John Barth: The Sot-Weed Factor

Sorry to say that this 750-page volume was beyond me. I stumbled at the end of part 1, on page 100, after enduring "a brief relation of the Maryland Palatinate", which was not so brief after all. This reminds me of reading Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, when I stumbled after 600 of a total of 700 pages.

In the meantime I finished several other worthy books - fiction and non-fiction - starting with Sophie's Choice, which I wanted to include in these 10 books for 2007 list anyway, but then chose The Sot-Weed Factor which had been lying dormant in the book shelf for too long to neglect it any longer.

Colm Tóibín: The Master

"It would spoil my post-mortem expression which I have been practising for years."

This is what James's sister says some time before her death, which he eventually attends:

"He stayed by her body, knowing that lying peacefully in death was what she had craved to do. She looked beautiful and noble, and he believed, after all his earlier doubts, that if she could see herself as her body awaited cremation, she would feel a grim delight at what she had become."

And on and on the book is filled with gems like this one, and that one:

"She could not utter a sentence without making passionate changes to her expression, smiling and frowning, and puckering up her perfect nose. He wondered how her face had withstood so many changes in its weather. Soon, he thought, there would be a landslide, something would have to give."

His brother William about his books: "In this crowded and hurried reading age you will remain unread and neglected as long as you continue to indulge in this style and these subjects."

How true! Henry James' leaden style has probably not only deterred me from reading his books, particularly his later ones. Even the Queen is impatient: Alan Bennett writes in his Uncommon Reader, "It was Henry James she was reading one teatime when she shouts out loud, 'Oh, do get on.' "

Then what a nice surprise Tóibín's weightless novel is, undoing the frustration of trying to read James' novels and tales and failing.

There are several books about Henry James on the market. However, I cannot believe that any of the other books betters Tóibín's. Here is a nice portrait of the fight for supremacy in the Henry James novelization market, written by one of the authors, David Lodge is given here.

Zadie Smith: White Teeth

Wow, did this book take me long to read! More than one month. I do not know if it is a good idea to set up a list of 10 books and then force oneself to read them all consecutively. Because in the meantime I bought a bunch of other books one by one but cannot read them. E.g., William Styron's "Sophie's Choice" (I even bought the DVD). I have wanted to read this book for a long time, Styron's recent death made this reading wish even more urgent. But I have to finish the other two books in the list of 10 first.

Also, I come to a point at which I doubt if I have to make my reading life public. Who is interested in my reports anyway? No one. So I write these hesitant outpourings for myself, diary-style. One thing is clear: this is the last time I write a literary blog. It is much more interesting to read those of others, e.g. Of Books and Bicycles, The Elegant Variation, The Millions.

Back to White Teeth: if I lived in the heterogenous environment of London which the book is about, I would have finished it in a much shorter time. My strongest impression for the book which went on and on, was the end which surprised me: the recombinant mouse disappears, and so does this - recombinant - book: after one month of reading snippets and snippets of the novel, not much to remember is left.

Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway

Like many recent readers of this novel I would not have cared to struggle through it without the incentive of Michael Cunningham's The Hours and/or the movie. I would rather reread The Hours than Mrs. Dalloway, it was such a torture. Fortunately it was rather short, only 200 pages. A virtue that modern writers of the school of Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce, not to mention Marcel Proust, have - sorry to say - failed to internalize. A difficult book should at least be short.

What a fascinating book. As one struggles through, one is constantly aware that this is a superior book, albeit one which is impossible to understand without such a deserving service as is offered by Sparknotes. This cleared up the novel's mysteries for my hazy mind. I still can blame the fact that English is not my native language. Therefore I bought a German translation to reread the book:


And thankfully the movie is already available on DVD:


Here is a review of the German translation shown above. Nowadays in Germany newspapers and magazines publish novels, non-fiction books and DVDs and use their print medium to advertise their production, like the respectable daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung:

Julian Barnes: Arthur & George

I was already well into the book when I found out that the "Arthur" of the novel is Arthur Conan Doyle, turning out to help George to regain his life which was stolen from him by ill-meaning neighbors.

