#the tragedy of arthur's story is heartbreaking and beautiful in it's own way

[monachopsissssss]

behold 714 words of me going insane

In the earliest days of theater, the primary genre was tragedy, and countless plays written were centered on the hamartia and the reverse of fortune, creating a very iconic structure. Centuries later, the bard himself, Shakespeare, took that structure and expanded on it, introducing a concept we colloquially now refer to as collateral damage. The passion that he sparked has not died down, and the legacy of tragedy lives strong today, pulsating under the mainstream, heartbreak and dread lurking around the corners of literature. Tragedy is the selling point, the callsign of many a work of fiction, and one in particular, a band by the name of The Mechanisms, pulls it off very, very well. To start off the list, the band does fictional retellings of many well known tales from folklore and mythology, and if you’ve read any of them, you will know that not many of these stories end well, contributing to the sense of inevitability that the bards of old oh-so dearly loved. Take for example, the myth of Ragnarok, a well known story that tells of the end of the earth. The sense of inevitability is already present, the coming of Ragnarok being a prophecy Odin receives. This prophecy turns out to be self-fulfilling though, when it is revealed that the actions he takes to prevent it are what cause Ragnarok in the first place. This is also a mark of many Greek tragedies, although it’s not strictly necessary for the tragedy format. Their album The Bifrost Incident keeps that element along with many others, and what Odin creates to prevent the tragedy is what causes it in the first place. Since we all know that Ragnarok ends with all the gods dying, with the world being destroyed with only 2 sole survivors, there is a sense of doom awaiting us, every step of the way. This is bolstered by the fact that every album starts with its name being spoken out loud; many of them are a reference to the tragic ending, or, in the case of The Bifrost Incident or Ulysses Dies At Dawn, straight up tell you exactly who dies. Adding on to that, the second and final key element of a tragedy that this traveling band of fictional immortal space pirates absolutely blows out of the park is the fatal flaw, hamartia. In High Noon Over Camelot, another album, the hamartia of many characters play off each other, creating the conflict and reversal of fortune in this story, with examples such as Arthur moving on and refusing to look back, Mordred not telling anyone anything and instead blending in, and Gawain’s hate blinding him. These all play off each other in very tragic ways, and without going insane about how terribly beautiful this album is, let’s just say that it ends with a lot of people dead. You can pinpoint exactly what went wrong and exactly what seemingly innocuous character trait led to the downfall of everything everyone knew and loved. The final nail in the coffin of the populations of multiple planets, their tragedies are not at all self-contained, eloquently massacring the Shakepearean concept of collateral damage. The album Ulysses Dies At Dawn ends, unsurprisingly, with Ulysses dying. This is the inevitable, the tragedy, but what it doesn’t tell you is how many people they eventually take down with them. Not even mentioning the bonus stories written by the Mechanisms, the deaths of 5 people were directly caused by Ulysses, and they indirectly cause the deaths of many more, just by the virtue of dying. It’s a new spin on the collateral damage, with the people getting hurt not particularly attached to Ulysses, but rather, shoved there by the society they live in, and by the puppeting hand of one particular pirate. By the end of the story, 6 are dead by Ulysses’ hand, and everyone else by the consequences of their actions. Their tragedy does not stick to one person, rather it is like a meteor in an ocean, because although there are other tragedies, they are dwarfed by the colossal wave of Ulysses’ own. With the last ingredient of a heart-wrenching tragedy in place, the Mechanisms’ job is done, their mastery over the art of the dread and anguish of tragedy firmly cemented.

[pathofcomet]

how can i love the heartbreak, you’re the one i love

fandom: ikemen vampire

pairing: isaac/MC

summary: written for isaac week, day 1; prompt: firsts. OR  Isaac recounts meeting his lover, and what it means to love to begin with. (AO3)

notes: This narrative is inspired by whatever the fuck Jeanette Winterson's books make me feel.Title belongs to a song by AKMU.

Isaac can remember the first time he has seen her, his heart thrumming in his ear, trying to make his disinterest visible. In the end, what is it to him, that there is now a woman here, disrupting their everyday lives, even as she is supposed to help out? Like with everything else that doesn’t interest him, Isaac actively ignores her.

That is, until he cannot anymore.

The first time he found out that he is supposed to be a vampire; and a monster on top of everything else, an aberrant even in the midst of the scariest of creations, he remembers the taste of his own death. This must be, then, a punishment from God – for wanting to overcome the most logical, most obvious step of life. Physics, as he has learnt to know them, relies on that which can be proven.

He doesn’t have the calculations for this place, for the reason why his heart is beating in his chest again, for all the memories that he carries from a life that is centuries old at this point, or for the failure that his particular body presents.

He only knows that when thirst overcomes him, ignored for too long – the tickling at the back of his throat turns into an itch, and then into an open wound, clawing at his being, clouding his judgement, darkening his vision. He came back to life just to not have entire control over it.

He has promised, in the clarifying moments after he almost bit her, after her edges cleared for him, by virtue of her tantalizingly sweet blood – he promised that this first misstep will be his last.

It’s the first promise that he breaks, in this second life he’s given.

To be fair, this entire thing feels like it’s his first time, all over again. And Isaac is mal-adjusted and clumsy, like a new-born, like a baby. He knows she jokes sometimes, that the geniuses of the world are so bad at knowing basic worldly skills. Arthur, despite his inability to go without it, has no idea how to get the mix of coffee just right, to his own liking. Vincent, bright and smiling and understanding almost to a fault, cannot see the ugliness, pick at the shadows. Mozart, so focused on his art that he forgets his words should be filtered. And then, finally, Isaac, with his lack of words entirely.

Even now, so much further down on this path she agreed to share with him, he catches her smiling as she reads a book – and he stops on the spot, dumbfounded, feeling his tongue heavy in his mouth, his head heavy with words he doesn’t know how to say. In the morning, as she kisses him, he’d like to tell her he loves her, with the same ease that she possesses. Maybe keep going: with his gratefulness, thanks that he’d like to lavish upon her always, for choosing him every single day, a choice that she keeps on making. With her beauty, which disarms him entirely.

