Chet Reads & Writes*

I wrote this post with a 5 minute timer running. It was something that wife thought could be a good idea to get the creative juices flowing for the day.

2010 has been a good year.

Despite the fact that when it began I was probably at the most rotten place I’ve ever been in my life. After months of unemployment I was working a temp. job. It was one of those classically horrifying cubicle places. I now have a new respect for Office Space, and anyone who makes their living in a cubicle.

I eventually moved on to a new job at a bookstore. This is the best job I’ve ever had. As with any job there are moments of uneasiness and instability, but overall I love it. I’ve made some great friends from working here, and learned a lot more about myself and my abilities. I also have a continuous stream of books.

In August my family came to visit that was awesome. I was able to show them around Lincoln and had a great time for a solid week. I can’t wait for that to happen again.

In October a great friend from high school, however rare those are, came to Lincoln to cover a football game. It was amazing. We spent 3 days hanging out and walking around downtown Lincoln. There are some snazzy pictures from that.

In November, wife and I went on a trip to Chicago and Ft. Wayne, Indiana. I love my wife and the trips we take together. No matter how nervous I am about traveling, she makes it better!

Back in September I stumbled upon a forum post at Library Thing about a BBC Meme. This particular meme is very similar to the lists of movies we’ve all read through and marked up in our magic way in order to display our theatrical conquerings. However I prefer this list, because a long list of read books is always more impressive than hours logged in front of a television. According to the person who posted this list at Library Thing the BBC believes that most people have only read 6 out of the following 100 books.

I’m not entirely sure how this list came to be, especially since some of the items are sort of duplicates of others, Hamlet and The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

I’ve striked the ones I’ve read, italicized the ones that are incomplete and made bold the ones I want to read.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien**
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams***
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
39. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
40. Animal Farm – George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown****
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
44. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies – William Golding*****
49. Atonement – Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi – Yann Martel******
51. Dune – Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
61. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
68. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
70. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
71. Dracula – Bram Stoker
72. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses – James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal – Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession – AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
89. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
93. Watership Down – Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
97. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
98. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
99. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Read: 23
Incomplete: 4
To-Read: 15

These numbers don’t really bring me up to the full 100, however it does bring me over the requisite 6, but I don’t mind. I’m not interested in a lot of them at this time, but maybe that will change. Any good reasons I should read the unmarked ones? Leave a comment.

**I started these and stopped. I attempted to read them at the height of my fantasy obsession, and couldn’t get through them. I’ll probably try again.
***This is probably the best series of book ever. I love Douglas Adams’ writing. I just picked up the sixth book in the trilogy. Adams had started it, but passed before finishing. It was written in his stead by Eoin Colfer.
****I don’t know why this is on here, but Angels & Demons isn’t. It was clearly the better book.
*****Probably my favorite book.
******In the top running for Chet’s Favorite Book.

I’ve recently finished Tim O’Brien’s In The Lake of the Woods, one of his few that I had not read before. If you’re at all familiar with O’Brien you know that his novels always relate back to his experiences in Vietnam as an infantryman in the 1960s. His writing isn’t for everyone, but I love it. I don’t think In the Lake of the Woods overtook If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home in my Tim O’Brien ranking chart, but it’s definitely above Tomcat in Love.

In the Lake of the Woods is about John Wade, recently failed U.S. Senate candidate and Vietnam veteran, and his wife Kath. After his loss in the primaries John and Kath retreat to a lakeside cabin in northern Minnesota. Everything is peaceful and life as usual between the unhappily married couple when late one night Kath goes missing. The rest of the novel is spent learning about John’s violent experiences in Vietnam, the growth and demise of his relationship with Kath, and the nature of her disappearance. Rather than building this story as a traditional mystery, O’Brien chose to sprinkle in several different Evidence chapters throughout the book. Each one takes a new look at what might have happened to Kath, and ultimately leaves the reader with the choice to decide which scheme they liked better. I won’t spoil any of them here, but let me know if you’ve read this I’d like to know what you think happened.

The horrors John Wade faced in Vietnam are the most difficult I’ve read from Tim O’Brien. There were multiple instances where I was in a strong reading groove, but then I’d read a Vietnam chapter and I’d have to put the book down. Despite these scenes being hard for me to swallow, they are also some of the strongest passages of imagery that O’Brien has ever written. Don’t let the tough parts deter you from picking up this book though.

While reading I noticed, as have others, that O’Brien peppered in some of his classic characters and scenes that can be found in his other stories. I’m pretty positive these are recycled because they have great personal value to O’Brien, but I have also seen that some people find it to be trite at this point. One returning character type is the Native American soldier serving alongside the main character, another is the guy who steps on a landmine and is blown into a tree, and of course the main character who has the opportunity to escape to Canada.

