'The Awakening' & 'Anna Karenina'

I've said this before, but Chopin gets Edna to the same place Tolstoy gets Anna in a 10th of the time.

Edna and Anna are merely two tiles in the great mosaic of morose women in literature. From Emma Bovary to the Little Women and all the heroines of Austin and the Bronte sisters, the legacy is deep and impactful.

As much as we could celebrate these great characters -- angry, disenfranchises, unsatisfied and sad -- the larger picture here is that women perhaps were not enslaved but the intentions were just the same.

Life prospects were slim, they were kept tethered to the idea that your worth was tied to whoever was married to you. That contentment was the ceiling, and shame and uncertainty were the bottom of the ocean.

Edna chose the bottom of the ocean. Anna, a train.

'The Diaries of Jane Somers'

Doris Lessing was a badass six ways to Sunday. 

She was born in Iran (back in the good ol' days when it was referred to as Persia) in 1919 and later moved to Rhodesia before striking out on her own. She got a late start in writing. She started in the 1950s and went well into the next century including the novels The Diary of a Good Neighbor and If the Old Could ... which were combined as The Diaries of Jane Somers. 

Lessing, though, was brave. Early on she made her socialist views very public, and even moved to London and abandoned some children along the way with their fathers. She protested nuclear weapons and apartheid, which got her blocked from visiting South Africa and Rhodesia. She later left the communist party after the USSR invaded Hungary and was critical of the war in Afghanistan. The British government spied on her and released their dossier years later. She had to have been doing something right. 

Lessing had been grocery shopping when it was announced that she had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. 

'Nine Tailors' & 'Murder Must Advertise'

Are we doing this again? 

Are we back in the saddle? 

Truth is, it never really stopped. 

'Cocaine Nights'

Part detective novel and part dystopian 1984, you keep waiting for Cocaine Nights to turn the corner. With all the secrets and all the mystery, the wizard is behind the curtain pulling all the levers. Then you get to the final 10 pages and realize there is no wizard, no curtain and no levers. There’s no resolution. There’s no real end. Characters and plots are interchangeable and the book could go on forever, but why tell the same story over again? It all sort of makes you depressed.

'The Cider House Rules'

A grand example of when the book is exponentially better than the film. Having seen the latter before the former, I thought it would carry the same emotional impact of a handshake, but instead it is a great story elevated by the flashbacks of Dr. Larch (you just don’t wake up and decide to become the leading abortion doctor in New England), the story of Melony and expanding the impact of the secondary characters (particularly Wally and the seasonal workers) makes it a very rich story.

Appropriate of nothing, author John Irving never met his father, who split with Irving’s mother in 1942 while in utero. Later, Irving’s father was shot down over Burma during World War II, a fact Irving did not discover until 1981 and a plot added into Wally’s story in The Cider House Rules.

'The Count Of Monte Cristo'

I thought it interesting if not odd that in his film Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino wrote in a line about Alexandre Dumas being of African descent (his paternal grandmother was an African slave in the French colony of Haiti). Odd because the film is set pre-Civil War in the Southern United States and the line is provided to somewhat show that someone famous was black. The character King Schulz thinks Dumas would not think kindly to the institution (Dumas died in 1870 so he probably had thoughts about the subject), not because he’s a “soft-hearted Frenchy” but because of his ethnicity.

The point of the line, though, is that Django Unchained mirrors the revenge plot of Dumas’ most famous work The Count of Monte Cristo. Although he probably thought poorly of slavery, but was probably a supporter of Django as he exacted his revenge on white culture and those that had tortured him and his wife.

Dumas probably also supported the wife. He not only married but had at least 40 affairs and a number of illegitimate children. We can’t all be so noble.

'Sons And Lovers'

Every son loves his mother and it should be no surprise that this is a common theme in literature. I say "love" only because it's the best word. In fact, the mother-son relationship is so dynamic that it shapes most males to their detriment or otherwise.

The United States government once claimed that they disallowed women in battle because it would be too traumatic for the male soldiers to see a woman die. That's because when a male soldier is bleeding out all they ask for is their mother. All women are sort of their mothers.

D.H. Lawrence wrote Sons and Lovers while his mother was ill. The first draft of the novel was lost due to him leaving it to tend to his sick mother. The story itself is a mirror of his mother. He felt she married below her social standing. Paul Morel's mother falls in love with a poor, drunk and simpleton miner. She lives a hard and unremarkable life fighting off her dullard husband and preventing him from spending their meager pay on drink.

I can relate. My parents divorced when I was 15 and it was probably another five years until my mother starting "dating" guys. She was in her 40s and 50s so it wasn't anything like it sounds. It was older, grandfatherly like guys from her church. Everyone was lonely.

I probably ran at least one of them off. I was in college so I wasn't around. But one guy was not unlike Paul Morel's father: Unintellectual, unambitious and physically unfit for any basic action like going to a museum or traveling.

Yeah, I understood that she was lonely and it makes me sick sorta thinking about it. However, that's no excuse for compromising even if the scales were even. I would like to think I did all of this because I love her. But I don't if it was altogether altruistic or built out of jealously.

'Finnegan's Wake'

I’ve done what most haven’t. It took me forever to find a copy of Finnegan’s Wake and I learned that’s probably due to the fact that it’s simply one of the hardest pieces of fiction every written.

