50 Book Pledge #15: James Joyce—Finnegans Wake

Regular readers might remember my original plans to offer regular updates on my trek through Joyce's final and most abstruse work, Finnegans Wake. But as soon as I set to work on that, the book dove so deeply into incomprehensibility that to even attempt to summarize what I'd read would consist of nothing more than Skeleton Key summaries. Unlike Ulysses, with its connected but distinct chapters offering unique perspectives and pleasures at every turn, the Wake varied as its sections are, flow together with such abandon that I got nowhere trying to parse individual elements of the book/

It was only when I stopped trying to get a handle on the book, to even get a basic footing of where I was, that I even began to get into the Wake. Around that time, however, the book started to make some kind of sense. Based around Viconian cycles, the Wake is, narratively speaking, easy to figure out. After all, Joyce repeats the story ad nauseam, of the protagonist's social rise and subsequent fall from grace over a lewd encounter in a park and his irrepressible guilt. The same characters appear to reenact the basics over and over, each time as new figures with new, gnarlier paths to the same outlet. And in HCE's all-pervasive sense of guilt is the guilt of Ireland past and present, an anthropomorphic realization of the suffocating cloud of Catholicism that hovers over Joyce's ex-pat recreation of his homeland. The only deliverance comes through the water form of HCE's wife, ALP, whose mysterious letter has the power to wash away her husband's sins (or her husband entirely). But ALP, like Joyce's best women characters—Molly Bloom, Gretta Conroy—exists outside her husband's hopeless encasement in Ireland's moral carbon monoxide. ALP's chapter, filled with river names and the constant burbling of water imagery, is perhaps the most poetic, liberated passage Joyce ever wrote.

Other aspects of the story slowly coalesced around these relatable touchstones. The twin sons of HCE, each representing a half of his personality, although not split along the lines one might expect. Shaun, the twin with the capacity for public leadership, is also the one who is insecure, petty and conservative. Shem, disdained by all, is not only the intellectual force that could give that leadership weight but is also the sexual curiosity that will ultimately lay HCE low (the kind of curiosity that can turn to depravity if repressed by the uptight forces of Shaun). Shem, naturally, is meant to be Joyce, which is both deceptively humble self-aggrandizement and, in the case of the chapter that brutally, hilariously castigates Shem, the purest self-flagellation of this guilt-besodden novel. But again, he's really the hero of his own book. Perhaps the cleverest aspect of the entire book, Shem slowly teaching his oblivious brother about sex via the geometrical representation of their mother's vagina, plunges into new depths of sexual morass, but this also reveals the triumphant humanity of this figure when he forgives his infuriated, eroticized and scandalized brother's subsequent outburst.

Entire chunks of the Wake are a mystery to me and shall likely remain so for years, if not my entire life. To even recognize a reference, historical or lingual (or both), in one of Joyce's polyglot puns marked a victory. The only way to get through it was to read it aloud, where the flow of the language barreled over its insensibility. But this also brought out the real hook of the novel, its incessant ability to get a laugh. Anthony Burgess rightfully praised this facet of Finnegans Wake, and regardless of how much one understands of the chapter of the kids doing their homework, or of the nightmarish collage of stories and media at play in HCE's tavern (a prescient bit of attention-deficit sensory overload), this is one of the funniest, cheekiest books ever written.

Already, I see the Wake everywhere I turn. So deliberately obscure, its depths can lure the reader into solving its dream puzzles at the expense of ignoring the surface-level delights that are so dense and ahead of their time that modern works can be tied to them. When I saw David Lynch's Wild at Heart and, even more recently, Lost Highway, the former's pan-temporal existence of all pop culture at once and the latter's Möbius-strip, transfiguring structure instantly called to mind Joyce's magnum opus. I see fragments of it in other films, music, literature and art, and some of its puns even seem to anticipate more modern phrases or events. I have never been so routinely dejected while reading a book, but as each absurdity or deft bit of idioglossia kept me going, my appreciation for this masterwork grew and grew. And if it is so regularly bewildering, that is only because nothing can be said to be like it, even though everything before and after it seems to lead to and issue forth from its oneiric, river language.

50 Book Pledge #16: Laurent Binet—HHhH: A Novel

If two things in this world have been done to death they are the WWII historical novel and glib, self-referential postmodernism that sidesteps narrative for telling the audience how hard it is to write a narrative. But by God, Laurent Binet managed to throw these things together and wind up with the best new book I've read in years. Binet's digressions, though routinely amusing and occasionally a bit grating, add to the overall effect of Binet's attempt to lionize the Czech and Slovak assassins who killed Reinhard Heydritch, possibly the most dangerous Nazi under Hitler and the true architect of the Holocaust. Binet manages to turn all of his story-interrupting tics into reflections of our continuing (possibly endless) quest to make sense of the horror of Nazi policy, and he also increases the tension of the stranger-than-fiction events he recounts with his interruptions and tics. Translated with terrific informality by Sam Taylor, HHhH is a fleet but unexpectedly powerful account of one of the few tales of WWII not covered to death, despite it being one of the most crucial events of the whole war.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

50 Book Pledge #14: Simon Reynolds — Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984

The post-punk era of music charted in Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again constitutes my favorite period of popular (sic) music of the last century. Reynolds' broad overview gives a fair encapsulation of why that is: he persuasively argues that the punk movement quickly reduced itself to regressive rock riffs and a simplistic, unadventurous rebellion that actually reinforced the rock it was meant to destroy. Post-punk, on the other hand, delivered on the promise of their '76 and '77 forbears. Reynolds displays an admirably open appraisal of the various forms of music produced during this six-year period of explosive creativity, lending equal artistic credence to the extreme noise pollution of industrial and just plain out-there bands as well as androgynous, image-conscious synthpop bands. Reynolds finds certain links between all these offshoot genres, noting the intellectual, even Brechtian approach to pop that defined some hit-makers looking to corrupt the machine from within and without, or the debt owed to producers like Giorgio Moroder and Lee "Scratch" Perry. Compared to the purist tone of so much punk writing, Reynolds almost verges on the anti-rockist, and he puts forward the case that Donna Summer had as much impact on this fertile period as the Velvet Underground or Can.

The book falters in its lack of focus, suffering the typical overview's flaw of giving just enough information to intrigue the reader before moving the next group of scene. And if Reynolds critiques so much of punk's values and value judgments, he is not so unlike them in his routine estimation of a group's first work as their best. Not only does he cease exploring this kind of music at the 1984 mark, he rarely even makes vague reference to what some groups did after this cutoff. For example, he speaks of Depeche Mode's early promise without ever touching upon its true creative peak at the end of the decade. Nevertheless, Reynolds at least differs in his appraisal of the early peaks of punks vs. those of the next wave: where punk bands generally fell apart because they could only muster enough energy and spark for one statement, so many post-punk bands assembled out of such varied tastes and intellectual goals that they collapsed from too much artistry, not too little. I added more than a dozen groups to a list of bands to check out reading this book, and I've already discovered some great gems from it. Recommended

50 Book Pledge #13: Alan Greenberg—Every Night the Trees Disappear

A Werner Herzog film shoot is an invariably absurd, harrowing thing, and few matched the intensity and insanity of the production of Heart of Glass. At least, that's the impression I got from Every Night the Trees Disappear, a revised edition of the making-of book written by Alan Greenberg, one of Herzog's early admirers, friends, and witnesses. Greenberg packs his diary with stories of Herzog philosophizing madly, controlling his actors through hypnosis and fear, and treating a pile of dead flies with more reverence and respect than human life. It's a mad tale, but also one that reveals a great deal about how Herzog works, and how he thinks.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

