9. 'Their Eyes Were Watching God' - Zora Neale Hurston

There are very few books that I can claim made much of an impact on my life. It seems that there is an incredible lack of quality literature these days... sure, there are plenty of things to read, but how much of it will you really take away with you? This is the reason why I was so moved by Hurston's novel.

Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford, initially a young woman who is simply trying to discover her path in the world. She is forced into marrying someone she doesn't love by her grandmother, the woman who raised her. Their marriage, however, was absolutely not built to last and Janie ends up running off with someone that meets and woos her with the promise of a new life away from all that she has known. She runs off and marries him and lives the next twenty years in a town that he more or less builds from the ground up. She's a middle-aged woman by the time she meets 'Tea Cake'. Despite the fact that he's considerably younger than her, the two fall in love and she moves down to the Everglades with him. Over the span of their marriage, Janie learns more about love and life than in all the years before. More importantly, she learns that despite what people might say, love knows no boundaries.

The book itself, in some places, seems like absolute poetry. The manner in which Hurston describes the world before Janie's eyes is beautiful and lyrical, something that is so rare to find in most novels these days. She makes me feel like perhaps it is, in fact, all right for me to love, in a most ridiculous way, someone that others deem entirely wrong for me. Hurston makes me feel like perhaps I might not be making a mistake in feeling so strongly about a person that is a little unorthodox. Enough reflection has since made it obvious to me that despite Hurston's words, there are some things that while I would love to justify them, cannot be so easily disregarded. Some relationships are simply not meant to last. Some men are not meant to be a part of youre life no matter how you feel about them. It doesn't mean that you cannot wish and long for something better for yourself when it seems that nothing is in your favor. Her novel gave me the gift of hope... hope for something dazzling in my future like the love that she felt for her last husband... or the happiness that simply being alone can provide.

There were so many things that I wanted to say about this and I wish that I wouldn't have waited so long to review it. I'll include more thoughts as they come, but all in all, I have to say that I would absolutely recommend this book to any woman that I know. Men... not so much.

Rating: 4/5

3. 'The Catcher in the Rye' - J.D. Salinger

I'm going to be absolutely honest. I know that everybody and their brother lists this book as being the one that changed their life, but I feel like I maybe read this a little too late. I wanted to like it because from what I understood (or at least from what everyone I know has said) it was a brilliant piece of literature. That might have been the case if I had read it as a teenager when the problems that Holden Caulfield faced seemed a little more relevant... but I didn't. I read it as an adult and the only thing that I could think as I did so was that I wanted to knock him upside the head with something heavy. Preferably a frying pan since anyone who knows me and my literary obsessions will recall my love for Lord of the Rings' Sam Gamgee... but that's beside the point. The point is, Caulfield did nothing but annoy me for page after page of repetitive, endless whining.

So, semi-long story short, this book is about a seventeen year-old boy that has managed to flunk out of several different schools and is currently getting kicked out of another. He whines to his roommate, gets into fights, and then leaves in the middle of the night for New York City. He goes to a hotel, hires a prostitute that he can't end up sleeping with, gets beaten up, and then whines some more. Oh, then he drinks a bunch, goes on a date that ends horribly, whines some more, and then potentially gets assaulted by his former teacher. All the while, he's plotting his escape... because we all know that running away is the best answer when you get pissed off. Did I mention that he drones on endlessly about how much he hates everyone? Because there's some of that, too. Maybe a few other things happen, but I think this more or less covers the basics.

Truthfully, this book made me never want to hear the word 'phony' again. Everything seemed to be phony, but the truth (in my opinion anyway) is that Caulfield was the most phony individual of the bunch. I'm sorry, but there's no way for any teenager to be that fucking cynical. They haven't had the life experience to make them hate existence as much as any adult I know. I guess I just don't have the patience for that degree of melodrama. My life has been fucked up and you don't find me bitching about it to anyone that'll listen. Ok... maybe that's not entirely true, but I can't possibly be as obnoxious as Caulfield tends to be. At least I know when to stop. So, he spends the entirety of the novel complaining about how phony everyone else is without ever pausing to take stock of just what kind of impression he's making on the world. His disaffected attitude toward society as a whole is not fooling anyone. They all know he's just a scared, miserable little child. It's just too bad he didn't realize it sooner.

I'm not entirely sure what I was supposed to take from this book. Maybe the point was missed on me because I'm not a seventeen year-old boy... or a seventeen year-old in general. Maybe I didn't get it because experience has taught me that depression happens but it doesn't necessarily mean you have to drink yourself into a stupor and moan to anyone who'll listen to manage it... and that it's not possible to hate everyone that you meet because almost all of them have at least one redeeming quality that makes their existence worth your acknowledgment.
Rating: 1/5

2. 'To Kill A Mockingbird' - Harper Lee

I can understand why so many people feel the need to read this book. Atticus Finch might very well be one of the greatest characters ever brought to life. The truth is that I rarely find anything worth five stars in my eyes, but that's how I felt while I was reading Mockingbird. The story surrounds the lives of one Southern family...

Rating: 5/5

Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century

On top of the 50 book challenge that I intend to complete starting January 2010, my goal by the time I'm twenty five (March 2011) will be to have read every book on this list at least once. I'll cross them off as I go along and track the date that they were completed. In some cases, the book was finished years ago and an actual date will not be available... not that anyone ACTUALLY cares.

TOTAL: 16/100

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger - 09 February 2010
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee - 06 February 2010
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E. M. Forster
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James
88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie