Oh, yeah--I had a birthday too.

It's been over a week since I hurt my back and went to the emergency room.  I moved out of my apartment on Monday, though I could do very little to help with the move.  I got a new job on Wednesday.  I'm not taking anymore prescription medication.  And frankly, I don't remember much of last week.  Everything is kind of in a haze, but to be fair, I was pretty doped up on pain killers the entire time.  I would be right now if I still had some.  Well, I do, but you aren't supposed to take ketorolac (toradol) for more than five days in a row.  It's the hyrdocodone I'm out of.  I've been taking ibuprofen, which does not work nearly as well.
Let me just say, I'm ashamed of how little reading I've gotten done considering how much time I spent in bed last week.  I've been reading, on average, about twenty pages a day, I'd say.  It's hard to comprehend what you're reading when you're essentially high, especially when what you're reading is written in the Queen Anne style.  I was thinking that Henry Esmond seems really hard to follow compared to Thackeray's other works, but it's probably the drugs.  Maybe I'll reread it sometime when I'm not constantly impaired.
I've been downloading more music than anything else.  Probably because I wake up extremely early.  Before everyone else, so I just look up music and wander the internet.  Eisley has a new album out that's pretty amazing, and I'm been listening to a lot of MC Frontalot.  Nerdcore is the only hip hop I'll listen to.  I've downloaded about twenty-five albums in a week.  I have to say, just to get it off my chest, I've been listening to the new Hellogoodbye album quite a bit and it's rather good.  This maturer sound they've developed is refreshing.  It's poppy, but not in the dance punk style they used to have, which had long since grown stale.  It sounds more like The Format.  Hell, I even downloaded a William Shatner album.  I was surprised by how much I liked it.
All this staying up late and waking up early shit has got to stop.  Granted, two Saturdays ago--the day after my fall--I slept for nearly thirteen hours.  But I woke up at 5:00 in the morning and stayed up till around 1:30 AM, only to wake up four hours later in extreme pain.  It's been about the same routine since then.  No matter how good I feel during the day, I always wake up around 6:00 or 7:00 with my back feeling completely awful.  Right now is the worst my back's felt at night for a while, but that's probably because I haven't had a pain pill since 7:00 this morning.  Plus, I took a nap after work, and I always feel worse after sleeping.
This post seems in no way coherent to me.  That's the way I've been since the fall.  I have a hard time concentrating.  But maybe that's me blaming my accident for how I've always been.  I have had memory problems.  Not real issues.  Just not as quick on the draw as I usually am.  My wife says I should be back to speed in a little while.  Once I'm completely off of any medication, probably.  Hopefully in a weeks more time I'll stop pausing for two minutes trying to remember something I should have readily available in my mind, and stop filling my sentences with "uh's," "um's," and "I can't think of it right now's."  No brain damage or anything.  Don't worry about that.  I didn't hit my head when I fell, and my new job is at a hotel I worked at before and after three hours of refresher training I was running the shift on my own.  So, my mind is fine, just running a bit slow is all.
Hopefully this doesn't set me back on my reading list, esspecially considering I added a few books to it, I still plan on reading all five of Dickens' Christmas books in December, and I have another big move in five months.  We'll see.  I'm only on nine out of forty-one, and seven of those were in January.  I was hoping to have Henry Esmond done by the end of February, but "there's many a slip between the cup and lip" and all that.  I love that expression.

