Most Difficult Books

Flavorwire, the worst kind of electrician snack ever, has a list of the fifty toughest books ever to read.   Dante's Inferno is one I've actually read, completed, and I don't think it's all that hard, if you acclimate yourself to the time and theme of the book; Naked Lunch, on the other hand, I attempted in my twenties and didn't get more than a dozen pages into it.  There wasn't even anything to appreciate about the book; I had to stop.   Much of the list, thought, are books I've considered reading, which means if I can successfully read a book labeled "tough" by a flavored wire, I'll be doing pretty good.

Litograph T-Shirts

Litograph produces high-resolution t-shirts which are composed of the entire text of a great work of literature.  Not content to just do the text in a boring, purely-typographical style, Litograph organizes words and color in a mosaic style that makes them look cool to wear:

Via.

Postmodern Books: Categorized

The LA Times blog has provided a 61-item list of the most significant postmodern novels, but that's not the important part. Most lists are simply that — lists — and if you're lucky some short description of each entry, but not necessarily why the item's on the list.

This list, however, is awesome in its data-density. It starts out with an icon key: each book is identified by author, title, and then a series of appropriate icons representing such things as "self-contradictory plot," "includes historical falsehoods," "plays with language," &c. Those icons make this a far more useful list than the usual Cracked fare; it fills in not just the 'what', but the 'why' and 'how' of postmodern literature. And, if those book features aren't appealing (who doesn't a like book which include the author as a character?), it might help you avoid too-dense literature that won't appeal to you…like I said, not everyone likes dense postmodern literature. Also, check out the comments for some other suggestions that didn't appear on the list. Via.

Music and Literature

University of Arkansas literature professor Christian Goering was interested in incorporating music into his English classes as an "instructional and motivational tool" for his students to connect better with the books they are assigned to read. Steinbeck and Tracy Chapman, Jane Austen and Counting Crows, Harper Lee and Johnny Cash: students draw on their CD collections to identify songs that evoke the book's themes, and the two are used together to help students understand their readings. A lot of musicians derive their songs from literary sources — Iron Maiden's Rime of the Ancient Mariner helped me through Senior English — so much of the list seems rather obvious, but if a student needs to get their head into a book, adding an audio component appears to be helpful according to professor Goering.

Goering asked his students to identify as many song connections as possible for the book Of Mice and Men, and the came up with a hundred connections, allowing Goering to pull six common connections that a song might have with a book:

• A song is inspired by literature directly;
• A song connects to a text thematically;
• A song’s setting connects to the setting of a literary work;
• Characters in a song mirror the characteristics in a classic work;
• The tone of a song is similar to the tone of a piece of literature, and;
• A song’s plot structure or narrative follows that of a literary work.

Goering's research has been included in The Essential Criticism of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, but he's been collecting more than just Mice and Men's related tunes at his LitTunes website. If you want to get to the meat of the associations and set up your iPod appropriately, the database of relationships can be found here. As a sidenote, I'm bookmarking the page about using Johnny Cash as an example for teaching writing for future reference.

The Codex Climaci Rescriptus

Last Tuesday, Sotheby's had a very, very old piece of literature for sale. The Codex Climaci Rescriptus was auctioned with an expected sale price of around £500,000 — around a million USD — but, sadly, it was not sold; Sotheby's website isn't very clear, so it could have been pulled, but more likely the Codex didn't reach the expected reserve price and the lot was skipped and may come up for sale again in the near future. I'm surprised it didn't go, because of its history, having its own Wikipedia page and being available for reading online via Google Books. It's not often that you can buy something with its own Wikipedia page, let me tell you.