But Isaac fidgets on the spot, patiently ties the ribbon in her hair, most annoying strands of hair out of her face. Isaac stares, opening his mouth and closing it again with no sound in-between, wringing his fingers together.

And she chuckles, her soft lips over his cheek or forehead – or pressed harshly against his own mouth. His fault as a genius, the touch of humanity, to teach him humility.

Isaac still tries. It’d be a first not to.

If an experiment fails, you just change the variables. With her at his side, it’s really hard not to change, or at least not want to change.

That’s a first in itself, as well. Isaac, his life so long and so objectively successful – thinks he has the recipe to living quite perfected. He has avoided most tragedies of living (though isn’t living in itself a tragedy?), he has poured his most in his studies and research. But to have her by her side, always open, always charmingly demanding, makes something inside him shift.

He wants to be better; he wants to finish his writings sooner, so he can join her in an evening of reading in the library, by the fire, comforted by the sound of her heartbeat, the fast turn of the page as she’s immersed in a story. He wants to be a good professor, so that when she comes and visits the university, the Recteur can speak of him with pride to his beloved, the students respect her by virtue of what she means to him.

And he wants to give her the gift of surety. He’s had a long and objectively successful life to learn the possible readings of a gesture, and centuries added on top of that; she has a couple of decades. His heart aches with fondness at the miracle that she is, alive and here and his. It doesn’t feel fair, to be loved so much.

And of course, Isaac loves her, his first love, coming so late. He would have waited forever for her, and it almost feels like he did. He’s glad he didn’t quite have to. Isaac, in his mal-adjusted and clumsy way, tries to make it known.

He kisses her wrist over breakfast, thanks for straightening the collar of his shirt before he heads out for work. He picks all the books on her beautifully scrawled list from town. He sits through her favourite theatre plays, even if he despises the author (Shakespeare). He waits for her in his office with a cup of tea, exactly to her liking (Earl Grey with two teaspoons of sugar and a bit of milk). He knows those things, at the top of his head.

And she smiles, like she knows. After all, if there is someone who can read him at a glance, it’d be the woman who has his heart. Maybe it’s because she knows that he wants to do even more; he never settles with his research, why would he when it comes to his curiosities about love?

Love. What a strange word. An even stranger feeling. The expanse of her skin, where it touches against him in the cold hours of the night. The familiarity of her smell, when she hugs him as a welcoming. The thoughts of her, that accompany him in his lonely hours. Her kisses, soft lips against his. Opening his eyes to her hair splayed over his pillow. Her.

She’s heading in town with Sebastian; stops by his room to ask if he’d like anything. He stares instead of replying, the familiar limits of his abilities welcoming him once again. Isaac shakes his head.

“Return soon?” he says, plea and order, shy inquiry and desperate yearning both.

She promised she’ll read one of his papers. He corrects more easily, when ideas come in her soothing voice – even if she continues to vehemently deny any understanding of his subject. Maybe this time together is all the more precious exactly because of it.

She leans close to him; Isaac pauses his writing, just in time for the touch of her hand, playing through his hair.

“Of course,” she says, voice soft and tinged with… love.

Isaac looks at her, how darling she looks, how dear she is to him.

“Y-you know,” he starts, and then sighs, resting his forehead against her waist. She wraps her arms around his shoulder, protective and lovingly.

“I know.”

“I still want to say it,” the slightest pout in his voice.

She lets him go, he straightens in his chair. Expectant, fingers crossed in her lap, like she shouldn’t hurry because Sebastian is waiting for her, like she’s not keeping him from his work: she stares at him.

Isaac’s tongue pokes out, wetting his lips – a dash of colour that catches her eye. She wants to kiss him; she always wants to kiss him. Her want for it is the closest she’ll feel to his hunger for her, she imagines, so she calms herself down, like he almost always does. She opens her hand, palm up, an unspoken invitation.

Recognized, Isaac laces his fingers with hers, raises hers to press it against his cheek, with the adoration of one who holds on to love for dear life.

“I love you,” he breathes, murmurs, the words barely even there.

“I know, you’ve been telling it to me for a while now, you know?” she replies, bringing his wrist to her lips.

She kisses the thin skin, his pulse fluttering under her lips, a mimicry of his own gestures.

“I-it’s different,” he stutters, his face warm.

“It is,” she hums in agreement. “But not more.”

Oh.

She taps her fingernail against his mug: his tea, as he prefers it (green tea, with a slice of lemon and a teaspoon of honey), prepared by her earlier in the morning, before getting ready to go out for her errands.

The vastness of her heart, knowing him in his entirety. Disarmingly so.

“Won’t take long,” she adds, and she’s gone and he’s alone, but not entirely so.

Not when everything around him is proof of what they share.

Oh.

[rockislandadultreads]

LGTBQ+ Fiction: reading recommendations

The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara

It’s 1980 in New York City, and nowhere is the city’s glamour and energy better reflected than in the burgeoning Harlem ball scene, where seventeen-year-old Angel first comes into her own. Burned by her traumatic past, Angel is new to the drag world, new to ball culture, and has a yearning inside of her to help create family for those without. When she falls in love with Hector, a beautiful young man who dreams of becoming a professional dancer, the two decide to form the House of Xtravaganza, the first-ever all-Latino house in the Harlem ball circuit. But when Hector dies of AIDS-related complications, Angel must bear the responsibility of tending to their house alone. As the mother of the house, Angel recruits Venus, a whip-fast trans girl who dreams of finding a rich man to take care of her; Juanito, a quiet boy who loves fabrics and design; and Daniel, a butch queen who accidentally saves Venus’s life. The Xtravaganzas must learn to navigate sex work, addiction, and persistent abuse, leaning on each other as bulwarks against a world that resists them. All are ambitious, resilient, and determined to control their own fates, even as they hurtle toward devastating consequences. Told in a voice that brims with wit, rage, tenderness, and fierce yearning, The House of Impossible Beauties is a tragic story of love, family, and the dynamism of the human spirit.

