Fifty Books in Fifty Weeks
In Which the author switches her non-fiction addiction and reads some of the best books since the invention of the printing press.Archive for Verne
yes and no -or- back again for awhile
So, I haven’t been keeping up with this project, right. I blame summer. I blame sunshine and the beach and bicycles. Basically, I’ve opted for a season outside. I mean, I have been reading some scattered classics. The Invisible Man, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Nothing against Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne or HG Wells, but I just didn’t have much to say about them. Basically, I read the books I should have been reading as a child instead of my steady diet of Sweet Valley High and Harriet the Spy ad nauseam. Good for me. But I didn’t really get anything useful from their technique. Maybe due to my bad attitude.
I also read more Truman Capote – Summer Crossing. And I am reading Answered Prayers right now. And I watched a documentary about Truman, a film he starred in, and two movies about In Cold Blood. In Cold Blood, by the way? The only of his books I can’t get into. It’s too dense, too much to digest. It’s so meticulously researched; you can tell Capote was loathe to leave out any detail because they were all so important to him. Which makes me love Truman even if I don’t love In Cold Blood.
I guess part of why I haven’t been keeping up also has to do with a kind of dry spell in my writing ambitions. Periodically, I feel like everything I have ever written is complete rubbish and isn’t even worth my time to rework. I feel like everything on my mind and everything in progress is a bad copy of something that someone else did to perfection. And then I stop writing. When I talked about my writing problems with my smart boy, he suggested that I re-read my mission statement. So I did. And I’m back, for better or worse. Probably worse until I get my head in the game and a few words on the page.
“Ah, we shall get on together, Mr. Fogg and I!”
So says Mr. Phileas Fogg’s fastidious Parisian manservant, Jean Passepartout. Why? The dude just wants some peace and quiet and Fogg is the perfect master to provide it. ”There was no study, nor were there books, which would have been quite useless to Mr. Fogg; for at the Reform two libraries, one of general literature and the other of law and politics, were at his service.” One, Jules Verne writes like me (in the “too many commas” sense) and Two, the protagonist prefers the library: Three, I heart Phileas Fogg.
Around the World in Eighty Days is probably what you’d expect it to be. Phileas Fogg is the Indiana Jones of seventeenth century literature: he’s cute, eccentric and he always gets the girl. He’s also kind of funny, which is essential in lit crush material. At one point, some dude exclaims at Fogg’s generosity-slash-willingness to adventure forth to save a lady from her tribal customs (in particular, the one in which a wife is required to be burned alive with her husband’s corpse if he chances to predecease her). The dude says, “Why, you are a man of heart!” Fogg responds, “Sometimes, when I have the time.”
I won’t reveal whether Fogg & company win their bet to traverse the world in eighty days, but if you missed this book in junior high like I did, I will recommend it even if you’re not trying to read 50 books in 50 weeks because above all else, this book was fun, which is a welcome change from some of the dark stuff I have read recently (for reference, Stendahl’s The Red and the Black is a novel contemporary with this one, and is far more dreary and philosophical).
Verne writes this book with an eye for the perfect detail; he’s a bit of a minimalist. He combines a travelogue with bizarre adventures and manages to make the reader sympathize with Fogg although he seems as inscrutable at the end as he was at the beginning. That takes skillz. The interesting thing about this book is the way Verne merges the travel narrative with the story; his description of San Francisco was all of two paragraphs long and I was transported there. The genius of Jules Verne lies in his ability to distill what could be too much text into the most pertinent features of the description so that you see what he sees without losing interest because he spends too many words on it: something I *definitely* need to take from him.
