sanskrit classics like Kalidasa's Recognition of Shakuntala. Europe could claim Homer's epics, Dante's Divine Comedy, and the essays of Montaigne. And from the Middle East came the Epic of Gilgamesh (rediscovered in 1853), the poetry of Rumi, and A Thousand and One Arabian Nights - not to mention the Bible and Qur'an. 

Gilgamesh is watching you... read.

As civil servants in British India, Harvard scholars, and aspirants taking China's traditional exams based on the Four Books - an 800 year-old practice - engaged their culture's literacy, they learned the classics of the core literacies - both their own, and, often, the adopted core of their colonial-rulers' cultures. This was the way of things in 1900, entering the 20th century.

But then the population ballooned to 7.7 billion.

And colonization ended. And, by 2020, fewer that 15% of the planet is illiterate.

Oral traditions, especially African, were written down for the first time. Post-colonial narratives arrived, with titans like Wole Soyinka and Frantz Fanon producing important literary and nonfiction works. Latin and South American countries stopped trying to sound like Europeans and created their own literary movements and styles, most notably the magical realism of authors like Mexico's Juan Rulfo and Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 

Asia, which started the century strong with a strong literary history, ran into problems. Great Chinese authors of the early 20th century, like Lu Xun, Lao She, and Cao Yu, had no equal after the civil war, Japanese occupation, and Maoism. For the better part of the century Chinese-language literature languished. India continued strong, but more than ever, in an era of translation and dissimulation, the myriad languages became an issue. Only those writing in English found large global audiences, unlike the majority of authors of great works in Bengali, Tamil, Urdu, Kannada, and so on. Indonesia, the world's third largest nation by population, left colonialism and, like many an African nation, entered into dictatorship: Indonesians were suppressed by Sukarno from 1945-1967, and then Suharto from 1968-1998. War ravaged Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and the Southeast Asian peninsula in general was chaotic. True, dictatorships reigned in Latin America as well - but with centuries of literacy and independence since the early 1800s, their situation was different from the former Asian and African colonies with only recent independence and historically lower literacy rates. The Middle East, as well, was not producing significant literature during the 20th century after first being colonized, and then, until now, living under dictatorships and suppression in most of the countries in the region.

Whole lotta dictators.

So you can perhaps forgive Harold Bloom for thinking the Western Canon was special. And, to be fair, it is a wonderful collection of work. It's just not unique, nor inevitable. So why did he think it was?

*    *    *

For the West, the 20th century was also a fascinating example of monoculturalism. Take television - in the UK you had the BBC, which only gradually expanded to have multiple channels. In the USA there were only three channels: ABC, NBC, and CBS. Fox didn't arrive until 1986. And cable, with the hundreds of channels that became our current nightmare, slowly developed over the late 1970s and 80s. In 2019 we hit a new record: 532 scripted television shows were broadcast - or streamed. These impacted monoculturalism, but not until the last quarter of the century.

Much of the 20th century felt, and relatively was, monocultural, and this made the Canon seem more inevitable. There were only a few channels on T.V. Musicians couldn't make it big or reach audiences without a record contract with one of the big companies. In 2018, 878 films were released in the U.S. and Canada alone. But twenty years ago, in 2000 it was only 371. Going back further, during the heyday of the studio era, the main attractions were shared by most audiences.

And the same monoculture goes for literature. Western audiences inherited the hierarchy of Chaucer, Moliere, Plato, and Aquinas. There were even some 20th-century authors immediately inducted, due to their clear innovations (always prized for Canon-worthiness): Joyce, Kafka, and Woolf were, by mid-century, considered entrants into the Western Canon. Just as Tolstoy, Baudelaire, and Melville had been inducted into the ranks the century before. Our systems of higher education reinforced these classics, with students in secondary schools reading the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Hamlet, and Greek tragedies.

Monoculture was further enforced by the Cold War, clearly demarcating, emphasizing and identifying the boundaries of cultures and traditions. Lenin and Yevtushenko might be "Western", but they were also clearly Soviet. So it was that, until the very late 20th century, propelled by centuries of non-admixture, and the unique factors of monoculture (created by media monopolies or censors), it seemed like the global literacies, the Canons of the world, were secure. But when the monoculture disappeared, as I think it unarguably has done, the Canons now came under a new, inordinately problematic, threat.

