Decadence and Dorian Gray

When I studied abroad in Paris, I learned the danger of false cognates--for example, the word excitée, which you think would mean "excited," an expression I use about once a conversation. As in "Dear Madame, I am so excited to stay with you this semester!"

Well, it means "excited," all right--just not the kind of "excited" you might initially imagine. Something I found out a good month into my stay. Only the French.

My favorite false cognate--one much less likely to get you into trouble--is the word décadence, used not in the sense of a dear, metabolically-blessed friend's dessert specialty (a Nutella-berry-ricotta pie) but rather to signify moral decay and social decline (pies = immorality?!) I picture decadence as a combination of the English and French senses of the word: a luxuriant, silk-swathed, chocolate-covered, hedonistic degeneration of civic virtue.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is really a portrait of decadence in turn-of-the-century England. As you probably know, it's the story of a beautiful young Adonis who, Faust-like, compromises his soul for eternal beauty and youth after realizing that "the life that was to make his soul would mar his body." His consequent descent into corruption and cruelty leaves him unscarred, while his portrait becomes increasingly wizened and gruesome--a meter of his actions. He's egged on by Lord Henry, the symbol of corrosive hedonism, who gets all the best lines in the book: "The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer." "I wonder who it was who defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given." And my favorite, "To define is to limit," which could be the manifesto for my generation's "hookup culture."

The book goes from zero to Poe--twisted and gothic--in the course of a few chapters, which I probably should have expected but didn't, and by the surreal, horrifying end, I was shivering under the covers (and had to sleep with the lights on). Dorian Gray was fascinating and brilliantly-written...but don't read it in the dark.

I've been remiss...

From the age of seven onward, I kept a never-ending series of journals--in composition books (I liked their retro appeal), on a Word document on the family Gateway marked "PRIVATE!!!--KEEP OUT!", on parchment paper with a calligraphy pen (how I wasn't stuffed in a locker at some point in my public school career is still a mystery), and yes, even on an early blog, in ninth grade, where I went by the unfortunate online handle "Chacha." These life-documentation endeavors would always begin earnestly enough: "Dear Journal, Hey! What's up? Let me introduce myself, since I think we are going to get pretty well acquainted, and since I will write in you every day. I'm in the fifth grade, I like blue and playing the piano and Twizzlers. What about you?" This poor, silent, unobtrusive new friend would promptly be forgotten a couple of days later. Skip to Mom-enforced spring cleaning time two years later, when I would discover its sad black-and-white-speckled self underneath a family-size pack of the aforementioned candy. "Dear Journal, Oops. LONG time no talk. So much to update you on. Wow. Middle school is sooooo different...check out this Gelly Roll pen."

My love of starting journals, and my difficulty keeping them up, is just to illustrate that I am not the world's greatest daily updater by any means. Doing almost any non-hygienic daily task, really, is challenging. Which is why I am late writing this post. My original idea for this blog involved reading a book and then writing about it early over coffee the next day, preferably after having gotten up at 5:30am, eaten fruit for breakfast, and done an hour of yogalates.

Alas, after a day of work, a midnight snack of Nutella and TV, and having just squeaked by my ridiculous self-imposed midnight deadline for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I have three books I have yet to write about, all of which were interesting and rare and complex. So here goes:

Monday was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This book had been so hyped to me that I was prepared to hate it. I loved it. Oscar de Leon is the winningest protagonist, a "ghetto nerd at the end of the world." He is an irrevocably dorky, literary, overweight Dominican gamer growing up in New Jersey who compliments girls in the 'hood on their "pulchritude" and "insouciance." The story traces a Kennedyesque curse on Oscar's family, called the fuku, which has ravaged and ripped apart the de Leon family; the fuku's counterforce, in a sense, is love, both romantic and familial. Books painted as tragicomic are so rarely equal parts both, but this one actually is--it is heartrending and alternately hilarious. The narration reminded me a lot of another book I like quite a bit, The White Tiger, which also has the kind of distinctive, unselfconscious, first-person narrative voice that allows you, the reader, to forget the author's presence altogether. Oscar Wao was also filled with tidbits of Dominican history--which I know literally nothing about--in amusingly sarcastic footnotes that Michiko Kakutani informs me are "David Foster Wallace-esque." Another author to add to the ever-growing list...

