In the interest of proving to myself that I have completed over half Francine Prose’s list of “Books to be Read Immediately”, I’m adding here the ones I forgot to earlier… To justify this patchwork blog post, there is Carl Jung, the answer to my query for “quote about completists” with the following: “Life calls not for perfection but for completeness.”
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Reading this book during the pandemic felt like a bit of vicarious travel… It was nice! Three quotes:
All along people were going to work. It felt pleasant to be going to work. I walked across the avenue and turned in to my office.
Up-stairs in the office I read the French morning papers, smoked, and then sat at the typewriter and got off a good morning's work. At eleven o'clock I went over to the Quai d'Orsay in a taxi and went in and sat with about a dozen correspondents, while the foreign-office mouthpiece, a young Nouvelle Revue Française diplomat in horn-rimmed spectacles, talked and answered questions for half an hour. The President of the Council was in Lyons making a speech, or, rather he was on his way back. Several people asked questions to hear themselves talk and there were a couple of questions asked by news service men who wanted to know the answers. There was no news. I shared a taxi back from the Quai d'Orsay with Woolsey and Krum. (p 36)
“No, I don't believe it. And I'm fond of him, too. And I'd like to have children. I always thought we'd have children.”
She looked at me very brightly. “I never liked children much, but I don't want to think I'll never have them. I always thought I'd have them and then like them.” (p 47)
I had coffee out on the terrasse with the team manager of one of the big bicycle manufacturers. He said it had been a very pleasant race, and would have been worth watching if Bottechia had not abandoned it at Pamplona. The dust had been bad, but in Spain the roads were better than in France. Bicycle road-racing was the only sport in the world, he said. Had I ever followed the Tour de France? Only in the papers. The Tour de France was the greatest sporting event in the world. Following and organizing the road races had made him know France. Few people know France. All spring and all summer and all fall he spent on the road with bicycle road-racers. Look at the number of motor-cars now that followed the riders from town to town in a road race. It was a rich country and more sportif every year. It would be the most sportif country in the world. It was bicycle road-racing did it. That and football. He knew France. La France Sportive. He knew road-racing. We had a cognac. After all, though, it wasn't bad to get back to Paris. There is only one Paname. In all the world, that is. Paris is the town the most sportif in the world. Did I know the Chope de Negre? Did I not. I would see him there some time. I certainly would. We would drink another fine together. We certainly would. Would I be up for the depart? I would certainly try to. Would I like him to call me? It was very interesting. I would leave a call at the desk. He would not mind calling me. I could not let him take the trouble. I would leave a call at the desk. We said good-bye until the next morning.
In the morning when I awoke the bicycle-riders and their following cars had been on the road for three hours. (p 236-7)
The Trial by Franz Kafka
I read The Trial in 2015 and appreciated Kafka’s talent more in retrospect than when I was reading his books. The story is frustrating, but, that was the point. A few sentences I liked:
Through the open window he had another glimpse of the old woman, who with truly senile inquisitiveness had moved along to the window exactly opposite, in order to go on seeing all that could be seen. (p 3).
[…] less loud indeed than he had threatened, but with such explosive force that it hung in the air a moment before gradually spreading through the room. (p 30)
Many seemed convinced that it was highly important for K. to find the joiner Lanz, they took a long time to think it over, suggested some joined who, however, was not called Lanz, or a name which had some quite distant resemblance to Lanz, or enquired of their neighbours, or escorted K. To a door some considerable distance away, where they fancied such a man might be living as a lodger, or where there was someone who could give better information than they could. […] He now regretted his plan, which at first had seemed so practical. (p 40)
Selected Stories by Alice Munro.
Since this author’s death, her reputation and legacy have been revisited. I read the collection in July of 2013, because in a journal I’d kept, I write “This afternoon I read Alice Munro. Francine [Prose] points out the simple, spare language.” In fact, Prose writes, “Alice Munro writes with the simplicity and beauty of a Shaker box. Everything about her style is meant to attract no notice, to make you not pay attention. But if you read her work closely, every word challenges you to think of a more direct, less fussy or tarted-up way to say what she is saying.” (p 23 in Reading Like a Writer)
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
This is a series of sketches of life as a soldier during the Vietnam War. I liked his description of the small town where he grew up:
The road was a sort of boundary between the affluent and the almost affluent, and to live on the lake side of the road was one of the few natural privileges in a town of the prairie - the difference between watching the sun set over cornfields or over water.
