Paper Anniversary
A note from the flight deck:
The first week of April, 2023, I posted my first post. Since most of you found your way here later on, I’m re-posting it today . . . with keener formatting, footnoting, etc.—this is more of a meta-version.
It gives me the chance to reprise two core ideas of this Stack:
PROJECTS: You can read randomly, which is fine, of course. Or (now and then) read in a more focused way. You might devote a month to reading books published during the reign of Queen Victoria, a practice known as Victober.1 Or read your way around the world as Ann Morgan did (she remains a terrific source of books from countries you’ve maybe never sampled).2 I’ve mentioned both of these before in posts. Hang out on book blogs and you’ll find reading-project suggestions, as we say at our house, up the yin yang. Read paired books,3 for instance, one fiction, one non-. Read only science books for a month, or plays, or writers’ last books,4 or a month of only re-reads, etc. Even goofy reading projects coax you into a bit of research, and chances are you’ll be bumped off center—which, after all, is the point.5 In my case, the project became not a month’s challenge but a lifetime’s: READING BACK IN TIME (aka David’s Insane Reading Project).
ORPHANS: There are great old books everyone remembers; these don’t need our worry. There are other great old books that survived because a critical number of dedicated readers or academics6 talked them up (as happened with Moby Dick). And there are still other great —or near-great—books that lacked this saving grace.7 But what I’m really talking about isn’t so much greatness, or near-greatness, but the population of our literary town—its rank and file, its citizenry. Our books, the ones we’ve decided—for whatever eccentric personal reasons—are too good to be forgotten, the ones we’re moved to be stewards of.8
David’s Insane Reading Project [1]
About the time I turned fifty, I challenged myself to read a book published in each decade. On a yellow tablet, I put: 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, and so on (back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, I joked). At coffee one morning, a guy asked if I’d ever read John Fante.9 Never heard of him, I said. He loaned me his Black Sparrow edition of Ask the Dust (1939). When I was done, I entered it on the yellow pad. Then I read Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alan Sillitoe10 (1958), All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren (1946), Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar11 (1966), Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (1925) and New Grub Street, George Gissing12 (1891). All was copacetic. I read House of Mirth, Edith Wharton (1905), Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev (1862).
I think the trouble started with Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons (1932). I already had the 1930s; I cribbed Gibbons in next to Fante anyway. Pretty soon they had company: Down and Out in Paris and London [personal essay], George Orwell (1933), They Shoot Horses, Don‘t They?, Horace McCoy13 (1935), BUtterfield 8, John O’Hara (1935), Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston (1937), Murphy, Samuel Beckett (1938), The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (1939), At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien14 (1939].
The yellow pad was an unholy mess.
Skipping ahead a bit . . . My original project eventually morphed into Reading Back in Time: Read (at least) one book of prose literature published in each year. I’d been keeping track of my reading since 1979; I transcribed those titles from handwriting to Word file (along with ones from my earlier life as they bubbled up)—organized by year of first publication (as a book), newest to oldest.
I added three ground rules:
I could read them in any order . . .
There was no deadline (aside from the Big Deadline) . . .
I couldn’t skip a book I knew I should read just because that year had already been checked off.
In this way, I conned myself into reading Pride and Prejudice, The Count of Monte Cristo, Vanity Fair, Our Mutual Friend, Les Misérables, Middlemarch, War and Peace, etc., most of which I liked immensely.15 I discovered Zola’s twenty-novel cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart. I took a chance on other titles I knew by name only: My Ántonia, Willa Cather (1918), The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett (1896), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs (1861), Two Years Before the Mast [personal history], Richard Henry Dana (1840), Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe16 (1722).
All that was to the good, but there were other discoveries. I learned that James Fenimore Cooper could be read with unfeigned pleasure (besides The Last of the Mohicans (1826), I read his Revolutionary War espionage novel, The Spy (1821). Ditto, astonishingly, Sir Walter Scott. On the treadmill one morning, I read Thomas Paine’s anti-religion screed, The Age of Reason (1807) and my inner atheist almost whooped aloud. I read Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) by Mary Wollstonecraft [better known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)—and for dying soon after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley], and was struck by how often, despite the ardor of her feminism, the attitude of class privilege surfaces. I read The Turkish Embassy Letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1763), writer, wit, wife of England’s ambassador—beyond her literary claim to fame, she’s remembered for introducing the Ottoman practice of inoculation against smallpox into Britain.17 I read the first volume of The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, Written By Herself (1825), which begins: "I shall not say how and why I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven" (fear not, she has plenty of other stuff to say). Then a pair of eye-opening memoirs: Mungo Park’s Travels into the Interior of Africa (1799) and Tent Life in Siberia (1870) by George Kennan18 (shirttail ancestor of Cold War diplomat George F. Kennan). The first attempt to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic having failed, the American Telegraph Company hatched a scheme to string wire from the Bering Straits across Siberia to Europe; Kennan and his team spent a couple of years plotting the route, securing timber, enduring insanely challenging conditions, but (the book’s triumph) he details as well the party’s interactions with native, often nomadic, populations. A fascinating read. (Word eventually reached them that a second try at the Atlantic cable had succeeded; the whole Siberia project collapsed, virtually overnight.)