First, there's volume. Since the first generation of Gutenberg's printing press there have been more books than you could read in a lifetime. But the Canon was, to an extent, a counter to that overwhelming flood. You didn't have to read everything: you could focus on these essential works. Yet, as the new technologies of the 20th century and 21st century have shown, that list is now insufficient.

Ruining completionists' dreams since 1440.

Consider Western classical music. In 1890 there were a handful of Canonical composers, maybe a score, whom a basic familiarity could be expected: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, and so forth. There were plenty of second-tier composers - just as there are quality second-tier authors, whose work wasn't deemed Canon in music or literature: Elgar and Agatha Christie, Gabriela Mistral and Palestrina, Lermontov and Martinu. But, with the advent music recording, all of a sudden the the number of genres, and musicians, skyrockets, encompassing everything from Scott Joplin's piano rolls, to Joao Gilberto's mid-century bossa nova, to the 90s hiphop of Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. The Western Canon now included a vast amount of music.

The same would take place in film, evolving from Charlie Chaplin's silent comedies, to Jean-Luc Goddard and the New Wave, to Quentin Tarantino. Television too evolved, although only recently. A list of the greatest or essential shows written in 2005 (Cheers, St. Elsewhere, The Honeymooners) would be very different from one now (Lost, Breaking Bad, The Office). Indeed, since the 21st century television has changed enormously. These were new media forms, not hardly present at the 20th century's outset. There were many more new formats evolving, such as comic books in the 1940s or the music video in the late 20th century, producing their own requisite essentials like Superman or Michael Jackson's Thriller.

And then, of course, there are the many new forms of 21st century, digital, entertainment. YouTube, with subscriptions and channels that range from sketch comedy to reality television-esque, Real World-style voyeurism of other people's lives. Podcasts. Social media and forums - although these are not perhaps Canonical, they take up an increasingly large slice of people's time: whittled away on Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Vine, LiveJournal, MySpace, blogging (...), and so forth. If we accept the premise that social media is a form of entertainment (likely a form of video/computer game), then the issue of this new media form becomes one of time-management. 

Canon.

So even with nearly 900 movies and over 500 television shows (just counting those which are scripted - who knows the number of nonfiction programs), you still might miss seeing the most recent Marvel movie, Oscar-nominee, or binge-able series because you're too busy uploading pictures of your puppy, commenting on Reddit, or watching Tasty videos.

*    *    *

This isn't a bad thing, necessarily. But it is bad for the Canon. As monoculture shudders and dies, the Canons of the various literacies are increasingly embattled. There's no time for second-tier authors anymore, especially when the new art forms and entertainments are so demanding. Game of Thrones takes nearly three days to watch without breaks - much longer than the seemingly similar epic proportions of Wagner's Ring Cycle (a mere 17 hours). A 1,000 page novel might sound like a chore. It might take days of dedicated reading to get through. But The West Wing, without breaks, lasts six days and ten hours: far longer than all but the most intense reading projects. And video games... They calculate game play now in tens of hours: a game like Dark Souls can take 50-60 hours; much longer than it would take to hear all of Beethoven's symphonies (5 hours), read all of Gulliver's Travels, or look at every painting on display in the Uffizi in Florence.

Granted, I've not seen Game of Thrones, but apparently this comparison makes sense?

This doesn't even begin to address the issue of translation and multiculturalism. Since translation has gotten better, and more content is available from more cultures and literacies, this adds another strain to mastering even a single Canon. We have unprecedented access to the music and literature of other cultures - traditions that are centuries or millennia old. And in the last 100 years we've added, and disseminated, the new media products of these cultures as well: film, games, comics, television. Time spent "straying" into a different Canon is time not spent on mastering your own, as Harold Bloom seemed to assert.