50 Book Pledge #12: Patrick deWitt — The Sisters Brothers

FINALLY getting back to reading after a busy end to my internship and then a week of just being out of it. I took a break from my Finnegans Wake reading and my tear through the Song of Ice and Fire series to check out this highly recommended dark-comic Western. I absolutely loved it. Clearly drawing on Cormac McCarthy, deWitt realizes he cannot capture McCarthy's almost Russian gift for human profundity in minute observation and instead strives to tell a more intimate story of two brother hitmen out on a task routinely interrupted by bleak oddities. It starts off hilarious, twisting that McCarthy style into deadpan humor with greater aplomb even than the Coen brothers' take on No Country for Old Men. Yet the closer it gets to its destination, the more The Sisters Brothers becomes an affecting, insightful view onto filial bonds, strained by differing, sometimes diametrically opposed, personalities and ambitions yet unbreakable and endlessly supportive. Even the sideplot about Eli's put-upon horse Tub is oddly touching, each new indignity suffered by the poor beast a fresh blow. I cared about that pathetic creature as much as I did the protagonists, which is an impressive feat in its own right given their reprehensible lives and the sad banality of Eli's inner narration. This book has been a huge hit lately among a lot of people I follow on Twitter, and I can see why they raved about it. One of my favorite contemporary reads.

Geoff Dyer — Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room

I mentioned reading this a few weeks back and that a full review was on the way. It's finally up at Spectrum Culture. Zona was a great read, illuminating in its anecdotal production details but best for Dyer's beautiful, sometimes poignant thoughts on one of the greatest of all films. There are some hiccups and digressions that grate, but for the most part this is one of the best books on a single movie I've yet read. Highly recommended.

Check out my full review now at Spectrum Culture.

50 Book Pledge #6: Philip Pullman — The Golden Compass

Having seen and quickly forgotten the decent 2007 adaptation of this book, I never got around to its source material, which is a shame because I would have treasured this as a teenager. An accessible fantasy book warning against religion, The Golden Compass could have helped my rough transition into atheism by giving me a storytelling backup, not merely the boring den of facts. And I must say, it's a fantastically swift read, even taking into account I'm an adult and this book can be easily read by children. The narrative momentum never falters in this first installment, and I more or less plunged headlong into the next installment the second I finished.

Robert K. Massie — Catherine the Great

This could have been a great text. Instead, it feels more like a very good introduction to Catherine II for middle schoolers, maybe high-school freshmen or sophomores. It is a genuinely engaging read, however, wonderfully paced and informative with the exception of one too many esoteric asides. Massie has a clear enthusiasm for the material that generally overpowers the nagging realization that he offers no particularly revealing insights on the subject. Overall I gave it a positive score, though I admit it made me look for superior biographies of one of Russia's most fascinating rulers (and therefore most fascinating rulers of any nation).

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

50 Book Pledge #5: Albert Camus — The Stranger

A short novel, but the way Camus writes, it'd breeze by at six times the length. His spare style nevertheless burrows deep into his cryptic protagonist, to the point that it contains ideas well beyond existentialism. A clear absurdist streak marks the meaningless progression of events that occur to Monsieur Meursault, who nihilistically recognizes their meaninglessness despite the occasional, wistful desire to connect with something. Matthew Ward's translation is, I believe, now the standard (for such a relatively recent translation, it is ubiquitous as the default English version), but it's easy to see why. He Americanizes much of the text while still leaving a few crucial words untranslated, especially "Maman," which he rightly ascribes a significance that "Mother" would not convey the same way. I had no excuse for not reading this, and it delighted me through the depression it gave me. In that sense, it's not unlike Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, a (dis)similarly bleak novella that manages to capture a multifaceted worldview and nuanced emotional palette with scarcely more than a hundred pages.

50 Book Pledge #4: Robert K. Massie — Catherine the Great

I can't really talk about this at present, as I'm meant to review this intriguing but occasionally narrow-minded biography for Spectrum Culture. Suffice to say, Massie's enthusiasm for Russian history is clear even without prior knowledge of his other books on various Russian leaders, and I am always both amused and deeply troubled to see just how eerily history constantly repeats itself in this vast, tortured country. Massie routinely compares Catherine's rule to the other "great" tsar, Peter, but he could just as easily have linked elements of her reign and some reactions to it to the Bolshevik revolution, even Stalinism. I'll have more to say about the book later, but for now I'll just leave you with a timid endorsement. I'll make my reservations (and compliments) plain near the end of the month.

50 Book Pledge #3: Martin Amis — Money

Like a Bret Easton Ellis novel as written by John Kennedy Toole, Martin Amis' Money is a savage gutting of the Reagan era as seen through the eyes of a clever but myopic and narcissistic glutton. John Self may not be as fat as Ignatius J. Reilly, but his appetites are more varied and vulgar, as his primary love is money, the root of all evil that allows him to trace his way along several crass desires. As Self gets deeper and deeper into the movie production from hell, everything slowly tilts off its axis until the detestable man is almost rendered sympathetic by the orgy of self-absorption and ego-stroking that surrounds him. I've yet to read a better takedown of the movie industry and celebrity, and the moralistic comeuppance that collapses on the narrative in the final chapters is so uproarious and insane that Amis narrowly avoids preaching for the ghastly hilarity of it all. I'd previously known of Amis solely as Christopher Hitchens' best friend, but now I'm eager to delve into the next book of his I can get my hands on.

50 Book Pledge #2: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — A Study in Scarlet

BBC's simply fantastic Sherlock series inspired me to revisit the Sherlock Holmes stories, and I was happy to stumble across some great new hardcovers from Barnes & Noble that collect all of Doyle's Holmes books into two volumes that cost only $8 apiece. I started, naturally, at the beginning, with Doyle's debut Sherlock novel, A Study in Scarlet. Man, it's amazing he ever built an iconic series out of this book, as it awkwardly ports over the mystery of Edgar Allen Poe (who is namechecked unflatteringly) without carrying over much of the suspense. It hardly even qualifies as a detective novel, with Holmes solving the case almost instantly and Doyle dragging the thing out by suddenly diverting into a strange flashback that uses inaccuracies about Mormons to paint an unintentionally hilarious "sinister" portrait of the religion. Doyle would go on to make one of the most well-known characters in literary history, but you'd never know it just by reading this.

50 Book Pledge #1: Vladimir Nabokov — Pale Fire

Nabokov's Pale Fire may be even better than his Lolita. A total put-on of a work—consisting of a poem by one "John Shade" and a foreword and commentary by Charles Kinbote—Pale Fire almost immediately reveals itself to be a farce, with the foreword so self serving on Kinbote's part that even the praise he lavishes upon his "dear" friend John is, on some level, all about him. The poem itself is neglected, a beautifully structured poem of unabashedly prosaic subject matter, speculating on life by way of the sights and sounds immediately at the poet's disposal. This style was anachronistic even when Nabokov published the book, but there's something charming about "Shade's" creation. That only makes Kinbote's resultant breakdown of the poem all the more hilarious. Vividly skewering the ability of critics to read anything in a work of art, especially if it conforms to some preconceived notion they have going into a piece, the notes flagrantly ignore the sensual (in the literal sense) quality of the poem to speculate about Shade's supposed allusions to the country of Zembla, which Kinbote may or may not have ruled before being deposed. There's not a single page of these notes that didn't make me laugh, even when it delved into darker realms of black comedy. Nabokov loved his pranks and jokes, and Pale Fire is his most immaculately crafted gag.

