Demian by Herman Hesse

Emil Sinclair is on a search to find himself. Starting the story as an innocent kid who nevertheless senses there is a darker part of the world to which he is not yet privy, he falls into bad company, has his facade of innocence ripped away, and is eventually brought to self-awareness by art, a few acquaintances, and the titular Demian, an enigmatic embodiment of aloof perfection.

I'm perfectly willing to admit that, as premises go, this isn't a bad one. Of Human Bondage is very similar structurally, for instance, and it's one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. And Demian starts out with a lot of promise--and it's worth noting that the writing is quite good clear through--but fizzles out in a mess of self-important, unengaging crap.

The opening vignette in the novel would have made a great standalone story: Emil, hoping to impress an older boy, tells an elaborate lie about how he and some other boys regularly steal apples from a nearby orchard. After extracting an oath from Emil that the story is true, the older boy blackmails him, telling him there is a reward for the person who turns in whoever has been stealing the apples, and agreeing not to rat on Emil only if he is paid an equivalent amount. Fearing the reprisal of his parents and the police, Emil engages in petty crime--stealing from said parents, mostly--to pay his debt, all while feeling as though he has left the world of good and stepped inextricably into the world of evil.

The problem with extracting even this section of the novel, which drums up a real sense of dread over a dilemma that the adult reader knows isn't really serious, is that it's resolved by bringing in the book's walking, talking Deus Ex Machina, Demian. He talks to the bully and the bully backs off, never to speak to Emil again. If you're hoping to learn what was said, keep hoping. It cheapens the whole episode and makes it feel like the scene in a bad action movie where the villain kills his right hand man just to show how evil he is.

And what can I say about Demian? He's never given much of a personality or, really, much to do besides dispense cryptic wisdom and look pretty. The most interesting thing about his character is the homoerotic subtext that run through the novel, which is never mentioned or alluded to, which makes me wonder if Hesse was aware and choosing this as the one place to inject subtlety into his story, or if he was so in love with the character himself that he was unaware of how it came across. The subtext, alas, is just another area where Demian refuses to pay off.

The story ends SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER with Emil living in some sort of commune with Demian, Demian's mother--who Emil really wants to (and maybe does?) sleep with--and a few other seekers who, Emil realizes, are just too caught up in their own beliefs to recognize the essential oneness of the universe, or whatever. Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but there's no evidence of why here--this book blows. It's a novel of ideas with no novel ideas, a character study with no real characters, a story without any stakes.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five thirty in the morning to wait on the boat the Bishop was coming on.

Spoilers, such as they are.

I realize that, for most people, the best place to start with an author is one of their most acclaimed works. You wouldn’t read Youth for your first Tolstoy, The Original of Laura for your first Nabokov, or The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner for your first Meyer. Still, there is something to be said for starting with a lesser work, particularly if the works upon which an author’s reputation has been built are massive, and you happen to stumble across a much shorter, lesser-known work by a well-regarded author at Goodwill for 50 cents. It gives you a chance to check out an author’s style and themes without investing hours and hours of reading; however, the downside is that some works are minor for a reason. All of which is a long way of saying that Chronicle of a Death Foretold was my first Marquez, and I really didn’t like it.

The story opens by introducing us to Santiago Nasar, a young Arab who, we learned in the first line of the book, has been murdered. The day of his death immediately follows the biggest wedding in his town’s history, that of Bayardo San Roman and Angela Vicario. As it goes, Bayardo San Roman returns Angela Vicario to her parents’ house the night of the wedding after learning that she isn’t a virgin. When her brothers find her the next morning, laying in the living room bruised from the beaten her mother gave her upon her return, they demand the name of her love, intending to kill him and thus preserve Angela Vicario’s honor. She gives them the name of Santiago Nasar, even though the narrator tells us that he couldn’t possibly have been her lover, and the twins make preparations for the kill. While doing so, they tell virtually everyone they come into contact with that they are preparing to kill Santiago Nasar, and soon everyone in the town knows, except Santiago Nasar himself. The murder becomes a sort of spectator sport, with no one intervening even as the twins brutally murder Santiago.

