Andrew Nagy

Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness is a tale of one young man’s journey into Africa as it was being colonized and exploited by European countries. I really had to push myself to finish this one, despite it’s short length. It seemed like the story developed a driving force very late. However, I will say Conrad writes beautifully and says some crazy things that stick with you. It’s worth the read if you have some time to kill, but I’d place it pretty low on the priority list. Here’s a quote that made me think:

“The mind of man is capable of anything — because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.”

The Book of the Dun Cow – Walter Wangerin Jr.

This fable has something I never thought I would enjoy: farm animal heroes. The protagonist is a rooster, for goodness’ sake. Who thinks of roosters as heroes? Walter Wangerin Jr., apparently. Well I digress. I thought this book was a great tale of bravery and protecting your home. It is a tale of good and evil, sharing many similarities with Watership Down by Richard Adams, but on a grander scale. It took me all of two days to read, so it’s a quick one, but very entertaining, earthy, and grounded. It’s full of little platitudes you might have heard your grandma say, and they’re all great. Here’s an example:

“For ‘Done,’ when it is well done, is a very good word.”

The Eyes of the Dragon is Stephen King’s only work of fantasy fiction, I believe, though I could be wrong on that. I started out reading it last Saturday and finished on Monday, so it’s a fairly quick read. While I did have a little bit of difficulty getting really immersed, it wasn’t long before I was turning pages like a mad fiend. While Eyes may not offer the kind of depth and reflection that something like Gilead does, it’s certainly an entertaining and fast-paced read.

King does a pretty good job of keeping you interested and wanting more. The tone and style is fairly normal, being that of a story teller revealing a tale of ages past. The story revolves around a King, his two sons, and an evil magician. Bottom line, I gave this a 3/5 which means it’s a fun read, and a good diversion when you’re looking for that sort of thing.

Up next, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

A couple of quick notes before I dive into my review of this amazing book. First, as you may notice, things look a little different. I decided I needed a more readable theme for these reviews, and Tanner Hobin (my good buddy and a great CSS’er) was obliging enough to help me out. So what you see is essentially a modified version of my Twitter account, which I love because it’s simple and neat. As you may notice at the bottom of my posts, you can now subscribe to this blog via Twitter (because I always post on Twitter when I have a new blog post out), subscribe via email, or if you use an RSS reader you can subscribe there if you choose.

On to my review. Last Saturday I picked up Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I don’t really know what I expected from this book, but to be honest I got the name Gilead confused with Galahad, so I suppose I was thinking it was some kind of grand adventure. Far from it, but no less enjoyable for all that.

Gilead is named after a fictional Southeastern Iowa town. An old man, having lived a full life of being a congregationalist pastor is writing a letter to his son. He was married very late and at the time of the letter he is 76, with a seven year old. So he decides to try to write out as much wisdom as he can to make up for all of the years of his son’s life he will miss.

The entire novel is is the letter, so it seemed rather not like a novel to me at first. Since there is a lot of reflection and philosophy, it was also a much slower read at first for me. But soon I didn’t even notice any of that. It’s going to be hard for me to really articulate how I viewed this book because it is very complex and evoked a wide array of emotions.

There is deep sadness and resignation as John Ames (the writer of the letter) is approaching his death. Yet there is also humor, friendship, family, and overarching all, a deep and abiding sense of love for the beauty God has granted humanity. John sees this beauty in nature to be sure, but where he reflects on it the most seems to be the nature of relationships between people and how blessed he feels to have lived his life. Coming from a man who lived through the depression, droughts, and three great wars, this is all the more impacting. Reverend Ames seeks to show his son why life is worth living, and in the process I found myself rediscovering all that as well.

I don’t do spoilers, so I won’t get into any details, but at a point in the book some events take place (John is writing this letter over time) which cause the book to feel more and more like a novel. It’s a great story, and much is revealed in it, but to be honest I think I’d have still been perfectly content to read this old man’s reflections for as many pages as his heart would last. The real author Marilynne Robinson does an incredible job at making you feel like this man really lived, and that you’d love to have known him.