The Codex is an example of one of the funnest literary terms I've heard in a while: it is a palimpsest. In ancient times, due to the difficulty in acquiring or affording parchment, old documents were reused. Being rather thick and resilient, the top layer of the parchment was literally scraped off, leaving a mostly-clean sheet to be written upon again. The process wasn't perfect, and as you see in the example above, the Codex had a very ineffective erasing. A ghost of the original text is clearly visible through the new transcription, and has been identified as portions of the New Testament. The biblical stories were scraped off, and in the 9th century A.D. the pages were flipped and re-written with a portion of the Scala Paradisi and Liber ad Pastorem. Today, those add far less to the value than the underlying older text: the Codex is better known for its Bible text than anything else.

Best Of The National Book Awards

Since 1950, the National Book Award has been given to those authors exhibiting excellence in American literature, but this year, in commemoration of the 60th Awards, a special award will be given. Today the National Book Foundation announced The Best of the National Book Awards Fiction award, selecting the greatest work of fiction of the past 60 years as the pinnacle of American literature today. Seventy-seven contenders have been selected by the National Book Foundation, the governing body behind the Award, and will be voted for by authors connected with the Foundation. The top six will become the 'short list' for the Best Of award, and in September the public will be polled, via their website, and the winner will be awarded in October.

There will be plenty to keep your attention in the meantime until the public vote is undertaken: the Foundation is publishing a blog with entries for each book, including a variety of information about the authors, times, and topics of these classic works of fiction. I'll be one of the people bookmarking the blog, reading about each book every day. The National Book Foundation, despite lacking an Oscars-sized media blitz, is making good use of the internet to get the word out about the award, keeping people interested, and being interested in modern literature is their honorable focus.

Robinsonade

Add this one to the list of classic literature I have never read: Robinson Crusoe is a book I've never opened, and I'm sure I've passed it by numerous times during my book-shopping habits. Not that it never would have appealed to me. I'd bet 10-year-old me, who enjoyed Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens, would probably have liked it a lot.

The reason it hasn't jumped out at me as a book requiring my attention may be the huge amount of artistic homage to Defoe's 18th century novel. Lost in Space, Swiss Family Robinson, Gilligan's Island: people are constantly ending up on uncivilized, ignored islands, left to fend for themselves. Men imagine each other are some form of beef-based junk food. Tom Hanks names a ball Wilson, which has become a part of American culture as the best name for a self-named friend. This continual reference to Robinson Crusoe even has its own, rather obvious and clumsy name: Robinsonade. The Germans loved the Robinsonade genre more than anyone else during the 18th century, but that doesn't mean they were necessarily good at it, according to The History of German Literature:

[Robinson Crusoe] appeared in a German translation in 1721, and elicited in Germany, as well as throughout Europe, the greatest admiration and a countless host of imitators. Between 1722 and 1755 more than forty Robinsons appeared in Germany, and were read with frantic eagerness. There were the German Robinson, the Italian Robinson, the clerical ditto; the Saxon, the Silesian, the Franconian Robinson; two Westphalian Robinsons at once; the moral, the medicinal, the invisible Robinson; and even the Bohemian Robinson. Then there was the European Robinsonetta: "Miss Robinson, or the cunning young maid;" "Robunse, with her daughter, Robinschen," and so forth. The books are generally worse than the titles.

We Americans lay claim to a genre called "Westerns" that is just about as full of waste as the German Robinsonade genre, so I can't complain too much. Even as a genre, "western" tosses a wider net , in terms of geography and characters, than the "robinson-crusoe" genre. A Robinsonade needs a main character, a one-way mode of transportation, and a civilization-free destination — the rest tends to lean on the level on ingenuity the character has, on on what aspects of civilization they can do without. For as narrow that view is, we've seen a couple hundred years of revamping and re-processing that same story in a myriad of styles, covering wide-ranging genres from contemporary fiction to sci-fi. To see more, the University of Florida's Digital Collections has a whole section on the Robinsonade genre.