Harold Bloom, a fairly pompous proponent of the Western Canon, died in 2019. But his vision of its supremacy had died a few years before he did. I think, facing down the death of the monoculture which kept the vision of the Western Canon's know-ability alive, we tried to hold on for about a decade. Until 2010 or so, we could still identify the major musicians, authors, and films of our time. In the early 2000s we shared JK Rowling and the YA lit trend, The Strokes and low-fi indie rock: these sorts of trends were identifiable and monocultural, to an extent. But over the past decade that has effectively disappeared. Few people, even critics and experts, would agree on whom the essential musicians were of this past decade, or authors, or films.

Multiculturalism is a Good Thing. There's no reason why an American student should be more familiar with The Aeneid or The Odyssey than The Epic of Mwindo or the Sundiata of West Africa. But time is a factor. Bloom had an ace up his sleeve: a truly prodigious memory. From his obituary in the New York Times:

His memory was superhuman; he carried in his head not just poems but whole libraries, word for word. At Yale, where he taught for many decades, he was known on campus for a kind of parlor trick: If you saw him crossing the quad, you could quote a line of John Milton, and he would take the baton, as he walked, and recite the lines that followed. He kept all of “Paradise Lost” — one of the longest poems in the English language, more than 10,000 lines — in his mind-vault, unabridged, alongside (supposedly) all of Shakespeare, all of William Blake, huge portions of Wallace Stevens and countless others. He was a one-man rejoinder to Plato’s complaint that writing would destroy human memory. In his final decade Bloom could still quote, off the cuff, Hart Crane’s “The Bridge” — the long, difficult poem that had electrified him as a child, some 80 years earlier.

But most of us aren't so fortunate; aren't prodigies. To become familiar with one culture's Canon, in one media subset (books, movies, television, music) takes decades of work. To become fluent in our own primary Canons the work begins as infants, with texts like Goodnight Moon, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We learn the lullabies, poems, and myths of our cultures as children. When I gave a series of poems by Chinese poet Du Fu to my students to read, one student, from China, groaned - for he had been required, like his classmates for generations, to memorize his poems as a young child.

Bloom, memorizing a list of reasons why he's better than you.

As such, it takes a dedicated lifetime to master even our own Canons across media, and especially to do so if we wish to 1) learn the Canons of other cultures and 2) keep abreast of the new potential entrants and inductees. The will to do so, the access, the ability - all are uncertain in the century ahead. Indeed, like the illiterate feudal peasants of medieval Japan, China, or Europe, we may be more focused on the daily struggles of living than the desire to know the Classics, despite our advantageous literacy. Or, our focus may shift because binging television, while time-consuming, is more of a receptive activity and perhaps easier than reading a novel, or sitting quietly through an opera. Maybe our attention is diverted not by competing media at all, but by concerns other than mastering any Canon: the need to address climate change, to fix political systems, and other calls to action in an era of emergency.

At any rate, there will be some, probably, who continue to take up the challenge of Canons. And in the upcoming century the role the Canonically-literate have in deciding and shaping narratives will be all the more important. So long as we have systems of public education in place, the Canon will continue to exist. Whether it is multicultural, or not, whether it is gender-balanced, whether it is reliant more on ancient authors or modern ones, these choices will shape the lives of those who end up reading Jane Austen or Toni Morrison - Matsuo Basho or Kenzaburo Oe. So long as education is free, and unhindered by tyranny and censorship, the Canon will, in some format, survive.

But not the Western Canon of Bloom: the idea that the West is superior, and everyone, in order to be educated, needs to read Descartes and Dickens. Depending on the political and economic shifts of the century ahead, we may instead see a global reorientation to the Canons of China, or Russia - excluding, I suspect, the dissident voices voices of Liu Xiaobo or dissident works like A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Much of the world is still censored. As Ray Bradbury suggests in Fahrenheit 451, at some level we may need, as Bloom did, to rely on our memories to preserve the literature, movies, and music of humanity's Canon. It's not a cheery scenario - but given our adaptability and resilience, perhaps our stories and teachings, the old Canon, mixed with the new media, will live on.

"You know the thing about a shark? He's got lifeless eyes - black eyes, like a doll's eyes."