I don’t know where to start with the things that bothered me about this book. By the time I finished the first ten pages, I was tired of the writing style, which is, I guess, magical realism. The narrator, unnamed but certainly a resident of the town, delivers the story, injecting asides about dreams and mystical occurrences that seemingly have nothing to do with the story. He also repeats himself, over and over. Indeed, the book would be half its length if he didn’t spend time meeting every resident of the town and telling us that they all knew that Santiago Nasar was going to be killed, and didn’t do anything about it. By the end of the first chapter, I already felt like I was being bludgeoned over the head with the point. I get it—everyone in town is complicit in the murder because they did nothing to stop it. What’s this a reference to? World War II? The Catholic purge in Mexico? Rwandan genocide? Basic human nature? We’re left to speculate, which is fine.

Less fine: throughout the book, we’re introduced to dozens of characters—indeed, Chronicle may have the highest character-to-page ratio I’ve ever seen—but we never learn enough about anyone to much care what happens to them. Even if we did, everyone here seems pretty terrible, or at least terribly apathetic. Again, I get it, that’s the point, but without any sort of relatable or sympathetic characters, the blurb on the back of the book is almost as impactful as the book itself. Angela Vicario probably gets the most development of anyone, and yet, when the narrator speaks to her years after the murder, she laughs about the things that happened, and admits that she picked Santiago Nasar’s name out of thin air. Intended or not, this makes her seem just as terrible as everyone else in her stupid town.

I’m not glad I read this book. It was awful and pointless and the writing style bothered me, although I can’t put my finger on why (although always using everyone's full names probably contributed). Can anyone who’s read any of Marquez’s major works tell me if they’re better, or am I better off staying far away?

Jim's One Hundred years of Solitude review, in which Jim is also bludgeoned with themes.

Increasingly Repulsive Garbage by Stephanie Meyer

This review is going to have spoilers. I'm sorry. But you shouldn't be.

I don't have a passage for my review of the four books of the Twilight "saga" because I couldn't find a single piece of writing that stood out in a good way. Let's get that straight right off the bat. There's nothing about Stephanie Meyer's writing in these books that indicates to me that she's particularly talented. Nothing at all. She can string words together as well as any English major, to be sure, but the popularity of these books doesn't come from the prose.

Let me take a step back. I just had to laugh at myself out loud, sitting at the keyboard because of how pissed off I was by these books. I'm pretty exhausted and I wanted to write this review in the morning. Upon finishing the fourth book, though, I was so happy to be done with the series and angry at what I'd just read that I wanted to write this all down before I forgot anything.

I read the Twilight books to try and understand why they were so explosively popular. After the first one, I thought I understood*. They read like Goosebumps. It's like popcorn. I read the entire series in six days, though admittedly after book 2 I was so dead set on being done with these awful %$&*ing characters that I wasn't stopping until I was completely finished. You don't need to think while reading them. I understand the concept of escapism. Really, I do. I enjoyed the Harry Potter books as much as the next guy. That's why I said I understood the popularity of the series... With an asterisk. I understand why your average 12 year old could enjoy these books. I do. Vampires and werewolves and dumb shit like that, kids eat that crap up. I know I did (Again, Goosebumps).

What I do not understand, is how any self-respecting adult could read these books and not walk away hating all of the main characters, the author, and all the themes of the series. I'm gonna focus on women here because its pretty clear men are not the target audience. My sister and lots of my female friends love these books. Before reading them, I would kid them about because I'd heard how bad the writing was and how over-the-top romantic it was. But even then, I can understand the appeal of some brainless gumball romance novel, much in the same way that I enjoy watching Die Hard for the 437th time whenever it comes on FX. After reading the books, though, I realize that these books aren't just brainless gumball romance. They're misogynistic, pedophilic, and really... Just ugly.

