A few weeks ago Monkeytoe said something on the forum to the effect that the best way to make himself lose interest in a book is to assign it to himself. Amen to that. So, instead of reading anything from my 2005 reading list, I am reading The Complete Sherlock Holmes and listening to Sense and Sensibility, which I have read at least twice before.

I’m sure I’ll read something new and challenging again someday. Right now, my brain and I are on summer vacation.

The Sign of Four. And now I understand why no one ever gave me any Sherlock Holmes to read when I was a kid. Between the cocaine use in this one and the polygamous rape in the last one, I am actually sort of glad that I didn’t read this in the sixth grade.

You can see Conan Doyle getting comfortable with his characters here, settling into his formula. This is better than the last one. (I’ve read enough of the next title to know that Conan Doyle starts slipping; in this story Watson’s future wife is an orphan, but in the next collection she will go off to visit her mother. Oops.)

A Study in Scarlet. After embarrassing myself by failing to realize that The Final Solution was about Sherlock Holmes, I decided it was time to introduce myself to Arthur Conan Doyle. I am reading them in order, so this is the first one. It has rough edges: the long flashback was jarring and not especially effective, and in this one Doyle hides the ball from the reader so that there is never any hope of solving the mystery along with Holmes. Actually that may be true of all the Holmes stories, but it’s a little annoying to someone who is used to current mystery novel conventions, in which hiding the ball is considered cheating.

This book surprised me a lot. I expected Arthur Conan Doyle to read a lot more like something between Poe and Dickens, but the language is surprisingly modern. And I had no idea of the extent to which Agatha Christie just plain stole from Sherlock Holmes — Hercule Poirot and Holmes, Hastings and Dr. Watson are different characters, but only slightly, and the relationships certainly follow a formula.

The anti-Mormon sentiment was rather jarring. The book was a fun read but some things just don’t age well.

With honors.

Gilgamesh : A New English Version. Here is what Amazon says about this new version:

The acclaimed translator of the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita now takes on the oldest book in the world. Inscribed on stone tablets a thousand years before the Iliad and the Bible and found in fragments, Gilgamesh describes the journey of the king of the city of Uruk in what is now Iraq.At the start, Gilgamesh is a young giant with gigantic wealth, power and beauty—and a boundless arrogance that leads him to oppress his people. As an answer to their pleas, the gods create Enkidu to be a double for Gilgamesh, a second self. Learning of this huge, wild man who runs with the animals, Gilgamesh dispatches a priestess to find him and tame him by seducing him. Making love with the priestess awakens Enkidu’s consciousness of his true identity as a human being rather than as an animal. Enkidu is taken to the city and to Gilgamesh, who falls in love with him as a soul mate. Soon, however, Gilgamesh takes his beloved friend with him to the Cedar Forest to kill the guardian, the monster Humbaba, in defiance of the gods. Enkidu dies as a result. The overwhelming grief and fear of death that Gilgamesh suffers propels him on a quest for immortality that is as fast-paced and thrilling as a contemporary action film. In the end, Gilgamesh returns to his city. He does not become immortal in the way he thinks he wants to be, but he is able to embrace what is.Relying on existing translations (and in places where there are gaps, on his own imagination), Mitchell seeks language that is as swift and strong as the story itself. He conveys the evenhanded generosity of the original poet, who is as sympathetic toward women and monsters—and the whole range of human emotions and desires—as he is toward his heroes. This wonderful new version of the story of Gilgamesh shows how the story came to achieve literary immortality—not because it is a rare ancient artifact, but because reading it can make people in the here and now feel more completely alive.

Audible has a very nice audio version of Mitchell’s translation, and that’s what I listened to. I do not have much to say about it except for the following:

• I had no idea what this was about before I started it.
• “Enkidu” is the funniest name ever.
• The oldest book in the world is very dirty. A holy prostitute hangs out in the woods with her legs spread waiting for the object of her seduction to come and put his penis in her, just like that! And he totally does it! And then later he curses her, and in his curse he talks about her sucking someone’s rod and asking him to touch her vagina. Just like that! The oldest book in the world is porn. That rocks.

The Kite Runner. I am going to go against the weight of critical and popular authority and say that this is a bad book. At first I sort of liked it, and then I thought that while it wasn’t a particular good book, it was still a decent page-turner, but by the time the narrator got back to Kabul I had decided that this was a bad book, a manipulative book that is either politically naive or just plain evil. Friends don’t let friends read this book.