Naked Lunch, Disturbing Literature

Naked Lunch, William Burrough's revered drug-fueled tale of anal sex, turns 50 this year, having now addled the brains of more than one generation. I attempted to read this during my twenties, and the copy still sits on my shelf, only the first twenty or so pages with any discernible evidence of having been read. Couldn't make it through the book; it made me feel like all the Sam Shepard and Samuel Beckett I read during my theatre years did — that there was some huge joke on me, or on everybody, but I was the only one to recognize that the jumble of overwrought symbolism really meant far less than the literati would have you believe. The absurdist era never really appealed to me, no matter how much I tried, I just couldn't enjoy any of it, and it seems that none was ment to be enjoyed, but to pondered.

Burrough's masterpiece fills the #8 spot in PopCrunch's list of The 10 Most Disturbing Books Of All Time. Before I even opened the link I knew Naked Lunch had to be somewhere on the list, but I was curious about the rest. My greatest surprise was the number of disturbing books that had been made into movies: Blindness, Requiem for a Dream, American Psycho. What didn't surprise me much is that I hadn't read any of the books. I guess I'm too much of an optimist, that overly depressing and violent books really don't appeal to me. Maybe I'm missing out — many of these books also show up on others' lists of great works of modern literature, so it might be time to try one out. Naked Lunch is still off my list; I don't care if it has lasted through 50 years of literary acclaim, I'm not sure I could get any further than I had already read.

Via, Via.

Literary Band Names

Bookride has an awesome list of literary band names, including their sources. I've seen lots of shorter lists or 'top tens', but this is much more comprehensive than that. Some are kind of specious, while others I barely believe they're actually real bands ("Ungl’unl’rrlh’chchch"? Really?)

Nobel Prize Codenames

Being assigned to the Nobel Prize literature selection committee isn't all stuffy libraries, snifters of brandy, and wingbacked chairs (this isn't the Man Booker prize, you know) — the Nobel process is loaded with cloak-and-dagger sneakiness that is rarely seen outside of a Tom Clancy novel. Contenders for the Nobel Prize in literature are referred to by code names, reducing the likelihood that word will leak out of who is in the running, such as code-naming Harold Pinter as Harry Potter, or Doris Lessing as Little Dorrit. The code-naming process, which no doubt requires supercomputers and a team of old men who speak an ancient dead language, appears to have been cracked: bookies saw a sudden surge in bets on this year's Nobel winner shortly before the results were announced. There seems to be a mole in the system: someone within the Nobel team has been compromised. Be prepared to hear of mysterious 'disappearances' in the literary world as this hole is sealed up: there is no mercy at Nobel. Remember, it isn't the Man Booker.

Banned Book Quiz

The Guardian in the UK has composed a thirteen question quiz on the state of book banning around the world. Sadly, I only got 6 out of 13: "Rather ignorant, I’m afraid. You’re clearly reading in slavish obedience to the censors. Are you going to be voting for Sarah Palin?" Ah, the UK even thinks the Republican vice-presidential candidate is a joke.

Choose Your Own Adventure: College Years

Choose Your Own Adventure was a series of books that came out when I was a kid, and while it feels like it died out in the early 90s, the line has refused to die. And, like most thirty-year-old literature, it's being addressed in college-level literature courses. At George Mason University, the English 343 class is dissecting a COYA and mapping it as an assigment -- and the students have to write about their experience. (note: not all students understand 'tags' - there's more CYOA stuff under 'Reflections')

Grapes of Wrath: Director's Cut

You've read Grapes of Wrath: if you're American, a high-school graduate, and somewhere between 20 and 50, I can pretty much guarantee you were assigned to read it during your teen years, grown-adult-breastfeeding and all. Thing is, Steinbeck had a fouler mouth than you got to read in most recent editions. Keith Phipps has the 'restored' edition, which has notes on which obscene words were replaced in earlier editions, and it seems "Joan Crawford" was a euphemism for something unholy once upon a time, as near as I can tell.

Literary Tattoos

Proving that newspaper reporters know how to use Google Image Search, the UK's Daily Telegraph has a collection of literary-focused tattoos found online.