In the end, I really enjoyed the book. I gave it 5 stars in my journal and over on Goodreads. Check it out for yourself and let me know what you think.

This post may contain information that people who haven’t finished the book don’t want to know.

Last time I set out to write about House of Leaves I had intended to finish off everything I had to say. Then I had banged out almost 500 words about Johnny Truant and decided that if I expected anyone to read these, then Navidson should probably get his own write-up as well. For the sake of brevity, here we go!

Will Navidson and Karen Green lived within a rather tumultuous love affair. Karen, a former model, and Navy, a globetrotting photojournalist, have a semi-happy life, with two children, but they wanted more. They wanted a house to call their own, a home where they would be together and their children could grow up happily with both parents around. A few weeks of happiness, then a strange hallway between two rooms and an extra quarter inch. Then a trip across the country, and upon return a mysterious, ashen hallway has appeared. That was a quick rehash of the events that led to Navidson’s final decent into the house alone.

As much pain as the shifting house caused this family, the chain of events eventually comes full circle to help Navidson understand where his love and attention belongs. The house leads to a reconciliation between Navy and Tom, his twin brother. Navidson also began to see that the house was causing him to lose so much in his life, and that it needed to be ended. His last adventure into the house was to find finality. To see what happened at the end. He wanted the darkness to overtake him, and leave his family alone.

I feel that there’s a lot that can be said on this subject, how much do I personally want to write about it and analyze it? Not much more at all. I’ve just about crossed the line of too much analyzing , and I’ll start ruining the book for myself. So to circumvent that I’ll jump to my conclusion, too bad I don’t have a mat.

Karen Green, no matter how much she disapproved of Navy’s actions, she loved him absolutely. The ultimate proof of this was her willingness to not only enter the house alone, but to walk into the darkness within. She turned her back on everything in life in hopes of finding Will Navidson a final time. That my friends, is love.

My parents recently came to Lincoln to visit Nicole and I. It was a pretty awesome time! It’s nice to have family around every so often, especially after going nearly a year without seeing them. That though is a story for another blog altogether.

Today I’m here to show you guys my fancy new journal! At Indigo Bridge we have a super neat Moleskine display, and this past Friday we received two of their Passions Book Journals. Naturally I was thrilled, as these journals have been nearly impossible to get into stock, much less keep in stock. I haven’t added anything to the journal yet, but it’s mine. My awesome mom bought it for me, along with some other goodies that I will be sharing soon!

This journal will be great for me to keep handwritten notes about what I’m reading, while I’m reading it. I’m terrible at remembering to type my notes, especially since I usually read just before bed. So here’s to hoping that the post quality will only go up here.

Do you keep a book journal, or any journal for that matter?

This post may contain information that people who haven’t finished the book don’t want to know.

This is part one of the end of my House of Leaves series. I did some reading and some thinking. A lot of people have spent a long time discussing the many, many nuances from this book. I will be more than happy to discuss the book with everyone that’s read it, and wants to raise some new points with me; however I’ve decided that for the purpose of this blog I’m only going to expand on what I personally took away from the book. Bear in mind that this blog will be shorter than my initial feelings, and contains some ideas inspired and accepted from the Wikipedia article on House of Leaves.

At the heart of it House of Leaves is a love story, or stories even. The top most layer revolves around Johnny Truant and love in many forms. We see Truant through a difficult phase in his life, but from his writings we learn about much of his past. At first the only love Johnny is struggling with is finding a woman to complete him; his stories of sexual promiscuity, and his complete infatuation with “Thumper”. As he sinks deeper into his obsession with compiling The Navidson Record we start to see that there are questions within Johnny about the agape his mother, Pelafina, deserved, and the self-love that humans need to be able to prosper and remain happy.

Toward the end of story we see Truant going through some positive changes. Most of them occurred after he came across the band in New Mexico. Where he met someone who cared about him and his story more than anything. He left the band to their thoughts, and never let them know who he was, but it seemed to me that those people caring about him truly helped him see some positive light in life.

I’m still not entirely sure about Truant’s feelings toward his mother. The Whalestoe Letters is immensely helpful in seeing Pelafina’s worldview, and the constant love for a son that appears to have abandoned her. Though Johnny seems absolutely lost between whether his mother was strangling him or hugging him after the hot oil incident. What do you guys think? For me I think Johnny comes to realize that his mother was taken away to Whalestoe for the good of everyone. She needed the supervision found there, and he acknowledges that she believes everything she ever did to him, was truly out of love for him.

Truant is a difficult character to pin down in totality. He’s broken. He’s a liar. He’s trapped. There is enough happening to him that entire dissertations could be written solely concerning the life and feelings of Johnny Truant. Please discuss him with me in the comments though!