I’m going to give you Amazon’s description and review to balance what I am going to say. This seems to summarize the prevailing sentiment about The Kite Runner:

In his debut novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini accomplishes what very few contemporary novelists are able to do. He manages to provide an educational and eye-opening account of a country’s political turmoil–in this case, Afghanistan–while also developing characters whose heartbreaking struggles and emotional triumphs resonate with readers long after the last page has been turned over. And he does this on his first try.

The Kite Runner follows the story of Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of Amir’s father’s servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s, the boys are inseparable. They spend idyllic days running kites and telling stories of mystical places and powerful warriors until an unspeakable event changes the nature of their relationship forever, and eventually cements their bond in ways neither boy could have ever predicted. Even after Amir and his father flee to America, Amir remains haunted by his cowardly actions and disloyalty. In part, it is these demons and the sometimes impossible quest for forgiveness that bring him back to his war-torn native land after it comes under Taliban rule. (“…I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”)

Some of the plot’s turns and twists may be somewhat implausible, but Hosseini has created characters that seem so real that one almost forgets that The Kite Runner is a novel and not a memoir. At a time when Afghanistan has been thrust into the forefront of America’s collective consciousness (“people sipping lattes at Starbucks were talking about the battle for Kunduz”), Hosseini offers an honest, sometimes tragic, sometimes funny, but always heartfelt view of a fascinating land. Perhaps the only true flaw in this extraordinary novel is that it ends all too soon.

I will disagree with that assessment of the book’s flaws; I found the last half of the novel to be one of the most interminable stretches of prose in my recent experience — and I just finished The Scarlet Letter. I can think of three much bigger problems with The Kite Runner: it needed an editor, it needed a third-person narrator, and it needed political objectivity.

I will take the first point last because I am going to include spoilers in that part, and I want to warn you in case you go ahead and read this stupid book despite my very sincere wish to spare you the wasted hours. So I’ll start with the first-person narrator, which is kind of tied in with the lack of objectivity. The first-person narration is a problem here for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Amir is a complete ass. Even people who liked the book have noted this issue, and while he is definitely supposed to be a flawed character, you get the impression that he is more flawed than the author believes him to be. Amir’s flaws become the novel’s flaws: he is inobservant, lunk-headed, emotionally dense, self-centered, and a big whiny baby. Also, as another character offhandedly points out, Amir is a tourist in his own country: as a son of privilege, he really doesn’t know or understand that much about Afghanistan’s sad history, and since he is our only window, we are left not knowing much about Afghanistan, either.

This would not necessarily ruin the novel if the author were more observant than Amir himself. A lunk-headed narrator can reveal a lot in the hands of a good writer, but Hosseini is nowhere near that talented. His shortcomings are revealed most starkly by the fact that this is a political novel above all else, but it tells us nothing about the real troubles in Afghanistan; the United States figures heavily in the story but only as a sort of shining promised land for refugees. The CIA’s involvement with the mujahidin and the subsequent rise to power of the Taliban? The CIA’s own web page tells you more than Hosseini’s novel does. In this version of the story, the Taliban comes out of nowhere, and they are bad and mean because they are sociopaths. Which may be true, for all I know, but it sure makes for an unsatisfying novel. And as if the Taliban weren’t bad enough without embellishment, Hosseini adds organized child molestation to their list of crimes. It takes an awfully bad book to make you feel like the Taliban is being unfairly portrayed.

And as for the editing … Well, without spoilers I can tell you that the writing is just plain bad at points. Hosseini never trusts the reader to be more adept at picking up subtleties than he is himself, so the novel is full of repetitions, clichés, and belaboring of the obvious. Not only are the events contrived and obvious, Hosseini makes a point of pounding the symbols and foreshadowing into the ground by telling you, over and over, anything you might have missed. If you were completely stupid and had never read a book before.

The rest of this post will contain spoilers, which you can read anyway if you don’t want to read this book, or if you are one of those people who always guesses plot twists before they happen, because if you are any good at all at guessing the end to stories, you will know everything that is going to happen in this book well ahead of time. But consider the rest of this post my service to the world, both to hack writers and to readers who would like to save time by knowing what will happen in all the hack novels of the world, without having to actually read them. Let’s call it:

Beth’s Guide to Spoilers

• If a character notices something in another character’s face that reminds him of something, he’s not sure where he’s seen that look before, but it is oddly familiar: that second character is secretly related to someone to whom he is not supposed to be related.
• If two characters in a novel are unable to have children, and one of those characters is carrying terrible guilt over having betrayed a friend: eventually he is going to make retribution by adopting the child of the friend he betrayed.
• If a character who has just received bad news goes to take a bath and is then really quiet for a long time: he has slashed his wrists and you should stop reading immediately and go call a doctor.
• If a character is described as being a whiz with a slingshot and someone mentions offhand that he never goes anywhere without said slingshot: expect him to do something contrived and ridiculous with a slingshot.
• If you are reading a bad novel about Afghanistan in the 1970s and it happens to involve a playground bully: he is totally going to grow up to join the Taliban.

