After some two thousand words and many hours of staring at the word doc, I think I could finish today. Sans epilogue, anyway. I should make myself finish, actually, because I can feel my confidence already seeping away. It always happens. I push and push and push to finish something, racing against my own sense of failure which will eventually overtake and sideline for a few days or weeks.
Can only believe in myself for so long, and then suddenly—sometimes within hours—I just stop believing that it’s readable, that there’s a plot, that the characters are remotely interesting.
I can’t even let myself write here about the story of this last one, even the genre, because I know I’ll start second-guessing my decisions.
Ick. Need something more cheerful to think about.
Like spring, which is zipping forward here in Michigan. Took the dog for a long, muddy walk today. Yesterday, when it was sunny I sat out in the sun for an hour, wrapped in a blanket, happy as a clam, and deep in a book.
I’ve been trying to read Kerouac, but have to admit that when I feel like reading I’m reaching more often for my latest Trollope, The Small House at Allington. There’s something comforting and happy and mildly, softly funny about a good Trollope book. He’s like a brownie—you SO know what you’re getting before you even start, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a brownie. You want one. All the time.
(Joel made a pan of them the other night, and yes, they’re already gone. More’s the pit).
For those of you who like lists (and for me, because I’m disorganized and likely to LOSE said list), here’s the list of classics I’m (mostly) reading from for the next year or two (I believe I found and/or compiled the list from a couple different internet sources) (okay, and the blue ones are the ones I’ve already read. And now I promise I’m done with the stupid parenthesis crap):
1 Don Quixote 1605, 1630 Miguel de Cervantes Catholic
2 War and Peace 1869 Leo Tolstoy Russian Orthodox
3 Ulysses 1922 James Joyce Catholic (lapsed)
4 In Search of Lost Time 1913-27 Marcel Proust Jewish Catholic
5 The Brothers Karamazov 1880 Feodor Dostoevsky Russian Orthodox
6 Moby-Dick 1851 Herman Melville Transcendentalist
7 Madame Bovary 1857 Gustave Flaubert Catholic
8 Middlemarch 1871-72 George Eliot Anglican; agnostic
9 The Magic Mountain 1924 Thomas Mann Lutheran
10 The Tale of Genji 11th Century Murasaki Shikibu Buddhist/Shinto culture
11 Emma 1816 Jane Austen Anglican
12 Bleak House 1852-53 Charles Dickens Anglican
13 Anna Karenina 1877 Leo Tolstoy Russian Orthodox
14 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1884 Mark Twain Presbyterian
15 Tom Jones 1749 Henry Fielding
16 Great Expectations 1860-61 Charles Dickens Anglican
17 Absalom, Absalom! 1936 William Faulkner Presbyterian
18 The Ambassadors 1903 Henry James Anglican
19 One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Catholic
20 The Great Gatsby 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald Catholic
21 To The Lighthouse 1927 Virginia Woolf Neo-pagan
22 Crime and Punishment 1866 Feodor Dostoevsky Russian Orthodox
23 The Sound and the Fury 1929 William Faulkner Presbyterian
24 Vanity Fair 1847-48 William Makepeace Thackeray
25 Invisible Man 1952 Ralph Ellison
26 Finnegans Wake 1939 James Joyce Catholic (lapsed)
27 The Man Without Qualities 1930-43 Robert Musil Catholic
28 Gravity’s Rainbow 1973 Thomas Pynchon Catholic; agnostic
29 The Portrait of a Lady 1881 Henry James Anglican
30 Women in Love 1920 D. H. Lawrence
31 The Red and the Black 1830 Stendhal Catholic
32 Tristram Shandy 1760-67 Laurence Sterne Anglican
33 Dead Souls 1842 Nikolai Gogol Russian Orthodox