Jennifer Egan — A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel/short story collection/who-cares A Visit from the Goon Squad has racked up enough accolades for a defining work of our time. After reading it, I can only pray "our time" is not set in literary stone by such shoddy, ignorant documentation. The much-touted stylistic shifts are hardly whirlwinds of upheaval, and the characters are drawn so thinly as to be nothing more than vehicles for easy tragedy, tragedy that works neither on a human level nor the allegorical, societal plane she seeks to pinpoint. A few bright spots of wit and clarity can be found among the detritus, but I regret to say I  found the book to be such a disappointment of half-baked literary knowledge and easily exploited tropes that I was stunned to learn that it was not, in fact, some English major's creative writing exercise.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Books I Read in 2011

I fell shamefully behind on reading when I went to college, first overburdened by an engineering course load then spending so much time writing stories for journalism assignments or delving deeper and deeper into film to tend to my literary interests. This year I vowed to get back into the groove and challenged myself to read 40 books before New Year's. Just last week, I succeeded. For the most part, I read a lot of great books over the year, so I thought I'd share some brief thoughts for them after the jump.

1. The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy — Bill Carter

Less dramatically intense and straightforward than The Late Shift—in part because of the more diverse late-night field that now exists and because so much of the central conflict occurred on television and in constantly updated Internet stories—New York Times television writer Bill Carter’s investigative look at the latest fiasco at NBC is nevertheless well-researched and narratively assured. Perhaps a bit too unwilling to lay blame at anyone’s feet, Carter points out the surprising ties that bind Conan and Leno, from their mutual sense of company loyalty and work ethic to their worship of the Tonight Show franchise and overriding desire to be a part of its legacy.

Carter presents the issue of the Tonight Show as the product of so many compounded mistakes that no one, not even Jay Leno and Jeff Zucker, can be held responsible for the resultant train wreck. But even setting aside my own Team Coco bias, it seems as if that tangled web was primarily woven by NBC executives and Leno, but the depth of Carter’s reporting ensures one cannot stay mad at anyone for a series of decisions made in the attempt to please everyone. But those in entertainment should know you’ll never be able to make everyone happy, and as much of a White Person Problem as this whole saga is, I continue to marvel at how gripping the story can be.

2. Absalom! Absalom! — William Faulkner

William Faulkner’s writing is hilarious, poignant, allegorical, immediate and, quite often, borderline infuriating. It took me three goes with this novel before I finally understood the truth: stop trying to figure it out. Yes, Absalom! Absalom! is allegorical and symbolic, but it works by letting its endlessly overlapping and conflicting histories add up to an emotional, even semi-spiritual, portrait of the post-Reconstruction South. The “truth” of Quentin Compson’s assembled chronology of the Sutpen clan is irrelevant: what matters is just what the contradictions say about them, and of Compson, and of the entire Southern sensibility. Most importantly, though, it speaks to the desperation of the soul, that terrible need in all of us to know ourselves, to know and make our place.

Faulkner’s structure is breathtaking: you cannot even call it ouroboric because that would imply a circular movement. This is less the sight of the snake eating its own tail than the excreted remains of self-consumed serpent. Nearly everything one needs to know is located in the first chapter, but different perspectives encroach, all of them adding, at least, characters’ subjective interpretations and, at most, their freewheeling speculation. There’s Rosa Coldfield’s ingrained hatred casting nightmarish shadows over Thomas Sutpen, Mr. Compson speaking more analytically but also reverently, Sutpen’s own words passed through several generations of lips or, most hilariously, Shreve’s conjecture, an outgrowth of his intense fascination with the corkscrewing story as well as his fed-up attempts to get to the damn point (rarely has a character served as a better stand-in for the audience). And at the center of it all is Quentin, so discombobulated by the Sutpen legacy and what it means to him that he’d eventually throw himself off a bridge, though in true Faulkner fashion, he’d technically already done that.

There are few things more gratifying than wrestling with an accepted masterpiece until you find that when you stop trying to appreciate it, it’s a damn sight easier to love it. It’s till a challenge, but I couldn’t put it down, finally enthralled by Faulkner’s most towering work, even if I still prefer Light in August.

3. Blood Meridian — Cormac McCarthy

Review here.

4. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain

Huck Finn is a serio-comic masterpiece, one of a handful of books in any language to truly contain a laugh a page, but also that rare comedy that can step outside itself in horrifying moments of clarity that do not derail the comedy even as they deepen the text. I remember disliking the final chapters when I read this my freshman year of high school, utterly failing to see Twain’s intention: by reintroducing Tom Sawyer, he completely changes our view on that erstwhile protagonist by divorcing us critically from antics that now seem less precocious than sociopathic and deranged. Furthermore, Tom contrasts the absurdity of romanticism with the meaningful drama of Huck’s realism.

I re-read this over the latest censorship fuss to plague the novel, and as ever I remain in the camp arguing it should never be altered. Twain knew exactly what he was doing using that word, and it makes his satire all the more lastingly piercing.

5. Silence — Shusaku Endo

With Martin Scorsese finally on-track to adapt this long-gestating project, I decided to give the source material a go. I discovered two things: 1) It's obvious why Scorsese would want to film it, what with its themes of religious doubt and suffering lining up neatly with his own preoccupations and 2) As good as the book is, there is room for improvement. Endo's writing segues awkwardly from an epistolary collection of writings from his protagonist, Rodrigues, to limited third-person, a shift that would work better in film where perspective can more smoothly change. By the same token, Endo's direct but resonant prose contains an undeniable power.

The best art dealing with faith is made by those grappling with belief. Endo's priest hero heads to Japan unable to comprehend the rampant apostasy of the recently converted and even a few European priests, despite the reports of horrid, unimaginable torture placed upon them. Once he arrives, however, the unforgiving attitude of the ruling daimyo toward Christians, and even the harsh terrain, confront the zealous missionary with the first resistance to religion he's ever experienced, and all he can notice after a time is the deafening silence of God in response to atrocity. But Endo, who presents Japan as a nation inhospitable to the vision of a Christian God, intriguingly reveals his own unique (and culturally Japanese) take on God/Jesus as a being that sufferers with his followers instead of simply looking down from above. A fascinating, moving book that will certainly rank as one of my favorite artistic endeavors to wrestle with faith

6. The Awakening — Kate Chopin

Read for my American literature class. Before it was assigned, I’d never even heard of the book, or Chopin, despite her groundbreaking influence on my favorite Southern writers. Though her writing only flirts with the stream-of-consciousness Gothic qualities that Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner would later perfect, you can still see the germinating seed here. Still, the novel itself is a bit dry, restrained by its Victorian sentiment of freeing a woman solely by having her act like the selfish, lustful image of man and not by truly probing femininity and gender rebellion. I enjoyed it more as a tongue-in-cheek version of a horror story (Egads! A woman declaring independence!) than as an examination of what it means to be a woman, but that may have been Chopin’s intent all along.

7. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce

Having read only the tiniest excerpts of Joyce in high school, I figured it was high time to dive into that most celebrated (and feared) of 20th century writers. Despite the lengthy annotations (nothing compared to his two biggest works, which contain hundreds of pages of notes), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man alerted me quickly to the rhythm of Joyce’s prose, a bouncy livelihood which more than compensated for his dense lingual experimentation. Given the novel’s focus on a young man who finds himself through his talent and rejects what he considers the banalities of the world, I’m surprised this doesn’t get mentioned alongside The Catcher in the Rye more often, but Joyce goes far deeper than Salinger ever dared, not only conveying Stephen’s growth through the narrative but the text itself. The book starts with a children’s tale using children’s words, and it ends with a well-articulating, radical artistic manifesto (an expression of one’s thoughts made more literal in the epistolary last chapter). Some might accuse Stephen of arrogance, but Joyce is simply refusing to apologize for presenting a truth: an artist, a true artistic genius, must step outside normalcy to better create. Political and religious imagery runs through the book, but Stephen rejects both to pursue creation.

There’s simply too much here to spotlight, but I would like to register just a snippet of Joyce’s gift for wordplay: Stephen Dedalus, a combination of the first Christian martyr and the mythological architect of the labyrinth in Crete, a dichotomy Joyce circles around throughout. Stephen’s father’s name is Simon, and when Stephen has a rush of spiritual shame that leads to a brief dalliance with Catholic living he briefly considers using money to atone for his sin, thus making him guilty of simony. And I cannot quite put into words why I am so affected by one of the last passages in the book, written in the terse bullet-form of a journal entry but full of meaning, as it addresses the genuine humility underneath some "know-it-alls": “Mother indulgent. Said I have a queer mind and read too much. Not true. Have read little and understood less.” I find this passage as beautiful as the novel’s most flowery runs, and there are many. A masterpiece.

8. Notes from Underground — Fyodor Dostoevsky

A terrifying outpouring of bile that at every turn reveals the unutterable sadness beneath the unnamed narrator's screeds. So short it barely constitutes a novella, Notes from Underground nevertheless troubles me more than nearly any other work of art. But its cathartic honesty only makes it more necessary; writing it probably kept Dostoevsky from killing someone.

9. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen

Few things in life are more delightful than sitting back and watching Jane Austen work her magic with the English language.

10. Jurassic Park — Michael Crichton

God, this might be even more awkwardly anti-human than the special-effects bonanza movie.

11. Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991 — Paul Tingen

Tingen makes some weird diversions into talk of Zen Buddhism, and he is occasionally too eager to use all of the notes he collected (every journalist knows you never use all your research) but otherwise his meticulous cataloguing and interviewing adds invaluable insight into the neglected and even mocked late-career of an American icon. I love Electric Miles, and some of the revelations here only made me appreciate Miles' daring sonic explorations even more.

12. Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë

HATED this in high school, couldn't put it down this time. I still don't quite cotton to its almost emo romance, of two insular people basically retreating from the rest of the world to live their Gothic life, but the mash-up of social romance with Gothic horror is not only entertaining but often riotous. Brontë gets in a number of fantastic jabs.

13. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 — Hunter S. Thompson

One of my all-time favorites, densely involved in the minutiae of political wheeling and dealing to the point that it can be hard to follow, yet so ingeniously scribbled by Thompson that it is compulsively page-turning. I reread it all the time, and you can be damn sure I'll be breaking it out in this upcoming election season, which promises to be an outright farce .

14. The Dirt — Motlëy Crüe

I've never hated the members of a band so thoroughly, nor have I ever been so unable to put down a book. The confessions here are demented and disgusting, but the occasional moment of clarity of the addict makes for harrowing self-evaluations. Vince Neil's self-loathing over his fatality-inducing drunken driving is particularly brutal in its honesty. A trashy read, but a revealing one.

15. Ulysses — James Joyce

Life-altering. My collection of posts for each chapter can be accessed here.

16. Leviathan — Scott Westerfeld

Intriguing take on steampunk that also explores a what-if? history re: Darwinian theory and genetic engineering. Shame it's a YA novel, as the story constantly moves away from its fascinating world to focus on clichéd storytelling elements further restricted by the age of the intended audience.

17. The Sirens of Titan — Kurt Vonnegut

One of Vonnegut's best. Surreal and silly, but often so piercing it hurts. Up there with Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle for me.

18. Swamplandia! — Karen Russell

Half of this book is a masterpiece. The magic realist chapters with the daughter make prose poetry out of banal, even ugly, tracts of land. Sadly, the stuff with the brother rates as dimestore anti-capitalist satire, and a garish plot-twist that launches the final act is a predictable and cheap ploy for shock. It's a shame; Swamplandia! started out as one of the most lyrical, intoxicating reads of recent years, only to end up an all too typical disappointment.

19. The Great Terror: A Reassessment — Robert Conquest

Review here.

20. Hitch 22 — Christopher Hitchens

Even his damn memoir is combative. I still can't really write about Hitch yet. Maybe I'll try if and when I get through that massive final collection of essays.

21. The Lost World — Michael Crichton

If Spielberg's poorly aged Jurassic Park is nevertheless an improvement over Crichton's original, it's hard to say who came out worse with their respective sequels. Spielberg's Lost World is a soulless, pedestrian waste of time and perhaps the director's worst film. Crichton's book may be even worse, a lethargic trudge through a pointless plot that exists only to posit how the dinosaurs went extinct. Because we were all on pins and needles to hear what Crichton thought about that.

22. What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years — Ricky Riccardi

Riccardi can be a bit too defensive of Armstrong and defend some questionable career decisions, but his book is as vital as Tingen's on Miles' late career. He makes a compelling case for the artistry, even the barrier breaking of Satchmo's mainstream success, and it sent me scrambling to save up the cash for the new 10-CD collection of Armstrong's post-Hot Fives & Sevens career. It's sad how many supposed music lovers seem to think that Armstrong's legacy stops after those short years near the start of his professional life.

23. The Age of Innocence — Edith Wharton

Succeeds at capturing the rule-ordered social world of the setting that the pain of forbidden love never quite breaks through. I actually prefer Scorsese's film of the work.

24. Dubliners — James Joyce

A suffocating portrait of Dublin, but one that also finds meaning and occasionally even beauty in the characters trapped by Ireland's necrotic past. "The Dead" is, of course, a masterpiece, but I'm still captivated by most of the stories, which can be so cynical, yet so human. It's an inexplicably attained balance, and it's no wonder Jennifer Egan recently failed so badly at writing a postmodern Dubliners for America (more on that later).

25. Franny and Zooey — J.D. Salinger

I never took to Salinger in high school, but I should give him another try now that I'm no longer around people who are, like, TOTALLY inspired by Holden Caulfield. This bifurcated novella was a refreshing reentry into the late author's work, a slightly precious but intensely moving account of genius children in serious danger of falling into incurable waste as young adults. Its short length gives the work a brevity that gets to the heart of the story quickly without sacrificing style.

26. The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky

One of the most psychologically rich novels ever written. Whole pages of neurotic word soup pass without so much as a single paragraph break, but I never once got tired of Dostoevky's epic. Overwhelming in the best sense, Karamazov covers so much ground that only a book like Ulysses, which chased profundity by running in the opposite direction, to minute observation over cosmic melodrama, could find something else to say about the human condition in its wake. The "Grand Inquisitor" chapter is one of the most incisive, brutal things I've ever read.