I could have written this novel myself after the first chapter. You could have, too, if you’ve ever been to the movies or read a novel or watched any of those grainy clips showing atrocities committed by the Taliban.

The Kite Runner is a bad book. It doesn’t work as a thriller because predictability is not thrilling. It does not work as a character study because the characters are either unlikeable, unbelievable, or both. It does not work as a political novel because it is politically uninformed. It is a bad book, and I think you should read something else.

The Portable Greek Reader. I am having trouble sticking with any new books, especially fiction, so I am reading this for now. I expect that these Greeks are going to kill me, plus these are old translations and some of the exerpts seem fairly random and abrupt, but wow, is Auden’s introduction a good read.

I’ll be honest — I wanted, and sort of expected, to come here today and say, “I kicked that test’s ASS.” But that’s not exactly how I feel. I feel pretty good, and I think I passed unless they fail me outright for stupidly forgetting that I had mentioned A Room of One’s Own in two sentences in one of my morning essays, and then using it as the basis for my afternoon essay. The rules of the test barred us from discussing any text more than once, but I am hoping that that means principal texts and not off-hand citations. I hope.

But I only feel pretty good. I don’t think I kicked anything’s ass.

The questions were significantly harder than the difficulty of the texts would have led one to expect, except I did sort of expect that, once I worked out a theory of who I thought was on the exam committee. My first guesses were mostly wrong, I think, but my current theory is based on the presence of a Linda Hogan book on our list, an alleged accidental admission in class combined with the prevalence of 19th century literature, and the fact that only one person on the faculty seems to be willing to admit to having read the David Lodge book. Most of the professors who volunteered to do review sessions looked at the critical works list, including the Lodge novel, and said, “Wow. Huh. Well, good luck with that.”

Anyway, if the committee is who I think they are, they are a good bunch of professors, but I was right to expect difficult questions. I did think that at least two of the questions were probably recycled from other exams because they did not feel like a good fit with our reading list, but maybe I was just blanking on which texts would work best with them. I feel very sorry for anyone who followed the bad but often-repeated advice that a former classmate of ours has been passing around since she took the exam a year or so ago, which is that you only needed to read seven texts in order to pass the exam. That was dumb advice for a lot of reasons, the most obvious being that some years the test includes a section of short-essay identification questions, and you would fail that section if you had only read seven texts. (We did not have such a section, and we have known for two weeks that we would not, which is why I stopped studying all the short poems in the last two weeks.) The other reason it is dumb advice is that the test is not the same every year, and on ours, for instance, you had to discuss a minimum of nine texts, and the essay questions were specific enough that I don’t think you could have just thrown any random nine texts into the mix and not run a significant risk of having absolutely nothing to say.

I felt morally compelled to read everything, anyway, and even though the test is over I am still feeling a little guilty for not having reread “Nature” or The Waste Land. But that moral compulsion apparently made me a freak, since hardly anyone read both Great Expectations and The Portrait of a Lady, and a whole lot of people did not read Wide Sargasso Sea or any Chaucer or Milton.

I read all of those things, but I only discussed the Henry James, and in fact I only wound up discussing one work that was not written in the nineteenth century. I wonder if the committee will fail me for being so one-dimensional. It is unlike me to be so Victorian, anyway, because as an undergrad I mostly skipped the whole nineteenth century except in survey courses; my classes were all focused on the early twentieth century, and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And I’ve only taken one class on nineteenth-century lit in grad school, as well.

Another funny thing: I noticed in the review sessions that all the professors were talking about Kant, about The Critique of Pure Reason, post-Kantian this and pre-Kantian that. In four years at this university, I swear nobody has mentioned Kant, and now Kant is turning up in all the review sessions and making me go, “Oh! Yeah! Of course. That makes perfect sense.” And yes, Kant turned up in one of my essays. Maybe two of them, I can’t remember. I am very amenable to suggestion.

Anyway, here is what I wound up writing about. Committee members, I think at least one of you reads this page, so here is where you should stop reading if you want to preserve the blind grading.