Sure enough I bought the book because it was one of the shortlisted novels for the Booker Prize of that year. I was also attracted by what I meant was the main theme of the book: the juxtaposition of two adults who had very diverse upbringings. This, however, turned out to be wrong. What I got instead was something of a sophisticated crime story plus portrait of some aspects of cultural phenomena at that time, like spiritualism (the most boring part of the book, it took up the bulk of the last pages), village and middle class life in the Victorian age.

This was not the first book of Julian Barnes I had read. Twenty years ago I read his Flaubert's Parrot which made him famous and even brought him to Munich, where I got to see him in a book reading. Recently I read his Lemon Table stories, which did not particularly enthuse me. Don't call me a Barnes fan because these two books did not leave any remaining impression. However, his Arthur & George is a book to remember.

Philip Roth: The Plot Against America

"A goyisch idiot flying a stupid plane."

What a coincidence: just as I was finishing this book, Philip Roth was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Prize for the third time, for his "Everyman".


"A political catastrophe of unimaginable proportions was transforming a free society into a police state, but a child is a child, and all I could think about in my bed was that when the time came to move her bowels, Aunt Evelyn would have to do it on our storage bin floor."

This sentence, a gem like many others, jutting out of the backdrop of the political climate, summarizes the mood of the book: the child does not quite understand the consequences of what is happening to him and watches how the adult characters react to the gradual and then sudden political changes.


From my German point of view I envy Americans that they have an author like Roth who can explain American history for them in the form of novels. This is is only one in a series of Roth novels that does that.

The book gives me a chance to talk about my experience with American literature in general. I started with Saul Bellow when I was still a teenager. His books are hardly penetrable for someone of this age group, but I read, Augie March, Victim, Herzog (this one in German), Sammler's Planet (in German also), Humboldt's Gift. I also tried The Dean's December, but found it dull. But Henderson the Rain King was the most accessible for a teenager, and I read it twice. This was all just after he won the Nobel Prize. That is how I discovered him. Much later I read his Ravelstein. This was my start of reading books by Jewish authors. Several others followed: Bernard Malamud (most of his novels, the bulk of his short stories), I.B. Singer (who had won the Nobel Prize two years after Bellow), and Roth. Roth's first, and only novel for a long time, I read was his unavoidable Portnoy's Complaint. A few years ago I read his American Pastoral, which found heavy reading. The Plot Against America is much more accessible.

As for American literature, who can best Philip Roth for his large scope of topics?

Claire Messud: The Emperor's Children

From left to right: Marina, Julius and Danielle,
but the artist, Ray Bartkus, confused the two girls

I am not able to find out why I found this book dull: the characters and character development are exciting. Still I had to reread sentences again and again and eventually the book dragged on for more than two weeks.

But I suffered from the banal dialog. Dialog is what the author cannot do. It is improbable that Claire Messud intended the banal dialog to show how empty the characters are, because they are not. How can people with such rich inner life talk like that?

Murray Thwaite

The 430 pages of the book are divided into 67 easy to handle chapters. Messud's style is not overly complex. Yet my mind is blank and not inspired to write a lengthy comment. Thankfully, Metacritic collects all reviews and I have enough interest left in me to catch there what I missed in the book.

Although Bootie, the nephew of Murray Thwaite, is the least alluring character of the book, I can symphatize with him most. In the beginning he takes upon himself the toil to read Moby Dick, War and Peace, Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow, which he does not finish, like me (except for Moby Dick, the other tomes are constant reminders that there are limits to invest quality time with unsurmountable books). As events evolve, Bootie finds relieve in - of all books - Robert Musil's immense Man Without Qualities, which he finishes. He proves to be a more persistent reader than I am, as I stopped after 10 or 20 pages (I only have the first of two volumes). But there is hope: in Germany the book is available on 6 CDs in MP3 format, lasting 63 hours.

On to the next book!

Daniel Kehlmann: Measuring the World

Who doesn't know these two icons of science, Humboldt and Gauss? How Mount Chimborazo looks similar to the curvature of normal distribution! Who influenced whom?

But the real question is, why is this novel so popular in Germany? It was published in September 2005, and it is still number one on all bestseller lists. Germany has 80 million people, and by mid-July 2006, according to the British newspaper The Guardian, the book was sold 600,000 times, "knocking JK Rowling and Dan Brown off the top of the best-seller list". How many of these 600,000 books have really been read? What did those who actually finished the book get out of it?