Going Dutch by James Gregor

Exhausted by dead-end forays in the gay dating scene, surrounded constantly by friends but deeply lonely in New York City, and drifting into academic abyss, twenty-something graduate student Richard has plenty of sources of anxiety. But at the forefront is his crippling writer’s block, which threatens daily to derail his graduate funding and leave Richard poor, directionless, and desperately single. Enter Anne: his brilliant classmate who offers to “help” Richard write his papers in exchange for his company, despite Richard’s fairly obvious sexual orientation. Still, he needs her help, and it doesn’t hurt that Anne has folded Richard into her abundant lifestyle. What begins as an initially transactional relationship blooms gradually into something more complex. But then a one-swipe-stand with an attractive, successful lawyer named Blake becomes serious, and Richard suddenly finds himself unable to detach from Anne, entangled in her web of privilege, brilliance, and, oddly, her unabashed acceptance of Richard’s flaws. As the two relationships reach points of serious commitment, Richard soon finds himself on a romantic and existential collision course—one that brings about surprising revelations. Going Dutch is an incisive portrait of relationships in an age of digital romantic abundance, but it’s also a heartfelt and humorous exploration of love and sexuality, and a poignant meditation on the things emotionally ravenous people seek from and do to each other. James Gregor announces himself with levity, and a fresh, exciting voice in his debut.

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster. The Great Believers has become a critically acclaimed, indelible piece of literature; it was selected as one of New York Times Best 10 Books of the Year, a Washington Post Notable Book, a Buzzfeed Book of the Year, a Skimm Reads pick, and a pick for the New York Public Library's Best Books of the year.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

PROBLEM: You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years now engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes--it would all be too awkward--and you can’t say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of half-baked literary invitations you’ve received from around the world. QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town? ANSWER: You accept them all. If you are Arthur Less. Thus begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take Arthur Less to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India and Japan and put thousands of miles between him and the problems he refuses to face. What could possibly go wrong? Well: Arthur will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Sahara sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and arrive in Japan too late for the cherry blossoms. In between: science fiction fans, crazed academics, emergency rooms, starlets, doctors, exes and, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to see. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. The second phase of life, as he thinks of it, falling behind him like the second phase of a rocket. There will be his first love. And there will be his last. A love story, a satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, by an author The New York Times has hailed as “inspired, lyrical,” “elegiac,” “ingenious,” as well as “too sappy by half,” Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.

[wee-chlo]

It always breaks my heart to read people talking about how Javier was a traitor or an asshole in Red Dead Redemption 2. He wasn’t an asshole or a traitor. He was a victim.

Javier’s like... my top three favorite NPCs in Red Dead Redemption 2. Javier, Mary-Beth, and Kieran, but Javier most of all. I think that Javier is probably the biggest victim of Dutch’s casual psychological cruelty, the way he (knowingly or not) uses people and creates a cult of personality and adoration. 

Javier tells his story around the campfire in fragments, but his story is heartbreaking and speaks volumes about why he’s so loyal to Dutch. More or less every member of the gang has something of a similar bent: how they were down and out, abandoned or abused or shunted to the side, and Dutch came and picked them up and gave them purpose. Javier, I think, has the most dramatic of them though.

Because while the majority of the gang are victims of society (women, former slaves, Irish), Javier is the only one I’ve heard so far of being so keenly aware of the system and passionately opposed to it. While everyone has their personal loyalties to Dutch, Javier is the only one I’ve heard to have genuine and incredibly passionate loyalty to not just Dutch but the cause.

Javier was a revolutionary, and his story is dark and full of tragedy for someone so young. He’s been witness to violence seemingly all his life; saw men including his uncle fed to pigs for daring to argue for a fair wage, killed a man for a woman implied to have betrayed him, fleeing to America and nearly starving to death. When he talks about his flight to America he’s poetic, and the descriptions are stark and grim. How he fled with nothing but his fear because he had to run so quickly. How he’d been so terrified of being killed in Mexico as he crossed the desert, then terrified of being turned away at the border, then terrified of being killed in America... But in America, he didn’t speak English and couldn’t get money or food, and no one cared about him. So he starved.

When he talks about it, his voice breaks. He sounds like he’s about to cry, or crying already. A man who cared so passionately, so deeply, so furiously that he fought for love and killed for love and fled for love nearly starving to death because no one cared.

And then Dutch showed up. According to Javier, Dutch took him in, fed him, clothed him. Javier has only been with the gang for four years but he speaks fluent, eloquent English and he clearly learned that by being around Dutch and his crew. He says that he misses Mexico but that the gang is his home now, that the people of the gang are his family now. And he credits Dutch for that.

More than anyone else, I think Dutch gave Javier his life back. And in return, Javier devoted his life to Dutch and his teachings, his feelings on society and civilization and wild. Javier was a revolutionary. He was intelligent and passionate and driven. He was aware of how society was rigged against the smaller, weaker masses and I think it was an easy thing for him to latch his own feelings to Dutch’s teachings. 

So when Dutch starts to collapse in on himself, starts to go insane from physical and psychological trauma and loss and certain voices whispering in his ear, Javier can’t argue. He can’t tell Dutch he’s wrong or crazy, not because Javier’s too stupid to realize it or too mean-spirited but because Dutch made himself into Javier’s savior, a central pillar in Javier’s life in America. Javier, as far as he’s concerned, owes everything to Dutch. Dutch gave him a life, a home, a family. And as everything falls apart and the days get darker and John and Arthur start muttering and people disappear into the night and people die, Javier engages in desperate denial. He has to. As Arthur, we don’t get it. It seems like blind loyalty, ingratitude, betrayal. But we see why he has to in Red Dead Redemption.

Because when Dutch’s fall from grace becomes impossible to ignore, Javier’s fall is just as meteoric. His whole world collapses on itself. He betrays everything he once held to be true and good, works for people he loathed as a young man, becomes broken and unwashed in body and soul. Because more than anyone else, I think, he was a victim of Dutch. Arthur dies, but he dies himself. In a High Honor ending, he dies more true to himself than ever, I think. John dies but he stayed himself too, got a few years of happiness and became aware of Dutch’s failings in a way that didn’t cause him to shatter. Bill suffered but ultimately was still Bill. The others managed to get away; some thrived and others died but they got away.

Javier just... broke. 