There were times reading this novel when tears filled my eyes. There were also times when I laughed out loud. This book crosses such a vast array of emotions, being both simple to understand and complex in its effect. I’m glad I gave myself two weeks per book, because even though I finished this one in four days, I am going to take a day or two to reflect on it and gather myself a bit.

Bottom line: 5/5. I can’t give this any higher recommendation that to say that anyone who can read should read it. It greatly increased my capacity to perceive and think about joy, beauty, and the wonders of creation, the pinnacle of which is humankind. For all our evils we are capable of, there is also much good, love, and intense beauty we can give to each other, and that, I think is what affected me the most. I’ll leave you with a quote that I feel sums up the message of the book pretty well, and you can think/debate/comment on it as you will.

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”

P.S. (Pre-script): I’ve added all of my books to read to my Goodreads.com account, so if you have an account there, feel free to add me as a friend or whatever.

Since I couldn’t wait to finalize the list before I started reading something, I ended up consuming Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe in about a week. I thought I’d give this whole review thing a shot since I will be doing it much more in the coming years.

Before I embark upon my review, I just want to sort of set up how I envision these going. I’m not a scholar or talented at articulation. I like to think, but I’m not great at putting my thoughts into words so much. My goal is to give you an account of how each book impacted me and some of the general points or ideas I took away from it. Hopefully by reading these, you’ll be able to tell if a book will be the kind you will enjoy reading, or engage with me and others on how the book impacted you if you have read it. I’m going to focus on how the book made me feel, as well as general writing style and other “logistical” matters like that.

On to my thoughts.

Robinson Crusoe was a little tough to get into at first, being written in the early 1700s, but once I got going it wasn’t too terribly difficult. Most of you probably know, but Robinson Crusoe is about a man who finds himself stranded on an uninhabited island far from any kind of help or company. From the get go the book is written in 1st person from the perspective of Crusoe, so you know some way or another he gets out of all the trouble in which he manages to find himself. I found however, that although I knew from the outset there was probably some sort of happy ending, it didn’t in any way deaden the suspense I felt at several difficulties Crusoe finds himself in.

One of the main themes in the book is the idea of God’s providence. Crusoe goes back and forth throughout as he tries to find assurance in the belief of an all-powerful God who has his best interests at heart. While severe and troubling external trials force Crusoe to think, be creative, act boldly, work hard, and fight for his life, he always seems to go back to giving the credit of his own actions to the God that empowers him and watches over him. As a Christian myself who shares these beliefs, I empathized with this struggle for assurance of one’s own well-being.

The book is a roller coaster of emotions. Fear, loneliness, desperation, and despair will suddenly give way to the most exuberant joy (and vice versa), and when Crusoe felt it, so did I. Defoe does an amazing job at making the internal dialogue of one man over the period of decades not only interesting, but engrossing. Somewhere near the end, I had a strong desire to live on my own little island and have as amazing an experience as Crusoe.

Bottom line: I’d highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys fiction. If I had to rate it, I’d say it got a 4/5. Those of you who have read it, let me know what you thought were the main themes and how it affected you. To those of you who haven’t, do you think you might give it a try? Thanks for reading as I try to figure this all out.

First of all let me say thanks to all who commented on the last post. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to really trim this list to 100. Several of you mentioned that I should only have one book per author, and while I understand that perspective, I found myself not wanting to drop any books on the list from those authors.

I finally decided to drop all of the multiple-book entries. While I do want to read these at some point, I realized I would be reading three to six books in a row from one author. In the case of an author like Stephen King who has three books on the list, I can easily split these up so that I’m not reading them all back to back.

Once I had gotten rid of the trilogies, et al, I realized I was down to 87 books. I realized then that I had completely ignored the Modern Library 100 best novels list, so I pulled it up and pseudo-randomly selected 13 books to fill in the list. Without further adieu, here’s the complete list (by order of author’s first name in the order I’ll read them):

***Update*** Zeuben pointed out that I had the same book on twice, so I replaced the dup with Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby, Jr.