Let us talk a bit about me: I am living in the city of Gauss, Göttingen (see skyline on banknote), where he is still revered, with an exhibition of his many scientific findings shown just recently. But I did not know too much about Humboldt, though several institutions in Germany are named after him.

This is a novel about two young scientists who live very intensely as young people, but when they get old they find that they had reached their peak at an early age. Many readers who feel they are leading a lukewarm life may be enchanted by the two scientists' energetic dedication to their worthy goals.

If you have to look abroad to find good contemporary literature because your local authors have let you down, then such a book is more than welcome.

Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Under normal circumstances I would now indulge in my newest obsession and read one or another of Bill Bryson's books. But it is not to be as I have to work through my list of 10 books.

The book that impressed me least when I read the first 10 pages of each book was this book. I wanted to get over it as fast as possible and move on to other books (as of this writing I am already reading the next book). Getting through this short volume (120 pages with lots of space inbetween) dragged on for three evenings. Finally I succeeded and rewarded myself by watching the DVD of the play, which had been waiting to be watched for countless months. Thanks a lot that the movie is available in German: I found it tough enough to follow the action, as Shakespeare with his difficult language kept phasing in and out of the play.

Of course it is the other way around: R & G are stuck in their play and once in a while the Shakespeare play in which they only participate marginally gets in and out of their play for a short while. They would rather be in "Hamlet" than in their own life, it seems.

At the end of "R & G A D" they finally understand: "There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said - no" to participate in "Hamlet", which kills them, but - no need to worry: there are not going to die (at least not in the text; they do in the movie, i.e. you see two ropes tightening). How can they die when their death in "Hamlet" is not shown. Instead, for them, death is "the absence of presence".

Before I saw the movie, I wrote in my notes, "We know what is happening in Hamlet. No suspense. They are so insignificant characters, that not even Stoppard rewards them with the heroic end that they got in 'Hamlet'". But the play is not about them playing in "Hamlet". Rather it is an effort of a playwright to successfully expand on another, immortal, play from an absolutely astonishing point of view.

But I would never have been able to understand the play without having seen the movie, which is extremely charming with two enchanting actors: Tim Roth and - of all actors - Gary Oldman. Imagine: Gary Oldman who is so famous for his grizzly characters, in movies like Leon and The Fifth Element. And he played Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK!

Has my enthusiam come across?

Bill Bryson: The Lost Continent

"The monument looked smaller than I had expected."

I am enthusiastic. Already I am thinking which book of Bryson to read next. Definitely A Short History of Nearly Everything and his newest, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. The latter because the Last Continent keeps returning to Bryson's crazy vacation travels with his parents when he was a child, to locations that he revisits now. His parents were a crazy bunch. No wonder Bill Bryson was keen on escaping them by moving to England. Also because he thinks lowly of his country people on which he keeps shedding insults. I think you can only insult your own country people like Bill Bryson does, but never a foreigner without seeming tasteless.

Unfortunately I only started at page 75 to compile the insults:

Page 75: an encounter in the streets of Holly Springs, Mississippi: "I had to calm because a state trooper pulled up alongside me at a traffic light and began looking me over with that sort of casual disdain you often get when you give a dangerously stupid person a gun and a squad car. He was sweaty and overweight and sat low in his seat. I assume he was descended from the apes like all the rest of us, but clearly in his case it had been a fairly gentle slope."

Page 77: a meeting in the tourist office of Oxford, Mississippi, getting driving directions from a local of how to get to William Faulkner's home: "She gave me the rest of the instructions and I pretended to understand, though they meant almost nothing to me. All I kept thinking was what funny sounds they were to be emerging from such an elegantly-looking woman. As I went out the door she called out, 'Hit doan really matter anyhow cuz hit be's closed now...You kin back arond the grounz if you woan, but you caint go insod.'"

Page 91: about the students of Auburn, Mississippi: "In my day, the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available, but at least you did it. Nowadays, American students' principle concerns seem to be sex and keeping their clothes looking nice."

Page 95: while visiting Little White House, the weekend home of Theodore Roosevelt who also died there, in Warm Springs, Georgia: "The old people were noisy and excited, like schoolchildren, and pushed in front of me at the ticket booth, little realizing that I wouldn't hesitate to give an old person a shove, especially a Baptist. But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead."