As for me, I intend to be one of those guardians. I am always trying to expand my media, my multicultural Canons, and I hope I've done a decent job learning them and disseminating them to my students and friends. In the Memoirs of Hadrian French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, put these words into the mouth of the Roman emperor Hadrian:

Catastrophe and ruin will come; disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time. Peace will again establish itself between two periods and there regain the meaning which we have tried to give them. Not all our books will perish, nor our statues, if broken, lie unrepaired; other domes and pediments will rise from our domes and pediments; some few men will think and work and feel as we have done, and I venture to count upon such continuators, placed irregularly throughout the centuries, and upon this kind of intermittent immortality.

To be a 'continuator' - that to me is a worthy, and noble goal. And as long as you are engaging at least a little in the new and old, Western and non-Western, written, auditory, or visual Canons, you are a continuator too - and that's a title to be proud of.

2019 in Books

Nonfiction

Philosophical Papers Vol. 1+2 by Richard Rorty

I found some of these works to be excellent, but most to be beyond my scope. As such his writings on politics were of greater interest than some of his other commentaries – but even those weren’t without merit. A previous familiarity with Heidegger, Foucault, and Wittgenstein was why I was interested in the volumes, but my lack of knowledge of Davidson, Quine, Kuehn, and Derrida left me cold for large swaths.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

The 2017 edition published the year before Hawking’s death, updated from the mid-90s edition, provides a wonderful, concise, clear explanation of cosmological physics up to an including the LIGO detection of gravitational waves. An excellent primer on where physics stands today.

What is Civilization? by David Wengrow

An odd little work – the main section shows, through archaeology, how closely related Mesopotamia and Egypt really were. It is bookended by a premise and a very short second sections that tries, vaguely, to connect the ideas as a refutation to Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”.

Qur’an translated by Abdullah Yusuf Ali

After reading the Bible and the foundational texts of Hinduism and Buddhism, the lack of the Qur’an was beginning to be a bit conspicuous. An interesting text, both in format and, to an extent, content; benefited by Ali’s copious commentaries and explanations.

The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg

A history which I’d long been familiar with, but had not read for myself. The peasant miller Menocchio’s ideas and worldview are truly fascinating in an era (late 1500s) when such thoughts were apparently uncommon – his inquisitors are astounded. But as Ginzburg deftly teases out, their origins in oral peasant culture and now-obscure works of the time were there all along, bubbling beneath the Church’s imposed dichotomous culture of orthodox and heretic.

In Pursuit of the Unknown by Ian Stewart

In this 2012 work Stewart explains 17 equations that changed the world. He ramps up quickly – chapter three is calculus – and sometimes covers concepts too hastily for a math dummy like me. Indeed, as he goes on, he expects ever greater familiarity, and doesn’t bother to explain much at all. It can be a little frustrating, but not too significantly – really an extra ten pages probably would’ve solved the problem.

Because Internet by Gretchen McCullough

The basic premise is simple: the internet has changed language. There are a lot of interesting examples and concepts put in, and it’s well-researched. A long-ish chapter on memes was interesting – but felt a little out of place. All in all, a good read if you look at it sooner rather than later, and it becomes a historical snapshot.

Stop Me if You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes by Jim Holt

An interesting little read – essentially an essay – on how jokebooks came about, and some theories on why we laugh. Not a bad use of time, but will almost certainly leave one wanting more. Notably, I thought while reading, it seems unlikely that Asia produced no humor throughout history…

East is a Big Bird by Thomas Gladwin

For those not already familiar with Micronesian sailing techniques… The first couple of chapters are standard, interesting, anthropology of life on Puluwat – an island in Micronesia. The next two, making up the bulk of the text, are a relatively exhaustive account of canoes and sailing methods – admittedly impressive dead-reckoning done by the stars. The final chapter, however, was a real curveball: comparing abstract and concrete systems of thinking, linking them to educational heuristics, and seeing how all of this navigating inverts middle class American stereotypes of the public education system and intelligence.

Fiction

The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue

A short saga from my on-going quest to read all 80 of the (Penguin) Little Black Classics (LBCs). Honestly, one of the most interesting sagas besides the Burnt Njal – which this work references.

