Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

"He so immersed himself in those romances that he spent whole days and nights over his books, and thus with little sleeping and much reading his brains dried up to such a degree that he lost the use of his reason"

I must preface this post by mentioning that I haven't actually read Don Quixote. Now before you all lambast me for writing about something that I haven't read let me remind you that English majors are professionals at that very thing. But really, despite the fact that I haven't read Don Quixote (I assure you, it is near the top of my 'when-I'm-done-with-my-masters' list) I am well aware of its literary impact and artistic significance. But first lets describe the books themselves.

I have two copies of Cervantes' master work. The first was a fantastic impulse buy from the wonderful Barnes and Noble imprint. This version is a huge, backpack-defying tome, worth it not only for its price but moreso because it includes those wonderful Gustave Dore engravings I've discussed before in this blog. This will likely be the book I'll read when I get around to it, despite the fact that if I read it in public I'll likely get the question readers of big books often get when reading such tomes: "Are you reading the Bible?" (Can anyone explain why 'large book' automatically means 'Bible' to so many people?).

The second version of Don Quixote would be somewhat more difficult to read as it is a complete Spanish edition. Despite the fact that I've retained my Spanish fairly well since high school I don't think this particular language ability is quite up to par with Cervantes'. What makes this book significant is that it was purchased for me by my sister Tamara who spent a semester abroad in Madrid. My family and I had the good fortune to take nearly three weeks to visit her last year. This brings me to my justification for blogging on a book I haven't read.

There is so much about reading books that is augmented by context. Stories, by nature, are meant to carry you to another time and place and allow your imagination to recreate something with which you may not be familiar; literature brings far-off lands to you in a way that no picture or movie can and while there is much to be said for such an experience having context begins to make that experience particularly literary. During our trip to Spain we spent a few days driving through the countryside of La Mancha and I made sure to keep my eye out for windmills. As it turned out, Cervantes' picaresque knight practically came to me. Not only did we happen upon a fantastic statue of Don Quixote himself, but one of our stops was a castle surrounded by period windmills. In fact, my bookmark for my future reading experience will be a Spanish national parks brochure that has a Don Quixote countryside tour map printed within its leaves...so yeah, I have context, which I expect will undoubtedly enhance my experience of one of the greatest tales of blind idealism in the face of a world that is slowly turning its back on the old codes of honor.

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Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Trans. David Stuart Davies. [city?] Barnes and Noble. 2007
Cervantes, Miguel de. El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha. [city?] Lunwerg. [date?]

Alice in Wonderland review postponed

For the sake of continuity I would have liked to discuss the new Tim Burton film for this week's blog but I just haven't found the time (or the marital cooperation) to go and see it. I will probably just end up moving on this coming week but I will keep you posted whenever I get a chance to see it.
In the meantime, wæs hæl!

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll

"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe."

In light of the new Tim Burton film I though it providential that I have arrived at the letter 'C' in my semi-alphabetical exploration of my bookshelf. Hopefully next week's post will be about the film which I hope to have seen by then but today I am writing of the particularly confusing opus of Lewis Carroll's known as Alice in Wonderland (and we'll go ahead and include Through the Looking-glass as well).

This book is one of the most special books in my collection as it was a gift from my late grandmother, the woman to whom I can attribute a great portion of my love for reading. What's more, as you will see from the picture below, she seems to have anticipated my love of reading and of books before anyone else. When I was quite young Grandma Jane used to pick me up from school every Wednesday, bring me home, and read with me. Unbeknown to me each week she had spent nearly the whole week prior deliberating over what book she would read with me. Though I have books that are older and even ones that have been in the family longer it is particularly heartwarming to know that this was the first ever book in my collection (by that standard I have been collecting books for 25 years!).

Since I've started at the beginning so far I have to not that the first experience of this book that I ever had were its pictures. I'm not sure of John Tenniel or Henry Holiday's status among readers of Carroll but their art has defined for me the quintessential look for the book's pinafored protagonist. Before I could understand the book (an ironic statement which I will discuss below) I used to flip through its pages just examining the confusing but expressive features of each of the strange characters depicted there. I even remember wondering how the Jabberwock fit into the plot. Now that I have read both Alice books, I smile wryly at this notion.