The next two posts were other snips of the same essay [“Oblivion”]. Links below. Thanks for stopping by. It’s been a good year. More good stuff coming, I promise.
Be well, read some books. See you in ten days.
Ann Morgan:
https://ayearofreadingtheworld.com/Paired: I’m not going to post about this—it’s been over-done. But a couple of suggestions from my own reading: DeFoe’s, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Camus’ The Plague (1947). And Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible (1953) and the study he used as his source, Marion L. Starkey’s’s, The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials (1949).
Last books: If so, have a look at literary theorist Edward Said’s last book, On Late Style (2006), published posthumously:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/on-late-style-music-and-literature-against-the-grain-edward-w-said/8526601?ean=9780375726330You could even scroll back through the first year of David’s Lists 2.0 and take me up on one of mine. Egad.
Passionate academic: It might only take a handful, if they get traction—I’m thinking of Anne Boyd Rioux who rescued Constance Fenimore Woolson [Anne (1882)].
https://anneboydrioux.com/books/books-constance-fenimore-woolson/Did you see Yesterday—the Himesh Patel film? After a cycling accident, Jack Malik wakes up in a world where the Beatles don’t exist—he’s the only one who remembers their songs. For a while, he pretends they’re his and people go gaga over him. Alternate history as thought experiment. So: Moby Dick is written, published, but the negative press dooms it—if you look diligently, you can find it listed in a footnote—apparently some doctoral candidate mentioned it in her dissertation in the 1960s).
Or pick one of your own. No Jane Eyre. No One Hundred Years of Solitude. No Miss Havisham, no Leopold Bloom, no Lily Bart, no Gandalf, no Scout, no Little Prince.
I discovered, along the way, that I could add cubbyholes to my page (sub-Substacks?), so I started filing Birth Year Project posts on their own shelf (the first ones are still scattered among the early weeks of the archive). Seventeen Birth Years have been done thus far, so all good there.
But, sad to say, Shelter From the Storm (the name for the book rescue project) hasn’t caught fire. Still seems like a good idea, so I’ll let it hang for now and see if any new recruits want to take part.
My hunch is that too few of our subscribers/followers treat this Substack as interactive.
The 5 February post [“The Ongoing”] includes explanations for these two sub-projects:
Ask the Dust:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask_the_DustSillitoe: He appears in the soon-to-be-posted Birth Year Project: 1959. Here’s the note from that:
One of the post-war British, especially working-class, novelists/playwrights called the Angry Young Men (others: Kingsley Amis, John Brain, John Osborne, John Wain). Sillitoe was a poet, essayist, playwright, memoirist, writer of children’s books. This novel, about a borstal boy, and his first, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), are his best known among his many works.
Cortazar: This novel was in Birth Year Project: 1963. That note:
A major force in the Latin American Boom. Hopscotch is an experiment in narrative form: Read the chapters in order, stop as instructed (skipping the remaining chapters), and it’s one story. Read according to a list of chapter numbers (that includes the skipped ones), and it’s an alternate version. A worthy effort, but basically a one-off. The ethos of the 60s spawned other experiments in form, but (IMHO) the linearity of writing makes alternate schemes much harder to pull off (compared to, for instance, the visual arts). Cortazar is also remembered for having written the short story that inspired (very obliquely) Antonioni's classic film, Blow-Up (1966).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_Boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Cort%C3%A1zarGissing: A bit of background from Wiki:
Until the early 19th century, Grub Street was a street close to London's impoverished Moorfields district . . . pierced along its length with narrow entrances to alleys and courts . . . Its bohemian society was set amidst the impoverished neighbourhood's low-rent dosshouses, brothels and coffeehouses. Famous for its concentration of impoverished "hack writers," aspiring poets, and low-end publishers and booksellers, Grub Street existed on the margins of London's journalistic and literary scene.