27. The Help — Kathryn Stockett

An insipid bit of revisionist nonsense that allows a white woman to kind-of, sort-of, not-at-all address her own upbringing by a black maid. But Stockett is so invested in learning that she was actually loved by her own help that she won't let anything in the book that even hints at the possibility that a black woman forced to neglect her own children might only not love a white baby but could utterly resent it. Stockett even talked to former maids who expressed this view while conducting research, but funnily enough that didn't make it in the novel. And why should it? Her deceptive structure only gives the impression of telling black women's stories.

28. Light in August — William Faulkner

I had to wash The Help out of my mouth with a book by a white person that actually gets racism right. Faulkner's novel is a harrowing reckoning of the South's racial past, its shuddered waves of shame and self-repulsion more suffocating even than his works on the South's broader issues with self-identity and lack thereof. My favorite Faulkner.

29. Culture and Anarchy — Matthew Arnold

Keeps all the good bits from Plato and leaves out that whole "censor and punish the artists" chestnut. I still think there's a limiting view to Arnold's philosophy, but this a nice stepping stone to more engaging (to me) philosophers like Levinas.

30. Twilight of the Idols — Friedrich Nietzsche

I love Nietzsche. He's so easy to misconstrue that I'm afraid to even say what I think he believes on any topic, but he is so witty and combative that his philosophy is fantastically readable. As something of a self-summary of intent, Twilight of the Idols is accessible even by his standards, and I loved his thoughts on religion.

31. Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov

As I recall, Lolita was the one Stanley Kubrick film I didn't like, and I was reluctant to delve even into its lauded source material for fear of its potential romanticization of a repellent affair. Happily, Nabokov's playful prose subtly undermines its rhapsodic narrator, carefully making clear that Humbert's self-justification is just that, and that his perceived romance with a girl wise beyond her years is actually a psychologically scarring event that tears down that old-young pairing that runs through literary history. I toed the water with this at first, but I emerged as ready to sing its praises as the host of more qualified literary critics.

32. Elective Affinities — Goethe

Too odd for me to even go into. Not entirely sure what the book is saying beyond the idea of human chemistry being as irreversible and natural as elemental chemistry, but then maybe that's the whole point. I was intrigued throughout, but I don't necessarily know that I enjoyed it.

33. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited — Robin Wood

This critical assessment, split between Wood's original edition and a revised evaluation not only of other Hitchcock films but his own previous writing, is indispensable. Wood's knowledge of various critical theories and his ability to fluidly connect them to practical, demonstrable examples not only deepens our understanding of one of the great directors but also makes complex academic theories more palatable and cogent to a layman like me. This book makes me want to be a better critic, and I think that reading it while taking a class on critical theory helped me understand some of the writers I was reading in that class so much better.

34. A Visit from the Goon Squad — Jennifer Egan

I should have a full review up for this on another site sometime in January, but for now I'll just say that Egan's sub-Joycean stylistic exercises left me underwhelmed, and her characters were so crudely drawn that I could not believe anyone could see any humanity in this work. As social critique, it is laughably clueless, and as literary experimentation, it is infuriatingly safe.

35. Images: My Life in Film — Ingmar Bergman

A surprisingly bouncy read that offered enjoyable insights from the director into his own work, and not always positive self-assessments. Naturally, the autocritique lacks the more layered study a detached critic could bring, but Bergman is sufficiently candid that Images is never just a parade of compliments and self-justification.

36. James Joyce — Richard Ellmann

Review here.


37. Catch-22 — Joseph Heller

I'm going to make a habit of reading this every few years. I first read it in high school and found it funny. Now, I couldn't make it past a page without laughing, even as the more traumatized segments of sheer horror affected me more profoundly. Christopher Hitchens once advised readers to "stay on good terms with your inner Yossarian," and I have a better idea as to why after rereading this all-too-sane farce on the sheer madness of war and the bureaucracy that carefully orders that madness into official insanity.

38. Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings — ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, Robert Bernasconi

I had a hell of a hard time understanding Levinas at first, even compared to my normal difficulty with philosophy. Yet once he clicked, I found I delighted in his thoughts more than just about any other thinker, his beliefs on our innate ethical responsibility to others the most affirming philosophy I've ever heard. There are still huge gaps even in this introductory collection of essays I found impenetrable, but I was not only stimulated by what I understood but utterly moved.

39. Mirroring People — Marco Iacoboni

My critical theory professor gave us this final read as, I suspect, his idea of a reward for getting through various philosophical essays over the semester. Whatever the reason, this fleet, intelligent but layman-targeted explanation of mirror neurons was a great read, and one that offered empirical biological data to support Levinas' assertions of ethics. The notion that we are neurologically predisposed to engage in mimetic and empathetic behavior is exciting, not merely for its revelations of human communication but its implications for treatment of disorders like autism.

40. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — Stieg Larsson

I touched on my feelings on this book with my review of David Fincher's adaptation of it (which not merely surpasses the Swedish version but improves on this source material). Larsson broaches so many interesting ideas but constantly pulls back to rant about the state of investigative journalism, even using an extraneous act after the mystery climax to settle Mikael's scores. Furthermore, Lisbeth Salander, so tragically seen as some kind of feminist action heroine, is so blatantly the fetishized projection of this male author that I couldn't help but feel embarrassed at times. Still engagingly page-turning enough to keep me going, but I was amazed that someone managed to make a near-great film out of this, given what a near-abysmal novel it is.

Richard Ellmann — James Joyce

Richard Ellmann's James Joyce is, quite simply, the best artistic biography I've ever read. Like the work of David McCullough, Ellmann's book is not only meticulously researched (nearly 100 pages are devoted to endnotes) but so lyrically written as to be almost novelistic. At first I did not understand the need for a biography of Joyce, given how autobiographical his work is, but Ellmann beautifully ties even the most minor incidents and acquaintances of Joyce's life into his flowing corpus. In fact, James Joyce could serve as well as a set of notes for Dubliners, Exiles, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake as it does a biography.

Progressing in chronological order, Ellmann sidesteps this predictable, typically tedious structure by making clear how much of Joyce's growth as an artist was specifically related to his constant change. Where others might devote chapters to the subjects that influenced and inspired the artist, Ellmann makes it clear that, more than anything else, time was the great preoccupation of Joyce. Joyce never stopped dealing with the forces that shaped him, he just added countless new observations and studies until he built from microcosmic fragments of Dublin life to a dream language of the universal man. Amazingly, Ellmann captures every nuance of this constant evolution without ever losing sight of the man. Then again, for Joyce, life and literature were one and the same.

Sparing any saintly view of the artist, Ellmann lays out the hardships of Joyce's adolescence and adult life—money was almost always a concern, and when it wasn't, John (and, later, James) made sure to get rid of any comfortable surplus quickly—but never shies away from the negative aspects of Joyce's personality. The same memory that allowed Joyce to reconstruct all of Dublin from European exile also made possible the holding of lifelong grudges, few of which were ever ameliorated. Ellmann even notes Joyce's excitement over the drowning of an ex-friend who attempted to drive a wedge between Joyce and his partner Nora, an excitement arising from Joyce having "predicted" the suicide via Cosgrave's avatar in Ulysses but also perhaps a sense of victory over a sexual rival.