***Update*** Ok I had to make a bunch of changes for various reasons. Some of the books were plays, and I decided I wanted to save that for another time. Also I got rid of one or two more for reasons I don’t care to explain because I’m tired and just want to start this thing! Here’s the (I really hope) final list. I’ve got the first book ready to pick up tomorrow, so it looks like I’ll be embarking on the 14th of November.

1. Gilead – Marilynne Robinson
2. The Eyes Of The Dragon – Stephen King
3. The Book Of The Dun Cow – Walter Wangerin Junior
4. The Wings Of A Falcon – Cynthia Voigt
5. Idylls Of The King – Alfred, Lord Tennyson
6. The Hunt For Red October – Tom Clancy
7. Of Mice And Men – John Steinbeck
8. The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
9. The Tale Of Desperaux – Kate Dicamillo
10. The Once And Future King – T.H. White
11. Starship – Brian Aldiss
12. Atonement – Ian McEwan
13. The Tale Of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu
14. Dracula – Bram Stoker
15. Crime And Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
16. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
17. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
18. The Name Of The Rose – Umberto Eco
19. A Separate Peace – John Knowles
20. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
21. Xxx-Holic – Clamp
22. Lilith – George Macdonald
23. The Constant Gardener – John Le Carre
24. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
25. World War Z – Max Brooks
26. The Man Who Was Thursday – G.K. Chesterton
27. Battlefield Earth – L. Ron Hubbard
28. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
29. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
30. The Trial – Franz Kafka
31. Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) – Philip K. Dick
32. The Call Of The Wild – Jack London
33. Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
34. Beowulf – Anonymous
35. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
36. She – H. Rider Haggard
37. Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
38. Star Risk Ltd. – Chris Bunch
39. Peace Like A River – Leif Enger
40. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
41. The Giver – Lowry, Lois
42. The Elves and the Shoemaker – Brothers Grimm
43. Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk
44. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
45. The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
46. The Odyssey – Homer
47. Rorschach’s Ribs – Marcus Eder
48. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
49. Lord Of The Flies – William Golding
50. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Haddon, Mark
51. House Of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
52. The Sound And The Fury – William Faulkner
53. Pride And Prejudice – Jane Austen
54. The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
55. The Napoleon Of Notting Hill – G.K. Chesterton
56. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
57. The Scarlet Letter – Hawthorne, Nathaniel
58. Home – Marilynne Robinson
59. The Stand – Stephen King
60. Ulysses – James Joyce
61. Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
62. The Old Man And The Sea – Earnest Hemingway
63. The Emperor Of Ocean Park – Stephen L Carter
64. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
65. Requiem for a Dream – Hubert Selby, Jr.
66. Look Homeward Angel – Thomas Wolfe
67. To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
68. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
69. Ceremony – Leslie Marmon Silko
70. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
71. A Confederacy Of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
72. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
73. The Unbearable Lightness Of Being – Milan Kundera
74. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
75. Bitten – Kelley Armstrong
76. Thief Of Time – Terry Prachett
77. The Chessmen of Mars – Edgar Rice Burroughs
78. Modern Japanese Stories – Ivan Morris
79. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
80. Dandelion Wine – Ray Bradbury
81. Citizen Of The Galaxy – Robert A. Heinlein
82. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
83. Oryx And Crake – Margaret Atwood
84. Metamorphoses – Ovid
85. The Aeneid – Virgil
86. Heart Of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
87. Life Of Pi – Yann Martel
88. Neuromancer – William Gibson
89. The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
90. Boy’s Life – Robert R. McCammon
91. Les Miserable – Victor Hugo
92. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns – Frank Miller
93. One Hundred Years Of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
94. The Count Of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
95. Grapes Of Wrath – John Steinbeck
96. Animal Farm – George Orwell
97. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein
98. The Razor’s Edge – W Somerset Maugham
99. Leepike Ridge – Nathan Wilson
100. Moby Dick – Herman Melville

Next I have to figure out the order, but it shouldn’t be too terribly difficult. I ordered them randomly using Excel, so here we go. And one other small item of note. I couldn’t wait to finish my list so I went ahead and read Robinson Crusoe this week. I’ve cut it out of the list and replaced it with another Modern Library entry. But I think I’m still going to do a review as an introduction to the series soon, so look for that.