Favorite Books: Part One

A lot has been happening in my personal life of late. I said in the first post of this blog that I'd try to keep my personal life to a minimum here - this is supposed to be showcase for my writing and artwork, not Facebook - but I feel like I ought to explain a few of the wrenches that have been tossed into my productivity. For one, I'm in the middle of moving. Since my parents' divorce about a year and a half ago, my Dad has moved out and found his own apartment. Our house went up for sale. We had to do several renovations, keep the house spotless in case a realtor wanted to show the property (in which case we'd have to leave for an hour), haggle over price, and when it finally did sell, try to find a decent apartment or townhouse and move in in a two-week window. 

Fortunately, we did find something close-by for less than the monthly mortgage payment, and managed to get everything in before the house was signed over to the new owners. With a house's worth of belongings now in a little townhouse, it feels like my Mom and I are living in a episode of "Hoarders." We can barely find anything, especially in the kitchen, but at least we're not loosing things between two houses and having to drive several blocks over to grab a tube of toothpaste or a plate. 

Money is as tight as ever. I'm down to one job. I quit Home Depot, but that's a whole 'nother blog post. The college loan bills keep coming. I can't seem to find anything I'm qualified for. I've tried looking for human resources work, secretarial work, even government jobs, but nothing is happening. I'm having trouble sleeping.

I gotta find a way to sell some of this artwork taking up space in the new townhouse, but every gallery is every 1) not interested, 2) doesn't respond, or 3) is booked until 2013. I wonder if Etsy.com is a viable option or whether it's another eBay?

Right now I have several unfinished writing projects:

(1) completed short story that needs heavy editing

(1) short story, two-thirds of the way done that needs an ending not as loose as the last story

(5-6) half-finished poems and a dozen fragments of poems

(2) mediocre ideas for short stories

(40) pages of an abandoned novel

(0) pages of an outline for a half-baked novel on an apartment of college grads trying to weather the Recession.

More updates on these later.

In lieu of some decent content, I've decided to post some excerpts of my favorite books (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays, and graphic novels are all included) since I don't know if I could articulate a list of what I consider to be "good literature." I considered explaining what I thought made each book great and how it influenced me, but decided to let them speak for themselves. 

Side note: I'm also thinking of posting a list of what I think are the most overrated books ever written, but this may get me shot by a lunatic. *cough Catcher in the Rye*

HERE'S PART ONE:

MIDDLESEX by Jeffrey Eugenides

I could sense the happiness of couples holding first babies and the fortitude of Catholics accepting their ninth. I could feel one young mother’s disappointment at the reappearance of her husband’s weak chin on the face of her newborn daughter, and a new father’s terror as he calculated the tuition of triplets. On the floors above Delivery, in flowerless rooms, women lay recovering from hysterectomies and mastectomies. Teenage girls burst with ovarian cysts nodded out on morphine. It was all around me from the beginning, the weight of female suffering, with its biblical justification and vanishing acts.

FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 

I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.

WIT: A PLAY by Margaret Edson

This is my play's last scene “Here... Heavens appoint my pilgrimage's last mile And my race Idly, yet quickly run Hath this last pace My span's last inch My minute's last point And gluttonous death Will instantly unjoint my body and soul" John Donne... I've always particularly liked that poem. In the abstract. Now I find the image of my minute's last point, a little too, shall we say... pointed. 

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED by Tim O’Brien

They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.

WATCHMEN by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore

  

GRENDEL by John Gardner

I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly - as blindly as all that is not pushes back. I create the whole universe, blink by blink.

THE HOBBIT by J.R.R. Tolkien

The yells and yammering, croaking, jibbering and jabbering; howls, growls and curses; shrieking and skriking, that followed were beyond description. Several hundred wild cats and wolves being roasted slowly alive together would not have compared with it.

LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding

“Maybe there is a beast....maybe it's only us.”

THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

THE LUCIFER EFFECT: UNDERSTANDING HOW GOOD PEOPLE TURN EVIL by Philip Zimbardo

The genocide and atrocities committed in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Burundi, and recently in Sudan’s Darfur region also provide strong evidence of people surrendering their humanity and compassion to social power and abstract ideologies of conquest and national security. Any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us - under the right or wrong situational circumstances. That knowledge does no excuse evil: rather, it democratizes it, sharing its blame among ordinary actors rather than declaring it the province only of deviants and despots - of Them but not Us.

THE CRUCIBLE by Arthur Miller

Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!