Page 98: "There is a fashion in many parts of America, particularly the South, to name things made of concrete after some local worth - the Sylvester C. Grubb Memorial Bridge, the Chester Ovary Levee, theat sort of thing. It seems a very odd practice to me. Imagine working all your life, clawing your way to the top, putting in long hours, neglecting your family, stabbing people in the back and generally being thought a shit by everyone you came in contact with, just to have a highway bridge over the Tallapoosa River named after you."

Etc.

He does not even shy away from making fun of Ike Eisenhower when he observes during a visit to his home outside Gettysburg: "In Ike's room his baathrobe and slippers were laid out and the book he had been reaing on the day he died was left open on the chair beside his bed. The book was - and I ask you to remember for a moment that this was one of the most important men of his country, a man who held the world's destiny in his hands throughout much of World War II and the Cold War, a man chosen by Columbia University to be its president, a man venerated by Republicans for two generations, a man who throughout the whole of my childhood had his finger on The Button - the book was West of the Pecos by Zane Grey." I wonder if I would have preferred Eisenhower's reading taste and his life experience to my way of living. At least people remember him.

Bill Bryson focuses on people during the first part of his trip, on his Eastern loop. The dense population of the East has ruined nature, the highways are lined with fast-food restaurants and gas stations. (He prefers highways because on the minor roads he keeps getting lost hopelessly.)

However, once he has passed Iowa and moves up to the Northern part of Michigan, crossing the Great Lakes on the Straits of Mackinac, the mood changes and he stops making fun of America. Already earlier he has praised the beauty of Savannah or the weekend mansion of Roosevelt in Warm Springs and has described his American heaven in Charleston: "Charleston had the climate and ambience of a Naples, but the wealth and style of a big American city."

He describes what he sees and there are hardly any people in the West. He is fed up with the cities: "As I was close to Los Angeles, I toyed with the idea of driving on it, but I was put off by the smog and the traffic... I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannof for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there." This is quite in contrast to what he writes about nature, e.g. about Colorado: "It was like driving into the opening credits of a Paramount movie."

The most ecstatic moment of the journey comes when he approaches the edge of Grand Canyon: "I came across a snow-spattered sign announcing a look-out point half a mile away along a trail through the woods, and impulsively I went down it, mostly just to get some air. The path was slippery and took a long time to traverse, but on the way the snow stopped falling and the air felt clean and refreshing. Eventually I came to a platform of rocks, marking the edge of the canyon. There was no fence to keep you back from the edge, so I shuffled cautiously over and looked down, but could see nothing but grey soup. A middle-aged couple came along and as we stood chatting about what a dispiriting experience this was, a miraculous thing happened. The fog parted. It just silently drew back, like a set of theatre curtains being opened, and suddenly we saw that we were on the edge of a sheer, giddying drop of at least a thousand feet. 'Jesus!' we said and jumped back, and all along the canyon edge you could hear people saying 'Jesus!', like a message being passed down a long line. And then for many moments all was silence, except for the tiny fretful shiftings of the snow, because out there in front of us was the most awesome, most silencing sight that exists on earth."

But mostly the West is empty: "I drove and drove. That is what you do in the West. You drive and you drive and you drive, advancing from one scattered town to the next, creeping across a landscape like Neptune. For long, empty hours your one goal in life is to get to Dry Gulch or Cactus City or wherever. You sit there watching the highway endlessly unfurl and the odometer advancing with the speed of centuries and all you think about is getting to Dry Gulch and hoping by some miracle it will have a McDonald's or at least a coffee shop. And when at last you get there, all there is is a two-pump gas station and a stall with an old Indian woman selling Navajo trinkets."

After such toil, would you believe that the last word of the book is "serene"?

First impressions: reading the first 10 pages of each book

Measuring the World
I think rather than judging the book from my translation of two sample sentences, please walk down the road to Border's and have a peek in the book's translation. All dialogue is in reported speech and the style imitates the literary style of the 19th century, well beyond my capabilities. In the first chapter the mathematician Gauss is accompanied by his son Eugen in a coach.
"He had always found it typical for God's wicked humor that a mind like his were imprisoned in a sickly body, while an average brain like Eugen would virtually never become ill."
"He talked about differential geometry. It were hard to divine where the path into the curved spaces would lead. He himself would comprehend it just barely, Eugen should be glad about his mediocrity, sometimes he were in awe."

