Week 5: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Stephen W. Hawking. A Brief History of Time. Bantam Books, 1988.

This is a re-read, but I read it while I was living in Sheffield—that’s late last millennium, so I can count it for the challenge.

I'm struggling to put pen to paper with this one. The man is a genius—one of the most important physicists of our, or any other time. The book is an important attempt to bring at least a basic understanding of a number of important developments in physics to the lay person. Yet I find it rather unsatisfying.

The science, at the level presented, isn’t particularly difficult (at least for some definition of difficult—although it wasn’t my speciality, I have done some introductory undergraduate physics, albeit many, many years ago, which gives me a bit of a head start), although you do have to spend some time thinking about the concepts.

It’s more that the author is so far beyond we mere mortals, and he struggles to connect with us, the prose coming across as stilted and at times rather forced. This was reinforced because I’d recently re-read In Search of Schrödinger's Cat by John Gribbin (although old, it’a still an excellent introduction to quantum physics), and the contrast between the writing styles is dramatic.

It's not a bad book, and it's certainly one that will exercise the brain cells, but the prose doesn’t read as easily as it might.

And now that I’m somewaht ahead of the game, time to tackle a weightier tome: Cervantes is next.

Stats to Date

Books Read: 6

Books by Male Authors: 3
Books by Female Authors: 3

Books by Australian Authors: 2

Fiction Books: 4
    Genre Books: 1
Verity Books: 2
    Literature Books: 1
    Science Books: 1

Week 4: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket, included the Library of World Classics edition with the complete Tales of Mystery and Imagination and the collected poems. Octopus Books, 1981.

This was the book I interrupted to read Foster’s How to Read Literature…. I’ve owned this volume since sometime in the early- to mid-eighties—it was purchased to get the tales and the poems, and somehow I never actually read Pym, sandwiched as it was between the two.

Poe is a master of the short story, and quite a decent poet (The Raven and The Bells being particular favourites), but his one foray into long form narrative fiction leaves something to be desired—it seems to lack focus, at times seeming to dwell endlessly on minor, and somewhat irrelevant points.

The ending is silly:

“Note: The circumstances connected with the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym are already well known to the public… If is feared that the few remaining chapters which were to have completed his narrative, and which were retained by him… for the purpose of revision, have been irrecoverably lost through the accident by which he perished himself.”

What a cop-out, coming as it does just as the protagonist approaches the climax of his voyage. Sorry E.A.P., but this one’s a turkey.

Stats to Date

Books Read: 5

Books by Male Authors: 2
Books by Female Authors: 3

Books by Australian Authors: 2

Fiction Books: 4
    Genre Books: 1
Verity Books: 1

Week 3: How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

Thomas C. Foster. How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Harper Perennial, 2014 (Revised edition).

A book about reading books (is that a meta-book?). Foster explores the use of pattern, mythology, archetype and symbolism, and shows how recognising when an author is using them, and what they may mean (e.g., immersion as baptism or rebirth).

Reading a book along these lines was triggered by last year’s re-read of Pride and Prejudice, when I realised just how much I’d missed the first time round. An interesting read, and I’m glad I bought this.


This is my week three entry. It’s a little late, as I’d read part of another book when this arrived in the mail mid-week, but I thought it more important to read this.

Stats to Date

Books Read: 4

Books by Male Authors: 1
Books by Female Authors: 3

Books by Australian Authors: 2

Fiction Books: 3
Verity Books: 1

The Best Laid Plans… The Lifeline Book Sale

Went to the Lifeline Bookfest yesterday. Lifeline is an Australian charity that runs a Crisis Support Line, offering phone support for suicide prevention and bereavement support.

Over nine days they sell millions of second hand books donated at their charity shops and other collection points (I think there are also donations of remaindered books, as sometimes you see multiple copies of the same book all in very good condition).

The books are laid out on tables in a huge hall (they take over several halls in the Brisbane Exhibition and Conference Centre), and as books are purchased they lay out more books, so it’s a case of choose from whatever is currently on the tables. The books are split into $1, $2.50, and “high quality”.