William Makepeace Thakeray: Second isn't Always the First Loser

William Thackeray had his nose broken twice by two different boys.  That's why his nose looks the way it does in pictures.  But how many men can say they had their nose broken by a friend of Tennyson?  Of course, George Stovin Venables wasn't Alfred Tennyson's friend at the time.  Nor was he yet a Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge.  He was a fellow student with Thackeray at Charterhouse School, the third school he had attended.
Venables described Thackeray as "a pretty, gentle, and rather timid boy."  My response to that would've been, "So why did you break this timid boy's nose?"  We don't know if his broken nose was the result of a swift punch in the face or came about after a fight between the two boys, but we do know that before the first broken nose was finished healing, it was broken again by another boy whose name is unknown to history.
So why all the violence towards this "pretty, gentle, and rather timid boy"?  Knowing what we know about Thackeray today, it's easy to assume he was a sharp witted youth who perhaps made statements his fists couldn't back up.  But if Thackeray was anything like the title character from his novel The History of Pendennis, which he most likely was considering it's autobiographical nature, it is very likely that Venables and this mystery boy were defending themselves against an easily provoked youth.  (Interestingly enough, Venables is said to be the basis for George Warrington, the bosom buddy of Arthur Pendennis.)
We can make some fair assumptions about an author based on their body of work.  For example, only using his works to study him, we can assume Dickens was a sentimental, enthusiastic, compassionate, optimistic, and often ridiculous man.  Thackeray, on the other hand, it would be safe to assume, was abrasive, intelligent, witty, pessimistic, and perhaps a bit of a rascal.  I'd also say he had a strong appreciation for justice and morality, a characteristic he shared with Dickens.  I think it is ever so likely that he quite possibly deserved a punch in the face and possibly gave as good as he got.
In a scene early on in Pendennis, Arthur strikes down a boy for making a rude comment to him regarding an attachment he had made to a low-bred actress.  Hobnell Major is surrounded by his friends, but Arthur, not standing for any jokes at his expense, leaps upon him and knocks him down into an open grave and turns upon Major's friends to see if any of them will have some of the same.  They decline.  It is a very intense scene, and in all likelihood is nothing more than wish fulfillment.  Of course, history doesn't record how many times Thackeray was the one breaking noses, so I suppose we'll never know.

Thackeray, age 2, with his mother Anne

We do know that this timid boy was also a mamma's boy.  Born in Calcutta in 1811, Thackeray can never really claim to have known his father, who died in 1815.  His mother, however, outlived Thackeray by a year, dying in 1864.  She returned to England in 1819, remarried to an old flame, who Thackeray admired and used for inspiration in his novel The Newcomes, narrated by Arthur Pendennis.  From Pendennis alone, we can see something that goes beyond merely a deep appreciation for the matronly figure.  Thackeray's mother would serve, for him, as the prime example of the best in womankind.
When he came of age (twenty-one), he received his inheritance, which he quickly squandered away on gambling as well as funding two unsuccessful newspapers.  He was rather idle in his youth, and after his money was nearly wasted away, he began to consider art a viable source of income.  It was not until after his marriage in 1836 to Isabella Shawe that he seriously turned to writing, which, as history clearly shows, he did pretty well with.
His wife "went mad" in 1840, after the birth of their third daughter.  He spent less time at home after this so he could get work done, but after feeling guilty, he went back to take care of her.  In hopes of curing her, he took her on a trip to Ireland, but while on the way, she threw herself overboard.  She was rescued.  It's easy to assume this was postpartum depression, but considering that she eventually detached from reality altogether and never recovered, confined to a home in Paris for the rest of  her life, it's possible it was something else.  Thackeray looked eagerly for a cure, but never found one.
Being essentially a widower, he did pursued two women after this, one a married woman named Jane Brookfield, whose husband barred him from seeing her, and another named Sally Baxter, an American twenty years his junior, who married someone else in 1855.  Of course, we cannot assume Thackeray was as virtuous as his fictional self, though I will not presume to say if he had a physical relationship with either Mrs. Brookfield or Miss Baxter.  His wife died in 1893, outliving him by thirty years.

