The October Reading List

As I write this, it is still October 30 and a bit early to be posting a monthly book list. I've started writing the post any way; the only thing that might change between now and then is that I may or may not finish the book I'm reading now. Of course, this can all be edited before posting

When I last posted here I was reading a book by Arab Israeli author Sayed Kashua - Second Person Singular. That novel uses Tolstoy's novella, The Kreutzer Sonata as a major plot device and frankly, I was more impressed by Kashua's novel than Tolstoy's novella.

During the first week of October, I was finally able to finish reading all of Agatha Christies mystery novels. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I went from there to read Anthony Burgess' The Enderby Quartet which I was able to read because I had discovered a website which had books still under copyright available for free download......like a virtual public library. It was this website that enabled me to download a number of books by Arthur C. Clarke in addition to the above mentioned novel by Sayed Kashua.

Thanks to that website, I've been able to download quite a few relatively recent books. One of those newly published books was To Rescue the Republic: Ulysses S. Grant, the Fragile Union, and the Crisis of 1876 by Bret Baier and Catherine Whitney. This book on U.S. Grant brought me back to Project Gutenberg to download Grant's two volume memoir. There was a break between Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 of the memoirs, due to my being unable to transfer Vol. 2 to my Kindle from my P.C. while my P.C. was in the shop.

Postern of Fate                    Agatha Christie
Curtain - Poirot's last case  Agatha Christie
Sleeping Murder                Agatha Christie
Hercule Poirot And The Greenshore Folly
Inside Mr Enderby            Anthony Burgess
Enderby Outside               Anthony Burgess
The Clockwork Testament  Anthony Burgess
Enderbys Dark Lady           Anthony Burgess
Childhood's End                 Arthur C. Clarke
Rendezvous With Rama     Arthur C Clarke
2001: A Space Odyssey     Arthur C. Clarke
2010: Odyssey Two           Arthur C. Clarke
The Kreutzer Sonata          Leo Tolstoy
Second Person Singular     Sayed Kashua
To Rescue the Republic     Bret Baier
Personal Memoirs Vol. 1    U.S.Grant
Dubliners                           James Joyce
Personal Memoirs Vol. 2    U.S.Grant

The Kreutzer Sonata

It's not usual for a writer to mention, within a novel, a book that a particular character is reading or has read. The names of other writers often make their way into novels. I've discovered quite a few writers, coming upon their names in a novel I'm reading. Elizabeth von Arnim, Mikhail Bulgakov and Mayne Reid are three examples.

At one point in 2010: Odyssey Two , Dr. Heywood Floyd attempts, unsuccessfully, to read The Kreutzer Sonata in the original Russian. I was a bit confused by that. I was familiar with Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9, known as The Kreutzer Sonata, but I was unaware of any book by that name - and certainly not a Russian novel.

With a little web search, I learned that Clarke was referring to a novella by Tolstoy named after Beethoven's sonata. According to the wikipedia article on the novella,"The work is an argument for the ideal of sexual abstinence and an in-depth first-person description of jealous rage. The main character, Pozdnyshev, relates the events leading up to his killing of his wife: in his analysis, the root causes for the deed were the 'animal excesses' and 'swinish connection' governing the relation between the sexes".

The work was banned by the Russian censors and in 1890, the United States Post Office Department attempted to prohibited the mailing of newspapers containing serialized installments of the translated novella. Theodore Roosevelt called Tolstoy a "sexual moral pervert."

Of course, with recommendations like that, I had to download a copy from Project Gutenberg.

I'm certainly no expert on Tolstoy - I've read Anna Karenina twice and attempted to read War and Peace more than that. I was not familiar with his somewhat bizarre take on Christianity. With The Kreutzer Sonata and the other four stories in the ebook I downloaded, Tolstoy goes full blast, bombarding the reader with his strange philosophy.

Reading the wikipedia article on Tolstoy's novella, I learned of a book by Arab Israeli author Sayed Kashua, Second Person Singular , which uses Tolstoy's novella as a major plot device. I'd never heard of Kashua prior to this, but now I'm currently reading Second Person Singular and I'm very impressed with his writing. His other books will (somehow) find their way to the queue.