When I first read Alice I could not help but hope that there was something really important going on, as if the convoluted plot and colorful cast held some deep secret that could be unlocked with the proper key. I have since been dissuaded from this opinion (which I still feel is a loss-of-innocence moment for me) and rather consider wonderland and its inhabitants to merely represent an early exploration of modernism or absurdism in which the point is that there isn't one. Being at this point a medievalist and tending to study literature with a sort of Ent-ish view of the written word (medieval writers don't tend to say anything unless its worth taking a long time to say) Carroll's narrative is a bit disappointing and even somewhat annoying. That said; I want to clarify that it doesn't make me love Alice any less since her and her hatters and mock turtles are a fun crew for leisurely reading. But if someone out there has this key that I mentioned that will unlock the absurdist mystery I would love to hear it.
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Carroll, Lewis. The Best of Lewis Carroll. [city?]: Castle, 1983

Angels and Demons - Dan Brown

I don't really have a great deal to say about this book specifically. When I read it I read it fast but that is Dan Brown's style. He writes page turners. His style is fast-paced and engaging without challenging his readers too much. In short, Dan Brown writes fantastic movies (note that I use the word 'movies' and not 'films').

There is an interesting phenomenon that I would like to mention before springboarding into a related rant and that is an interesting tendency for readers of authors like Dan Brown to rate the books inside the author's own canon. More than once I have heard of Angels and Demons called a 'better book than The DaVinci Code. I find this interesting since the main character is the same, the style is the same, and the plot is not all that different. In the words of Oscar Wilde "There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all." Despite this, the very same system of valuation is why I own Angels and Demons and not The DaVinci Code.

This leads me to another discussion upon which Dan Brown is the subject. You will recall a few years back when The DaVinci code was on the best seller list and conservative Christianity was in uproar over the supposedly apocryphal nature of the book's narrative. The issue involved Brown's appropriation of some recent pseudo-historical research involving Jesus and the possibility of a romantic affair with Mary Magdalene that may have produced offspring. Thus the term sang riall (royal blood) came to be known as sankreall, or what we understand in an Arthurian context as The Holy Grail (the true etymology of either term is still in question and may in fact be coincidental).

Throughout the DaVinci debacle, while Dan Brown was undoubtedly sipping tumblers of Louis XIV thanks to the attention he received (there is no such thing as bad press, after all) I was wondering the whole time why it was that a work of fiction, not only that but an average work of fiction in the literary continuum should cause such an uproar. It was, after all as I've reiterated, fiction! If there was anything that we ought to be incensed over it would be Brown's lack of credit given to the researchers who developed the theory he used. Why cause such a fuss when, according to his readers, The DaVinci Code wasn't even his best book?

But I guess this is just another entry in a tradition of misappropriations of blame and misguided anger. No doubt it is the same mentality that sought to ban Huckleberry Finn for its use of the N-word. The grand irony that I can't help but point out is that all the fuss made over Brown's book served to canonize it much more solidly in the annals of pop-fiction.

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

"Before I left my bed in the morning, little Adele came runing in to tell me that the great horse-chestnut at the bottom of the orchard had been struck by lightning in the night, and half of it split away"

I sought out Jane Eyre when I was trying to decide between the two career focuses that I had been struggling between. As we know Beowulf and Le Morte D'Arthur won out and I am now a fully committed Medievalist but there was a time when I was very close to committing my lifelong study to Victorian Literature. I know the Brontes don't necessarily fall into the usual Victorian category but there is plenty of gray area between the blissfully ignorant Romantics and the stylized realism of the Victorians. I had mostly been drawn to this ghastly and fantastic gray area by interest in the Gothic Novel. Frankenstein had been one of the most incredible novels I had ever read and I was seeking something similar. Perusals on Wikipedia led me to what some consider the first Gothic novel, the somewhat uninspired Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (which I will blog at some late point) but a former professor's suggestion brought me to Jane Eyre. 