It was a graceful, good-sized lake. [….] Then, there had not been a war. But there had always been the lake, which was the town’s first cause of existence, a place for immigrant settlers to put down their loads. Before the settlers were the Sioux, and before the Sioux were the vast open prairies, and before the prairies there was only ice. The lake bed had been dug out by the southernmost advance of the Wisconsin glacier. Fed by neither streams nor springs, the lake was often filthy and algaed, relying on fickle prairie rains for replenishment. Still, it was the only important body of water within forty miles, a source of pride, nice to look at on bright summer days, and later that evening it would color up with fireworks. Now, in the late afternoon, it lay calm and smooth, a good audience for silence, a seven-mile circumference that could be traveled by slow car in twenty-five minutes. (p 157)
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor; Wise Blood, Collected Stories
I liked “A Good Man is Hard to Find”… it’s such a perfectly contained story that it’s hard to extract a quote. But here is one:
The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She had her big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a motel with a cat.
Apart from that story, I find O’Connor hard to read. This is one assignment I didn’t complete. By contrast, I find her letters fascinating…
Freedomland by Richard Price
This is one of the few novels from the list adjacent to the mystery genre. The quotes I recorded are all ones that made me smile:
Danny stared at him. Then, without a word, he turned and marched over to Bobby McDonald, who stood on the paved side of the tape, hands in pockets, squinting up at the trees as if attempting to count the number of pairs of sneakers thrown up there bolo-style and left to dangle like rubberized fruit. (p 93)
But McCoy’s… The air conditioning gave off Legionnaires’ disease, and although there was some kind of grudging, nominal menu, the geriatric cook had TB and it took twenty minutes for him to dismount from his bar stool, the resulting hamburger on white bread, with a side of potato chips, finally showing up something like six drinks after it had been ordered. (p 245)
“What do you self-help people with?”
“Happiness.” He gave her a shrug. “Aspects of happiness.” Then as if reading her mind, he added, “I’m happier than I look.” (p 253)
Swan’s Way by Marcel Proust
Reading Proust was magical. His long sentences that stretched like spider silk, weaving an ethereal architecture of thought that held me in awe. I read it in the original French, and here are a few favourite quotes:
Elle me faisait luis dire le sujet des poèmes que j’avais l’intention de composer. Et ces rêves m’avertissaient que puisque je voulais un jour être un écrivain, il était temps de savoir ce que je comptais écrire. Mais dès que je me le demandais, tâchant de trouver un sujet où je pusse faire tenir une signification philosophique infinie, mon esprit s’arrêtait de fonctionner, je ne voyais plus que le vide en face de mon attention, je sentais que je n’avais pas de génie ou peut-être une maladie cérébrale l’empêchait de naître. (p 170)
Les intérêts de notre vie sont si multiples qu’il n’est pas rare que dans une même circonstance les jalons d’un bonheur qui n’existe pas encore soient posés à côté de l’aggravation d’un chagrin dont nous souffrons. (p 375)
Et encore, même à ce point de vue de simple quantité, dans notre vie les jours ne sont pas égaux. Pour parcourir les jours, les natures un peu nerveuses, comme était la mienne, disposent, comme les voitures automobiles, de “vitesses” différentes. Il y a des jours montueux et malaisés qu’on met un temps infini à gravir et des jours en pente qui se laissent descendre à fond de train en chantant. (p 383)
Proust can be intimidating to begin, but I was encouraged by Alain de Botton’s book How Proust Can Change Your Life. In it Botton uses Proust to reflect on suffering, language, and friendship, but a passage that is pertinent to this reading list project is the following:
Without drawing attention to how contentious or critical the point was, he [Proust] argued that we should be reading for a particular reason: not to pass the time, not out of detached curiosity, not out of a dispassionate wish to find out what Ruskin felt, but because, to repeat with italics, “there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt.” We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thoughts that help us do so. A fulfilled academic life would therefore require us to judge that the writers we were studying articulated in their books a sufficient range of our own concerns, and that in the act of understanding them through translation or commentary, we would simultaneously be understanding and developing the spiritually significant parts of ourselves. (p 178)
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
This is a short read. From it, a few short quotes…
Franny’s ministering to a pet goldfish:
She was still stroking Bloomberg, still succoring him, forcibly, into the subtle and difficult world outside warm afghans. (p 133)
The description of an outfit, (the reefer is a peacoat, the tam a hat similar to a beret):
She was wearing a navy-blue reefer and a tam that was very nearly the same shade of red as the blanket on the bed in Van Gogh’s room at Arles. Her tam did, in fact, from Zooey’s vantage point, appear not unlike a dab of paint. (p 150-1)
The nose-blowing that makes me wince:
Behind him, just then, Franny blew her nose with guileless abandon; the report was considerably louder than might have been expected from so fine and delicate-appearing an organ. (p 151)
The Elements of Style by by E. B. White and William Strunk Jr.