Come close by Sappho

Yet another Penguin LBC, this time a collection of Sappho’s poetry – which I was previously unfamiliar with. Pleasant little verses.

Woman much missed by Thomas Hardy

An LBC that contains a complete poetry collection: Poems of 1912-1913 by Hardy. A collection of touching verses on the subject of his wife, recently passed.

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

My first Greene novel. An interesting account of Catholicism, well-told and very well-paced.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

I previously had only read “A Simple Heart” which was good, but hadn’t shown me what to expect from this excellent work of poetic realism. One of the best 19^th century novels I’ve encountered.

Three Novels: Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

Three narrative monologues which become increasingly combative towards the reader. Admittedly, by the time you get to the third section, you’re in a realm of fiction you’ve likely never encountered before – and perhaps never again will. Is that worth a struggle that makes Joyce seem fairly easy, and a nihilistic lack of crescendo and awe? Personally, no.

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

I’ve been wondering what to think about this work. If Dave Chapelle hadn’t created the black, blind, white supremacist sketch, would it still be funny? Or if Spike Lee hadn’t directed BlackkKlansman? Or Richard Pryor written much of Blazing Saddles? Waugh is (very) white – so the humor of an otherwise well-written comic novel can be troubling when he deals with race. Key example that I wrestled with: There’s a civil war in an African nation, between communists on one side and fascists on the other – who insist they are pure Aryans, “we’re just swarthy”. If Chris Rock writes it, it’s hilarious. But I truly don’t know if it’s okay when Waugh does it, and I’m sort of leaning towards, no.

Returning Home: Tao-Chi's Album of Landscapes and Flowers by Shi Tao (Tao-Chi)

A very short album of reflective, somewhat melancholic poems, coupled with paintings by the author.

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell

This tetralogy is okay, but not great. This first volume, ‘Justine’, tells of a passionate love-affair, an affair which is cast into significant doubt by the second volume, ‘Balthazar’. ‘Justine’ has an interesting and novel literary device worth mentioning – the protagonist comes across a novel already written about the woman he desires, and compares his affair with her to the other author’s. ‘Balthazar’ tells of the same time period, but from a friend’s perspective, who had better information than our original narrator. The third volume shifts entirely, and was probably my favorite. ‘Mountolive’ abandons the simple love story and adds yet another layer of complexity to the time period, this time with a new, omniscient, narrator. It was actually a pity in the final installment, ‘Clea’ to have to return to the original narrator – and distinct from the other novels, move forward in time. Indeed, ‘Clea’ seemed to me the weakest of the set.

The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

Banned in South Africa for its anti-Apartheid themes, Gordimer places us in the mind of a conservative, bigoted, embodiment of white male privilege. The journey is not pleasant, but then, of course, it’s not supposed to be. The quality of writing, though, makes her Nobel Prize award understandable.

“Sully Prudhomme” from The Library of the World’s Best Literature by Sully Prudhomme

Prudhomme doesn’t have any definitive English translations of his collections on the market – not even old pieces you can try to dig up from his time. His poems can be found in the authorized Nobel Library, but also in this work, from 1917 (found on Bartleby, online), or amateur translation scattered online. The poems in this collection are sentimental, romantic, and fairly forgettable. Solely of interest to Nobel Laureate collectors.

Jean Christophe by Romain Rolland

This massive novel might have been a world classic – it blends together the naturalistic style and the psychological style which were the dominant forms of the late 19^th century. Such a synthesis would have been noteworthy, except, that the work was finished in 1912, and such a combination was quickly relegated to a minor footnote in literary development, as Modernism exploded upon the scene. Further, the work is weighed down by the difficulties of those years – a primitive 1800s nationalism, antisemitism, long-winded passages about “the will”, etc. For two years of dedicated study I went through this story, and can’t really recommend it. It has rightly been forgotten in an apt and ironical fashion: Jean Christophe is, as happens, the story of a composer whose music, initially praised, ends up being surpassed and forgotten.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

There are a few novelties in this work. But the characters I found very disagreeable, and the premise extraordinarily dull. If you liked Swift’s “Tale of a Tub” and “Gargantua and Pantagruel” (all of it), then you’d likely enjoy this work.