Based on past experience, I hit the $2.50 selection (I’ve found the $1 selection is of variable quality, and for a lot of the classics—at least the out of copyright ones—the high quality section is close to, or even more than, the price of a new mass-market paperback). It took over 5 hours to go though just the Australiana and Literature/Classics tables, but I’ve more or less bought a year of reading for not a lot of money.

From the Literature/Classics table:

• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
• Fanny Burney, Evelina^†
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales^‡
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
• Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
• —, Great Expectations
• Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
• George Eliot, Middlemarch
• William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary
• Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
• E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundered Years of Solitude
• Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
• Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
• Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons
• D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
• Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
• Vladimir Nabakov, Lolita
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
• Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
• William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
• Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho^†
• Anthony Trollope, The Warden
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
• Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days
• Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey
• Émile Zola, Germinal

^† I expect these to be dreadful, but before I tackle Northanger Abbey, I feel I need to read some of the books Jane Austen is satirizing.
^‡ This will be a long-term project, as it’s in middle English.

Noticably absent were Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Proust. The Cervantes I bought was the only copy I saw. On the other hand, I was wading through lakes of Jane Austen.

I also picked up a few genre books from that table:

• Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
• Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
• Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World
• Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly

Memo to self, next time take a list of the Sherlock Holmes books I already have, so I can complete the set.

From the Australiana table:

• Jessica Anderson, Tirra Lirra by the River
• Murray Bail, Eucalyptus
• Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda
• —, True History of the Kelly Gang
• Marcus Clarke, For the Term of his Natural Life
• A.B. Facey, A Fortunate Life
• Miles (Stella) Franklin, My Brilliant Career
• Mrs. Aeneas (Jeannie) Gunn, We of the Never Never
• George Johnston, My Brother Jack
• Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain
• Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock
• Sally Morgan, My Place
• Ruth Park, The Harp in the South
• Neville Shute, A Town Like Alice

Bryce Courtenay, Richard Flanagan, Kate Grenville, Thomas Keneally, Colleen McCullough, Christina Stead, Christos Tsiolkas, Patrick White (at least Voss, Tim Winton, and Markus Zusak were not in evidence.

I also picked up a few fact books (I dislike the term “non-fiction”—defining something by what it is not is silly):

• Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance
• Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle
• Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

Doesn’t quite match up with the original plans, but it’s a decent start on the classics.

Plans: The Dead White Guys

Ok, here's a first cut at a list of the western canon to read. A maximum of one book or set per author, and about a 2½ year supply at one a fortnight.

• Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
• Aeschylus: The Oresteia†
• Hans Christian Anderson: Fairy Tales and Stories
• Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
• Giovanni Boccaccio: Decameron
• Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fiction
• Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
• Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
• Albert Camus: The Stranger
• Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
• Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
• Anton Chekhov: Collected Short Stories
• Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
• Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy†
• Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
• Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
• George Eliot: Middlemarch
• Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
• William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
• Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
• F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
• Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
• E.M. Forster: A Passage to India
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust
• Nikolai Gogol: Dead Souls
• William Golding: Lord of the Flies‡
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
• Joseph Heller: Catch-22
• Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises
• Homer: The Odyssey
• Victor Hugo: Les Misérables
• Aldous Huxley: Brave New World‡
• Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady
• James Joyce: Ulysses
• Franz Kafka: The Trial
• Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird‡
• Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Herman Melville: Moby Dick
• John Milton: Paradise Lost
• Toni Morrison: Beloved
• Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
• One Thousand and One Nights
• George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty Four‡
• Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Tales of Mystery and Imagination‡
• Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time†
• Francois Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel†
• Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children
• J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
• William Shakespeare: Hamlet‡
• Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
• Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji
• Sophocles: The Thebian Trilogy†
• John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
• Stendhal: The Red and the Black
• Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
• Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
• William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair
• Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
• Ivan Turgenev: Fathers and Sons
• Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Virgil: The Aeneid
• Voltaire: Candide
• Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
• Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse

† These are multi-volume sets, each volume counts as a book in the 52 books challenge.
‡ I've read these before, but not this millennium, so they count for the challenge.

The single book that is crossed out I was forced to read at school, and I refuse to pollute my bookshelves with it again. Once in a lifetime is one too many readings for that piece of tripe.

The following books were bumped from the list due to the one book per author rule:

• Charles Dickens: David Copperfield
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment‡
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Idiot
• William Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!
• William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
• Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms
• Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
• Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea
• Homer: The Iliad
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Franz Kafka: Collected Stories
• Franz Kafka: The Castle
• Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis
• Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks
• Vladimir Nabokov: Pale Fire
• George Orwell: Animal Farm‡
• Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
• Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway

Technically Crime and Punishment should be on the first list, and The Brothers Karamazov on this list, however I’ve read C&P and TBK was only one place below on my source list. I think it made sense to bend the rules slightly here.

The following books were bumped from the lists because I've read them this millennium:

• Jane Austen: Emma
• Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
• Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

This list was generated by pulling the top 90 or so entries from The Greatest Books, which is a meta-list of lists of the greatest western literature. This was essentially a way of consulting a large number of experts as to what was canon, my idea being that any book that made it into the top 100 of the meta-list (of just shy of 2000 books appearing on at least one of their source lists) has to be on most people’s list of great literature.

See later: The Best Laid Plans… The Lifeline Book Sale.

Plans: Australian Authors

One of my goals in joining the Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge was to read more books by Australian authors. Here’s a preliminary list of books I’m considering—at one a month this is about a 2½ year supply:

• Jessica Anderson: Tirra Lirra By the River
• Murray Bail: Eucalyptus
• Peter Carey: Oscar and Lucinda
• Peter Carey: True History of the Kelly Gang
• Marcus Clarke: For the Term of His Natural Life
• Jill Ker Conway: The Road from Coorain
• Bryce Courtenay: The Power of One
• Richard Flanagan: The Narrow Road to the Deep North
• Miles (Stella) Franklin: My Brilliant Career
• Anna Funder: All That I Am
• Kate Grenville: The Secret River
• George Johnston: My Brother Jack
• Thomas Keneally: Schindler’s Ark
• Joan Lindsay: Picnic at Hanging Rock
• Colleen McCullough: The Thorn Birds
• Sally Morgan: My Place
• Ruth Park: The Harp in the South
• Nevil Shute: A Town Like Alice
• Nevil Shute: On the Beach
• Craig Silvey: Jasper Jones
• Christina Stead: The Man Who Loved Children
• Christos Tsiolkas: The Slap
• Ethel Turner: Seven Little Australians
• Derek Walcott: Omeros
• Patrick White: Riders in the Chariot
• Patrick White: The Tree of Man
• Patrick White: Voss
• Tim Winton: Cloudstreet
• Alexis Wright: Carpentaria
• Markus Zusak: The Book Thief

The bold type indicates the choices for the first year (I've deliberately limited myself to one per author for this year), but, as always, the best laid plans are subject to change.

See later: The Best Laid Plans… The Lifeline Book Sale.

Week 2: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Jane Austen. Sense and Sensibility. Wordsworth Editions, 2007.

A shelfie. I bought a boxed set of Jane Austen last year, and this is the fourth of the seven books to be read (I have already read Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion).

Back when I were a lad (the late 1970s), we were forced to read P&P at high school. I hated it, which I largely suspect was due to the teacher’s failure to explain the society in which it was written, and what J.A. was attempting to do (we got the surface layers—the overt action—only).

Fast forward many years, and I watched a movie adaptation of P&P (the Keira Knightly–Matthew Macfadyen version) with my then wife, and I realised there was a lot more going on than meets the eye).

Last year, I intended going to the Jane Austen Ball in October, and bought a boxed set of J.A.’s novels. I started with P&P, and from the very first sentence, this was a completely different book [seriously, who rewrote P&P between the late 70s and the early 2000s?]. This was funny, it had claws like a cat (and didn’t hestitate to use them), and it was subversive. I also read and enjoyed Emma and Persuasion. I started S&S and Mansfield Park, but couldn’t get into them, and put them aside (Northanger Abbey is on hold until I've read a least a few of the novels it references).

