Edith Wharton

The Marble Faun, the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, is on my list of potential reads this year -- it's the 150th anniversary, plus the Wikipedia description sounded pretty darn awesome.

POSSIBLE (MILD) SPOILERS

The Marble Faun is Hawthorne's most unusual romance, and possibly one of the strangest major works of American fiction. Writing on the eve of the American Civil War, Hawthorne set his story in a fantastical Italy. The romance mixes elements of a fable, pastoral, gothic novel, and travel guide. The climax comes less than halfway through the story, and Hawthorne intentionally fails to answer many of the reader's questions about the characters and the plot. (Complaints about this led Hawthorne to add a Postscript to the second edition).

SPOILERS DONE

Checks at a couple of local libraries showed they both have it in omnibus collections of novels and other stories. Also on Project Gutenberg, of course: Volume 1 and Volume 2.

Yesterday, after finishing As I Lay Dying, I saw a mention that Faulkner also has a story called "The Marble Faun."

"Interesting coincidence," I thought to myself, making a mental note to check it out.

Meanwhile I started The Age of Innocence, which I picked up at B&N last weekend. Lo & behold, in chapter 5:

"If you dined with the Lovell Mingotts you got canvas-back and terrapin and vintage wines; at Adeline Archer's you could talk about Alpine scenery and 'The Marble Faun'..."

Ha!

A few months ago I got the idea to create a reading queue based on anniversary. There were quite a few great books celebrating more or less significant birthdays in 2009.

Continuing the idea, here's a list of possibilities to choose from for 2010, with the ordinal in parentheses. The list is skewed to 20th Century lit since I didn't go farther back in my searching except for certain authors -- there will be scads of additional selections available if you feel like looking around. Feel free to offer any other suggestions in the comments.

I'll strike out those I get around to reading during the year.

• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (30th) - Douglas Adams
• I, Robot (60th) - Isaac Asimov
• The Handmaid’s Tale (25th) - Margaret Atwood
• Martian Chronicles (60th) - Ray Bradbury
• Ender’s Game (25th) - Orson Scott Card
• The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (10th) - Michael Chabon
• Farewell, My Lovely (70th) - Raymond Chandler
• The Brothers Karamazov (130th) - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Sign of Four (120th) - Arthur Conan Doyle
• Baudolino (10th) - Umberto Eco
• The Name of the Rose (30th) - Umberto Eco
• LA Confidential (20th) - James Ellroy
• As I Lay Dying (80th) - William Faulkner
• Good Omens (20th) - Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
• Love in the Time of Cholera (25th) - Gabriel García Márquez
• The Difference Engine (20th) - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
• The Marble Faun (150th) - Nathaniel Hawthorne
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (70th) - Ernest Hemingway
• Rhinoceros (50th) - Eugene Ionesco
• The Cider House Rules (25th) - John Irving
• The Town and the City (60th) - Jack Kerouac
• Tristessa (50th) - Jack Kerouac
• Immortality (20th) - Milan Kundera
• To Kill a Mockingbird (50th) - Harper Lee
• A Canticle for Leibowitz (50th) - Walter M. Miller
• Devil in a Blue Dress (20th) - Walter Mosley
• Ringworld (40th) - Larry Niven
• The Violent Bear It Away (50th) - Flannery O’Connor
• Hemingway's Chair (15th) - Michael Palin
• Skinny Legs and All (20th) - Tom Robbins
• Still Life with Woodpecker (30th) - Tom Robbins
• Contact (25th) - Carl Sagan
• Green Eggs and Ham (50th) - Dr. Seuss
• One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (50th) - Dr. Seuss
• The Bachelors (50th) - Muriel Spark
• The Ballad of Peckham Road (50th) - Muriel Spark
• Cryptonomicon (10th) - Neal Stephenson
• Zeitgeist (10th) - Bruce Sterling
• The Artificial Kid (30th) - Bruce Sterling
• The Snake’s Pass (120th) - Bram Stoker
• A Confederacy of Dunces (30th) - John Kennedy Toole
• The Accidental Tourist (25th) - Anne Tyler
• Hocus Pocus (20th) - Kurt Vonnegut
• The Sleeper Awakes (100th) - H.G. Wells
• The Age of Innocence (90th) - Edith Wharton
• Jeeves in the Offing (50th) - P.G. Wodehouse
• Mrs. Dalloway (85th) - Virginia Woolf
• Le Bête Humaine (120th) - Emile Zola
• Nana (130th) - Emile Zola

Much like for my favorite movies, here is a list of my Top 25 favorite writers.

