Yelena's comments (member since Sep 26, 2007)

Yelena's comments from the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die group.

I don't think a lot of the formatting held up, but here it is: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p...

The new ones are marked by asterisks instead of numbers since I didn't have the time to figure out exactly where in the chronology each fit. Sorry...

Oh, Phyllis, if on a winter's night... is one of my all-time faves. I'm so sorry you didn't enjoy it. And Tess, I'm sorry you didn't enjoy any of your Faulkner, though I definitely understand that his style can be a love it or hate it kind of thing.

But I too can confess my antipathy for major writers. Let's see:

I think D.H. Lawrence is the least talented soft-core pornography writer I've ever encountered (and I wonder if the list's fondness for him allowed the inclusion of the totally bereft of value Story of O).

If you are British and you wrote during the 1800s, chances are I am pleased/hoping you contracted syphilis.

Thomas Mann, why did you write The Magic Mountain, and better yet, why did I read it?

If your name is Henry James or Edith Wharton, I find you dull. Not criminally so, just too dull to read anymore. Your parlor intrigues lack something. Please see Tolstoy, Leo for some pointers.

If you are Ayn Rand, I hope you and L. Ron Hubbard are having a nice laugh at our expenses in the afterlife.

Finally, please allow me to reiterate my feelings of "don't believe the hype" when it comes to Messrs Coetzee, Coehlo, and McEwan. I'm glad you've written a lot of books. Please stop.

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

Ok, so, since it's my penultimate day at my job and I'm not really working, I made a new spreadsheet to which I added these updated books. The total number is now 1276. I put asterisks next to the books that were "new."

My first impressions, sadly, involve the presumed need to diversify the list, and going by how truly useless many of the existing moder-day entries are, I don't have a lot of faith for their new brethren.

It's also interesting to note that, again, both Blindness and The Master of Go were omitted, that only one of Bohumil Hrabal's novels was included (though thank god Klima and Skvorecky got a nod), and a host of other oversights. Since I like nothing better than an uphill climb, I'm adding the books and not subtracting any (ok - there's every possibility my finger might slip and hit delete over a Victorian novelist).

Started The Feast of the Goat by Maria Vargas Llosa.

Derrick, I understand what you're saying, and I'm not sure I have a solution either - I do know that I find reading group question suggestions that are often included at the back of certain books to be unbearably dull, i.e.

"What do you think Mary meant when she said, 'I like peas.'? Do you think her love of peas made her relationship with Steve difficult? Discuss some difficult relationships you've had that have been made worse by vegetables."

What did you think is open ended but it gives you a chance to see what things other people were struck by most. But I'll make you a deal: the next time a book comes across the planning schedule that I've read a couple of times, I'll get some questions ready that have nothing to do with peas!

Youth - J.M. Coetzee. It was better than the other two books of his I read, though not a favorite by a long shot. I dug the premise of the novel, but found the choice of character to be one that didn't invite interest.

Good call, Logan, I love de Bernieres, but I offer one note of caution: there are some people, gasp, who get a little put out by magical realism, and even thought I think de Bernieres is far more accessible than, say, Rushdie or Garcia Marques. Though, now that I'm thinking about prolific authors I love, I can come up with caveats for all of them. Tough question, Leslie.

Logan,
I figure I'll have to get them out of the way eventually; at least the awful book I'm about to read is about 170 pages, whereas the awful book you're about to read (smiles) is over 1000.
Good luck!

Smarti,
The Magic Mountain is actually a huge joke among my family and friends. My great uncle got the book for me at 13 and I spent the next 8 years reading about 100 pages per year because that was all of it I could stomach at one time. I guess at that rate, though, I could have learned German and read in the original. Ah, wasted youth...

Darn, now you'll all know I'm part lizard. Mark, I've actually read it twice. You won't catch me saying it is a work for everyone, nor that it's easy once you get into it; in fact you'll not hear me say it's better than Ulysses. But I have read it an know a couple of other humans who have too. Think of it as a literary scavenger hunt!

