The Red Badge of Courage

Stephen Crane's serialized novel, The Red Badge of Courage (Simon & Schuster Enriched Classic) may have pleased audiences in 1894, but this crapfest was painful to read and it's current popularity stands as a testament to how high school teachers must enjoy torturing students with horrible books. Crane, a reporter who never fought in the Civil War, chronicles the psychological melodramas of a young soldier, Henry, exposed to the horrors of war for the first time. Henry the intellectual douchebag justifies his cowardly retreat from his first battle as indicative of his superior intelligence--he wanted to preserve his life while his automaton comrades fought like beasts or cogs in the great war machine. Eventually, Henry learns how to fight as a beast as well.

Yawn.

I wouldn't read this bung ever again. And I certainly would never recommend it to anyone. But I did get it for $.10 at a Friends of the Library book sale and despite my loathing of the work itself, I remain entirely enamored of used book sales. There's a certain allure to tattered books that have been passed around for years, their pages yellowed and weathered with use.

Gulliver's Travels

I'm a few books behind in my reviews, so I'm afraid these may be rather abbreviated.

Jonathan's Swift's classic novel, