Book list

Back in March, I mentioned a list of ten books that someone in the magazine, Books and Culture, had suggested everyone should read.   You know how people - and newspapers, and magazines - do this all the time.  On this occasion I decided to note down the titles, with the intention of reading my way through them.  In the end I only read the first three books on the list.  It wasn't that I got bored with the idea, but as always, other books came along demanding attention, and the list went by the by.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, A House for Mr Biswas, and Things Fall Apart, were the three I read. I don't remember much about the first, except that it was pretty strange.  Strange, convoluted, and yet surprisingly readable.  I really enjoyed Mr Biswas, though most curiously, when I read it again a couple of years ago, I found it disturbing, irritating, and very dark.  Odd how a period of years can make a difference to the same words on a page.

Things Fall Apart is pretty dark too, but it was a marvellous book, and, most intriguingly, gave an insight into how it must have been for those Biblical patriarchs who had several wives - and how the wives themselves must have fared.  It always seemed odd to me that three or four women (or more) could possibly get along with one husband.  The answer is, of course, that they don't.  The situation is fraught with tension at all points, with jealousies, anger, frustration and much more.  How the husband manages all this is beyond me.  He would have to have a fairly high opinion of himself, I suspect.

Anyway, while clearing up stuff round the house today, I found the original list in the back of a notebook.  Here are the rest of the titles:

The Adventures of Augie Marsh - Saul Bellow
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - I read this when I was young, when Solzhenitsyn was the In-writer (his books suddenly became available after being circulated in hand-written copies for some years) but I don't remember much about it.
Rabbit Angstrom - Updike.  This is officially a trilogy, so that adds another couple of books to the list!

Existential E

I came across a website address today - www.equote.com - and decided, without looking it up, to imagine what the 'e' might stand for.  With all the earthquakes Christchurch has been having, it could stand for earthquake quotes, a company that keeps an eye out for you when you're buying a house so that you don't wind up with a place that gets demolished by an earthquake.

Hmmm..don't think that's going to work.  There were warnings thirty years ago about potential earthquakes in the Christchurch region.  To a great extent they were pooh-poohed.

It could stand for eternity quote, as in, will I get into heaven?  On second thoughts I'm not sure that any company would offer bets on that possibility.   Ah, maybe it's existential quote - when you're stuck for a quote that's quintessentially existential, you could contact them by email, or even chat, and ask.  If I was running such a company you might wind up with quotes where the word existential was used, rather than an existential quote, but since existential is a pretty loose concept anyway, I doubt that that would matter.  Here's an example of what I'd give you:

There is no motor driving it, no music to tether it, and nothing to hold it aloft apart from that up-draft of sensual atmosphere and existential dread. 

Seems to me that's a pretty existential sentence in itself.  It comes from the Guardian article on Hitchcock's movie, The Birds, which Xan Brooks says is his favourite Hitchcock movie.

Or this interesting piece from Salman Rushdie in The New Yorker:

The British humorist Paul Jennings, in his brilliant essay on Resistentialism, a spoof of Existentialism, proposed that the world was divided into two categories, “Thing” and “No-Thing,” and suggested that between these two is waged a never-ending war. If writing is Thing, then censorship is No-Thing, and, as King Lear told Cordelia, “Nothing will came of nothing,” or, as Mr. Jennings would have revised Shakespeare, “No-Thing will come of No-Thing. Think again.”

And finally here's a nice piece by Robert Hughes on Damien Hurst's fish artwork:

I am underwhelmed by the blither and rubbish churned out by critics, publicists and other art-world denizens about Hirst's fish and the existential risks it allegedly symbolises. 

That'll do for today...by the way, equote is an online insurance company, though as far as I can see it doesn't give us an explanation for the 'e'.