Samuel Johnson had included the term in his Dictionary (1755). The original Grub Street was long gone by Gissing’s day, but the sense of the term remained. New Grub Street juxtaposes the fates of a well-rewarded hack journalist and a close-to-starving idealistic novelist of the 1880s.
Gissing wrote over thirty novels and story collections (also a critical study of Dickens) before dying at 46. His career was a slog, recognition coming, but late. George Orwell was a fan—the central theme of Gissing’s novels, he said, “can be stated in three words—’not enough money.’”
But you should also know his novel of 1893, The Odd Women, about the struggle of women in British society. Here’s Orwell again:
In The Odd Women there is not a single major character whose life is not ruined by having too little money, or by getting it too late in life, or by the pressure of social conventions which are obviously absurd but which cannot be questioned … in each case the ultimate reason for disaster lies in obeying the accepted social code, or in not having enough money to circumvent it."
OK, I know this footnote is getting out of hand, but here’s a link to “The New Woman”—a literary/social movement of the 1890 (I hadn’t ever heard of it before this novel):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_WomanHorace McCoy: This one I knew from the film (1969)—Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin, Susannah York. Dance marathon in the pit of the Depression. It was a good era for movies Five Easy Pieces (1970), The Last Picture Show (1971), Chinatown (1974), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). McCoy was a small-time actor and screenwriter and writer of pulps.
A few years ago, I started collecting Signet pulps from the late 40s to the late 60s. They were a crazy mix of high and low art—the back cover always said: Great reading for the millions. So you had Faulkner, Capote, Dreiser, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Nevil Shute . . . surrounded by a slew of mystery/detective/noir titles: Stone Cold Blonde, Requiem For a Redhead, Let the Night Cry, etc., with lurid cover art by James Avati [“The Rembrandt of Paperback Book Covers”]. I got a kick out of their attempt to put suggestive covers on the likes of Darkness at Noon or An American Tragedy. Anyway, McCoy wrote a handful of these besides They Shoot Horses . . . Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948), No Pockets in a Shroud (1948), Scalpel (1952). And the truth is, despite a good subject and a great title, he was, well, a pulp writer.
Flann O’Brien: A cult classic. Here’s Amazon’s blurb, which pretty much nails it:
Hailed as the paramount expression of metafiction and Irish culture, and uproariously funny and inventive, At Swim-Two-Birds has influenced generations of writers, broadening the possibilities of what can be done in fiction. This comic novel is the story of a loafing and inebriated Dublin-based university student who composes a mischief-filled novel about a protagonist doomed to fail as a writer.
Cheeky.
You should also know his novel, The Third Policeman (written 1939-40).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_PolicemanMost of which I liked immensely: I bailed on Crime and Punishment—too goddamned turgid, dreary, philosophical, etc. If you esteem this famous work, chacun à son goût. My attitude: If you don’t like a book, read a different one.
DeFoe: I was surprised how easy he was to read. My preconceptions about tackling very old stuff proved wrong (in this case). I went on to read Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Journal of a Plague Year (1722), also his first book, nonfiction, an account of the cataclysmic storm that struck southern England in November 1703—some five thousand houses along the Thames were destroyed, the Royal Navy’s Channel Squadron was wiped out, scores of other ships sunk, thousands of Britons killed. It was the first national weather event to be captured by journalists. Defoe’s book, The Storm appeared the following year.
For various reasons—debt, seditious libel, politically incorrect pamphlet-writing, etc.— DeFoe was a stranger to neither pillory nor prison cell . . . actually, he led quite a complex life—read about him here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_DefoeLady Mary Wortley Montagu:
Here she is lounging on a divan in her “Turkish habit”:
Painting by Jean-Étienne Liotard
George Kennan: I’ve recommended this book over and over again [Full disclosure: My wife Susy got me to read it in the first place—she has a thing about Siberia]. Travelog/anthropology/adventure story.
The word “astonishing” came up in your post. That is the word I apply to Cold Comfort Farm.
Your focused reading is impressive. Much of my own reading is completely random and meandering, and sometimes that works out in amazing ways. I read Gilead because I had been waiting for it for a long, long time. Immediately after, I read The Known World. Now, there is a lot I could say about those two novels, but what struck me as I began my MFA program right after reading them was Gilead was dwelled in reflection with almost no scenes while The Known World was rapid-fire scenes with no reflection at all. A year or so ago, I deliberately read a book about Baba Yaga, and two more fell into my lap, then I moved on to something else and halfway realized it was also a Baba Yaga book. Some authors I read one title after another and might fall in love or abruptly out. Serendipity.