Since I'm waiting on some new books to arrive (living Down Under, it's usually much cheaper to buy books online from the States and/or the U.K., but it means a few weeks wait instead of instant gratification), I grabbed what was unread and to hand.

S&S isn't in the same class as P&P, but it isn't a bad book either, and it seemed to improve the further one read—by the end it was something of a hybrid between a comedy of manners and an opera buffa. The supporting characters are rather one dimensional, and neither Elinor or Marianne Dashwood are particularly likeable, which made it difficult to get emotionally involved with the story. I'm glad I read it, but it's unlikely to get a re-read.

As an aside, I quite like the Wordsworth Classics books. They're decent quality mass-market paperbacks with one standout feature: they're very low priced. In a country where a regular paperback (e.g., a Penguin Classics) sells for $15–$25, being able to buy a decent quality book for around $5–$7 means a lot more reading for the same limited budget.

Stats to Date

Books Read: 3

Books by Male Authors: 0
Books by Female Authors: 3

Books by Australian Authors: 2

Fiction Books: 3
Verity Books: 0

Week 2: Murder in the Dark, A Phryne Fisher Mystery by Kerry Greenwood

Kerry Greenwood. Murder in the Dark, A Phryne Fisher Mystery. Allen & Unwin, 2006.

Another Phryne Fisher mystery from my housemate's collection, simply because it was to hand.

This is the sixteenth in the series. Another set away from Melbourne, and again something was lacking—maybe I miss Dot, Jack, Burt & Cec.

Stats to Date

Books Read: 2
Books by Male Authors: 0
Books by Female Authors: 2

Books by Australian Authors: 2

Fiction Books: 2
Verity Books: 0

Week 1: Urn Burial, A Phryne Fisher Mystery by Kerry Greenwood

Kerry Greenwood. Urn Burial, A Phryne Fisher Mystery. Allen & Unwin, 2003.

So we start with book by a not-dead, not-guy. This one was selected because it was what I was reading when I signed up for the challenge in the middle of the first week.

This is the eighth Phryne Fischer novel (I started reading my housemate's collection at Christmas), and to be honest the least enjoyable so far. Not that it was bad, but just didn't come up to the standards set by the previous seven books—it just seemed a bit too contrived.

Stats to Date

Male Authors: 0
Female Authors: 1

Australian Authors: 1

Fiction Books: 1
Verity Books: 0

Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge

This blog is to track my participation in a “Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks” challenge.

The blog title.

The blog title is a tongue-in-cheek dig at all the whingers who crawl out of the woodwork whenever someone publishes a western literature canon list, complaining that their particular demographic is under represented. Sorry, but most of the canon is written by dead white guys for a very simple reason: most western literature, whether good or otherwise (and Sturgeon’s Law dictates that most falls into the otherwise category), was written by dead white guys:

• Our literary traditions go back to the Sumerians and the Epic of Gilgamesh (if not earlier). With over 3000 years of back catalogue, it’s statistically more likely that an given piece of writing was done by a deceased author than one still living.
• For most of those 3000 odd years, it was quite rare to encounter a female author. Again, it’s simply more likely that a piece was written by a male.
• Given that I'm discussing western literature (i.e., the literature of European nations and the colonial areas dominated by those nations), the vast majority of authors would identify as being “white”

It's not discrimination, it's just basic statistics.


The Rules of the Game.

The target is to read 52 books before the end of 2018. This shouldn't be too hard as I read a lot anyway, but the intention is to give my reading a bit of direction, so there are a few restrictions:

• I must read at least 12 books that are generally seen as being canon;
• I must read at least 12 books by Australian authors (my homeland has been woefully neglected in my past reading)
• I must read at least 12 non-fiction books;
• I can’t count any books read this millennium (but I can count books I started and put aside and then restarted this year);
• I can’t count YA books unless they qualify as serious literature; and
• I can’t count anything short (novellas for example).

I haven’t figured out how poetry and drama will be dealt with.