Thackeray's caricature of himself

Thackeray's interest in the feminine character is shown throughout his works.  Perhaps this understanding of women is due to his unique relationships with them, as well as the fact that he had three daughters, though the second born died after eight months.  His mad wife might also explain, in part, his interest in Jane Eyre, which he said he read in one sitting.
Thackeray was not unfamiliar with illness.  One such illness struck him in the middle of writing Pendennis and, as he indicated in the dedication to that novel, nearly ended the novel prematurely.  Despite this, he went on to produce several novels afterwords, most notably The Newcomes and his personal favorite The History of Henry Esmond, a novel George Eliot called "the most uncomfortable book you can imagine."
His health began to deteriorate more noticeably in the 1850's, when he was stuck in bed for days at a time.  Much to be expected from a man like Thackeray, rather than help himself, he over ate and drank, as well as got little exercise.  To top things off, he refused to give up spicy peppers, which only worsened his digestion.
On the 23rd of December in 1863, he died of a stroke while getting ready for bed, after coming home from a dinner, where you can be sure he eat and drank his fill.  But it seems to me, if he had given up the drink, the peppers, and the abundance of food, if he had gotten more exercise, we may have gotten a few more years out of him; but it wouldn't seem like William Makepeace Thackeray to me. The savage satirist went out in pure Thackerayan style: stubborn and irascible, just like his most famous characters.
Seven years later, the only writer of the era rated higher than Thackeray would also die of a stroke in his home, Gad's Hill Place, ending what some consider to be the greatest days of the novel.  Today, that man--Charles Dickens--is better known and more appreciated, but there is a reason why Thackeray was second only to Dickens in his day.  They two were distinctly different animals from the other novelists of their day.  In a way, they are two sides of the same coin: Dickens the optimist and Thackeray the pessimist.  But to truly understand the Victorian period, it is necessary to read both, and thoroughly.  Sure, there are other Victorian authors ones need to read--when studying the era--but I deride an Academia that can award someone a masters in Victorian literature without requiring them to read a word of Thackeray.

Books to Read in 2011

For the last two years--the years I've been keeping track--I've had a habit of reading thirty books (not including Charles Dickens' Christmas books, as I've pointed out before).  I'm hoping to change this in 2011.  For this year I've made a reading list of forty books, and I've already completed three books.  I had wanted to reread some books this year, but they just don't fit with my reading list.   Next year will be a year for rereading old favorites; this year is for reading books I've never read before.
Like I said, I've read three this year: St. Francis of Assisi by G.K. Chesterton, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz  and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz (he only wrote two books and I might as well get them both).  I have the next four planned out as well.  The Croquet Player by H.G. Wells, Pendennis by William Thackeray, Gargantua and Pentagruel by Francois Rabelais, and Robinson Crusoe.
Here's the complete list of books I intend to read this year.  I feel like posting it online will help me actually get through them.

Pendennis by William Makepeace Thackeray
The History of Henry Esmond by William Makepeace Thackeray
New Grub Street by George Gissing
The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin
A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis
The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
Confessions by Saint Augustine
Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede
The History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Gargantua and Pentagruel by Francois Rabelais
The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens
St. Francis of Assisi by G.K. Chesterton
The Return of Don Quixote by G.K. Chesterton
Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Baudolino by Umberto Eco
Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
1066 by David Howarth
The Moon & Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham
The Egoist by George Meredith
The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz
The Travels of Marco Polo
Waverly by Walter Scott
The Croquet Player by H.G. Wells
Tono-Bungay by H.G. Wells
Medieval Lives by Terry Jones & Alan Ereira
The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Last Man by Mary Shelley

Another List

Well, since December has reared it's cold, white-bearded head, I suppose it's time again to make the list of books I've read this year.  Sadly, just like last year, it's at thirty.  But at least it's not less than last year.  And just like last year, I'm not including Dickens' five Christmas books that I read every year in December.  I'm currently reading a small collection of essays by William Hazlitt, but I doubt I'll get it finished before January, so it's not included.
I've devided the list into two lists of fifteen (just like last year), and, of course, and asterisk next to the name means I've read it before.  Prepare to judge me harshly.