It took completing Jane Eyre for the full effect of the novel to sink in but what it ultimately left me with was a similar feel to the dark, fantastic magic of Frankenstein and the bittersweet denouement of Great Expectations (the first ending, of course). In a world of insulated nobility and romantic popular novels (we have established, of course, my disdain for Jane Austen) Bronte goes to great lengths to convey the unconventionality of the two lovers in her novel. Jane Eyre is plain and of common stock and thankfully is not found to be secretly the daughter of a Duke or any other such ridiculous deus ex machina. Mr. Rochester is a contemplative man who is kind yet has a checkered past and thankfully (spoiler alert) experiences an irreversible impairment before the tale comes to fruition. As unconventional of a pair as these two are Bronte never feels as if the match is fabricated with this intention. Her characters are imperfect people forced to make sense of a world that is grotesque and beyond their control and they do so in perfect, quiet, accepting English fashion.

Characters aside there is one moment that has stuck with me and probably with most other readers of Jane Eyre. Though I have above compared the novel to Frankenstein, Jane Eyre does not contain the magical or pre-sci-fi elements of the former novel. In fact there is only one scene that seems to evoke powers beyond the very human characters that Bronte creates. The reader may note the location of Rochester's proposal to Jane beneath a chestnut tree in the his garden. It is this very same tree that is struck by lightning the next day offering a plethora of symbolic interpretations to trouble the mind of the protagonist as well as the reader. I myself haven't exactly decided how to read this event but the effect it left upon me as a reader stems from a stark contrast with the rest of the novel. For the most part the events depicted in Jane Eyre could easily occur in the real world. Bronte's narrative shows a sustained need to remain within a realistic sphere but this scene makes an exception. It seems that in this lightning strike, despite what it might mean, it is a violent intrusion of the supernatural into a narrative that has developed a certain sense of comfort from the natural and therefore causes our reading of the entire novel to hinge upon it. 'This' thought I as I read 'is my Frankenstein moment.' Though the moment is brief the echo of thunder reverberates through the rest of the novel allowing each plant, shadow, and attic door at Thornfield Manor and beyond to pulse with an eerie life that lends Bronte's work that mysterious Gothic feel that came so close to capturing my professional interest.
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Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ann Arbor, MI, J.W. Edwards: 2006. (Borders Classics Imprint)

The Perfect Library

Amidst the burgeoning hubub of my last semester of Master's work and most especially amidst the hubub of my wife and I opening escrow on our first house I have been thinking less about particular books than the idea of needing to move them as well as where I will be moving them to. I'm pretty sure that I have already picked out which room will be my office/library, pending the wife's approval (who will be seeing the house for the first time this weekend thanks to a 6-week long training on the East Coast) and I have already begun to play a mental game of Tetris in reference to exactly how everything will fit into this room. I will describe the reality of the room in a bit but I first want to detour into the train of thought that this obviously leads me to; my concept of the perfect library.

 

 

As I mentioned last week I have grown up with images of the vast, magical libraries from movies and other real-life experiences. Of course there is always the caveat of actually having the ability to read all of these collected books. As a result my concept of the perfect private library is a bit scaled down but not without its own magical perfection. Thanks to the advent of Google Sketch-up I've managed to put my imagination into some type of tangible form which I will attempt to show here.