The first section was a brief (one-hour) essay on British lit. Two of the questions made me one to get up and leave the room. One was about aesthetics and morality and required us to discuss three works, one was about post-colonialism (I think), and the third asked us to discuss how two British poems reflected changing attitudes toward war and violence. I chose the latter even though at first I could not think of any poems on the list that would work for the question, except for Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” But then I remembered Yeats’s “Second Coming,” which is probably my favorite poem ever because I am easy and predictable like that, and also I know it by heart. Knowing things by heart is good for the comp exam, because they like it when you quote. I know a lot of “Charge of the Light Brigade” by heart, too, as it turns out, but I did not trust my memory (honestly, I hate that poem and I wasn’t even entirely sure that it was 600 and not, say, 6,000) so I didn’t quote it. I was a little mean to Tennyson, so I hope no one on the committee is a Tennyson groupie. (I think actually there is one semi-groupie, but if so, he already knows how I feel about Tennyson and he didn’t fail me the last time around.) That was one of the easier questions once I thought of two poems that would work.

The second question focused on American literature, and again we had to choose one of three, and I immediately ditched the one about the American family because for some reason I just did not feel like discussing As I Lay Dying, and then I ditched the one about man and nature because I thought it wanted me to discuss Solar Storms and I suddenly could not remember anyone’s name. And then I realized that the one about the nineteenth-century American fascination with the fallen woman was perfect for something I had thought about just this Tuesday, when I read an essay discussing The Scarlet Letter as an exploration of the struggle between America’s Emersonian ideals and its Puritanical origins. I disagreed with some parts of the essay (mostly because I don’t think Hester is pure Emersonian any more than Dimmesdale is pure Puritan), but then in a review session about Portrait of a Lady, the professor mentioned someone’s (Bloom’s?) theory that the book is basically a re-exploration of Hawthorne, and specifically an examination of that same Puritan/Emerson dichotomy. And then I thought of how a fallen woman is really the perfect focal point for that conflict, and then I thought of a way to discuss Isabel Archer as “fallen” in spite of her chastity, and bam, that was a really fun essay to write.

The third question left me at kind of a loss. It was a comparative British/American essay, and one option wanted us to discuss notions of masculinity in Sam Shepherd’s True West and I could not remember the brothers’ names, and another wanted a discussion of race or otherness and I suddenly totally blanked on Wide Sargasso Sea, so I chose one about class and status in the two countries, and I focused on something that struck me for the first time last year when I read Jane Eyre and Frederick Douglass’s narrative back-to-back: the fact that both books are full of the phrase “my master,” how different the connotations of that term are in each work, and the fact that Jane Eyre was published in 1847, and Douglass’s narrative in 1845. So I talked about British class structures and how they infuse Jane’s weird balance of submissiveness and its opposite, and then I said some stuff about Douglass that was probably dumb, but you know what, at this point the printer in the computer lab had broken four times, the IT techs and our advisor were standing around talking in outside voices about six feet from my work station, and Word had crashed on me eleventy million times. I did my best.

Finally, after lunch, we got what are usually the theory questions, except we had these four weird choices that were not theory so much as they were … weird. (They were “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” James’s “The Art of Fiction,” Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Lodge’s Nice Work, which is a novel.) We did get a question I’d expected, which was to discuss the way our four selections addressed the role and purpose of literature. We also got one about Lodge’s discussion of several theoretical schools, and then we got the one that I wanted, which was to take one of those four works and apply it to two texts which we had not previously discussed, which allowed me to write an essay I’d thought of at four a.m. earlier this week, discussing Emily Dickinson as the exception that proves Woolf’s rule (not so much about the room of one’s own as about isolation, education, and the lack of an established literary language for women), and Mark Twain’s fictional Emmeline Grangerford as Woolf’s worst nightmare.

Yes. I did. I discussed “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d.,” with a straight face on my comphrensive exam. Actually I talked about her as an example of the Victorian “scribblers” whom Twain was satirizing, but still. Emmeline Grangerford. Go, grad school.

Anyway. It’s over. And I did file for graduation, so unless I fail, I am all done and I’ll be graduating on May 22. I’m still a little shell-shocked, because I was starting to think I’d just do this forever.

… I will have either passed my master’s exam, or I will be … well, never mind. In eight hours I will have passed my master’s exam. Let’s just leave it at that, for good luck.

Of course I won’t know if I’ve passed for another month or so, but in eight hours it will be over. What this means for you is that I will stop talking about Nathaniel Hawthorne and move on to something interesting. Let the cheering commence.