34 Tess of the D’Urbervilles 1891 Thomas Hardy
35 Buddenbrooks 1901 Thomas Mann Lutheran
36 Le Pere Goriot 1835 Honore de Balzac Catholic
37 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1916 James Joyce Catholic (lapsed)
38 Wuthering Heights 1847 Emily Bronte Anglican
39 The Tin Drum 1959 Gunter Grass Catholic
40 Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable 1951-53 Samuel Beckett
41 Pride and Prejudice 1813 Jane Austen Anglican
42 The Scarlet Letter 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne Transcendentalist
43 Fathers and Sons 1862 Ivan Turgenev Russian Orthodox; agnostic
44 Nostromo 1904 Joseph Conrad Catholic; atheist
45 Beloved 1987 Toni Morrison
46 An American Tragedy 1925 Theodore Dreiser Catholic; Congregationalist;
47 Lolita 1955 Vladimir Nabokov Russian Orthodox
48 The Golden Notebook 1962 Doris Lessing
49 Clarissa 1747-48 Samuel Richardson
50 Dream of the Red Chamber 1791 Cao Xueqin
51 The Trial 1925 Franz Kafka Jewish
52 Jane Eyre 1847 Charlotte Bronte Anglican
53 The Red Badge of Courage 1895 Stephen Crane Methodist
54 The Grapes of Wrath 1939 John Steinbeck Episcopalian
55 Petersburg 1916/1922 Andrey Bely Theosophy; Spiritualism
56 Things Fall Apart 1958 Chinue Achebe
57 The Princess of Cleves 1678 Madame de Lafayette
58 The Stranger 1942 Albert Camus Catholic; Existentialism
59 My Antonia 1918 Willa Cather Episcopalian
60 The Counterfeiters 1926 Andre Gide
61 The Age of Innocence 1920 Edith Wharton
62 The Good Soldier 1915 Ford Madox Ford Catholic; agnostic
63 The Awakening 1899 Kate Chopin Catholic
64 A Passage to India 1924 E. M. Forster
65 Herzog 1964 Saul Bellow Orthodox Jew (lapsed); Anthroposophist
66 Germinal 1855 Emile Zola Catholic
67 Call It Sleep 1934 Henry Roth Jewish
68 U.S.A. Trilogy 1930-38 John Dos Passos Catholic
69 Hunger 1890 Knut Hamsun
70 Berlin Alexanderplatz 1929 Alfred Doblin Catholic
71 Cities of Salt 1984-89 ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif
72 The Death of Artemio Cruz 1962 Carlos Fuentes Catholic
73 A Farewell to Arms 1929 Ernest Hemingway Catholic
74 Brideshead Revisited 1945 Evelyn Waugh Catholic
75 The Last Chronicle of Barset 1866-67 Anthony Trollope Anglican
76 The Pickwick Papers 1836-67 Charles Dickens Anglican
77 Robinson Crusoe 1719 Daniel Defoe Protestant Dissenter (Presbyterian)
78 The Sorrows of Young Werther 1774 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Deist
79 Candide 1759 Voltaire raised in Jansenism; later Deist
80 Native Son 1940 Richard Wright Seventh-day Adventist; Communist
81 Under the Volcano 1947 Malcolm Lowry Methodist; Anglican; agnostic
82 Oblomov 1859 Ivan Goncharov
83 Their Eyes Were Watching God 1937 Zora Neale Hurston
84 Waverley 1814 Sir Walter Scott Anglican
85 Snow Country 1937, 1948 Kawabata Yasunari
86 Nineteen Eighty-Four 1949 George Orwell Anglican
87 The Betrothed 1827, 1840 Alessandro Manzoni Catholic
88 The Last of the Mohicans 1826 James Fenimore Cooper Episcopalian
89 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe Episcopalian;
90 Les Miserables 1862 Victor Hugo Catholic
91 On the Road 1957 Jack Kerouac Catholic; Buddhism
92 Frankenstein 1818 Mary Shelley
93 The Leopard 1958 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Catholic
94 The Catcher in the Rye 1951 J.D. Salinger Jewish Catholic; Scientologist
95 The Woman in White 1860 Wilkie Collins
96 The Good Soldier Svejk 1921-23 Jaroslav Hasek Catholic
97 Dracula 1897 Bram Stoker Church of Ireland (Anglican)
98 The Three Musketeers 1844 Alexandre Dumas agnostic; Catholic
99 The Hound of Baskervilles 1902 Arthur Conan Doyle Catholic; Spiritualist
100 Gone with the Wind 1936 Margaret Mitchell Catholic
Yep. Got a ways to go.