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

This was my first experience with Clarke, and, excepting some almost bizarre holdovers from the 1950s, the work was very good. It was an enjoyable premise, well-executed. A nice piece of sci-fi to cleanse the palette, but also to generate significant rumination.

Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

Probably the bleakest, most broken set of characters to inhabit the American canon. A short, brutal, tale of wretches who go so far into degradation as to pass by tragedy.

R.U.R. by Karel Capek

An interesting little sci fi play, certainly worth an hour of most readers' time. Beyond just the origin of the term ‘robot’, the work serves as an interesting cautionary tale of capitalism.

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Some years ago I read ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories’ which I found pleasant but forgettable. Not so this work, which is, I think rightfully, a masterful blending of modernism and magical realism, and quite possibly an essential literary text of the 20^th century.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

A critical Modernist text, from 1890, the work relays the thoughts of a Raskolnikov-type, but one whom you can actually relate to and enjoy his thoughts – as he faces the rack and ruin of starvation.

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

A sort of ‘Long Days Journey’ meets ‘Who’s Afraid’, set in Oklahoma in 2007. Darkly comic, ultimately, of course, tragic, and not a bad option for something to read.

Lais of Marie de France

Intriguing little stories of courtly love, composed in the mid-1100s. A thoroughly pleasant collection, whose main story, Eliduc, I’d been familiarized with in high school.

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

I am fond of Gogol’s two short stories, “The Overcoat” and especially “The Nose”. The first volume is a very good work. The fragments of the second, unpolished, incomplete, and adding little of value, I think can and should be avoided – to only consider the work by the first, completed segment.

Youth and Typhoon by Joseph Conrad

Two unremarkable short novellas about life at sea that came with my copy of Heart of Darkness, but which I'd never gotten around to reading. One or two passages of good language, offset by more than typically racist depictions (especially Typhoon).

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

An enjoyable little novel of young bourgeois romance told with comic irony, when such a tone had not yet staled. Not as powerful as ‘A Passage to India’ which I read a few years ago, but certainly not off-putting, leaving me open to more Forster in the future.

I Hate and I Love by Catullus

Returning to the Penguin Little Black Classics I finally encountered the verse of Catullus, and his continual love / scorn for Lesbia. A fine small collection of poems.

A Death in the Family by James Agee

Parts are incredibly poetic, and moving, but the motifs are now so commonplace that I found the overall work difficult to stay interested in.

Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti

Another Penguin LBC, again of a poet I did not previously know. Rossetti’s poems are mostly forgettable, but there are a few choice selections.

Speaking of Siva

An LBC of four Indian poets: Basavanna, Akka Mahadevi, and Allama Prabhu from the 1100s, as well as an earlier author, Devara Dasimayya. All the poems are ontological and theological, regarding Shiva.

The Night is Darkening Round Me by Emily Bronte

A final LBC for the year, a selection of poems comprised melancholic eternities. If you’re into that sort of thing. Personally, it continued to confirm my distaste for Bronte.

Graphic Novels

Superman: Red Son by Mark Millar et al.

What if Superman landed in Ukraine instead of Kansas? While not as sophisticated as Gaiman’s ‘Miracleman: The Golden Years’, ‘Red Son’ is still very entertaining. Glad I finally read it.

Saga vol. 9 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

At this point the writing is still good, the character development is still good, but the plot is beginning to feel a bit formulaic and repetitive.

Top 5

Midnight’s Children

A Brief History of Time (2017 edition)

Madame Bovary

Childhood’s End

The Cheese and the Worms

Honorable Mentions

Dead Souls

Hunger

In Pursuit of the Unknown

August: Osage County

The Power and the Glory

A Decade of Music

I didn't much care for the music of this decade.

There was good, interesting stuff out there, but you had to dig for it. I think it was Rolling Stone who said that pop music was more ambitious than ever these past ten years: and that's true. But it was not any more innovative, and that's troubling. What made it ambitious was mingling with a few other existing forms, but the synthesis never created something boldly new.