I don’t usually include images on the blog, however because of the ergodic nature of House of Leaves I want to share my favorite page from the book.

I loved this page not only because it starts with a Poe quote, continues with a solid paragraph of Braille, and of course has the Braille translated in a footnote. You may not like it, but I loved the poem in the Braille. No other page stuck with me as much.

After this post I’m going to put up a small collection of other examples of pages from the books, but I want to see your favorite pages too!

Are you reading this as a Facebook Note? I promise you, it looks way cooler at it’s site of origin: http://chetgassett.com. Please follow the link to see the post with it’s original full-color formatting, and freedom from spoilers.

It took much longer to get through House of Leaves, than I originally thought it would. Between visitors, work, and enjoying the summer months in other ways, I allowed myself to meander through the long ashen hallways found within the Navidson’s house. I’ve decided that there is a lot I’d like to share from this book, and to do so properly is going to take more than one post.

To start I’m just going to share the basic lasting effects from this story, and make a few comments about its arrangement. I’m do not intend to release any information in this post that would spoil the book for someone else, but if I come across a section that I feel might be a little too revealing, I’ll make sure you can skip over them without too much effort.

The book is presented innocently enough as a non-fiction write up on the documentary film The Navidson Record by Zampanò, of course there are also the hundreds of footnotes and tangents presented by The Editors and Johnny Truant. As I made my way through the book I quickly discovered that the notes surrounding Johnny Truant are just as important to the development of the over all feeling and characters of the story as the Minotaur mythos.

If you’ve heard anything about this book it’s probably been one of two things: It’s terrifying and will most likely induce nightmares. The text is arranged in such a manner that the person running the printing press is either a child, or totally unstable. For me, there were no nightmares. I can see how under the correct circumstances, or with enough claustrophobia, this book could be quite distressing. I don’t think I can say it enough, I do not recommend this book to anyone who suffers from extreme bouts of claustrophobia; however Danielewski’s ability to relay the vast emptiness within the house is one of my top reasons to recommend this book.

The printing on the other hand, is exactly what you’ve heard. It will have you turning the book to angles you’ve never read at before. You’ll be looking for people to translate things for you, and mirrors to read backward text, you’ll wish you knew Braille and there are a couple bars of music. Your pulse will increase, you will become anxious and nerve wracked. You’ll be reading faster than you’ve ever read before, tensions are building, something is coming but then it just stops. Dead. In the middle of a sentence. The formatting is most often presented in a manner representative of the feelings of the characters or the rearrangement of the house.

All in all I really enjoyed every piece of information contained in this book. I have nothing but heartfelt care for Johnny Truant, and a bizarre curiosity about whether that never-ending house of leaves still stands in Virginia today.

I still haven’t read any additional research into the book. I wanted to give my first, totally untainted, thoughts about the book before I delved into that. I’m going to do some reading this afternoon, but it may be put off for a week. We have family coming to visit!

If there’s anything I want to change about my past reading endeavors, it’s that I had picked up Vonnegut in high school. I enjoy is writing style, and stories very much, and would have loved an opportunity to meet him. Lately I’ve found quite a few things on the interwebs that are literary inspired and I want to share them with my readers at every opportunity. I used to look down at this type of “blogging”, however I have reformulated myself and decided that this helps me keep a record of my thought patterns. Anyway, enjoy.

/*Neat!
//Nicole showed this site, I Write Like, to me tonight. I’ve been playing around on it, to //see how many different authors I can collect. When I ran the above paragraph it //returned:

I write like
Kurt Vonnegut

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

//Awesome? I think so.*/

A little morose, but classically Vonnegut.

This was originally published in December 2009.

The first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography is being published by the University of California Press this year, releasing approximately mid-fall. I’ve always enjoyed Twain quite a bit, and I do enjoy a well written memoir or biography, however I haven’t yet decided if I’ll be able to read all (~)2,100 pages of Twain’s autobiography between all three volumes. We’ll see if I can do it though! I fully intend to attempt to read this tale of one of the greatest penmen, and in preparation for such I’ve decided that I would like to read all of his novels.

• The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
• The Prince and the Pauper
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
• The American Claimant
• Tom Sawyer Abroad
• Pudd’nhead Wilson
• Tom Sawyer, Detective
• Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
• A Double Barrelled Detective Story
• A Dog’s Tale
• A Horse’s Tale
• The Mysterious Stranger

Will I make it through this list? I don’t know. That’s a lot of reading, and I’m kind of a slow reader. There are actually a lot more novels here than I was aware of. I will definitely hit the big novels, and then maybe the lesser known ones that sound interesting. On the bright side, I’m pretty positive that all of his novels are public domain now. Too bad that doesn’t mean that I can just take the novels from stores. That would be neat.

What do you guys think? Are you Mark Twain fans, or did school ruin him for you?