Red Poppies: A Novel of Tibet. This has been on my to-read list since before it was even published in 2003, and I finally had time to crack it open this morning. After one chapter, it reminds me a lot of The Tin Drum. This is how Amazon describes it:

The sweeping epic novel Red Poppies, by Tibetan author Alai, is set in eastern Tibet in the middle of the last century. It chronicles the waning days of the once-powerful Tibetan chieftains and the rise of the Communist Chinese state. The tale is narrated by the son of one of the most powerful chieftains, a son considered an idiot by his family. But this supposed idiot consolidates his family’s power and wealth with peasant good sense and cunning. And cunning is what is required to survive in this brutal world, where tribal revenge is exacted by ordering decapitations and the cutting off of tongues and ears. There’s plenty of lusty sex in this picaresque novel, as well as bloody battles, devastating earthquakes, and the political maneuvering of Tibetan monks. The writing, translated from Chinese by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin, is beautiful. In one strange and wonderful scene, mice are drawn to an opium processing shed by the intoxicating aroma; they gather on the rafters, swoon into the vats, and then are cooked and eaten as delicacies.

Red Poppies became a bestseller when it was originally published in China in 1998 and went on to win China’s highest literary award in 2000. It’s the first book of a projected trilogy from the author, so readers have much to look forward to.

So far it looks like the story will be brutal, the writing lively, and the narrator a little smarmy and annoying.

The Final Solution: a Story of Detection. What a lovely book. I didn’t intend to finish it so quickly; I thought it might at least get me through the post-exam weekend. But I finished it this morning, a scant four hours before the start of my exam.

I loved this book a lot, both because of Chabon’s skill with language and image, and because of his usual genre-tweaking. In this case he is playing with the British detective novel, specifically Sherlock Holmes, which I will now confess that I totally did not get until I just went and read the Amazon review two minutes ago. I have read a whole lot of British mystery novels but I have never read any Sherlock Holmes, so that is my excuse. Now I will have to reread it, maybe after reading The Complete Sherlock Holmes.

Given my obvious ignorance of what was going on here, I’m not going to say anything else about the novel, except to repeat that I loved it a lot. The story goes to dark places but has the characteristic Chabon happy (or as happy as possible) ending, which I find myself appreciating even though I usually don’t care about such things. And I really liked this summation at the end, which I think might be Chabon’s theory about why we love mystery novels:

The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings — the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life.

The continuation of that thought, on the other hand, might be his theory about why mystery novels are ultimately a little unsatisfying:

And yet he had always been haunted — had he not? — by the knowledge that there were men, lunatic cryptographers, mad detectives, who squandered their brilliance and sanity in decoding and interpreting the messages in cloud formations, in the letters of the Bible recombined, in the spots’ on butterflies’ wings. One might, perhaps, conclude from such men that meaning dwelled solely in the mind of the analyst. That it was the insoluble problems — the false leads and the cold cases — that reflected the true nature of things.

Immediately after that he adds another line that in turn calls that theory into question, but you’ll have to read that for yourself, because it is a bit of a plot-spoiler.

Excellent read. I can’t speak for how the Holmes character works if you know Arthur Conan Doyle, but it works just fine if you are dumb like me and think the nameless detective is just, you know, a nameless detective.

The Kite Runner. The first part of my exam preparation was kind of fun, because I reviewed things like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre on audio while I cleaned the house or worked in the yard. The last month, however, has included audio selections along the lines of Emerson, Thoreau, Milton, Melville, and Hawthorne. All good stuff, but my ears are bored nearly senseless.

This is my antidote. It is very good so far.

The Final Solution: a Story of Detection. This was supposed to be my post-exam reward, but I am starting it early. Just try and stop me.

After I finish this I am going to start at the top of my 2005 reading list and see how far I get before I can’t stand it anymore. I am really looking forward to Red Poppies, the first item on the list, but it’s really long. I can’t do long right now.

The Scarlet Letter. I quit. I have read enough. I am now forgetting basic plot elements, so that means my brain is full and I am not reading or even reviewing anything else between now and Friday morning. Fuck it; if I have not learned enough to pass this exam in the last four years, I am not going to learn it in the next two days.

I ditched the audio version of this and skimmed the text for scenes and images and lines I wanted to remember, and then I totally forgot them an hour later. Pearl is a brat. All the men are hateful. Demi Moore sure was pretty, though.

Can it be Friday now? Pretty please?

Today I will tie up the loose ends. Almost everything is crossed off my list. I am still listening to The Scarlet Letter on audio, but I’ve reread it very recently so I don’t really need the review. Right now I am selecting my main texts, the ones that I hope I will get to use because I have details and even some passages memorized.

I have reread every single thing on the list except for Emerson’s “Nature” and a few short poems that were just not sticking with me no matter how many times I read them. (“In Praise of Limestone” and “Ode to a Nightengale,” I am looking at you.) I feel guilty for not reading and understanding and committing to memory every single thing on the list, but you know, most of the people taking the exam did not read Great Expectations or Wide Sargasso Sea or Portrait of a Lady. Most of them did not reread the Milton or the Chaucer. I think I will be fine.

I will be fine, right?