The best example of this I can think of is Rihanna's album "Anti". Like many of the highly-praised pop albums, there's some interesting diversity on there. But the tracks that got all the attention, and radio-play, were the inane ones, like "Work". The lyrics are awful, as is the music. Of these offerings Beyonce's "Lemonade" was probably the best, and, consequently showed up near the top of many of the End of the Decade lists. From the list of albums I passed on, it may be one of the highest.

Still, my own list will have some of those mainstream offerings, of course. I mean, "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" was incredible. Beyond the pop offerings, though, I went deeper in my search. Which musicians won MacArthur awards? Pulitzer prizes? The Pazz and Jop polls? Mercury prize?

Instead of ranking, I'm just going to drop a bunch of albums here that I actually liked, and then a whole bunch that I didn't. The hope then, is that you can see this final list is based off of careful consideration, and depth of research.

Albums of the Past Decade I Liked

21, Adele - This has held up well, and will be seen as the 'Tapestry' of our era.
Art Angels, Grimes - If I am going to listen to pop, I want it to be trippy, dream-pop.
Channel Orange, Frank Ocean - A nice concept album that holds up lyrically and sonically.
Damn, Kendrick Lamar - "Pimp" may be the more important album, but for now "Damn" is the magnum opus, with all the benefits that implies.
The Electric Lady, Janelle Monae - As usually the case, the interludes add nothing, but the rest of the work is so strong it's okay.
Floral Shoppe, Macintosh Plus - One of the few interesting little innovations of the decade was this vaporwave classic. But it was more curiosity than movement.
Freedom Highway, Rhiannon Giddens - Very good folk/Americana offering in an otherwise blah decade for that genre.
Golden Hour, Kacey Musgraves - Rightfully heralded, the first interesting album to come out of country music in a long while.
Hadestown, Anais Mitchell - I loved this concept album, with guest appearances from people like Bon Iver and Ani Difranco. Not to be confused  with the Broadway album, which I've not heard.
Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda - Deserves all the love it got.
Heaven and Earth, Kamasi Washington - One of the more interesting jazz albums of recent years.
How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, Florence + The Machine - A great tribute to the singer-songwriters of an earlier era: Ronstadt et al.
Ism, Steelism - A fun, relaxing, album by an underappreciated duo.
...Like Clockwork, Queens of the Stone Age - A solid blast of unpretentious California rock.
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye West - An indisputable masterpiece.
Radio Music Society, Esperanza Spalding - A nice jazz crossover; all in all a strong LP.
The Suburbs, Arcade Fire - This increasingly feels like the last great hurrah of the preceding decade.
Universal Beings, Makaya McCraven - Another of the interesting jazz albums of the decade.
The Untouchables, Casey Hurt - I saw this show in San Francisco and liked the music, so I got the cast album. It is the most idiosyncratic of all the choices.

And now, the research:

Albums of the Past Decade I Didn't Like

1989, Taylor Swift
American Dream, LCD Soundsystem
Anti, Rihanna
The Archandroid, Janelle Monae
Be the Cowboy, Mitski
Black Messiah, D'Angleo and the Vanguard
Blackstar, David Bowie
Blond, Frank Ocean
Blunderbuss, Jack White
Body Talk, Robyn
Bon Iver, Bon Iver
Born to Die, Lana Del Rey
Coloring Book, Chance the Rapper
Ctrl, SZA
Dirty Computer, Janelle Monae
El Camino, The Black Keys
Ghosteen, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
I Like It When You Sleep..., The 1975
Idler Wheel, Fiona Apple
Invasion of Privacy, Cardi B
It's Album Time, Todd Terje
Lemonade, Beyonce
Let England Shake, PJ Harvey
Life of Pablo, Kanye West
LP1, FKA Twigs
El Mal Querer, Rosalia
Masseducation, St. Vincent
Matangi, M.I.A.
Melodrama, Lorde
Modern Vampires of the City, Vampire Weekend
A Moon Shaped Pool, Radiohead
Morning Phase, Beck
My Woman, Angel Olson
Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Lana Del Rey
Puberty 2, Mitski
Pure Heroine, Lorde
Random Access Memories, Daft Punk
Red, Taylor Swift
Run the Jewels 2, Run the Jewels
A Seat at the Table, Solange
Settle, Disclosure
Sound & Color, Alabama Shakes
St. Vincent, St. Vincent
Take Care, Drake
Tell Me I'm Pretty, Cage the Elephant
Teen Dream, Beach House
Thank U Next, Ariana Grande
This Is Happening, LCD Soundsystem
To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar
Wasting Light, Foo Fighters
When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, Billie Eilish
Whokill, The Tune-Yards
Yeezus, Kanye West