I read The Elements of Style as a university student. I had trouble being concise when writing essays and this book transformed my writing in the middle of a course on literature. The professor noticed, and I kept a copy of the essay I’d handed in (“Margaret Laurence’s The Fire-Dwellers”) and professor Doug Reimer’s response to a note I’d added, fretting over my writing. He wrote: “White’s Elements cannot be bettered, never, today, or next millennium. Your new ‘simplicity’ of style is exactly the right approach for you to take.”
The book had made such an impact, that it was always the first thing I recommended, when asked, as a writing tutor, some years later. Here, from the introduction, a little taste of William Strunk’s advice:
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky
“He’s not a man, he’s a machine, and a wicked machine when he gets angry,” she added, recalling Alexei Alexandrovich in all the details of his figure, manner of speaking and character, holding him guilty for everything bad she could find in him and forgiving him nothing, on account of the terrible fault for which she stood guilty before him. (p 189)
Konstantin Levin did not like talking or hearing about the beauty of nature. For him words took away the beauty of what he saw. (p 241)
Every man, knowing to the smallest detail all the complexity of the conditions surrounding him, involuntarily assumes that the complexity of these conditions and the difficulty of comprehending them are only his personal, accidental peculiarity, and never thinks that others are surrounded by the same complexity as he is. (p 302)
Fools of Fortune by William Trevor
I read this book but took note of only four sentences, two because they were funny:
The girl’s face had a woebegone look that was not much lightened by a display of darkened teeth when she smiled. (p 97)
and
You’re the laziest man God ever put eyes in. (p 133).
The two others denote the novel’s mood…
The consideration for our mourning implied that it rendered us delicate: people had stood aside from our path, a woman had crossed herself, men touched their caps or hats. “The Irish are like that,” my mother had explained. (p 107)
and
I stood with the nun in the hall of St. Fina’s, a huge expanse of brown and cream tiles, freshly washed, still smelling of Jeyes Fluid. (p 138)
On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf
I recently re-read this short essay, reviving my appreciation for Woolf’s talent. Nevermind this quote I like… you can read it here and see if you find something you like too.
But to return to the invalid. “I am in bed with influenza,” he says, and actually complains that he gets no sympathy. “I am in bed with influenza”—but what does that convey of the great experience; how the world has changed its shape; the tools of business grown remote; the sounds of festival become romantic like a merry-go-round heard across far fields; and friends have changed, some putting on a strange beauty, others deformed to the squatness of toads, while the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea, and he is now exalted on a peak and needs no help from man or God, and now grovels supine on the floor glad of a kick from a housemaid—the experience cannot be imparted and, as is always the way with these dumb things, his own suffering serves but to wake memories in his friends' minds of their influenzas, their aches and pains which went unwept last February, and now cry out, desperately, clamorously, for the divine relief of sympathy.
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
In a blog post in 2022, I wrote about appreciating the contrast of writers’ styles when reading more than one book at a time. I illustrated it then with a quote from Yates here. In addition are the following that I also liked.
A landscape I have seen:
At first their rehearsals had been held on Saturdays - always, it seemed, on the kind of windless February or March afternoon when the sky is white, the trees are black, and the brown fields and hummocks of the earth lie naked and tender between curds of shrivelled snow. (p 5)
A calm feeling:
The rain had stopped but it was still a wet, gray day and good to be indoors. The radio was dimly playing Mozart and a gentle, sherry-scented repose settled over the kitchen. This was the way he had often wished his marriage could always be - unexcited, companionable, a mutual tenderness touched with romance - and as they sat there quietly talking, waiting for the sight of the Givingses’ station wagon to appear through the dripping trees, he shivered pleasurably once or twice as a man who has been out since before dawn will shiver at the feel of the first faint warmth of sun on his neck. He felt himself at peace; and by theme the car did come, he was ready for it. (p 182)
The incongruity of death:
Shep, respectfully keeping his distance, allowed the inner voice to assure him that she couldn’t possibly be dying. People didn’t die this way, at the end of a drowsing corridor, like this in the middle of the afternoon. Why, hell, if she was dying that janitor wouldn’t be pushing his mop so peacefully across the linoleum. And he certainly wouldn’t be humming, nor would they let the radio play so loud in the ward a few doors away. If April Wheeler was dying they certainly wouldn’t have this bulletin board here on the wall, with its mimeographed announcement of a staff dance (“Fun! Refreshments!”) and they wouldn’t have these wicker chairs arranged this way, with this table and this neat display of magazines. (p 317)