But that's the wonderful messiness of Joyce: everything that made him unpleasant and even withdrawn also made him the great humanist writer of the modern era, perhaps ever. Ellmann focuses so intently on the minutiae of Joyce's life because they inform his entire position, which in and of itself was a radical shift from most novelistic grounding. His worlds were not those of aristocrats or the aspirant middle class but of pétit bourgeois citizens with mundane concerns, and even as Joyce was taking the English language to hyper-intellectual new heights, he concentrated on the simple thoughts of ordinary people. Then he proved that doing so was more daring and difficult than the most lofty and poetic pronouncements.

Part of what makes Ellmann's biography so indispensable is the manner in which he shows Joyce honoring even the people he mocks when putting them down in prose. Ellmann's descriptions of John Joyce, a man of fierce but constantly undulating temperament and extravagant spending far beyond his means, paint a traditional literary portrait of a less volatile Fyodor Karamazov. But as Stephen Dedalus' father, John's stand-in Simon is a small-scale tragic hero, a working class version of a dying king surveying his splintered kingdom. As much revulsion as Joyce shows of the man's weaknesses, he rounds out any simplistic reading of Simon with sympathy and even admiration. For all the symbolism and allusion of his writing, he really wanted to capture people as they are (which is why his work was so often censored or withheld from publication over fears of litigation; he wrote about everything, down to farts and menstruation.)

The portrait Ellmann sketches is rarely flattering. As a lad, Joyce's early intellectualism distanced himself from his peers before he had the literary faculty to prove his mettle. Ellmann routinely quotes verses Joyce composed in his correspondence with people, and a number of them come from the artist's earliest days of writing. Their stylish but empty rhymes certainly do not justify the arrogance of the young Joyce, who would quibble with anyone, even the great Irish poet Yeats, who nevertheless couldn't help but like the boy. As an adult, Joyce was even worse, having moved beyond what few literary heroes he allowed as an adolescent to criticize them ostentatiously. For a man who had practically nothing published by the time he was 30, Joyce could so easily puncture the balloons of others. Even when not discussing art, Joyce's volatile temper could explode without warning, and Ellmann recounts several cases where Joyce pursued litigation for the most petty of squabbles despite even his lawyers saying it would be a waste of time and money. Humble as he could be, Joyce's vanity sometimes demanded a scapegoat.

And yet, he was not an intellectual in the sense of other expatriates of the early 20th century. While living in Paris during the '20s, he did not typically fraternize with the Lost Generation writers and largely avoided conversations with literary types. Ellmann presents fascinating anecdotes of Joyce delighting in the blunt (but strangely spot-on) comments of ordinary people, and the authors with whom he generally spoke were those who could convincingly capturing their provincial voices, not the ones aiming for the cosmos. For example, while living in Trieste, he discovered Aron Schmitz, a businessman who happened to have written two novels at the turn of the century and since hidden them away after an apathetic reception. But Joyce read them and loved how well they captured Trieste's lingual melting pot and wound up resuscitating the man's literary career at the end of his life. Elsewhere, he would entrust the tricky prospect of translating his novel to friends instead of looking for the most educated mind in each country.

These strange quirks are so clearly evident in Joyce's work that Ellmann doesn't even need his routine quotation from the author's books to demonstrate how the man's life informed his writing. The duality of his intellectualism and disdain for those obsessed with the highbrow make him an unwieldy subject, and I was always interested to read not only Joyce's progression through the years but the changing opinions of his admirers. Ezra Pound, Harriet Weaver, Yeats, even Joyce's brother Stanislaus all oscillate between admiration and repulsion, cautious disapproval with gradual respect. That's how difficult the man's work was; even those who admitted its singularity could hardly stand to read it—Ellmann takes an obvious pleasure in pointing out that neither Yeats, who loved Ulysses, nor George Bernard Shaw, who hated its content for what it revealed of Irish life, read the thing from cover to cover. And even when they would come around to one thing, the next would send them reeling. Weaver, perhaps Joyce's most generous patron, exchanged letters with Joyce over sections of Finnegans Wake that show her trying desperately to conceal just how much she clearly hates this new book, even referring to its style as raiding the "Wholesale Safety Pun Factory."

But Joyce never let anyone get to him. Stanislaus, who put up with so much of his brother's profligate spending and erratic emotions out of a childhood sense of hero worship, finally rebelled over parts of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and Joyce simply stopped asking the one family member who understood him for his opinion. Pound asked for changes to Ulysses, and Joyce routinely ignored them. He even acknowledged how alienating his work could be, but he couldn't bring himself to change it. By the same token, Ellmann includes a number of quotes, especially in relation to Finnegans Wake, that suggest Joyce cared far more about pleasing people with his writing than delivering any kind of statement. In conversation, he mentioned using all those river names in the ALP chapter so that someone in the farthest reaches of the globe might one day read his novel and smile at seeing his or her home river mentioned.

Capturing the complexities of Joyce's warmth and aloofness, Ellmann makes a suitably contradictory, dense, yet utterly readable account of the greatest literary mind of the century. Though he does not offer significant diversions for the close relatives in Joyce's life, Ellmann also manages to delve beyond mere summary for such vital figures as Stanislaus, John and, of course, Nora. But everyone who came in even indirect contact with Joyce made it into his work, and by recreating the webs of reading and interaction that shaped Joyce's life, Richard Ellmann did the invaluable service of clarifying the most ambitious literature of any era and any language. I would recommend it to anyone even cursorily interested in Joyce, not as a supplement but a skeleton key.

Harry Potter Books, Ranked

Compared to my marked indifference to the films, the Harry Potter books continue to charm me long after I move beyond YA fiction. The endless exposition does get to me at times, but there's a reason these books caught on: the relatable characters, the engaging plot and the element of surprise that remains in these works after numerous rereads and a general understanding of its wholesale ripoff of classical hero archetypes. I've cheered on Neville or been smitten by Hermione as much as I've been affected by any characters in fiction. So, to offset the light cynicism of my film post, allow me to take a more pleasant stroll down Memory Lane with Rowling's novels.

7. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Rowling's second book has wild tonal inconsistencies between more gosh-gee whimsy and sudden dips into darkness without any kind of balance or transition. The added characters, such as Colin Creevy and Ginny, are largely pointless and suck ridiculous amounts of time from the rich cast of characters already introduced and interesting enough to warrant further analysis. Gilderoy Lockhart makes for a great buffoon, his fame-hungry attention seeking a key counterpoint to Harry's humility, something called into question by so many in the later books. Overfilled with exposition, lacking almost entirely in solid character growth and erratic in tone and thrust, Chamber of Secrets is by far the most frustrating of the novels.

6. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

It's a shame that the most thematically interesting novel of the series is also the most cumbersome and unfocused. The main plot, dealing with an arch-conservative, isolationist propaganda war designed to silence news of Voldemort's return, offers heady social commentary for youth fiction, and the couching of this plot in the loathsome toad Dolores Umbridge, who is terrifying for all the reasons one wouldn't expect, is genius. But Rowling burdens this story with wayward hormones, which she has to spruce up with magic and possession, an attempt to link these asides with the overarching importance of Voldemort's return that ultimately leads only to absurdly OTT and blithely selfish outbursts from a Harry who has never been more unlikable. Tack on the interminable sideplots and what might have been a vicious take on government's unending, counterproductive desperation to never let on that something has gone horribly wrong instead feels like a distended, scattershot rant on puberty.

5. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I've read this book four times and I still don't remotely understand the arbitrary creation and subsequent all-importance of the rules of wand ownership. It's such a random way to handle the climactic duel that I just assume Rowling pointed a wand at her ass and yelled "Accio resolution!" Having only introduced the concept of Horcruxes in the previous book, Rowling leaves most of the object hunting to this entry, leading to awkward plot jerks between hiding out in the woods away from detection and constantly coming into conflict with enemies to destroy Voldemort's soul fragments. Like all concluding entries, Deathly Hallows has to tie up a lot of loose ends, but there is a perfunctory feel to many character returns and subplot payoffs, thrown in just to get a cheer rather than as a narratively justified insertion. Nevertheless, it's a thrilling read when elements fall into place, and the utter disappointment of the convoluted finale cannot undermine a overriding feeling of relief at this poor boy's ordeal finally ending. And it made me care about Dobby, which is kind of like making me mourn Jar-Jar Binks.

4. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Granted, even by Rowling's standards, this trades mood for exposition, but then this is obviously the most child-oriented of the series. Besides, its giddiness is infectious; from the moment Hagrid arrives to remove Harry from his Dickensian trappings, Philosopher's Stone is whimsical, charming and wondrous. It manages to cordon off allies and enemies quickly while giving sufficient reasons why those lines will more or less maintain over the whole of the series. Even the climax, with its multi-stage progression to the final confrontation, is more exhilarating than dark. Not a "great" novel, per se, but certainly the most delightful of the books. It's no wonder this captured so many imaginations, and continues to do so.

3. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

It was obvious in Chamber that Rowling wished to go to less savory realms with this saga, but the pall that hangs over Prisoner of Azkaban is still surprisingly unsettling. The mystery of Sirius Black drives much of this atmosphere, but even in retrospect this book feels dirty and ominous. When the most helpful and gentle character is as rough-looking as Remus, you know you're not in for a sunny year at Hogwarts. Dementor attacks, disappearances, the feeling of always being watched and threatened, Prisoner of Azkaban markedly splits the series from children's lit into the more demanding levels of YA fiction, the rapidity of maturation reflected in the choices Harry himself must suddenly make. While the falling action of time travel and abetting criminals is thrilling, it is the climax in the Shrieking Shack that proves not only the most intense moment of the book but of the whole saga, forcing moral choices of not only Harry but Ron and Hermione that show how adult they really are.

2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Where Azkaban went full-tilt into darkness, Goblet eased back and bit and offered the best balance between the light-hearted wonder of the early books and the darkness to come. The best-paced of Rowling's books, Goblet even manages to go off on its tangents—Rita Skeeter's tabloid hack, the unwelcome return of Dobby—without disrupting the flow, and in many cases she only enriches the book. For example, Krum is an extraneous character, but he serves to bring out the tension in Ron and Hermione's relationship for the first time, or at least to clarify the edge they always had as a show of mutual affection. Furthermore, this is the one book that shifts tones with smooth, natural transition, moving from glee to bombast to creeping menace to full-on horror without flagging. It doesn't get across as much character as the two books to either side of it in my rankings, but the exceptional plotting more than makes up for the relative lack of growth.

1. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

With the exception of the random repositioning of Ginny, the least developed major character of the series, as Harry's sudden love interest, Half-Blood Prince is a nearly perfect character study, incredible given how late in the series it arrives. The dips into Voldemort's past not only elucidate his character but add more depth to Harry, Dumbledore and the relationship they have. Ron and Hermione dig into their tension so fully that its continuation into the final installment frankly feels a step too far because they have nowhere else to go as a will-they-won't-they couple. Though the final book flat-out dives into Nazi imagery, I find Half-Blood Prince, with its sinisterly scribbled textbook, uncomfortably humanizing and literally de-humanizing progression through Voldemort's life, and the horrific ordeal in the cave and ambush at Hogwarts, to be the darker work. And yet, it also weaves a thread of genuine wistfulness into the pages, taking stock of the home Harry and his friends will have to leave behind in the coming war, and it's remarkable how poignant such scenes feel. None of the books is perfect, but the combination of tonal sophistication and meaningful character insight makes this by some degree my favorite installment in the saga.

Robert Conquest — The Great Terror

After reading some of Sheila O'Malley's posts on a book called The Great Terror, I found myself sufficiently interested to order a copy and set about reading Robert Conquest's painstakingly researched survey of Stalin's Terror.

It took me about a month of dedicated reading to finish. Unlike, say, Ulysses, this wasn't because the book was complex or obscure. It was simply too much to handle. The Great Terror is a catalog of death, with enough names listed to fill a war monument. In fact, that's how I began to think of the book at some point, akin to going through each name on the Vietnam Wall, albeit with the added horror of knowing how nearly each of them died. And like the conflict in Vietnam, the Terror was so senseless, so base, so cynical on the highest level that coming to grips with it is such an awful prospect it seems better to simply act as if it never happened.

But of course, nothing ever gets solved that way, and Conquest's book is a necessary slog through Hell to find some meaning, some motive, some psychological tear that explains the system of fear and torture that took over a society supposedly founded on collectivism and the common good. I shouldn't even say "supposedly:" as Conquest reveals, the horrid, mad genius of Stalin's reign was in the dictator's use of such ideals to convince everyone that every arrest, no matter how transparently absurd and fabricated, truly was for the good of the U.S.S.R.

No one was spared. Peasants filled prisons hundredfold past the buildings' limits. Fearing potential coups from the Army, Stalin went ahead and took out their command. The intelligentsia suffered almost total casualties, to the point that Stalin effectively set Russia on a path backwards by killing or imprisoning all the well-qualified people in the union. Even Old Bolsheviks were brought down through slander and accusation until the very architects of the Revolution were recast as spies and saboteurs all along. And the artists, the artists who actually believed in Communism and set to work glorying it, were only censored if they were extremely lucky; the rest suffered harsher fates.

But imprisoning, torturing and killing was never enough. The most insidious, troubling aspect of the Terror were the confessions. It's a brilliant strategy, of course; no matter how many times we hear of coerced confessions, people seem to accept a defendant's admission of guilt as the be-all, end-all of a trial. But how anyone could have bought into that during the Purges is insane: defendants would arrive in court, reject the confession they'd been made to sign, offer evidence to the contrary, then be shouted down and coerced further until a retraction of the retraction was made that same day. The Russian court system was its own satire, and some of the accounts Conquest lists would be funny had they not actually happened and had they not entailed a full physical, moral and psychological breakdown.

The book rarely deals directly with Stalin, because Stalin found so many ways to avoid direct culpability. He'd assign tasks to an upper echelon and let orders filter down further from there, but no one, either out of crazed ignorance or sheer obedience, ever seemed to trace it back to him. Even when Stalin would clear out the ranks of those closest to him, some poor saps who must have known Stalin signed their death warrants (there were hardly any intermediaries between them and the big man) sent letters to him begging for help.