The Lost Continent
This book is excessively funny. The book starts with his origins in barren and well-fed Iowa. I have to violate the copyright laws by quoting two extensive sections, both on page 14 of my Black Swan paperback:
"I had to drive to Minneapolis once, and I went on a back road just to see the country. But there was nothing to see. It's just flat and hot, and full of corn and soya beans and hogs. Every once in a while you come across a farm or some dead little town where the liveliest thing is the flies. I remember on long, shimmering stretch where I could see a couple of miles down the highway and there was a brown dot beside the road. As I got closer I saw it was a man sitting on a box by his front yard, in some six-house town with a name like Spigot or Urinal, watching my approach with inordinate interest. He watched me zip past and in the rear-window I could see him still watching e going on down the road until at last I disappeared into a heat haze. The whole thing must have taken about five minutes. I wouldn't be surprised if even now he thinks of me from time to time."
"Iowa women are always sensationally overweight - you see them at Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines on Saturdays, clammy and meaty in their shorts and halter tops, looking like little elephants dressed in children's clothes, yelling at their kids, calling out names like Dwayne and Shauna. Jack Kerouac, of all people, thought that Iowa women were the prettiest in the country, but I don't think he ever went to Merle Hay Mall on a Saturday. I will say this, however - and it's a strange, strange thing - the teenaged daughters of these fat women are always utterly delectable, as soft and gloriously rounded and naturally fresh-smelling as a basket of fruit. I don't know what it is that happens to the, but it must be awful to marry one of those nubile cuties knowling that there is a time bomb ticking away in her that will at some unknown date make her bloat out into something huge and grotesque, presumably all of a sudden and without much notice, like a self-inflating raft from which the stopper has been yanked."
Already I have decided to reward myself by reading this book first of all. After all writing this log prevents me from reading fine books like this one.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
You would believe this is a play out of Shakespeare, but then you read a sentence like, "If we postulate, and we just have, that within un-, sub- or supernatural forces the probability is that the law of probability will not operate as a factor,..." blablabla (page 17 of the Grove Press paperback edition. The play starts excessively slow: the first 7 pages are about throwing coins 92 times, and each time head comes up. But Stoppard does not succeed in generating any suspense from it.
At last some suspense is generated by the revelation that R & G are on their way to meeting somebody, but they do not know whom.
I think I will read this play as one of the first of the 10. After all it has only 120 pages and I can reward myself by watching the DVD of the play, with Richard Dreyfuss, Gary Oldman (as R) and Tim Roth (as G).

Arthur & George
A beginning well done. Arthur are George, who are not connected in any way in the early part of the book, are introduced in several short alternating chapters.
Arthur, brought up by a dedicated mother and a failing father who does not make anything of his talent as a watercolor painter. Both parents are poor descendents of noblemen and artists, getting poorer and poorer. "At home he learned extra commandments on top of the ten he know from church. 'Fearless to the strong; humble to the weak.' 'Chivalry towards women of high and low degree.' A world of yet unknown opportunities is instilled into him.
George, brought up with the rigid principles of a vicarage family: "You do not shout, you do not run, you do not soil yourself. Mistrust of the outside world is infused into him.

The Plot against America
Smooth reporting style with no literary affectations. Makes one want to contine reading. Very elegant and economical introduction of Jewish life in Newark before Lindbergh is elected President, in 1940.

White Teeth
The book starts with a suicide attempt, always an interesting topic, and a lame joke: "No one gasses himself on my property. [...] We are not licensed for suicide around here. This place is halal. Kosher, understand? If oyu are going to die round here, my friend, I'm afraid you've got to be throughly bled first." But the jokes get better.
Wants one to read on, but not pressingly so. What will happen with the failed hero next?

Mrs. Dalloway
So this is interior dialogue?! While Clarissa Dalloway's mind rambles on, the reader can follow her progress through the streets of London on a map. Introduction to half a dozen main characters within the first ten pages. And - surprise - to Clarissa's well-hidden wrath, which flares up briefly. Michael Cunningham kept us away from this aspect of her personality in his The Hours.
I had my problems with Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (only 10 pages read), James Joyce's Ulysses (no more than 20 pages), Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain (gave up after 600 of 700 pages), and will I equally fail with this pioneer of modern literature?