He was a violent man but he wasn’t a bad one. Everything that Dutch preached, helping those who need helping and freedom and the wild beauty of the west, Javier believed. He loved the gang with all his heart, loved everyone in it, and he loved Dutch. 

Every single person in that gang deserved better but god, Javier in particular breaks my heart.

[lifements-blog]

Reto de Lectura Rory Gilmore

Sé que llego tarde a este reto de lectura pero nunca me había animado a tomarlo, lo descubrí hace años no recuerdo donde y ahora que me topé con el de nuevo en  BlackWhite Read Books y queria intentarlo.

Gilmore Girls fue una gran parte de mi adolescencia vi todos los capítulos más de una vez y me identificaba con Rory, su amor por la lectura y su vida cotidiana, es una serie que siempre vivirá en mi corazón y es más que una serie para mí, me enseño muchas cosas y me ayudo con muchas más.

El reto de lectura consiste en leer todos los libros que Rory leyó a lo largo de la serie, los cuales son muchos, entre ellos existen muchos clásicos como Alicia en el País de las Maravillas y El Diario de Anna Frank, la mayoría de libros en esta lista no están siquiera en mi lista TBR la cual es otra de las razones por las que quiero intentarlo, la lista consiste de 339 libros por lo que no me pondré propósitos irreales como leerlos todos durante este año (2016), en dos años o en cinco, simplemente me propondré terminar esta lista algún día y divertirme con ella.

Marcare mi progreso en este post y quizá haga una reseña de ellos, los mencione en mis libros del mes o en GoodReads pero primordialmente será aquí.

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Inferno by Dante

The Divine Comedy by Dante

1984 by George Orwell

A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman

A Month Of Sundays: Searching For The Spirit And My Sister by Julie Mars

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

A Room with a View by E. M. Forster

A Separate Peace by John Knowles

A Streetcar Named Desiree by Tennessee Williams

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Adventures of Huckleberry by Mark Twain

An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy

Babe by Dick King-Smith

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney

Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

Bridgadoon by Alan Jay Lerner

Candide by Voltaire

Carrie by Stephen King

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White

Christine by Stephen King

Complete Novels by Dawn Powell

Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker

Cousin Bette by Honore de Balzac

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Cujo by Stephen King

Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende

David and Lisa by Dr Theodore Issac Rubin M.D

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

Deenie by Judy Blume

Don Quixote by Cervantes

Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe

Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook

Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn

Eloise by Kay Thompson

Emily the Strange by Roger Reger

Emma by Jane Austen

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Ethics by Spinoza

Europe through the Back Door, 2003 by Rick Steves

Eva Luna by Isabel Allende

Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Extravagance by Gary Krist

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore

Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein

Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce

Fletch by Gregory McDonald

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger

Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

George W. Bushism: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg

Gidget by Fredrick Kohner

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

Goldilocks and the Three Bears by Alvin Granowsky

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry

Henry IV, part I by William Shakespeare

Henry IV, part II by William Shakespeare

Henry V by William Shakespeare

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris

House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer

How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss

How the Light Gets In by M. J. Hyland

Howl by Allen Ginsberg

I’m With the Band by Pamela des Barres

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee

Iron Weed by William J. Kennedy

It Takes a Village by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

Lady Chatterleys’ Lover by D. H. Lawrence

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Marathon Man by William Goldman

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir

Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Mencken’s Chrestomathy by H. R. Mencken

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Moliere: A Biography by Hobart Chatfield Taylor

Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and It’s Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh

My Life as Author and Editor by H. R. Mencken

My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru by Tim Guest

Myra Waldo’s Travel and Motoring Guide to Europe, 1978 by Myra Waldo

My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult

Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature by Jan Lars Jensen

New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Night by Elie Wiesel

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Novels 1930-1942: Dance Night/Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel/Angels on Toast/A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell

Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Old School by Tobias Wolff

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Oracle Night by Paul Auster

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Othello by Shakespeare

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

Out of Africa by Isac Dineson

Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

Pigs at the Trough by Arianna Huffington

Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Property by Valerie Martin

Pushkin: A Biography by T. J. Binyon

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

Quattrocento by James Mckean

Rapunzel by Grimm Brothers

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin

Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman

R Is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton

Rita Hayworth by Stephen King

Robert’s Rules of Order by Henry Robert

Roman Holiday by Edith Wharton

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi

Sanctuary by William Faulkner

Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford

Say Goodbye to Daisy Miller by Henry James

Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman

Selected Hotels of Europe

Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913-1965 by Dawn Powell

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Several Biographies of Winston Churchill

Sexus by Henry Miller

Shane by Jack Shaefer

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

S Is for Silence by Sue Grafton

Slaughter-house Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Small Island by Andrea Levy

Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway

Snow White and Rose Red by Grimm Brothers

Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore

Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos

Songbook by Nick Hornby

Sonnets from the Portuegese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Sophie’s Choice by William Styron

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

Stuart Little by E. B. White

Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

Swimming with Giants: My Encounters with Whales, Dolphins and Seals by Anne Collett

Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber

Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Term of Endearment by Larry McMurtry

Time and Again by Jack Finney

To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

The Archidamian War by Donald Kagan

The Art of Fiction by Henry James

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Bhagava Gita

The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews by Peter Duffy

The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman

The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse

The Collected Stories by Eudora Welty

The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

The Da Vinci -Code by Dan Brown

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson

The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx

The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan

The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

The Godfather: Book 1 by Mario Puzo

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford

The Gospel According to Judy Bloom

The Graduate by Charles Webb

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Group by Mary McCarthy

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon

The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

The Iliad by Homer

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

The Jumping Frog by Mark Twain

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 by Gore Vidal

The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield

The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway

The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen

The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

The Love Story by Erich Segal

The Manticore by Robertson Davies

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare

The Miracle Worker by William Gibson

The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion by Jim Irvin

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin

The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John P. McGowan

The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan

The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan

The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton

The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition by Donald Kagan

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker

The Portable Nietzche by Fredrich Nietzche

The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Rough Guide to Europe, 2003 Edition

The Scarecrow of Oz by Frank L. Baum

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Shining by Stephen King

The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht

The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker

The Sonnets by William Shakespeare

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Story of My Life by Helen Keller