1. Vladimir Nabokov
2. Ray Bradbury
3. JRR Tolkien
4. Kurt Vonnegut
5. Douglas Adams
6. Mark Twain

The rest in alphabetical order by last name:

• Robert Benchley
• Charlotte Brontë
• Emily Brontë
• Albert Camus
• Raymond Chandler
• Umberto Eco
• William Gibson
• Spalding Gray
• Franz Kafka
• Milan Kundera
• Ursula K Le Guin
• George Orwell
• Dorothy Parker
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Muriel Spark
• Bram Stoker
• Jules Verne
• Edith Wharton
• HG Wells

Honorable Mentions

• Jane Austen
• Jorge Luis Borges
• George Carlin
• Philip K Dick
• James Ellroy
• Ernest Hemingway
• James Joyce
• Jack Kerouac
• Stephen King
• Herman Melville
• Flannery O'Connor
• William Shakespeare
• Mary Shelley
• Neal Stephenson
• John Steinbeck
• Hunter S Thompson
• Virginia Woolf
• Oscar Wilde
• PG Wodehouse
• Emile Zola

Last year's selection of Spooky stories for Halloween was great fun, so we're back this year with more.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is one of the creepiest short stories I've read, with parts that remind me of those disturbing modern Japanese horror flicks. Absolutely one of my favorite short stories ever, much less favorite scary stories.

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.

A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!

Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.

Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?

John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.

John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.

John is a physician, and PERHAPS—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster.

You see he does not believe I am sick!

That it is from 1892 makes it even more remarkable, but it is also semi-autobiographical. After reading the story, check out this article by the author from 1913, "Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper".

You can't go wrong with Edgar Allan Poe on Halloween, and how about a quick triptych of terror, courtesy of Project Gutenberg?

Head over to the "First Project Gutenberg Collection of Edgar Allan Poe". It includes the sublime stories "The Cast of Amontillado" and "The Masque of the Red Death", as well as the classic poem "The Raven." Guaranteed to put you in the mood for All Hallows' Eve.

The “Red Death” had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.

A Stable for Nightmares is a collection of stories by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Sir Charles Young, et al. The following is from the first story in the book, "Dickon the Devil":

The peat and furze were pretty soon left behind; we were again in the wooded scenery that I enjoyed so much, so entirely natural and pretty, and so little disturbed by traffic of any kind. I was looking from the chaise-window, and soon detected the object of which, for some time, my eye had been in search. Barwyke Hall was a large, quaint house, of that cage-work fashion known as “black-and-white,” in which the bars and angles of an oak framework contrast, black as ebony, with the white plaster that overspreads the masonry built into its interstices. This steep-roofed Elizabethan house stood in the midst of park-like grounds of no great extent, but rendered imposing by the noble stature of the old trees that now cast their lengthening shadows eastward over the sward, from the declining sun.

The park-wall was gray with age, and in many places laden with ivy. In deep gray shadow, that contrasted with the dim fires of evening reflected on the foliage above it, in a gentle hollow, stretched a lake that looked cold and black, and seemed, as it were, to skulk from observation with a guilty knowledge.

Games for Hallow-e'en by Mary E. Blain is a 1912 treatise on how to throw an awesome Halloween party.

Hallow-e'en or Hallow-Even is the last night of October, being the eve or vigil of All-Hallow's or All Saint's Day, and no holiday in all the year is so informal or so marked by fun both for grown-ups as well as children as this one. On this night there should be nothing but laughter, fun and mystery. It is the night when Fairies dance, Ghosts, Witches, Devils and mischief-making Elves wander around. It is the night when all sorts of charms and spells are invoked for prying into the future by all young folks and sometimes by folks who are not young.

In getting up a Hallow-e'en Party everything should be made as secret as possible, and each guest bound to secrecy concerning the invitations.

Any of the following forms of invitations might be used.

Witches and Choice Spirits of Darkness
will hold High Carnival at my house,
..............Wednesday, October 31st,
at eight o'clock. Come prepared to test
your fate.
Costume, Witches, Ghosts, etc.

Last year's stories, still as good as ever:

• Edith Wharton’s “The Eyes” can be found in Tales of Men and Ghosts.
• Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” is available in Curious, if True: Strange Tales.
• “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” from Washington Irving.
• "The Raven" with illustrations by Gustave Doré.

Related Wikipedia articles:

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Madame De Treymes (1907) by Edith Wharton (short story).

She spoke quite easily and naturally, as if it were the most commonplace thing in the world for them to be straying afoot together over Paris; but even his vague knowledge of the world she lived in--a knowledge mainly acquired through the perusal of yellow-backed fiction--gave a thrilling significance to her naturalness. Durham, indeed, was beginning to find that one of the charms of a sophisticated society is that it lends point and perspective to the slightest contact between the sexes. If, in the old unrestricted New York days, Fanny Frisbee, from a brown stone door-step, had proposed that they should take a walk in the Park, the idea would have presented itself to her companion as agreeable but unimportant; whereas Fanny de Malrive's suggestion that they should stroll across the Tuileries was obviously fraught with unspecified possibilities.

Artemis to Actaeon, and Other Verses (1909) by Edith Wharton (poetry collection).

I quivered in the reed-bed with my kind,
Rooted in Lethe-bank, when at the dawn
There came a groping shape of mystery
Moving among us, that with random stroke
Severed, and rapt me from my silent tribe,
Pierced, fashioned, lipped me, sounding for a voice,
Laughing on Lethe-bank--and in my throat
I felt the wing-beat of the fledgeling notes,
The bubble of godlike laughter in my throat.