Stalin's genius—and for all his prosaic, anti-intelligentsia qualities, he was in some respects outrageously brilliant—lie in his patience and consideration. By not being the head inquisitor, by not overtly ordering police around but secretly slipping orders through the chain of command, he could always misplace resentment and blame, occasionally giving the people a light morale boost by persecuting the old Secret Police chief for following brutal orders as told. And the sick games he played: more than once, Conquest relates a story of an arrested man being set free, given a phone call by Josef personally, assuring the man that everything will be fine. Then, a few days, weeks, months, even years later, the other shoe dropped, usually on the condemned's skull.

To call Stalin's complete takeover of society goes beyond a cult of personality, something Conquest himself argues. Never noted as a philosopher with the rest of the high-ranking Old Bolsheviks, Stalin so terrified his people into subservience that he soon became hailed as one of the foremost thinkers of the era, offering responses to Hegel and elucidations of Aristotle that never seemed to make their into the record. He could literally rewrite history with a single sentence, forcing historians and anthropologists to flat-out lie because he believed one people descended from a completely unrelated region or civilization. He might have destroyed a country to completely control it, but he somehow knew that his actions would lead to this result, of total thought control. Conquest occasionally returns to the notion that those who felt Stalin was either conducting his purges for the good of the State or was in fact barely involved with them at all "did not understand [him] yet." But it's damn near to understand him even now. Oh, his reasoning, sure, but not the pathology, not the super-sanity of his crazy decisions, all of which led to ruin but succeeded in that they solidified the dictator as complete lord over the people of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

I quaked, cried and heaved reading The Great Terror. It is not merely a demonstration of an authoritarian's capacity for cruelty but of a shared culpability engendered in a society based on fear that perpetuates the cycle. Stalin trots out a few show ponies with confessions in-hand, sparks a web of informants and narks in which people rat out neighbors, friends, even relatives to avoid being arrested for lack of diligence, then get sent to the prisons themselves. If everyone has either been broken into confessing to horrible crimes and made to denounce others, who can claim the moral high ground and oppose the regime? Descriptions of this subtly woven trap tore me apart the way reading about the Holocaust for the first time did. How does one ever come to terms with this? How does any human being have the audacity to claim dominion of this planet when this is what we do with that "authority"?

Conquest's accounts are all the more devastatingly felt for having been culled from the testimonies of those who suffered. Initially, all he had to go on were the bits and pieces of memory and official document the Soviet government had not sufficiently suppressed, and the sheer size of the Terror Conquest nevertheless could capture reveals how massive an undertaking it really was.

His judiciously structured book frames the Terror not as a series of purges but as a mounting attack on the Soviet people, one long crescendo that always traced back to Stalin's first grabs for ultimate power, in this case the orchestrated murder of his rival, the rising star Kirov. From that moment, everyone remotely in a position of status could never simply stand trial for any one crime. Every general, artist and Party member was in some way complicit with either the Kirov murder or, later, the Bukharin "plot" to undermine the U.S.S.R. At some point, even the believers accepted that their fellow cellmates were as innocent as they were.

Importantly, Conquest does not frame The Great Terror as simply a reflection of Stalin. This was not a system turned bad by a rotten apple; this was a poorly-conceived, inherently autocratic society tailor-made for Stalin by those who eventually got an undeserved romantic reputation for breaking with him. Lenin and Trotsky conducted their own Purges, executions and farcical trials, and to look to them as beacons of what might have been is simply reductive. They simply lacked Stalin's talent for institutionalizing these acts; as anti-intellectual as he was, Stalin was oddly correct in noting that the intelligentsia thought too hard in terms of logic when politics was a game of image and suggestion, which he proved hundreds of times over with his sham trials.

The version of the book I read, and the only one currently in print, is of a revised edition published after the fall of the Soviet Union gave Conquest access to buried documents. In almost every case, Conquest's estimations and extrapolations from oral histories and fragments of official accounts were either right or actually too conservative. This is important to note because, upon the book's original publication in 1968, leftists the world over savaged him for what they considered slander. France, in particular, undergoing the May '68 brouhaha, wanted nothing to do with it, with intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre refusing to even consider the possibility of such a damning account of the moral failure of Communism.

But in their rejection was proof of what Conquest attempted to show: that a sense of denial spurred by belief in a cause could lead to absolving the murderers and shunning the innocent. On one level, I can sympathize with this denial, because I can see it more innocently reflected in those Stalin purged: the sheer level of atrocity is so difficult to fathom that the first response is disbelief. After all, Stalin was so...indiscriminate. What might be dismissed as a consolidation of power must be confronted as a crackdown of an entirely different kind. This wasn't even something as transparent as the Reichstag fire or as focused (however huge) as the Shoah; Stalin broke every member of the Soviet Union into submitting to him completely, and he preyed on the humanity of others to cover up his true intentions, which are still incredibly hard to suss out, regardless of how openly he admits his willingness to kill millions.

On the other hand, of course, ignoring, even writing apologia for, Stalin's crimes solely to protect one's rosy view of a political system that has yet to work is pathetic. I'm fairly ensconced in the liberal camp—I do think that the state should control certain enterprises that should not exist simply to make money, such as healthcare, basic public transportation and local/national security. But Communism always struck me as nothing more than the unfavorable opposite of Ayn Rand's absurd vision of Utopia: neither system truly favors the industrious or talented (not even Rand's, which uses all the wrong markers of success to measure moral worth), and both leave huge spaces for an inhuman mind to fill. After not-so-subtly suggesting how and for what duration his critics could go fuck themselves in his updated epilogue, Conquest summarizes the memory of Stalin and the successors who could never fully break out of the system he established by saying, "The world, whatever its other problems, is a better place without them." It is no surprise that Conquest's statement is true; it is disheartening, though, that so many disagree with him solely on blind ideology.

The main lesson of The Great Terror is not that Stalin was inhuman: it's that he was just human enough to recognize how to manipulate others. Conquest never tries to write off Stalin, never takes the simple route of explaining away Stalin's psychology, always keeping focus on how his bad wiring managed to short out the moral fuses in so many subordinates. The descriptions of rapes, beatings, psychological torture made me shake uncontrollably at times; this was a society that put so many people in jail that the only ones left outside were the actual criminals. Petty grudges could land entire families in gulags based on a poison-pen letter without substance from some loon. Children came of age expecting to inform on their parents, leading to what nearly amounted to a feral generation of amoral, vicious teenagers who make the sneering punks hanging around S.E.X. in the '70s seem even more tame and harmless.

How could this have happened? I apologize for the circularity, but I cannot get off this question. How could Stalin permit this, whatever amorality drove him? How could anyone allow it to continue when they could see Russia sliding backwards in front of their eyes? But then, if I was tortured physically and mentally, if my family were threatened with the same horror, and if I knew I would go to prison anyway, wouldn't I confess to make it stop, no matter if I knew the pain would keep coming? It is necessary to approach the Terror as one does the Holocaust: not as the result of one man's insanity but of one collective's willingness to go along with transparent atrocity.

This is a devastating book, a Herculean effort on Conquest's part (he had to piece together the narrative from scattered anecdotes, records and testimonies decades before he could confirm everything), and one of the more damning accounts of man's inhumanity. But I said earlier that it was necessary, and I stand by it. It's no good running away from these horrors, and Conquest's meticulous research helps put the puzzle together and explain how evil seeped into every nook and cranny of an already-flawed system. It's a harrowing read, but also one I have no choice but to recommend. Beyond that, even; it's one of the most important books of the last hundred years.