I’m not saying I “got it.” No one “gets it.” You read it and then find CliffsNotes to basically translate it.

I will say, some of the syntactical contortions James Joyce undertakes is really, really remarkable.

'Labyrinths' & 'Ficciones'

Got scared after reading Ficciones and starting Labyrinths and thinking I'd already read the first story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." In fact, I had. Labyrinths was just a collection of stories and essays published in Ficciones and Jorge Luis Borges' El Aleph. 

And "scared" because Borges is not the easiest of reads in the world. He writes fiction like nonfiction and it's hard -- in the shorter format of an essay -- to differentiate between the two. 

Borges was an interesting guy having been brought up in an highly educated household: Bilingual, reading Shakespeare at a young age, studying the philosophy in German as a teenager. 

By the time he was publishing his essays like Ficciones he had gone blind and captured international renown on lecture tours. He was anti-Communist and anti-Fascist. A native Argentinian, he was anti-Peron. Basically, he thought the people should rule and none of those political systems paid much attention to the people and more so on the ruler. 

He referred to the Falkland War as "a fight between two bald men over a comb."  

Clever guy. 

'Brideshead Revisited'

Hey guys, Evelyn Waugh is a guy!

And he married a woman named Evelyn.

Must've been hard for a guy to get something published in the 1940s so he wrote under a pseudonym.

'Robinson Crusoe'

I really feel I've been lied to all these years. What is the quintessential shipwrecked survival story? What piece of pop culture is mentioned in the iconic theme song for Gilligan's Island?

Robinson Crusoe.

Then you read the book and understand that maybe 25 percent of the story is Robinson and his man Friday stuck on that lonely piece of the Pacific Ocean. In fact, most of the book is Crusoe leaving the island, incidentally coming back to save the day and proceeding to sail around the world.

The original title of the book:

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates

'Little Women' & 'The Brothers Karamazov'

I've been the gravesite of Louisa May Alcott. At the time, I didn't appreciate her nearly as much as I do today. She is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Mass. She is buried what is known as Authors' Ridge.

Alcott was an extraordinary woman. She learned under Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne. She not under learned under those scholars but she was raise by transcendentalists, which is a philosophical movement of the 1820s and 1830s in the northeast, which basically was a belief in the inherent goodness of people and nature.

Alcott was an abolitionist, having worked on the Underground Railroad. She was a feminist and suffragist. All before the Civil War. She might also have been a lesbian. Although not unreasonable to go through life with no husband, she was briefly associated with a man once.

"I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man's soul put by some freak of nature into a woman's body ... because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man," Alcott said.

Little Women is essentially biographical. It is set in Masschusetts and mirrors that of her actual sisters and family. She created "Jo" in her reflection. She too had a younger sister die and felt the sting of separation and growth when her older sister got married.

Much is made of the relationships of brothers. The first story ever -- the book of Genesis -- is wrought with stories of brothers from Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau and Joseph and his brothers. I don't think it's any mistake that all three stories are wrought with badness -- murder, betrayal and jealously.

Those stories are not alone as it continued throughout artistic creation including The Brothers Karamazov. It has a half percent of the sweetness of Little Women, but it does mirror the complications you find between brothers (and a father) compared to sisters. But often the feelings are the same. One thing you won't find in many brother stories is a strong adult female presence like the mother in Little Women. The mother is missing often in brother stories.

It's simple for either sisters or brothers. But if it was it'd make pretty boring literature.

'The Last Temptation Of Christ'

I cover high school football for a local daily newspaper. I often arrive at the game really early to make sure that all my equipment is working and that I'm assured a seat. I also often bring a book to read because I'm more often than not sitting there because all is well.

I took The Last Temptation of Christ one night and while reading I was accosted by, of all people, an advance scout from a high school that was preparing to play one of the teams I was covering.

He asked me about a dozen questions. I thought maybe he recognized the title (maybe) although he asked me what I was reading. A lot of the questions had to do with what I thought of the book and my opinions of what was on the pages.

I thought maybe he was asking because the book (and the 1988 Martin Scorsese) has been a topic of controversy because of its depiction of Jesus ... as an ordinary guy despite being ordained by God to be the messiah.

I can't recommend this book enough. Apart from the actual story, it's a rich, textural history of the time providing some revealing cultural discussion points when you consider the times in which Christ lived.

For one, Jesus (or the messiah) was not only expected to be the Son of God, the lamb slain for the sins of man into perpetuity. He was supposed to overthrow the Roman government occupying Judea (and the rest of the world). Not an easy task, even for the Son of God.

What fundamentalist Christians got most angry about was this milquetoast Jesus being depicted. He was forlorn, doubtful and amid great terror in his private moments (in the book, at least, Jesus publicly turned into sort of a badass). As if he weren't human.

Christians want to believe that Christ was sermonizing in the Temple from birth and took to the highway and byways at some young age. In actuality, he was a carpenter's son and he too plied his craft (in the book, he is vilified for making crosses for executions) until the voice of God took him elsewhere.

It's an interesting read and no matter your religious affiliation it is a must-read.

'I, Robot'

Mostly, it's about artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence and the parameters that organic intelligence attempt to place on it. And how this could possibly even succeed. Artificial intelligence is only as capable, as intelligent as organic intelligence strives to make it.

Yet, organic intelligence feels the need to place rules on something organic intelligence has every opportunity to temper.

Isn't that weird?