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Tragedy of Richard III by William Shakespeare

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 by Sylvia Plath

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson

The Vanishing Newspaper by Philip Meyers

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum

The Year of Magical Thinkinf by Joan Didion

The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Ulysses by James Joyce

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Unless by Carol Shields

Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground and Nico (Thirty Three and a Third series) by Joe Harvard

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Walt Disney’s Bambi by Felix Salten

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

We Owe You Nothing – Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews edited by Daniel Sinker

What Colour is Your Parachute? 2005 by Richard Nelson Bolles

What Happened to Baby Jane by Henry Farrell

When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

(Post original en: http://lifements.blogspot.com/2016/01/el-reto-de-lectura-rory-gilmore.html )

[laertesstudies]

J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fall of Arthur”: A Review

J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Fall of Arthur,"  brings the alliterative verse of Beowulf and other 14th century epic poems into the modern English. The subject matter is one of the most famous of the stories of the Round Table: the betrayal of Lancelot and Guinevere and the role it played in the fall of Camelot. He also explores some of the themes that are prevalent in some of his leter works, such as wanderlust, the search for power and glory and the ruin it can bring, and women who take fate into their own hands.

I have to admit, when I saw a copy at the local library, I was almost giddy with excitement. Tolkien has written some of the most meaningful books of my childhood, and his work continues to impact me to this day. I cannot tell you how many hours I have spent crying over the sacrifice of Samwise Gamgee, or the tragic beauty of the Lay of Luthien. But the Arthurian legends have an even closer place in my heart. They're a part of my heritage, a story that has been passed down throughout the generations and helps connect me to my ancestors; it's a tale of courage, and heartbreak, and chivalry. The stories of the Round Table inspired me as a kid in a way I can't even begin to put into words.  And damn does he do them justice (even if the poem was never finished.)

The thing that I loved most about this poem was Tolkien's masterful use of imagery. The most prolific of these images is the storm that is brewing throughout most of the book, and the rising of the sun in the fourth canto. However, the symbolism that struck me more is to be found in the ensigns of the different parties in the war. Arthur's banners are white, with images of the Madonna and Child emblazoned upon them in silver - fitting, as Arthur is supposed to be the embodiment of divine right and the grace and goodness of God. In contrast, Lancelot's banners are said to be "silver upon sable... the fair flower-de-luce on its field withered drooping in darkness." The flower-de-luce, or fleur-de-lis, has many meanings, but in this case it is also a representation of the Virgin Mary and everything she stands for. But whereas Arthur's flags are white to symbolize his integrity, Lancelot's are black, showing his disgrace. Finally, Gawaine's banners are white, and upon his banner is a rising sun and a fiery griffin. The griffin is representative of Gawaine's loyalty, honor, and nobility; these virtues are what ressurect Arthur's hope and fighting spirit. Like the sun rising to shatter the darkness of night, Gawaine's goodness shines out from the darkness of betrayal. 

Overall, I absolutely adored "The Fall of Arthur." Despite being a fairly modern poem (Christopher Tolkien estimates his father wrote it about 1934), it very much feels like reading a 14th century tale to me. Mordred is a cruel and despicable villain, although not entirely unsympathetic, and the tragedy of Lancelot is captured so beautifully in the poetry. Guinevere is neither an innocent victim nor a wicked adultress, but simply as a flawed woman in search of love, and this was definitely a nice change. If I have any complaint with the poem, it is only that I wish Tolkien had been able to finish it. I definitely give this work a solid A+.

[a-bit-of-lit-blog]

i noticed y’all have been enjoying my novel masterposts. so im just going to keep posting because im obsessed with books like that T.T

for my study-like-rory studyblr friends who want to read all the books mentioned in gilmore girls (because hello?? who doesn’t??), here’s a list! pls let me know if i missed a book, but i think it’s quite a complete list! enjoy!!

#

1984 – George Orwell

A

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon

An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser

Angela’s Ashes – Frank McCourt

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank

Archidamian War – Donald Kagen

The Art of Fiction  – Henry James

The Art of War – Sun Tzu

As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

Atonement – Ian McEwan

The Awakening – Kate Chopin

Autobiography of a Face – Lucy Grealy

B

Babe – Dick King-Smith

Backlash – Susan Faludi

Balzac & the Little Chinese Seamstress – Dai Sijie

The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

Beloved – Toni Morrison

Beowulf – Seamus Heaney

The Bhagava Gita

The Bielski Brothers – Peter Duffy

Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women – Elizabeth Wurtzel

A Bolt From the Blue & other Essays – Mary McCarthy

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

Brick Lane – Monica Ali

Brigadoon – Alan Jay Lerner

C

Candide – Voltaire

The Canterbury Tales – Chaucer

Carrie –Stephen King

Catch – 22 – Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

The Celebrated Jumping Frog – Mark Twain

Charlotte’s Web – EB White

The Children’s Hour – Lilian Hellman

Christine – Stephen King

A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

The Code of the Woosters – PG Wodehouse

The Collected Short Stories – Eudora Welty

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

A Comedy of Errors – William Shakespeare

Complete Novels – Dawn Powell

The Complete Poems – Anne Sexton

Complete Stories – Dorothy Parker

A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

Cousin Bette – Honore de Balzac

Crime & Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Crimson Petal & the White – Michael Faber

The Crucible – Arthur Miller

Cujo – Stephen King

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon

D

Daughter of Fortune – Isabel Allende

David and Lisa – Dr. Theodore Issac Rubin

David Coperfield – Charles Dickens

The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

Deal Souls – Nikolai Gogol (Season 3, episode 3)

Demons – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller

Deenie – Judy Blume

The Devil in the White City – Erik Larson

The Dirt – Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mark, & Nikki Sixx

The Divine Comedy – Dante

The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood – Rebecca Wells

Don Quijote – Cervantes

Driving Miss Daisy – Alfred Uhrv

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde ­– Robert Louis Stevenson