1.  The Princess and Curdie by George MacDonald
     I first read The Princess and the Goblin in 2006.   It was the second novel I read by MacDonald and the first one I enjoyed all the way through.  I checked all the book stores in town for the sequel, but not finding it, I let it slip from my mind.  I wish I hadn't, because the two should really be read back to back.  They compliment each other in the sense that Goblin is the feminine story while Curdie is the masculine.  Of course, the two are ripe with Christian metaphors, though like most of MacDonald's works, they are never preachy.  It is definitely a classic I'll read to my kids one day.  (My future children, not my future baby goats.)
2.  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
     I had intended to start the year off with this novel.  This was to be my year of reading novels everyone should read.  I made a dent in that list, at least, and I started with this book.  I've already said how I rank the Brontes in an early post, but I'll say again: Anne is my favorite.  That's not to say Charlotte is a bad writer, but having read two of her novels, I find them somewhat trite.  Jane Eyre specifically, I found to be predictable--I knew little to nothing of the story--and often boring.
3.  In a Glass Darkly by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
     Le Fanu is a little know Irish author from the Victorian movement who was stuck in the Gothic period.  This is in no way a bad thing.  In a Glass Darkly is a collection of short occult mysteries, taken from the papers of one Dr. Martin Hesselius, an expert in metaphysics and the occult.  He appears very little throughout though, which is due to him being merely a pretense to publish these all together.  They were most of them, if not all, published separately beforehand.  While the five stories were all interesting and entertaining, the best was certainly the novella length vampiric tale Carmilla, the story of a lesbian vampire's obsession with an English girl living in Western Europe. Not your typical Victorian romance.
4.  Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
     This is a powerhouse of a story.  Like many novels written in the Victorian era, it spans a large time frame and includes a large cast of characters.  Despite that, it is highly memorable and entertaining.  It's easy to see why it was so influential.  What's not easy to see is why Becky is so beloved.  She was the least likable character in it, but feminists see her as a strong woman.  I've never thought being amoral makes you strong.  But again, I think most people miss the point in the same way Blake missed the point about Milton's Satan.
5.  Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
     For those who don't know Jonathan Swift's famous story, it is the tale of a traveler who apparently has the worst luck when he finds open water, and finds himself four times stranded on islands with strange inhabitants who just so happen to lampoon and attack the flaws and foibles of the day.  Of course, this is why Swift is considered by many to be England's greatest satirist.  I would go so far as to estimate that this fictional travelogue is one of--if not the most influential book of the last three hundred years.  It's effected not only literature and film, but also the English language.  Not to the extent of Shakespeare, but certainly you've never met someone who didn't know the word "yahoo."
6.  The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
     Like many people who read a lot of classic literature, this was recommended to me because I'd like the subject matter and the references.  Sadly, it takes more than a mention of Martin Chuzzlewit to get me to like a book.  Do I doubt Fforde really enjoys classic literature?  No.  But this book is trying way to hard to not only make that point abundantly clear, which, by the way, it does not do; but it is also trying way to hard to be eccentric.  Oh, it's kinda cute that Thursday Next has a Dodo named Pickwick, but that doesn't fix the weak points in his plot or dialogue.  I'll probably still read the second one in the series though, since I own it.
7.  David Copperfield by Charles Dickens*
     David Copperfield is my favorite novel.  It's not Dickens' best work.  No, that title would go to Bleak House most likely.  But David Copperfield has sentimental value.  It also helps that some of Dickens' best characters are displayed in this novel.  The wonderfully positive Thomas Traddles, the clearly bipolar and perpetually impoverished Wilkins Micawber, the simple yet lovable Dora Spenlow, the conniving and dastardly Uriah Heep, and the stiff but gentle Betsy Trotwood--and the cast goes on.  Dickens displays his knack for making eccentric characters better in David Copperfield than in any other work.  And it's this knack for the eccentric that I've always loved about Dickens, ever since I first read A Christmas Carol.
8.  The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
     The thing about Beagle is, he looks like a fantasy author.  More than that, he looks like a fantasy reader.  In some ways, this is a good thing.  One can tell from reading The Last Unicorn that Beagle knows his fantasy, especially high fantasy.  The problem is though, The Last Unicorn is high fantasy in a low fantasy body.  (For those who don't know the difference, click on the links.)  Granted, I think I was looking for something a little bit more William Morris, and what I got was more Diana Wynne Jones.  I like both authors, but I felt this book could've been something so much more than it was.  As it is, I found it somewhat forgettable and boring in many places.
9.  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