All I read on the internet these days is this 'TEAM EDWARD" or "TEAM JACOB" nonsense. Are you girls kidding me? Hmmm... Lets see: "Team Breaks-Into-Your-Home-At-Night-And-Watches-You-Sleep-And-Blatantly-Stalks-You" or Team Forces-Himself-Upon-You-Sexually-And-Then-Develops-An-Infatuation-With-Your-Infant-Daughter?" WTF. The main character, the woman the audience is supposed to identify with, is completely useless in every way you could possibly imagine. She depends ENTIRELY on her man to not only keep her safe and alive, but emotionally stable as well. Once he leaves, she falls to pieces. She's so distraught at her beau's absence that she takes to suicidal behavior because it makes her imagine his voice. Seriously. But don't worry... She gets better! As soon as another man swoops in to save her again. The only other (human) female characters are: 1) Tw0-timing "friend" who turns on Bella for popularity's sake and, naturally, to get herself a boy 2) Another friend who is left completely undeveloped until she finds a boyfriend to play against 3) Bella's mother who is an airhead who clearly cares more for her new husband than she does her daughter. I also really enjoyed the part where Jacob grabs Bella, grabs her by the hair and forces himself upon her while she struggles and fights herself off (to no avail, because she's oh-so-weak) and then when Jacob later tells Bella's father about the incident, he applauds him. It's okay though, because like 200 pages later Bella realizes she really wanted it the whole time. This is what we want young girls reading. Right.

Everyone knows about the whole abstinence allegory. It should be noted that Bella only becomes a strong(er) character after she fills herself up with Edward's... venom.

The whole pedophilia angle is almost so mindbogglingly sick that I can't believe I haven't seen anyone talk about it. First let's start with the less obvious case. In what way is it okay for Edward (like 90 years old) to be going after Bella (17)? In what universe do people read this story and go, "Ohhhh that's normal, he looks like he's 17!" How does that make sense? Just because he's not a wrinkled old pervert doesn't mean he's not an old pervert. A 30 year old man and a 16 year old girl are essentially on the same level of sexual maturity. Would a relationship between the two get any less disgusting if he suddenly aged 60 years but looked exactly the same? Hell no!

The more blatant example comes from the werewolves and their imprinting. It's no big deal when a full grown man falls in love with a toddler (or later, an infant still covered in afterbirth) because, hey, he doesn't have any sexual feelings for her. That's Meyer's explanation. And I bet there are fans out there who would defend it. Guess that. That's still twisted. Think about that relationship and its nature. Exactly when does that paternal love become sexual love? It's a gradient, and at one point on that gradient things are going to inevitably be disgusting. Go read Lolita and then come back and tell me H.H. doesn't talk exactly the same way about his little nymphettes in exactly the same way that Quil and Jacob talk about theirs.

I won't go too much into how shitty of a writer Meyer is. Even the people who somehow like these books seem to agree that she's not much of a wordsmith. But there were a few technical things that really pissed me off:
1) When you're trying to make allusions to other great literary romances, be subtle about it. Don't spend pages and pages spelling it out to the reader that this character = Romeo and this character = Juliet and this character = Paris.
2) When you inevitably DO decide to make the dumbest decision possible with your main character (Making Bella a vampire), come up with something more interesting to propel the plot than suddenly introducing a bunch of X-Men like characters with lame super powers.
3) If you're going with suspense, maybe don't name the last chapter of the final book (listed clearly in the Table of Contents) "The Happily Ever After"

I could go on but I think you catch my drift. These books are disturbing and send all the wrong messages to exactly the audiences that are consuming it at the fastest rate. It's really a shame.

Lowlights: Knowing how many people have read this trash and not picked up on how instantly unpleasant it is.
Highlights: I liked Seth. That's it. This book has like 100 characters and I liked one.

PS - All this being said, there's no way I won't be paying my $11 for tickets to the film version of Breaking Dawn just to see Cedric Diggory give his Keanu-Reeves-Acting-Academy co-star a Cesarean with his teeth.

PPS - After this, if I don't finish with 54 books I'm going to feel like I cheated myself.

Go Ask Alice by Anonymous

I wish I were popular and beautiful and wealthy and talented.
-
My mind possessed the wisdoms of the ages, and there were no words adequate to describe them.
---

Go Ask Alice purports to be the honest-to-goodness real diary of a poor girl who starts off as a sterling, if somewhat shy, student and is gradually drawn deep into a web of drugs, alcohol, illicit sex, and suspiciously aggressive potheads. Of course, once the book became a hit, Beatrice Sparks, a Mormon psychologist and youth counselor, came forward, claiming to be the book's compiler and editor, though not it's actual author who was, of course, Alice. or, well, not really. Actually, Alice is in the book for about 3 sentences, but for simplicity's sake, I'm going to assume the anonymous diarist is named Alice as well.