There were more, that I'm forgetting, but that says more about the albums than their being on this list. Some of these were fine, just not anything special, some were very nearly good (Solange, Nick Cave, and Eilish got really close), and some were just bad.

Cultural Literacy

I've been thinking about which stories are, increasingly, universal. Namely, which tales, mythologies, and characters should be known by a large audience.

Of course, even with my interest in Asia, with its long literary history, and other cultures' oral histories, my list skews white and Western. Thanks to Disney, though, something like Hercules has now entered the global cultural consciousness. Hollywood helped the whole world become aware of a Western set of stories.

This doesn't include child-specific cultural literacy (Dr. Seuss, Goodnight Moon, Looney Tunes, Mickey Mouse, Peanuts, etc.)

That said, here are the stories I think most people do/should be aware of:

MYTHOLOGIES

Buddhism
Buddha's life

Celts
Arthur

Chinese
Monkey - Journey to the West
Daoism
Zodiac

Greeks
Iliad and spin-offs (Oresteia, Aeneid, Odyssey)
Pantheon and Hercules
Theban cycle
Zodiac

Hinduism
Basic Pantheon (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Lakshmi, Ganesh)
Baghavad Gita
Ramayana

Judeo-Christian
Genesis (Creation, Eden and Cain and Abel, Noah, Tower of Babel, Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael, Sodom and Gomorrah)
Exodus (Moses and the Exodus)
Jonah
Job
New Testament (Jesus' life and death, Revelations)

Norse
Pantheon
Ragnarok

West Africa
Mwindo

STORIES AND FOLKTALES

China
Outlaws of the Marsh
Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Europe
Aesop and La Fontaine (Grasshopper and the Ants, Fox and the Grapes, Tortoise and the Hare, Country Mouse and Town Mouse, Lion and the Mouse, Boy who cried Wolf)
Anderson (Little Mermaid, Emperor's New Clothes, Princess and the Pea, Ugly Duckling)
Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
Barrie (Peter Pan)
Brothers Grimm (Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Rumplestiltskin, Snow White)
Burroughs (Tarzan)
Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)
Cervantes (Don Quixote)
Conrad (Heart of Darkness)
Defoe (Robinson Crusoe)
Dickens (Christmas Carol)
Doyle (Sherlock Holmes)
Goethe (Faust)
Kafka (Metamorphosis)
Orwell (1984, Animal Farm)
Perrault (Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty)
Robin Hood
Rowling (Harry Potter)
Santa Claus
Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream)
Shelly (Frankenstein)
Stevenson (Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
Stoker (Dracula)
Swift (Gulliver's Travels)
Tolkien (Hobbit, Lord of the Rings)
Wagner's Ring Cycle/Neibelunglied
Wells (Time Machine, War of the Worlds)

India
Kalidasa (Recognition of Shakuntala)

Japan
Zatoichi

Middle Eastern
"1001 Arabian Nights"

United States
Batman
Baum (Wizard of Oz)
"Fakelore" (John Henry, Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed)
Fitzgerald (Great Gatsby)
Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
Melville (Moby Dick)
Spider-man
Steinbeck (Of Mice and Men)
Superman
Twain (Huckleberry Finn)

Cinema and Television
Avengers
Back to the Future
Casablanca
Citizen Kane
Doctor Who
The Godfather
Indiana Jones
James Bond
Jaws
Jurassic Park
King Kong
Metropolis
Muppets
Princess Bride
Psycho
Simpsons
Stark Trek
Star Wars
Terminator
The Tramp (Charlie Chaplin)
2001: A Space Odyssey

What do you think? What am I missing?