Book # 90 - I, Claudius by Robert Graves

I, Claudius, by Robert Graves is written as if it is the autobiography of Roman Emperor Claudius but really for most of the book he's just in the background and giving a history of the Romans though the reign of Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula. I found most of it fascinating but there is just so much information here that it is a lot to take in. Basically everyone in his family underestimates Claudius his whole life and looks down upon him. And since this is a family where they're always killing each other to become the next emperor this serves him pretty well since by the end most everyone else in his family that could have been emperor is dead and he's the only one left. I'd say the book was entertaining and also educational. I'll have to find out how accurate the information in the book is now. A-.

Book # 2 & Sci-Fi Book # 3- 1984 by George Orwell

Somehow I had forgotten just how dark and bleak 1984 by George Orwell is. I'm sure that as time passes this novel will sadly become more and more relevant. The novel follows Winston Smith in a dystopian future where the government puts people under constant surveillance, changes history to match their goals and attempts to make everyone think in a specific way. He tries to rebel, gets caught and is tortured until he changes his way of thinking.

There are a lot of concepts discussed but the one I found most interesting was doublethink, which is the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. This seems to have become a mainstay of current politics. I could name examples but really all you'd have to do is turn on the news and see someone spout something that totally contradicts itself. Even though it is a bummer, it gets an A+.

Book # 6 - The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

This is the third time I've read The Grapes of Wrath and I always have the same thought.... what kind of a name is Rose of Sharon? Anyway... the book still remains relevant to our times. Someone once mentioned it to me as the polar opposite of Atlas Shrugged and during this reading it seemed especially true.

The novel follows the Joad family as their Oklahoma farm is taken away from them by a bank and they travel across the country to California to become fruit pickers only to find that the price of labor is kept so artificially low by collusion among farm owners that they barely can make enough money to feed themselves. So it is pretty much a take down of unregulated free market capitalism. Did the scenes where policemen would bust up potential unions remind me a little bit of Wal-Mart... or the bank literally plowing over the Joad's house of the housing market collapse? Yeah a little bit.

Yep, one of my favorite books. A+

So after finishing this book I'm 60% of the way though the initial top 100 list and a third of the way though the top 200. So here's my updated rankings of the top 200 I've read so far.

1. The Lord of the Rings 2. Dune 3. Les Misérables

4. Invisible Man

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

6. Don Quixote

7. The Hobbit

8. A Farewell to Arms 9. The Big Sleep 10. The Grapes of Wrath 11. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

12. The Trial 13. The Magic Mountain

14. David Copperfield

15. Great Expectations

16. Harry Potter

17. The Stand

18. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

19. Pale Fire

20. The Handmaid's Tale

21. Perfume 22. A Christmas Carol 23. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

24. The Chronicles of Narnia

25. The Name of the Rose

26. The Great Gatsby

27. The Sound and the Fury

28. Frankenstein

29. Pride and Prejudice 30. Lord of the Flies

31. The New York Trilogy 32. The Color Purple

33. Things Fall Apart

34. Tristram Shandy 35. Wind in the Willows

36. Anne of Green Gables

37. Rebecca

38. Lucky Jim 39. Atonement

40. One Hundred Years of Solitude

41. Native Son

42. Anna Karenina

43. Sons and Lovers

44. War and Peace

45. A Passage to India

46. A Prayer for Owen Meany 47. The Kite Runner 48. Watership Down 49. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 50. The Count of Monte Cristo

51. The Scarlet Letter

52. Winnie-the-Pooh

53. Emma

54. Charlotte's Web

55. Wuthering Heights 56. The Iliad 57. On the Road

58. Remembrance of Things Past

59. Possession 60. Bleak House

61. His Dark Materials

62. Absalom, Absalom

63. The Ambassadors

64. To the Lighthouse

65. Mrs. Dalloway

66. Gone with the Wind

67. Atlas Shrugged

Mycroft Holmes by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse

Well I like Sherlock Holmes. And I'm a fan of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar... so a book written about Sherlock's brother by Kareem is something I'd have to read. Mycroft Holmes follows the famous detective's older brother on an adventure early in his life that helps to explain why Mycroft is how he is in the Holmes stories. The main mystery about why children are being killed kind of peters out near the end and involves an easily discovered conspiracy, but still I enjoyed the book. It isn't anything great but it was still a fun read. B-.

Book # 97 - The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

It has been a couple days since I finished reading The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, and it is still sitting there in my brain slowly being digested. Before starting it someone told me that it is one of those books that doesn't directly say what it is really about. The Wikipedia page describes it as "ambiguous" and even the book's introduction says that if you're reading it just for the plot you'll be disappointed and won't get much from the book.

In thinking about "the plot" in order to summarize it, I realize that there is technically a beginning, middle and end, but the "action" never builds to a climax and just like in real life it is just a serious of events with both ups and downs. The book starts somewhere around 1905 with Hans Castorp, a young German man, going to visit his cousin that is staying in a clinic high in the Swiss Alps to treat his tuberculosis. He plans to stay for three weeks but ends up being diagnosed with the same illness and ends up living there for seven years. Finally he leaves to go fight in WWI.

During his time there he meets a variety of characters, makes friends, falls in love, deals with death, discovers new music, ponders his own mortality, has strange dreams, and sees time slowly passing by. The book could be about so many different things every reader will probably interpret it differently. And the Wiki page is right... it is ambiguous. Some parts of it reminded me of my own twenties, and I found the passages about the passing of time especially meaningful. After a few years Hans gets to the point where everyday is just the same for him and distinguishing time becomes difficult and suddenly years have past by.

Even though it is a huge book without an exciting plot I enjoyed it immensely. There may have been a few parts that dragged a bit (mostly the discussions between his friends Settembrini and Naphta) but there is just so much to ponder here and take in. Mann once said that to really understand his book you'd need to read it twice. I guess someday I'll have to pick it up again and hopefully I'll get even more insight into it. A+

Book # 60 - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man isn't exactly a page turner... not to say that I didn't enjoy it in some way though. It is written in a stream of consciousness style and tells the story of a young man as he grows up Catholic in Ireland and falls away from the church only to go back to it and then leave it again. It was interesting getting in this guys head and seeing what motivated him but at times I found they style too hard to follow. Also it seems like most of the secondary characters weren't really necessary and weren't interesting. I'd also mention that the book has completely unnecessary maps of walks that the character took... I just don't get it... the maps are pointless. Also it mentions The Count of Monte Cristo.  A-

Book # 17 - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Let me start my saying that Pride and Prejudice is Lucinda's all time favorite book... and since she wants to see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies this week I figured now would be a good time to re-read the book. I've probably absorbed a good bit of knowledge about the book through osmosis from my wife so the whole book felt pretty familiar while I was reading it (Examples of how that osmosis occurred.... viewing the film version, vising the Jane Austen center in Bath, seeing films like Austenland, playing the P&P board game, etc). It was also interesting seeing how I thought of the book now versus what I thought about it as a teenager when I first read it. As a kid I wasn't really into it, but now I see that it is quite funny and there were several passages that made me laugh. So I can see how it is Lucinda's favorite book... Basically it is just an old-timey romantic comedy in which the boy and girl meet... don't like each other at first... and eventually realize they love each other... Pretty much the synopsis of every Hallmark or Lifetime movie. I'll have to give it an A.