E

Complete Tales & Poems – Edgar Allan Poe

Eleanor Roosevelt – Blanche Wiesen Cook

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe

Ella Minnow Pea – Mark Dunn

Eloise – Kay Thompson

Emily the Strange – Roger Reger

Emma – Jane Austen

Empire Falls – Richard Russo

Encyclopedia Brown – Donald J. Sobol

Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton

Ethics – Spinoza

Eva Luna – Isabel Allende

Everything is Illuminated – Jonathon Safran Foer

Extravagance – Gary Kist

F

Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 911 – Michael Moore

The Fall of the Athenian Empire – Donald Kagan

Fat Land:How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World – Greg Critser

Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson

The Fellowship of the Ring – J R R Tolkien

Fiddler on the Roof – Joseph Stein

The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom

Finnegan’s Wake – James Joyce

Fletch – Gregory McDonald

Flowers of Algernon – Daniel Keyes

The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathon Lethem

The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

Franny and Zooey – JD Salinger

Freaky Friday – Mary Rodgers

G

Galapagos – Kurt Vonnegut

Gender Trouble – Judith Baker

George W. Bushism – Jacob Weisberg

Gidget – Fredrick Kohner

Girl, Interrupted – Susanna Kaysen

The Ghostic Gospels – Elaine Pagels

The Godfather – Mario Puzo

The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy

Goldilocks & the Three Bears – Alvin Granowsky

Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell

The Good Soldier – Ford Maddox Ford

The Gospel According to Judy Bloom

The Graduate – Charles Webb

The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

The Group – Mary McCarthy

H

Hamlet – Shakespeare

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – JK Rowling

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – JK Rowling

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers

Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

Helter Skelter – Vincent Bugliosi

Henry IV, Part 1 – Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part 2 – Shakespeare

Henry V – Shakespeare

High Fidelity – Nick Hornby

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – Edward Gibbons

Holidays on Ice – David Sedaris

The Holy Barbarians – Lawrence Lipton

House of Sand and Fog – Andre Dubus III

The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende

How to Breathe Underwater – Julie Orringer

How the Grinch Stole Christmas – Dr. Seuss

How the Light Gets In – MJ Hyland

Howl – Alan Ginsburg

The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo

I

The Illiad – Homer

I’m With the Band – Pamela des Barres

In Cold Blood – Truman Capote

Inferno – Dante

Inherit the Wind – Jerome Lawrence & Robert E Lee

Iron Weed – William J. Kennedy

It Takes a Village – Hilary Clinton

J

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan

Julius Caesar – Shakespeare

The Jungle – Upton Sinclair

Just a Couple of Days – Tony Vigorito

K

The Kitchen Boy – Robert Alexander

Kitchen Confidential – Anthony Bourdain

The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

L

Lady Chatterley’s Lover – DH Lawrence

The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 – Gore Vidal

Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman

The Legend of Bagger Vance – Steven Pressfield

Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis

Letters to a Young Poet – Rainer Maria Rilke

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them – Al Franken

Life of Pi – Yann Martel

Little Dorrit – Charles Dickens

The Little Locksmith – Katharine Butler Hathaway

The Little Match Girl – Hans Christian Anderson

Little Woman – Louisa May Alcott

Living History – Hillary Clinton

Lord of the Flies – William Golding

The Lottery & Other Stories – Shirley Jackson

The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

The Love Story – Eric Segal

M

Macbeth – Shakespeare

Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

The Manticore – Robertson Davies (Season 3, episode 3)

Marathon Man – William Goldman

The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov

Memoirs of  Dutiful Daughter – Simone de Beauvoir

Memoirs of General WT Sherman – William Tecumseh Sherman

Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris

The Meaning of Consuelo – Judith Ortiz Cofer

Mencken’s Chrestomathy – HR Mencken

The Merry Wives of Windsor – Shakespeare

The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka

Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides

The Miracle Worker – William Gibson

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

The Mojo Collection – Jim Irvin

Moliere – Hobart Chatfield Taylor

A Monetary History of the US – Milton Friedman

Monsieur Proust – Celeste Albaret

A Month of Sundays – Julie Mars

A Moveable Feast – Ernest Hemingway

Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

Mutiny on the Bounty – Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall

My Lai 4 – Seymour M Hersh

My Life as Author and Editor – HR Mencken

My Life in Orange – Tim Guest

My Sister’s Keeper – Jodi Picoult

N

The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer

The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

The Namesake – Jhumpa Lahiri

The Nanny Diaries – Emma McLaughlin

Nervous System – Jan Lars Jensen

New Poems of Emily Dickinson

The New Way Things Work – David Macaulay

Nickel and Dimed – Barbara Ehrenreich

Night – Elie Wiesel

Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen

The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism – William E Cain

Novels 1930-1942: Dance Night/Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel/Angels on Toast/A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell

Notes of a Dirty Old Man – Charles Bukowski

O

Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

Old School – Tobias Wolff

Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

On the Road – Jack Keruac

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch – Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life – Amy Tan

Oracle Night – Paul Auster

Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood

Othello – Shakespeare

Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens

The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War – Donald Kagan

Out of Africa – Isac Dineson

The Outsiders – S. E. Hinton

P

A Passage to India – E.M. Forster

The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition – Donald Kagan

The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky

Peyton Place – Grace Metalious

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

Pigs at the Trough – Arianna Huffington

Pinocchio – Carlo Collodi

Please Kill Me – Legs McNeil & Gilliam McCain

The Polysyllabic Spree – Nick Hornby

The Portable Dorothy Parker

The Portable Nietzche

The Price of Loyalty – Ron Suskind

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

Property – Valerie Martin

Pushkin – TJ Binyon

Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw

Q

Quattrocento – James McKean

A Quiet Storm – Rachel Howzell Hall

R

Rapunzel – Grimm Brothers

The Razor’s Edge – W Somerset Maugham

Reading Lolita in Tehran – Azar Nafisi

Rebecca – Daphne de Maurier

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm – Kate Douglas Wiggin

The Red Tent – Anita Diamant

Rescuing Patty Hearst – Virginia Holman

The Return of the King – JRR Tolkien

R is for Ricochet – Sue Grafton

Rita Hayworth – Stephen King

Robert’s Rules of Order – Henry Robert

Roman Fever – Edith Wharton

Romeo and Juliet – Shakespeare

A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf

A Room with a View – EM Forster

Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin

The Rough Guide to Europe

S

Sacred Time – Ursula Hegi

Sanctuary – William Faulkner

Savage Beauty – Nancy Milford

Say Goodbye to Daisy Miller – Henry James

The Scarecrow of Oz – Frank L. Baum

The Scarlet Letter – Nathanial Hawthorne

Seabiscuit – Laura Hillenbrand

The Second Sex – Simone de Beauvior

The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd

Secrets of the Flesh – Judith Thurman

Selected Letters of Dawn Powell (1913-1965)

Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

A Separate Place – John Knowles

Several Biographies of Winston Churchill

Sexus – Henry Miller

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafron

Shane – Jack Shaefer

The Shining – Stephen King

Siddartha – Hermann Hesse

S is for Silence – Sue Grafton

Slaughter-House 5 – Kurt Vonnegut

Small Island – Andrea Levy

Snows of Kilamanjaro – Ernest Hemingway

Snow White and Red Rose – Grimm Brothers

Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy – Barrington Moore

The Song of Names – Norman Lebrecht

Song of the Simple Truth – Julia de Burgos

The Song Reader – Lisa Tucker

Songbook – Nick Hornby

The Sonnets – Shakespeare

Sonnets from the Portuegese – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Sophie’s Choice – William Styron

The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

Speak, Memory – Vladimir Nabakov

Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers – Mary Roach

The Story of my Life – Helen Keller

A Streetcar Named Desire – Tennessee Williams

Stuart Little – EB White

Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway

Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust

Swimming with Giants – Anne Collett

Sybil – Flora Rheta Schreiber

T

A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

Tender is the Night – F Scott Fitzgerald

Term of Endearment – Larry McMurty

Time and Again – Jack Finney

The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffeneggar

To Have and to Have Not – Ernest Hemingway

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

The Tragedy of Richard III – Shakespeare

Travel and Motoring through Europe – Myra Waldo

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith

The Trial – Franz Kafka

The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters – Elisabeth Robinson

Truth & Beauty – Ann Patchett

Tuesdays with Morrie – Mitch Albom

U

Ulysses – James Joyce

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (1950-1962)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe

Unless – Carol Shields

V

Valley of the Dolls – Jacqueline Susann

The Vanishing Newspaper – Philip Meyers

Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

Velvet Underground – Joe Harvard

The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides

W

Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett

Walden – Henry David Thoreau

Walt Disney’s Bambi – Felix Salten

War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

We Owe You Nothing – Daniel Sinker

What Colour is Your Parachute – Richard Nelson Bolles

What Happened to Baby Jane – Henry Farrell

When the Emperor Was Divine – Julie Otsuka

Who Moved My Cheese? Spencer Johnson

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee

Wicked – Gregory Maguire

The Wizard of Oz – Frank L Baum

Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

Y

The Yearling – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion

OTHER RESOURCES:

19th Century Novels Masterpost

20th Century Novels Masterpost

21st Century Novels Masterpost

Rory Gilmore’s Reading List

Series Masterpost

[upalldown]

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Ghosteen

Seventheenth studio album from the alternative rock band self-produced by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is the final part of a trilogy of albums following Push the Sky Away (2013) and Skeleton Tree (2016)

10/13

The 2016 documentary One More Time With Feeling is, first and foremost, a film about a person getting back to work after an event of unimaginable trauma. In this case, that person is Nick Cave, the work is the recording of the album ‘Skeleton Tree’, and the event of unimaginable trauma is the horrific accidental death of Cave’s 15-year-old son Arthur in July 2015. “It was not an act of courage or anything” Cave later told the journalist Chris Heath, “it was just that I didn’t know what the fuck else to be doing. All I knew is that what I do is work, and that kind of continues. I think I knew, fundamentally, that if I lay down, I would never get up again.” Throughout his career, and certainly since he quit drugs in the late 1990s, Cave has got up five days a week, put on a suit, headed to the office and worked.

Something else, though, was going on with One More Time with Feeling. Why did he put himself through the experience of having the director Andrew Dominik document the very worst time of his life? Some suspected a ruse to avoid promotional interviews – this is folly, had Cave retreated from interviews for the rest of his life, absolutely everyone would have understood. No, something in Cave as a person – and as an artist – was changing, and it manifested itself in an urge to share and a compulsion towards the communal. To change in significant ways is not an uncommon reaction to grief and trauma, and Cave has been lucid about the “elastic band” or trauma, continually binding him and his family to that atrocious day in 2015. The film was the first sign of this change, and the second was the tour that followed Skeleton Tree. Watching those shows, the provocation towards the audience that typified Cave’s performing career became something else entirely – combativeness melted into communion. This continued with the launch of the Red Hand Files – a mailing list in which fans send questions to Cave and Cave selects those he wishes to answer (with answers ranging from the flippant to the forensic and heartbreaking). And then too, across 2018 and 2019, we had the ‘Conversations with Nick Cave’ events where fans were encouraged to, in Cave’s words, “ask me anything.” “Nothing can go wrong” Cave observed of the high-wire spontaneity of those fan events, “because everything has gone wrong.”

And so, announced via the Red Hand Files just a fortnight before release, we have Ghosteen, a double album. Cave has gone back to the office, he’s put the suit back on, and he’s knuckled down – recording the album across last year and this in Los Angeles, Brighton and Berlin. “The songs on the first album are the children” explained Cave in the album’s promotional materials, “the songs on the second album are their parents”. The two albums are stylistically distinct – the first are songs, the second are spoken-word poems over electronica soundscapes – but I don’t think that’s what Cave means when he refers to the ‘children’ and ‘parent’ relationship. We’ve no idea of course, but given that the same image of Jesus lying in his mother’s arms reoccurs on both of the albums would suggest the poems acting as creative spur for the songs.

