This Year's Reading

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David Allen continues on with more literary musings. Allen wrote in his blog that he's kicking off the New Year with another reading project. Last year Allen read and reported on "Moby-Dick."

This year Allen's chosen another Herman Melville work, this one a collection of stories:

You may recall that last New Year's, I decided to begin an ambitious book, "Moby-Dick," a novel that turned out to well repay the hours (and days, and weeks) I devoted to it.

That gave me the idea of starting one long, classic book each Jan. 1, something to lose myself in during the winter months and to constitute a sort of intellectual self-improvement program. What is Jan. 1 for if not for outsized goals?

I was batting around the titles of various complex novels on my shelves, including "Don Quixote" (bought from a sale table at B&N circa 2001, never read) and "Crime and Punishment" (bought after seeing "Match Point," ditto), before deciding to read a shorter classic book: Herman Melville's "Billy Budd and Other Stories."

The collection Allen is tackling includes a number of Melville's short stories, including "Bartleby, the Scrivner" as well as the novella "Benito Cereno."

You can read Allen's post here, and he invites you to pass on your thoughts and to share your own New Year's resolutions. Or not, if you would prefer not to.

Literary Ramblings

Daily Bulletin columnist David Allen, who spent the first quarter of 2008 reading Moby Dick, last week wrote in his blog about another of his literary journeys.

This time, Allen talks about reading novelist Larry McMurtry's memoir Books, in which the author describes his time as a bookstore owner. Allen related one bit that tied things back to Allen's earlier Melville reading:

As McMurtry tells it, the British edition of "Moby-Dick" had always been published in three volumes, and a certain editor, one Charles Reade, had been tasked with reducing the novel by two-thirds to fit into one book. The copy McMurtry viewed was Reade's working copy, the book he had marked up with passages for deletion.

Such deletions began on the first page.

"Charles Reade was not a man to be intimidated by a mere American classic," McMurtry wrote.

"He began his editorial work by drawing a bold line through 'Call me Ishmael.' "

McMurtry's usually a good read. Watching how the social and local government scene unfolds here in Claremont, we find ourselves thinking often of The Last Picture Show. Though we're about as far as you could get from McMurtry's Thalia*, Texas - culturally if not quite physically - sometimes it seems as if a flock of Jacy Farrows (that's the Cybill Shepherd character in the Peter Bogdanovich-directed film) swooped in here from West Texas and never left, becoming now-stodgy, clucking 60-year-old duennas, guardians of a self-created town mythology.

We've always felt more kinship with the Ruth Poppers of the world (Cloris Leachman to you movie fans). There's much to be said for enduring, even if you occasionally want to chuck that china cup and coffee pot against the wall out of frustration, anger, disappointment, or fill-in-the-blank. You get past it, whatever "it" may be, the way an oyster gets past an irritating grain of sand by enveloping, enclosing, walling it off.

"Never you mind, honey. Never you mind...."

As an Amercian novelist of another era once wrote, "The lowly and invincible of the earth - to endure and endure and then endure, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow."


*[In the 1971 movie version Anarene for some unknown reason. ]