An Education

The irony of having done a literature degree and compiling a list of the books I didn’t read is not lost on me. Especially considering how much I did want to read these particular books. That being said, there were definitely books I could have done without – Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg; the title alone should have put me off  – as well as books I happily did without – everything on the reading list of the experimental Early Tudor module I took; I got a 2:2 and I regret nothing. However, a few real classics slipped through the cracks and, at the risk of sounding nerdy, I do regret missing out on a few tutorial discussions. So, here it is, without further adieu, a list of the top five books I wished I’d read followed by my top five favourite books I read whilst at uni. 

TOP 5 BOOKS I WISH I’D READ

1/Manhattan Transfer – John dos Passos

2/Blue Highways – William Least Heat-Moon

3/Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen

4/Orlando – Virginia Woolf

5/Middlemarch – George Eliot

TOP FIVE BOOKS I READ

1/The Awakening – Kate Chopin

2/Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

3/All My Sons – Arthur Miller (…more accurately, every Arthur Miller play)

4/Native Son – Richard Wright

5/Beloved – Toni Morrison

Interestingly, the latter list contains a majority of American writers and a majority of woman writers, both minorities in the grand scheme of my education. Keep an eye out for updates as I attempt to work through the former list in upcoming posts.

Anna Karenina: a 'review'

Romans 12:19 - “Vengeance is mine; I will repay,” says the Lord.

Obligatory spoiler alert: Anna Karenina is, by common consent, one of the great love stories in world literature. If you wish to come to its plot in a virgin state, it is probably best not to read this.

I’ll try to keep this short: not something Leo Tolstoy managed in Anna Karenina (for reference, I read the Maude’s translation of 1918). There are 349,168 words in the original Russian text, first published in full in 1878 after being published in serial instalments from 1873-77. That makes it just shy of seven and a half The Great Gatsbies. I think it's fair to say that Tolstoy hit word count (although following on from War and Peace’s 587,287, it is possible that the Russian author considered what he called his “first true novel” a laudable act of self-restraint).

Reading Anna Karenina is thus a considerable undertaking. Yet in another sense, for the intractable lover of books, it is a considerable undertaking not to read Anna Karenina at some point in your life. Take just a few of the people who’ve contended at one time or another that Anna Karenina is the greatest book ever written (or close): Fyodor Dostoyevsky ("flawless as a work of art”), William Faulkner (when asked the three best books ever, Faulkner is attested to have said the novel’s name three times), Nabokov (whose lecture on Anna Karenina in his Lectures on Russian Literature extends to over 100 pages), Time magazine etc. - and these are just those listed on Wikipedia.

More significant than this sense of critical mass, than the opinion of any one person - even Oprah - is Anna Karenina’s aura. Before I’d even turned a page, I had heard somewhere of the famous scene where Vronsky falls off his horse at the races… I’d actually been under the misconception for some time that the assumed hero Vronsky had died in the fall and this was at the root of the book’s assumed tragedy. Anna Karenina is so much bigger than this, bigger than you can really imagine if, like me, you’ve spent most of your reading life in the 20th century’s endless first-person, fragmented, non-linear narratives.

The novel is focalised, significantly, from the perspective of at least seven different characters (and briefly a dog unimpressed at his master’s shooting ability - in the 1870s!). Though perhaps two of these are really the main characters - Anna herself and Levin - they all seem fully realised, by which I mean that they are characters who seem not merely to exist in this book but exist in the stories of this book. They could and do go on after Anna Karenina has finished.

The narrator has a key part to play: seeing everything, recounting with strange perfection everyone’s innermost thoughts, digressing wilfully onto matters that are utterly inessential, saying absurd things like the novel’s famous opening line, which I am bound to quote by duty: “All happy families resemble one another, but each family is unhappy in its own way.” Unlike some, I do not consider this opening to be either didactic or trivial, but I do think it is what Tolstoy is often not: unequivocal. In some aspects, Anna Karenina is a hugely didactic book.

As any epic worth its name it begins in medias res - “Everything was upset in the Oblonksys’ house.” - and fittingly for a novel so much concerned with adultery and unfaithfulness, adultery is the cause of that concern. This adultery, however, is between none of the book’s principle characters, if we regard those as being the main actors in Anna Karenina’s two interconnected love affairs. Anna, Stiva Oblonsky's sister, catches the train from St Petersburg to sort out the marriage of her brother and his wife Dolly. At Moscow station she meets Vronsky...

Anna Karenina plays out in delectably slow motion, in two volumes, eight parts and 236 short chapters and, though it is at least two great stories in one, this is no page turner. Each time the narrative turns urgent, Tolstoy’s gradual mode of telling slows it down or whisks us off somewhere else entirely. As well as its powerful evocation of character, the novel's appeal lies, for me, in Tolstoy’s staggering powers of description (even if, as many have observed, he likes both to show and tell). Look at the way that Anna notices her husband Karenin’s ears after she has first met Vronsky:

When the train stopped at the Petersburg terminus and she got out, the first face she noticed was that of her husband.  

‘Great heavens! What has happened to his ears?’ she thought, gazing at his cold and commanding figure, and especially at the gristly ears which now so struck her, pressing as they did against the rim of his hat. 

Tolstoy really is that novelist on "whom nothing is lost" - as Henry James famously demanded of the would-be writer - even if it is tempting to argue that he only achieves this by refusing to risk leaving anything out. 