For obvious and understandable reasons, the extent to which Skeleton Tree represented a stylistic break with Cave’s back catalogue went underdiscussed – it sounded like a creative breakthrough, and on the evidence of Ghosteen Cave is treating it as exactly that. Why was that record such a stylistic departure from the Bad Seeds’ previous work? For one thing, Warren Ellis’ electronics that had crept into 2013’s stunning Push the Sky Away were suddenly front and centre – the main meal. Similarly, Cave’s lyrics deviated heavily from his traditional maximalist Southern gothic conquests. In their place came something more elliptical, closer to modernist writing in their fragmentation and eschewing of narrative. It’s testament to Cave’s pedigree and discipline as a writer that he can flit from one mode to the other and produce work of such quality (that’s what you get for heading to the office every day).

At times, Ghosteen appears almost in dialogue with its predecessor, and this is no bad thing. Opener ‘Spinning Song’ seems to have itself spun from a line on Skeleton Tree – “the song, the song, the song it spins since nineteen eighty-four.” The gorgeous, revelatory Ellis backing vocals seen on ‘Girl in Amber’ are replicated all across this album, to beautiful effect.

As the vast bulk of Skeleton Tree was written prior to Cave’s tragic loss, it’s on Ghosteen that we have the first real document of Cave the writer working through pain and grief. There’s an embarrassment of riches here, and emotional gut punches land hard and fast from the outset. He writes on ‘Sun Forest’ of “a man mad with grief”, of “everybody hanging from a tree” – it’s an astonishingly vivid portrait of the fever that grief can be. I don’t often cry at music – just one of those things, doesn’t seem to happen – but on two separate occasions, at two different points on the record, I found myself in tears. Filling the void of loss and of grief is, though, nothing new in Cave’s work. Cave’s father, who introduced him to literature, died when Cave was just nineteen. “I see that my artistic life” he explained in 2001 “has centered around an attempt to articulate an almost palpable sense of loss which laid claim to my life.” I’ve long agreed with the writer John Doran’s point that a helpful way to understand Cave’s writing is to “picture a youngish Nick Cave unable to subdue the voice of his beloved father…asking ‘is this really good enough Nick?’”

Writing in the Red Hand Files, Cave explained that following Arthur’s passing, “we all needed to draw ourselves back to a state of wonder. My way was to write myself there.” Ghosteen begins to make much more sense in this context – the lyrics are dense with imagination. Cave as fantasy writer, striving for the victory of wonder and the imagination over the horror of things as they are. This fits, too, with the album’s artwork resembling something from blockbuster fantasy cinema – mythology and kitsch in blinding technicolor. The most striking expression of Cave’s push towards wonder is the recurrent motif of horses (also present on the artwork). Horses are mentioned repeatedly across the album, and appear as a lens through which Cave jousts with his views on wonder and creativity. “We are all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are / horses are just horses and their manes aren’t full of fire / and the fields are just fields and there ain’t no Lord.” Better, this seems to ask, to find the wonder in the horses than to give in and be resigned to the purely literal. “We all rose up from our wonder” he croons on ‘Night Raid’, “we will never admit defeat.”

God on this record, as is always the case in Cave’s work, is very much in the house. Jesus lies in his mother’s arms, priests run through chapels, Jesus freaks are out on the street. It’s no surprise though that Christian imagery pulsates harder than it has done in Cave’s writing for decades here at the point when he is most concerned with wonder – Cave has long linked the religious impulse with the creative one. In his 1996 lecture ‘the Flesh Made Word’, Cave explained that “Christ shows us that the creative imagination has the power to combat all enemies, that we are protected by the flow of our own inspiration.” That other messiah, Elvis, also makes a cameo on ‘Spinning Song’ – where 1985’s ‘Tupelo’ saw Cave depicting the creation myth of Elvis’ birth, here it’s the bloated anti-hero who ‘crashes onto a stage in Vegas’, Elvis of the later years, the fall from grace(land). Falling and rising happens a lot on this record, “a spiral of children climbs up to the sun” on ‘Sun Forest’, whilst on ‘Waiting For You’ bodies become “anchors”, bodies falling “that never asked to be free“. I don’t want to dwell on quite what it is that Cave evokes here.

The closest sisters to Ghosteen are Cohen’s You Want it Darker and Scott Walker’s Tilt – like both of those artists, Cave is in the small pantheon of songwriters who can claim genuinely revelatory late periods. Warren Ellis’ electronics – picking up not just from Skeleton Tree but from the film soundtrack work on which he and Cave have been moonlighting – here are at their most dominant and at their most astonishingly beautiful. The arrangements are often sparse and percussion is barely existent, occasionally pattering in and out of view absent-mindedly (one wonders if Jim Scalvanos got proficient at chess during the recording). Where once the Bad Seeds were marked by their bombast, now their sound is as elusive as Cave’s writing can become – Ellis’ synthesizers glow and swell, and occasionally like on ‘Galleon Ship’ they wail like the top notes of anxiety. It underlines the extent to which this is music made by someone in the aftermath of the unspeakable. On Skeleton Tree Cave’s voice was a often a rasp, pushed to breaking point and for very obvious reasons sounding under strain – these cracks were, of course, how the light got in, but it’s a delight to listen to Cave on this record delivering a career-best vocal performance. The weathered baritone is more powerful than ever, and the most affecting moments on the album see Cave creasing – making itself small – into a tortured falsetto.

Of the three ‘parent’ songs, the strongest is ‘Hollywood’. Ellis’ electronics here are at their most malevolent, and Cave alternates between vocal registers to suggest two different stories being told – one of Kisa, forced to bury her child, and one of another person (Cave?) fleeing to Hollywood after a tragedy (Cave has spoken in interviews of considering relocating to Los Angeles, Brighton carrying too many memories). There’s absolutely nothing redemptive about this album – why would there be? – but one moment offers hints about what comes in place of redemption, which is a roadmap through the worst of it. “I think my friends have gathered here for me” sings Cave on the gorgeous ‘Ghosteen Speaks’, as his friends the Bad Seeds chime a celestial choir around him, “I think they’re here for me.” It’s all we can ever ask from anyone.

On One More Time With Feeling Cave railed against the empty platitudes that surround the language of grief – on the album’s title track, he’s found something succinct and beautiful to say about grief, and I’ll leave the last word to Cave, back in the office, working through pain. “There’s nothing wrong / with loving something you can’t hold in your hand.”

https://www.loudandquiet.com/reviews/nick-cave-the-bad-seeds-ghosteen/