The Master
This novel's beginning reveals where Henry James got the stuff for his novels from. While meeting an old friend: "These thoughts preoccupied his, and he found that he watched the princess, carefully weighing up what she had been saying, while thinking how he could use this. He must write it down as soon as she left. He hoped to hear nothing more [...]" because he intends to suck a story out of the princess's miserable fate. "The bare bones of the princess's story" are enough for him, he will let his mind roam and put in the meat by himself.
The Master's style is as difficult as the novels of Henry James. That means the book will have to be patient until being read by me. How many readers have really finished this novel? Probably only students of English literature.

The Sot-Weed Factor
This can also be said about this novel: how many readers have really finished this novel? This book is even longer (750 pages) than The Master (less than half the size).
By the end of chapter 2 the hero - an adult by then and past education by home tutor and university - wets his pants because his exhaustive education prevents him from focussing on any one occupation including getting up to empty his "untutored" bladder.
What other dramatic surprises and turns of event can we expect?

The Emperor's Children
Claire Messud, are you going to disappoint my high expectations? What made the critics praise this book? The first chapter is very conventionally told, with a successful characterizations of the heroine, Danielle Minkoff - all surface ("Having spent half an hour putting on her face in front of the grainy mirror of Moira and John's bathroom, ogling her imperfections and applying vigorous remedial spackle - beneath which her weary, olive-shaped eyes were pouched by bluish bags, the curves of her nostrils oddly red, and her high forehead peeling - she had no intention of revealing to strangers the disintegration beneath her paint."). And with an unsuccessful description of the hero's features, Ludovic Seeley: "His ears, pinned close to his head, lent him a tidy aspect" etc.
This is the only hardcover of the 10 books. The rough cut - the first one in my library, the bulk of my books are disintegating and acidy paperbacks - lends a nice feel to the physicality of the book, though it is a bit heavy in my favorite reading position, lying on my reading sofa.

SUMMARY: The first book I will read is Bill Bryson's Lost Continent. Be warned: I am a slow reader.

Why did I pick these books (10 of 10)?

If you search for "White Teeth" in Google Images, the Zadie Smith novel comes up first only at position 16. Why the book's title, I am wondering for the first time?
Suspicious about the commercial success of White Teeth, I postponed reading it, but became an instant convert by the author's On Beauty, which I had read because of E.M. Forster's Howards End.

Why did I pick these books (9 of 10)?

There can be only one reason why I am reading The Master. Because Colm Toibin's favorably reviewed novel about Henry James is about an eminent literary figure, like Cunningham's Hours and Duffy's Wittgenstein book. Henry James, the stiffy, or his elaborate and demanding books are certainly not the reason. How I was suffering while trying to read The Wings of the Dove! Only two of his books survived my limited eagerness to read the work of Thomas Mann's American twin brother: The Portrait of a Lady and either The Bostonians or The Ambassadors. I do not remember. It is so long ago, 20 years.

Why did I pick these books (8 of 10)?

The Sot-Weed Factor is the most voluminous book of all the 10: 750 pages. Bulk is one issue why the book has been sitting on my book shelf since it was so warmly recommended by TIME magazine. Another is its demanding topic - a poisonous combination:
"The Sot-Weed Factor was an unprecedented leap in literature, an 800-page mock epic of the colonization of Maryland based on an actual poet, Ebenezer Cook, who wrote a poem of that name. The Sot-Weed Factor was what Northrop Frye called an anatomy — a large, loosely structured work, with digressions, distractions, stories within stories, and lists (such as a lengthy exchange of insulting terms by two prostitutes). The fictional Ebenezer Cooke (repeatedly described as "poet and virgin") is a Candide-like innocent who sets out to write a heroic epic and is disillusioned enough that the final poem is a biting satire" (Wikipedia).
Competing against this book for inclusion in this list of 10 was David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, another postmodern novel, more difficult to read, but shorter. No other book has been sitting on my book shelf unread longer, probably since early 2001, when I bought it inspired by Bruce Duffy's The World as I Found It, an unforgettable novel with Ludwig Wittgenstein as its hero.

Why did I pick these books (7 of 10)?