I would sometimes put Anna Karenina down, having snatched a chapter or two in a lunch break, and wonder whether what I had just read was the best thing I had ever read. The characters misunderstand each other so perfectly, so truly. One paragraph they overlap, the next they are in different countries. Not that Anna Karenina really is a perfect book. The fallacy of searching for such a thing aside, its final 50 pages are basically a bore, which might well seem odd in a book often legitimately argued to be the best ever written. 

The greatness of great books is not measured in plots but passages. I quote two, the first from the perspective of Anna, near the book’s end; the second, Karenin's, near its beginning:

Remembering Karenin, she pictured him to herself with extraordinary vividness, as if he stood before her, with his mild, dull, lifeless eyes, the blue veins of his white hands, his intonations, his cracking fingers, and remembering the feeling that had once existed between them and which had also been called love, she shuddered with revulsion.

Here as he looked at her table, at the malachite cover of her blotting-book and an unfinished letter that lay there, his thoughts suddenly underwent a change. He began thinking about her: of what she thought and felt. For the first time he vividly pictured to himself her personal life, her thoughts, her wishes; but the idea that she might and should have her own independent life appeared to him so dreadful that he hastened to drive it away. That was the abyss into which he feared to look.

Anna Karenina looks into that abyss - the disjunction between our inner and outer lives - with a boldness that will always seem extraordinary. And I have not even mentioned Levin…

#InternationalWomensDay

I noticed a trend. It started in my reading but, by taking my nose out of my book, I realised it extended to the larger literary scene. Famous women are writing personal memoirs. Droves of women and very few men have released high profile autobiographies, personal essay collections and the like in the last five years. They veritably populate non-fiction bestseller lists. And these women are coming from all walks of life; writers, sure, but also actresses, musicians and entrepreneurs. Why have women suddenly flocked to this form?

My favourite book – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard – is a collection of non-fiction essays written by a women, which may make me biased but I have thoroughly enjoyed what this genre has offered me so far. It goes without saying that this volume of published work is a triumph for women so I won’t say it. Honestly, the fact that all these books were written by women seems somewhat coincidental to me. They are diverse but there is a gem of commonality. These stories are intimate, emotionally connective, sometimes funny, sometimes sad and always inspiring.

In the last six months, I have read eight memoirs by women. This was by no means an intentional decision. It stemmed mostly from curiosity. I already owned Just Kids by Patti Smith and I knew it had received excellent reviews. I watched Orange is the New Black and Girls and was curious how much of it was true. And Wild by Cheryl Strayed fit perfectly into the parameters of my dissertation. Before I knew it, this was practically all I was reading and I was actively seeking out new releases.

For the most part, these books have an unnamed quality that I find so alluring. Maybe they feed into a younger sister complex in me, always searching for a role model.  The ingenuity of Sophia Amoruso, starting a company from nothing, or the perseverance and self-reliance of Cheryl Strayed, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, were fodder for my naïve early-twenties ambition. Or maybe they are just fun to read, the ultimate escapism within the confines of non-fiction. On a kind of metaphysical level, I can see the reason this genre has been in the spotlight.

My distinct hope is that these works mark a rejuvenation of literature. In the days of YouTube and Netflix, I fear the average attention span is shrinking, my own included. But maybe it is quite the opposite. Maybe in this time of unlimited information and content readily available, consumers are craving a return to more challenging or calming intellectual pursuits. Maybe this boom in personal writing is comparable to the boom in meditation practices or in minimalist mindsets. Whatever the case may be, it is bringing non-readers back to literature and making books a topic of conversation again. And this can only be good.

What I’ve read:

            Just Kids – Patti Smith

Bossypants – Tina Fey

Eat, Pray, Love – Elizabeth Gilbert

#Girlboss – Sophia Amaruso

Orange Is The New Black – Piper Kerman

Wild – Cheryl Strayed

Not That Kind of Girl – Lena Dunham

Yes Please – Amy Poehler

The Art of Asking – Amanda Palmer

*For full reviews please visit my GoodReads.

What I’ll read next:

            The Opposite of Loneliness – Marina Keegan

            Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? – Mindy Kahling

            The Year Of Magical Thinking  - Joan Didion

            Let’s Pretend This Never Happened – Jenny Lawson

How To Be A Woman – Caitlin Moran

The Glass Castle – Jeannette Walls

Bad Feminist – Roxane Gay

If you’ve read Wild and want more from Cheryl Strayed, check out her advice Podcast, Dear Sugar Radio with Steve Almond.

Amanda Palmer’s TED talk

Piper Kerman’s TEDx talk

And if you like Lena Dunham and have 1 hour and 7 minutes to kill, click HERE for a great and unexpected interview.

Happy International Women’s Day!

A Manifesto

"Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful."

No Dickens, no McEwan.
No discussion of translation theory, unless we can be bothered. A defence of this stance will follow (if we can be bothered).
No women on pirate ships.
No Freud – or any other universally defunct psychologists.
No Benedict Cumberbatch.
No dystopian young adult novels.
No co-opting of literature to make superficially clever points.
No clear explanation of what a furrowed page is.

There will be earnest criticism and discussion of poetry.
There will be reviews of both new books AND old books.
There will be a lot of self-indulgent discussion about books in general.
There will be feeble attempts to analyze books intelligently and sensitively using the skills gained during our degrees in English Literature (and Art History, for shame) at a TOP RUSSELL GROUP university.
There will be lists.
There will be chat about bookshops in London, sometimes.
There will be jokes but few good ones.
There will be mention of The Great Gatsby but absolutely no – and this nonnegotiable – Great Gatsby-themed parties.
There will be posts every Sunday.
There will be posts every Sunday.

"Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book."