 

 

First, my perfect library necessarily exists within the perfect house; my dream house which I have designed complete with a sweeping staircase, fireman's pole, secret passages, and a turret capped with a 360-degree reading room (if you're dreaming, might as well dream big). The library itself is just off the main hall (inlaid with a giant compass rose). The library is entered through a huge green, round door, with a brass knob in its center (I hope you recognize the reference). This door opens into a long room with a high ceiling and light pouring through the window seat directly opposite the door. Directly in front of this window is the desk; a broad flat affair with no drawers, just a nice amount of legroom beneath, and accompanied by a high backed leather executive chair and lit by a green glass secretary's lamp with brass hardware and a little hanging chain. The floor is wood and covered with a Persian rug. On the wall to either side of the door two small portraits: Leonardo DaVinci on the right and J.R.R. Tolkien on the left. Since I am a man of many hobbies the DaVinci wall is dedicated to music. It is divided into two sections of cabinetry; one with long doors opening to a miniature recording studio, the other containing drawers below and glass doors above with lights to illuminate my two most valued guitars. The left hand wall houses the books; the entire wall has been dedicated to shelves, maybe with a few open spots for knickknacks but mostly as a placeholder until more books arrive. This wall also houses the obligatory rolling ladder which leaves just enough room for the other stationary high-backed reading chair. I could tell you about the secret passage but that would be giving away too much, wouldn't it?

Now to face the reality; this dream would probably take up a space larger than the master bedroom in our new house. The room that I will probably use (again pending the wife's approval) might fit the desk and two bookshelves. The music section will likely be relegated to the closet along with a number of winter coats, I'm sure (its no wardrobe, I know). But its a first house. I can't say I've particularly earned the dream library just yet, but I'll be sure to let you know when the book deal hits. In the meantime I'll try to post pictures of the real room as soon as escrow closes.

Library Sightings

So I was thurling in the borogroves of the Cal State Long Beach library a few days ago and happened upon a volume that inspired the following blog-post. The volume below caught my eye momentarily as I was walking to another section of the library. The title took a few steps to register in my brain but it was enough to make me turn back and take a second look. It was entitled How to Collect Books by J. Herbert Slater. I found this title and the existence of the volume ironic for two reasons: only a proficient collector of books would happen to have this book on his shelf, and the book itself (published in 1905) has undoubtedly appreciated, at least slightly, by the very rules to be found in its leaves.

 As I thumbed through its pages, stopping here and there on pages displaying especially valuable binding types and illustrations of the tooled leather covers of a bygone era in bookmaking I began to recall some of my own inspirations for collecting books. I am by no means particularly discerning, at least when it comes to the market value of a particular book and the book pictured above seemed to focus mostly on shelf aesthetics.

In retrospect I am particularly aware of how my concept of a private library was formed. I have a bevy of images implanted in my brain, mostly from films like Beauty and the Beast (you all know which scene I'm talking about), The Pagemaster and The Addams Family (both films have undoubtedly implanted in my mind the small sliver of hope that the right book pulled from the shelf at the right time will quite literally come to life in my hands). Though fiction the libraries depicted there had a profound effect and having actually seen the private library of Thomas Edison (which I have had a hell of a time finding an actual picture of) made me think that such a dream was possible.

But there is one major issue inherent in such vast private collections: the simple fact that the more books one owns, the less likely it is that one has read them. I saw a perfect example of this my first year in college when a hallmate of mind took it upon himself to begin collecting books. Now the volumes with which his shelves were laden were typically those beautifully done printings by Barnes and Noble, often faux leather with gilded pages. I won't lie that I envied his collection as its contents were aesthetically pleasing and artistically valid. The one problem was that this particular student was a business major (I'm sorry to any of such ilk out there but these folk were notorious at my university for being meatheads; only one step above a Comm major *titter*). As a result, I would be surprised if the gilding of his copy of Plato has been cracked to this day unless by a curious houseguest.

This illustration in a way assuages my envy since, though my shelves are scattered with paperbacks, the contents are equally valid and more importantly, I can claim that I have read or intend to read (or at the very least understand) every single volume that I own. And that is a very comforting thought. In a world of Amazon and bargain used books I have learned that the content takes precedence over an unnecessarily high priced printing. Yet I still care enough for aesthetics to organize my collection in Dewey (sorry librarians, I'll need a few thousand more books for Library of Congress to be worth it) and to never, and I mean NEVER, break the spines on my paperbacks.
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(bibliography info thanks to CSULB's Library Catalogue)
Slater, J. Herbert. How to Collect Books. London, G. Bell & sons, 1905.