A Wodehouse Miscellany (2003) by PG Wodehouse (collection of articles, poems, and stories; public domain texts compiled by Gutenberg).

To the thinking man there are few things more disturbing than the realization that we are becoming a nation of minor poets. In the good old days poets were for the most part confined to garrets, which they left only for the purpose of being ejected from the offices of magazines and papers to which they attempted to sell their wares. Nobody ever thought of reading a book of poems unless accompanied by a guarantee from the publisher that the author had been dead at least a hundred years. Poetry, like wine, certain brands of cheese, and public buildings, was rightly considered to improve with age; and no connoisseur could have dreamed of filling himself with raw, indigestible verse, warm from the maker.

I was casting around for a replacement for the excellent Tofu screen text reader for Mac, due to some encoding issues. Always wont to explore the command-line options, I turned first to the ubiquitous less pager, available on pretty much every unix-alike system out there.

The only real drawback to less is its apparent inability to wrap long lines at spaces rather than chopping words in the middle and sans hyphenation. This isn't a problem on hard-return files like a Project Gutenberg ebook, but makes for difficult reading otherwise. (The opposite is the case for Tofu, which requires a bit of manual column widening to compensate for the hard returns.)

Doing a bit of poking around, I re-discovered the also-ubiquitous fmt command, which does word wrapping to a fare-thee-well, though doesn't do paging.

Combining the two commands gives the best of both in classic Unix fashion:

fmt 1911EthanFrome.txt | less

You can also use options to enhance the experience. less -m will give you a prompt showing how far along you are in the file; see man less for others.

The pager recognizes vim movement keys, which I love. Plus you can hit the v key at any time to drop into vim, edit the file, and then return to less. Spiffy.

Of course, you could just use vim (or your favorite text editor), but I like the simplicity without the overhead. Unlike other options, less doesn't read the entire file into memory before displaying it, a definite advantage on big documents.

Another Tip: If you're in a Mac Terminal window, right click on a word or phrase to search for it in Google or Dictionary.

Bonus tangential tip: if you don't care about downloading the text files but want to stick to reading Project Gutenberg files in the terminal, why not use lynx or ELinks?

In a Telegraph UK Books post yesterday, Justine Picardy had a couple of suggestions for spooky stories to read for Halloween.

'Nobody knows better than a ghost how hard it is to put him or her into words shadowy, yet transparent enough,' wrote Edith Wharton. 'If a ghost story sends a cold shiver down one's spine, it has done its job and done it well.' But that cold shiver is often mingled with a warm glow - for a ghost story is traditionally told by firelight, and its chilling effect accompanied by a pleasurable companionship between the teller of the tale and those to whom it is told.

Luckily for us of the Internet age, both of the 19th Century tales mentioned are available for free via Project Gutenberg. However, I would recommend sticking with reading them by firelight or candlelight rather than the far less dramatic glow of your LCD screen. :)

Edith Wharton's "The Eyes" can be found in Tales of Men and Ghosts.

I was waked suddenly by the feeling we all know--the feeling that there was something near me that hadn't been there when I fell asleep. I sat up and strained my eyes into the darkness. The room was pitch black, and at first I saw nothing; but gradually a vague glimmer at the foot of the bed turned into two eyes staring back at me. I couldn't see the face attached to them--on account of the darkness, I imagined--but as I looked the eyes grew more and more distinct: they gave out a light of their own.

Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Old Nurse's Story" is available in Curious, if True: Strange Tales.

The road went up about two miles, and then we saw a great and stately house, with many trees close around it, so close that in some places their branches dragged against the walls when the wind blew; and some hung broken down; for no one seemed to take much charge of the place;--to lop the wood, or to keep the moss-covered carriage-way in order. Only in front of the house all was clear. The great oval drive was without a weed; and neither tree nor creeper was allowed to grow over the long, many-windowed front; at both sides of which a wing protected, which were each the ends of other side fronts; for the house, although it was so desolate, was even grander than I expected. Behind it rose the Fells; which seemed unenclosed and bare enough; and on the left hand of the house, as you stood facing it, was a little, old-fashioned flower-garden, as I found out afterwards. A door opened out upon it from the west front; it had been scooped out of the thick, dark wood for some old Lady Furnivall; but the branches of the great forest-trees had grown and overshadowed it again, and there were very few flowers that would live there at that time.

While you're at it, another classic story with an appropriate theme for Halloween is "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" from Washington Irving.

A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a High German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power, that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. They are given to all kinds of marvellous beliefs, are subject to trances and visions, and frequently see strange sights, and hear music and voices in the air. The whole neighborhood abounds with local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions; stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country, and the nightmare, with her whole ninefold, seems to make it the favorite scene of her gambols.

Of course, Halloween all-star Edgar Allan Poe has quite a presence on Gutenberg, so there's lots to choose from, but for an especially awesome selection, check out The Raven with accompanying illustrations from Gustave Doré.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door —
Only this, and nothing more."

Do yourself a favor and read at least this one aloud. :)

See these Wikipedia articles for more on each:

• Edith Wharton
• Elizabeth Gaskell
• Washington Irving
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Gustave Doré

Happy Halloween!