Tuesday was Men Without Women, an early collection of short stories by Hemingway. When I was in high school, we had a "Hemingway unit" in which we all had to read The Old Man and the Sea (likely my least favorite Hemingway book) and then pick another novel or work of his to read on our own. (I picked A Farewell to Arms--the romance! the war! the Italian setting! the tragic end!) Anyway, a vast majority of students ended up reading Men Without Women because it was by far the shortest. I happened across a copy the other day and picked it up, having never read a Hemingway short story.

Aside from a mutual love of Paris, Hemingway and I have very little in common--he is, after all, the whiskey-drinking, bullfighting, womanizing, mustachioed, comma-eschewing epitome of Man (three of his books made it on the "The Essential Man's Library" list that I somehow stumbled upon while picking books to read for this project.) But I have always been strangely attracted to his work. The short story form fits especially well with his style--the unfinishedness, the economy of prose. I loved a few stories and could definitely have done without others (the bullfighting ones in particular...)

Wednesday was The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, who writes (I believe) in Czech and in French. I could not imagine translating this work, complex as it is, into English. Loosely, it's a story of two couples living in Europe in the Prague Spring of 1968 and of dichotomies: lightness/weight, love/lust, cyclicality/linearity. The idea of "unbearable lightness" comes from the book's rejection of history's cyclical nature--if everything were to happen once, and once alone, then humans are unburdened: "what happened once might as well not have happened at all...history is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow." I found the story completely frustrating and dreary, the writing beautiful and pithy. For example, on coincidences, which play a huge role in the novel: "It is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences, but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in daily life, for he therefore deprives his life of a dimension of beauty." Or on kitsch: "Kitsch excludes anything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence..." Kundera has a brilliant way of putting things.

And now it's on to Dorian Gray, and hopefully a timely entry tomorrow!

The List!

Well, a week has passed, and in the interim, I've cleaned/feng shui'd/archived everything in my room, vestiges of my college life--threadbare green bathrobe, array of French dictionaries, plastic dishware, fifteen-year-old plaid couch, "Quote of the Day" board (wishful thinking, of course...it was closer to "Quote of the Month")--relegated to storage, Proustian madeleines of the past. (Maybe this is a little melodramatic. After all, my budget and life over the next three years could easily be titled The Ramen Years: A Sequel.)

And also this week, after much deliberation, soliciting of personal recommendations, and perusing of lists along the lines of "1000 books you MUST READ BEFORE YOU DIE," "The Literary Bucket List," "You Don't Understand Literature, America, or Life Unless You've Read ____", I compiled my reading list! (Read about the project's inception here!) At this point, it numbers 45, equal parts fiction and non-fiction. (It was 35, then 40, and is uncannily growing longer every time I glance at a newspaper or a bookshelf and think of a new book I need to add.)

I wonder if I should've made this an entire list of classics--the Shakespeare plays I never read, the Russians I missed out on, the dreary stuff (looking at you, Bleak House) I'd purposely avoided--instead of what it actually is, an inchoate hodgepodge of bestsellers and recent Pulitzer winners and items on mandatory summer reading lists and interesting-looking things I've always wanted to read. But what constitutes a "classic," really? Style? Subject? Timeliness? Timelessness? Popular consensus? Some convergence thereof? Maybe it's a title bestowed, like sainthood, years after the book's modernity. Maybe it's a designation requiring the Potter Stewart approach--"I'll know it when I see it." At any rate, the very incomplete, terribly random, and surely oversight-filled list below contains anywhere from one to forty-five "classics."