Mrs. Dalloway, another books that I bought while enthused by another - Michael Cunningham's The Hours, and by the stunning movie with beautiful Julianne Moore and unsurpassed Meryl Streep, and Nicole Kidman walking into the river so impressively.
But how long has Mrs. Dalloway been waiting for my patience to go shopping for flowers with her, when I haven't given flowers to my wife in months?

Why did I pick these books (6 of 10)?

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is the only play on this list of ten. There would not be any on my list if I had not read Arthur Miller's splendid autobiography Timebends sometime last year. It never stopped keeping me interested in his enviable, though sometimes difficult, life. I vowed that I would read one play a month from then on. But in the end, as sudden and intense as my enthusiam was, as short-lived was my promise. At least I succeeded in reading two of Arthur Miller's plays:

Why did I pick these books (5 of 10)?

But if unknown English authors do not interest me, why do I include a book like Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children in my list of 10?
Indeed I did not know about her before this book was published in August last year. She did not pop up in my conscience even then, but only when I read several well-meaning reviews (e.g. Slate: "Claire Messud's remarkable new novel The Emperor's Children is that mythical hybrid that publishers dream of one day finding in the piles of manuscripts on their desks: a literary page-turner."). Plus it always helps when the book is about some confused, brainy, possibly even failing post-adolescents in NYC.

Why did I pick these books (4 of 10)?

Arthur and George is an unread leftover from my pile of shortlisted novels for the 2005 Booker prize. (It is true, of the 6 shortlisted novels I only read 3 and did not read another 2, The Accidental and A Long Long Way, and do not intend to do so.)
The reason I read these 3 novels - Banville's The Sea, Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Smith's On Beauty - was because I was familiar with all three authors, had either read earlier works by them or found that I could not avoid the author any longer (Smith).
I attended a reading of Julian Barnes in Munich in the early 80s just when he had become famous for his Flaubert's Parrot. I read most of the work of Flaubert at that time and went there to learn more about this preeminent French author. Of course I immediately bought his book then of which I cannot remember anything. I read his recent Lemon Table a few months ago, but again cannot remember anything except that it contains short stories and features a yellowish cross-section of a tree on the cover.
Why I picked such a disproportionate amount of books from the 2005 shortlist is somewhat beyond me. O.K., of the 2004 list one book is included in the 10 (The Master) and another one - David Mitchells Cloud Atlas - is on my radar, whereas the winner, Alan Hollinghurst's Line of Beauty does not interest me because I have no urge to read homosexual (unlike heterosexual - Updike!) literature. And the 2006 list does not interest me at all because I do not know any of these authors.

10 first sentences

Which first sentence belongs to which book?

- I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.
- A child wants to see.
- Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
- Two Elizabethans passing the time in a place without any visible character.
- In September 1828 the greatest mathematician of the country left his home town for the first time in years to participate in the German Scientific Congress in Berlin.
- In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.
- Earling in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.
- Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.
- Sometimes in the night he dreamed about the dead - familiar faces and the others, half-forgotten ones, fleetingly summoned up.
- Darlings!

Why did I pick these books (3 of 10)?

For lack of a new Paul Theroux travel book - I have read all of them - I have chosen one by Bill Bryson. This is the only non-fiction book in this bunch of 10. One in 10 is about the ratio at which I read non-fiction books, usually travel books. Some of my other favorites are Redmond O'Hanlon, Eric Newby and Wilfred Thesiger, i.e. all those writers who survived tough travel environments. However, Theroux is my favorite because I admire his style of sarcasm.
The Lost Continent is not the first of Bryson's books I am going to read. Earlier I read A Walk in the Woods to inform myself about long-distance hiking. If you happen to be in hiking long trails, I recommend you to walk along the former demarcation line between West and East Germany. Strangely enough a travel book has not yet been written about hiking there.
The Lost Continent is one of the lighter and more humorous books in my list of 10, so I expect to read it quite early.

Why did I pick these books (2 of 10)?