     I like Vonnegut, but I think I like him in smaller doses than a whole novel.  I've read many of his short stories and never been let down.  Slaughterhouse-Five was, sadly, not as good as I'd expected it to be.  It wasn't science fiction, for one.  That's a mislabel.  I think we all know Billy Pilgrim didn't go into space.  He suffered quite a bit as a prisoner of war, and eventually, he snapped.  That wasn't my issue.  I just got nothing out of the book.  Most of the Vonnegut stories I've read I highly enjoyed and they stuck in my mind long afterwords.  This, once I got to the last page, was out of my head immediately.  Maybe I'll read Cat's Cradle next time.
10. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
      By the time an American reaches the age of twenty-five, if he hasn't read The Great Gatsby, most people assume there's something wrong with him.  It might surprise some, but my school never required me to read it.  I'm not too fond of American literature in general, so I put it off.  I'm glad I did.  I'd already read Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age by the time I got to this, which added to what I got out of it.  I will say though, I felt it was a bit over-lauded.  It was good, but there were many British writers from the same period attacking the same social ills and doing it better.  I look forward to reading more by Fitzgerald though. 
11. It’s Too Late to Say I’m Sorry by Joey Comeau
      I've already expressed my enjoyment of the works of this crazy bastard once before, so it should come as no surprise that I read this collection of short stories in a few hours.  Comeau lends himself to easy reading though.  He's never too deep, but never too shallow.  He tows the line.  I read his darkly hilarious epistolary novel Overqualified last year and I've been reading his webcomic A Softer World even longer, so I knew what to expect from this collection: horror, romance, and a little bit of philosophical musings.  Throw in a little bit (or a lot) of perverted humor and you've got Joey Comeau.
12. The Mill On the Floss by George Eliot
      This is probably not what one would expect someone to read after Joey Comeau, but somehow it happened that way.  I was in the mood for some Victorian idyllic stylings, something like Thomas Hardy.  And who's more like Thomas Hardy than George Eliot?  (I suppose I could've just read Thomas Hardy, but here we are.)  Let me just say, I enjoyed this novel, but it was so slow.  It was like walking up a steep hill the entire time, and then, out of no where, falling into a crevice.  It just ended, and I did not see that ending coming.  After thinking about it, it makes sense, but at the time I was highly confused why she'd end it like that, so suddenly.  I know many people studying Victorian literature usually read Middlemarch, but I'd highly recommend this instead.  It is a biting, but also sympathetic, attack on many aspects of Victorian country life.
13. The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
      I remember that while reading this, I enjoyed it, but I remember very little from it.  I mean, I understand what it was actually about, what the intellectuals say it's about.  Maybe if I were someone who never thought of death and the afterlife it would've struck home more.  It's a very well done novella, but I can list on one hand all the novellas that have changed my life.  There's nothing wrong with it, and I'm glad I read it.  I'd even recommend it to anyone interested in the subject, the author, or Russian literature.  I suppose though, there's rarely a reason to not remind one's self of life's temporariness and the need to live right.
14. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen*
      I first read this in 2007 because a girl I liked told me to read Austen.  I'm glad I did because Austen is a necessity.  I read it at a ridiculous singles conference my church went to. I don't think they meant for me to spend the conference in a stairwell reading alone, but there you have it.  I feel like that's where Cathrine Morland would've been.  Northanger Abbey  is Austen's Don Quixote.  In fact, the earlier novel The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox was used as a model for Norrthanger Abbey.   But anyway, Miss Morland is perhaps my favorite Austen heroine.  She is, I believe, the most eccentric, which to a certain extent means the most sincere.  Naivety is a good sign of sincerity.  And rather than feel sorry for her when she makes her outrageous mistakes, I feel nothing but comradely.
15. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
      While this is barely more a short story, I've added it here because it's classified as a novella.  If you ask the average reader, they'll tell you Death in Venice  is paled by Lolita, but in my opinion, this is the superior work.  His use of the Apollonian life struggling against the Dionysian life, resulting in the end with a failure and Aschenbach falling victim to Dionysus, seems to me far more interesting than the concept tackled in Lolita.  In fact, I'd say, without Nabokov's unique use of prose, Lolita would be nothing special.  Of course, I only see this now after reading Lolita and comparing the two.  But I'll get to my views on Lolita in the next and final list.

Reading list

I don't usually make a reading list, but for once in my life, I have a clear cut idea of what books I want to read.  I'm currently reading Caleb Williams by William Godwin.  This is my list of books to read after that. There will be some free space in between some of them which can be taken up by randomly selected books, but I will adhere to this basic list.


Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy
The Monk by Matthew Lewis
Lolita by Vladamir Nobokav
The four Christmas books of Charles Dickens (as I do every December)
Pendennis by William Makepeace Thackeray
The History of Henry Esmond by William Makepeace Thackeray
New Grub Street by George Gissing
The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

These are books I've felt some sort of need to read more than others.  Some, like Tristam Shandy, I've been  wanting to read for a long while now.  It's not a long list, I'll admit, but what's most important is that they're books I want to read for no more reason than that I think I will enjoy them.