Anyone who actually reads the book, however, will start suspecting early on that either Alice or Beatrice is making things up as they go along. I could buy that Alice started drinking out of peer pressure and a desire to be cool. I could buy that she started smoking pot for the same reason. I found it harder to believe that she became a voracious addict to LSD after being secretly given a spiked glass of beer. Credulity is stretched to the breaking point, however, after the second time Alice's addict friends break into her house to plant drugs then, later, inject the candy bowl at the neighbor's house with cocaine and call the police. Alice, of course, winds up on the street, alternately transcribing her pathetic sexual escapes and waxing philosophical in ways that your average teenager doesn't. In the last several entries, Alice kicks the habit but then mysteriously dies in a postscript that, presumably, was not part of the original diary.

Later, Dr. Sparks published a series of books, all with the "real-life diary" angle, dealing with a boy who falls into Satanism, a homeless teen, and a knocked-up teen. These, fittingly enough, were shelved under fiction, ensuring that their terribly contrived, retarded, didactic stories will never be taken as seriously as Alice's. Sparks's most recent book? Open and Say Ah: The Story of a Lying Psychologist.

Anthem by Ayn Rand

The following is the only part of Anthem I liked:

"This would wreck the Plans of theWorld Council," said Unanimity 2-9913," and without the Plans of the World Council the sun cannot rise. It took fifty years to secure the approval of all the Councils for the Candle, and to decide upon the number needed, and to re-fit the Plans so as to make candles instead of torches. This touched upon thousands and thousands of men working in scores of States. We cannot alter the Plans again so soon."

Think of your favorite dystopian novel (1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, We) and extract the barest bones of the plot (we now live in a Communist society; we are not allowed to love; etc). Now imagine the protagonist is a first person narrator with less personality than Ben Stein, and that the author thinks you, the reader, are a complete dolt. That's what reading Anthem feels like. The pot is this: dull protagonist finds ancient (read:modern) technology in an underground bunker, tries to show his fellow men, is punished, triumphs by giving a long speech to himself about himself, the end. Oh, also, there's a forbidden word. It isn't "I" if that's what you're thinking.

I'd never read any of Ayn Rand's books, but, what can I say, I'm behind in books and Anthem is mercifully brief. I'd heard that Rand was a poor writer and that her books were basically skeleton plots to spread her philosophy of Objectivism (i.e. selfishness), but it didn't prepare me for the utter ineptitude of this book.

Not much happens in the book to begin with, but when something does (Person 12422494934843's capture for breaking the law, his presentation of electricity to the Council of Scholars), every effort is made to eliminate any trace of tension or importance. For example, Person 12422494934843 is beaten and placed in prison for breaking some laws. To escape, he just... knocks down the door and walks out. There are no guards, no pursuit, no sense of heroics. An infant escaping from a roomful of dead paraplegics would be more dramatic. Virtually the same thing happens when he "escapes" from the Council of Scholars: he goes out a window into the forest where he lives until Person 489023984, his love, finds him.

The book has a philosophical and a material climax, both of which are boring. The material climax occurs when the recently renamed Prometheus (SWM/21) and Gaia (SWF/18) discover a house from the old times, decide to build an electric fence, and live happily ever after. The philosophical climax occurs about 15 pages from the end of the book when Rand forgets that she's writign a story and has Prometheus speechify about Objectivism, which, if I understand correctly, is this: I am the most important person in the universe, everything revolves around me, I shouldn't help anyone, etc, etc. Objectivism is strongly opposed to etcetering.

The forbidden word? EGO. Objectively, this book sucks.

50 Books Appearance Changes

Hey guys,

I made some changes to the 50B blog today. Primarily I expanded the content area, but I also tweaked some of the colors. What does everyone think, and what changes do you suggest?

Also, if Carlton can make a version of his header image that's about 800 pixels long, we can use it for the header of the blog. Let me know.