Week One

(1) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

(2) Men Without Women, Ernest Hemingway

(3) The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

(4) The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

(5) Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama

Week Two

(6) Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

(7) To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

(8) Closed Chambers, Edward Lazarus

(9) Zeitoun, Dave Eggers

(10) The Stranger, Albert Camus

Week Three

(11) As They Were, M.F.K. Fisher

(12) Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez

(13) Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse

(14) Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger

(15) Life of Pi, Yann Martel

Week Four

(16) The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

(17) Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

(18) Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States, George R. Stewart

(19) Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

(20) Supreme Courtship, Christopher Buckley

Week Five

(21) Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee

(22) Dreaming in Hindi, Katherine Russell Rich

(23) The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton

(24) Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer

(25) The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell

Week Six

(26) Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky

(27) The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

(28) Atonement, Ian McEwan

(29) A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn

(30) Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Week Seven

(31) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

(32) The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

(33) Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen

(34) The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

(35) A Passage to India, E.M. Forester

Week Eight

(36) A Year in Provence, Peter Mayle

(37) Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

(38) Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

(39) America's Constitution, Akhil Reed Amar

(40) When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa, Robert H. Bates

Week Nine

(41) Catch-22, Joseph Heller

(42) The Road, Cormac McCarthy

(43) The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

(44) Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald

(45) A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel

What is the "Book a Day" Project?

I was a tremendously avid reader as a kid. We're talking stacks of novels ranging from the Boxcar Children to the Brontës; the skills to make a PB&J (without crusts) with one hand as the other was thumbing through beloved dog-eared copies of the Anne of Green Gables books; an encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of the March family; a pair of enormous, round, purple glasses that predated Tina Fey geek-chic; and a continued inability to conduct a normal conversation without working in a Harry Potter reference of some sort. That's not to mention that it is virtually impossible for me to leave a Half Price Books without buying something, and that my currently terrible vision is certainly the result of the hundreds of pages I read (clichédly) under the covers, in the semidarkness, way past a strict 9pm bedtime.

Unfortunately, one of the sad truths of growing up is that being assigned things to read makes them less fun, and the more assigned things one has to read, the less one actually tends to read. A very recently graduated college student, I'd found myself reading less and less of anything outside of my thesis topic (most recently the Bush torture memos, which were both gory and questionable in both style and substance) and the required stuff on the syllabus (generally completed the night before a test, which made it decidedly less enjoyable). Having gone to a math and science high school, I missed out on a lot of the classics and made a heroic effort to catch up--which ended the moment I read the first two sentences of Moby-Dick.

Seeing as I am entering law school this fall--the place where assigned reading reaches its hyper-apotheosis, in those capital-S Serious books whose sole function is to intimidate those who think you, the bearer, understand its contents--now seems like the perfect time to start my Book a Day Project. The "book a day" idea was inspired by a beloved political science professor's PBS series on the Supreme Court, which included a feature on Justice Hugo Black, who--according to the series--read a book literally every single day until he died. I intend to do the same--except just for the summer, and with breaks for weekends (and for catch-up, if need be). If a book is excessively long I'll spend a couple of days on it, but I'll try to stick to the promise and title of this blog as best I can. As the above-mentioned prof often says, once Hugo Black, you don't go back.

"Why?" you ask. "Aren't you going to be doing Herculean amounts of reading for the next three years and likely the rest of your life?" To which I respond, "Probably. Actually, definitely." But this is my last, glorious, extended stretch of summertime freedom, and I intend to milk it, sprawled out on a hammock (until the weather gets fried-egg-on-the-street-like, likely in July) with a new or old classic. I'll catch up on things I never read, things I've always meant to read, things I didn't know I wanted to read until someone mentioned them. I'll try to cover fiction and nonfiction, novels and shorts, biographies, autobiographies, even prosopographies! Religious and heretical, prosaic and poetic. Memoir and fantasy. I'll try to sample little bits of everything without taking the fun out of anything. And ultimately, as everyone probably does, I hope to rekindle my first, best love.

Stay tuned for a reading list!