This novel by Philip Roth makes use of a notorious German theme - the most ugly aspect of our otherwise respectable history. More than 60 years have passed since then and putting the swastika on a book's cover - even if written by a Jewish author - is verboten. That is why the publisher had to produce a different cover for the German market, not only for the German translation but also for the untranslated version. Go to any book store in Germany and you will only see the black cross on the cover. I had to go abroad to buy the novel with the original cover.
I did not choose this book because of its German theme but because of Philip Roth, as it should be. The first book I read of him was Portnoy's Complaint when I was a teenager or in my early 20s. After that I did not read any of his books for a long time, but eventually I read his American Pastoral because it was so widely praised. I have to admit Roth is a little above my head, at least when reading him in English. If there is a next American writer who will be awarded the Nobel Prize, he is the top candidate. A few years ago he would have had to fight it out with John Updike, who had the edge over him a decade ago. Who is the American author who can match him today?
About his recent novel Everyman, I think it will gain when I am 20 or so years older.
Talking about the Nobel Prize: if you haven't read Jose Saramago's Blindness yet, you still have a huge discovery to make. I envy you...

Why did I pick these books (1 of 10)?

Being a German, I have also picked one book by a German, Daniel Kehlmann. I will read this book in German of course (Die Vermessung der Welt), however, it is also available in English: Measuring the World. What may make this book interesting for non-German readers is that it was picked by TIME Magazine to be included in its annual Books of the Year list for 2006, though - strangely enough - only in its European issue, dated Dec. 25, and not in its U.S. issue. Here are the lists of both issues:

U.S. edition:
Alison Bechdel: Fun Home
Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Cormac McCarthy: The Road
Bill Bruford: Heat
Thomas E. Ricks: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Richard Ford: The Lay of the Land
Gary Shteyngart: Absurdistan
Hampton Sides: Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West
David Mitchell: Black Swan Green
Dave Eggers: What is the What

European edition:
Jan Morris: Hav
Carmen Callil: Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland
Ngugi wa Thiong‘o: Wizard of the Crow
Seamus Heaney: District and Circle
Tahir Shah: The Caliph‘s House
Tove Jansson: Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip
Ian Buruma: Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini: The Medici Conspiracy
Daniel Kehlmann: Measuring the World
Goerg Gerster: The Past from Above

The two lists are completely different. Here in Europe we are subscribing TIME Magazine to get the American point of view, but what we really get is that we have to satisfy ourselves with what we can also read in our own magazines. I have followed the TIME end-of-the-year lists since the late 1970s, but this is the first time I come across a specific European book list.

I have to admit that in the book store I already read a few pages. The book is so funny and such an easy read that I can imagine that I will finish this book first. A novel to be funny and easy to read is quite a feat for a German book because German authors have a big problem: they write in a grave style as this is the easiest way to hide that they have nothing to tell. However, once in a while a gem comes up, and then it is always a bestseller which stays on top of the bestseller list for months. Other examples are Patrick Suesskind's Perfume or Sten Nadolny's Discovery of Slowness. All these books are historical books. You get the point: if they write about things other than themselves, they create good literature (one exception I would like to highlight: Thomas Bernhard).

Here is TIME‘s portrait of Measuring the World:

The year is 1828, and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss has just met explorer and natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt in Berlin. This is where Kehlmann begins the life stories of the two eminent German scientists, but what happens after that is as much comedy as biography. Kehlmann writes the men as comically eccentric, sometimes tyrannical and, yet, not wholly unlikable. While Humboldt travels the world, Gauss prefers to journey into the depths of mathematics. Gauss loves women and Humboldt is curiously asexual. But the two contemporaries are united by their fanatical quest to explore the secrets of the universe. Gauss even abandons his new bride at a climactic moment on their wedding night when he has a sudden idea. Kehlmann has an overabundant imagination, but he's also a thorough researcher, which makes this an engrossing, enjoyable mix of fact and fiction. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, Measuring the World manages to be both clever and entertaining, which is a science unto itself.

Presenting the 10 books for 2007

Of the books I am going to read this year I will present the following books in this blog:

Claire Messud: The Emperor‘s Children
John Barth: The Sot-Weed Factor
Daniel Kehlmann: Measuring the World
Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
Bill Bryson: The Lost Continent
Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
Zadie Smith: White Teeth
Julian Barnes: Arthur & George
Colm Toibin: The Master
Philip Roth: The Plot against America

I will read the first 10 pages of each book. Only then I will decide how to proceed. If I am going to read one book after the other, or several books at the same time. I plan to finish all books, no small work because some of these books have been sitting on my shelf unread for years.