Without much enthusiasm, I embark upon yet another Coetzee book, Youth. I have a large stack I have to go through to separate list books from others, and Youth was the only one I immediately knew was a list book. Sigh.

My list is not going to include books I read before I discovered the list, but rather the books I've read from the list since finding it. One note: I've been working in reverse chronological order.

Vanishing Point - David Markson
Schooling - Heather McGowen
Platform - Michel Houllebecq
City of God - E.L. Doctorow
The Reader - Bernard Schlink

After many torturous years working through the Magic Mountain, I vowed never again to go near Thomas Mann. Years later, a friend of mine who is writing his PhD on early 20th century German culture and history, exhorted me to read Buddenbrooks, which I loved. I found it very Tolstoyan and am glad I put aside my Mann-phobia to read it.

Smarti, thanks for the recs!

Logan and Karen,
Of all the omissions from the list, Blindness seems to be, for me, the most egregious, especially since others of Saramago's works have been included. I've read a number of his books, and Blindness seems to me in a class by itself. Without denigrating his other books, I found my reaction to Blindess to be similar to my reaction to if on a winter's night a traveler; the authors' other books are wonderful, but those two are respectively otherworldly.

Sadly, the follow-up, Seeing, while good, is just good and not transcendent.

Ditto! But if you suggest The Magic Mountain, well, them be fightin' words! :)

Logan, have you read The Sea????? :) Didn't that win the Booker? I agree, they generally have their wits about them, but I think they too suffer the occasional misstep. I've often wondered about the Booker prize. It seems that sometimes it has the same problem the Academy Awards has, namely failing to reward someone's truly magnificent work, and then, by way of apologizing, rewarding a later, less exceptional one.

I started and finished this book on Tuesday, and I was really taken with it; one of the better books I've read off the list since joining the group. I hadn't read this thread before, but took a look at it now since finishing the book, and I think the positions of Judith and Smarti are really fascinating.

I didn't find the book to be simplifying or exonerating Hanna's criminal past; in fact, I didn't think the book was about Hanna at all. The struggle with her past crimes, I thought, were contributing factors to Michael's troubles. I found her life to be merely a prism through which he saw himself, and her nazi past created such conflict and self-abnegation in him, regardless of how she felt or behaved.

I also saw the illiteracy as more figurative and macrocosmic than Hanna herself. On the outside, we look at the actions of "ordinary" German people during World War 2 and ask ourselves how they could have participated or turned to look away, and I think Schlink was using the illiteracy partly as a metaphor; not to exonerate those who acted wrongly or didn't act at all, but to offer up an idea of helplessness in the face of what seems like an insurmountable obstacle. And much like I wouldn't commend a person for refusing to learn how to read even though learning how to read is hard, I wouldn't commend a bystander or minor participant in the crimes of WW2 because the alternative was difficult.

So that's what I derived from the book, but I must admit I found it very powerful.

I don't know if I can be quite as critical as Logan, but I found the book to be uninteresting and somehow longer because of that. It wasn't so much that you knew what was going on before it was explained to you, and it wasn't even so much that the story was trite, it was that there was nothing added to make it anything more than the teleplay from a Lifetime Movie of the Week. It was the first book I had read by Atwood, and I'll certainly give her another chance; I wasn't put off by the book, just perplexed by its existence.

So, I read Saturday first, and wasn't impressed. I saw a lot of positive feedback about McEwan on the board, so when I picked up Atonement last week, I did so with as neutral a bearing as I could.

And I'm sorry. I don't think I believe the hype. There is nothing wrong with the book, but there was nothing absorbing for me either. I found it mediocre. This is somewhat disheartening as it looks as though nearly everything the man has written appears on this list, and I will get to them, but I don't think he's much my cup of tea.

If there's consensus on which of the remaining McEwan novels is a fan favorite, that would help me either a) read that one next or b) save it for last among his works.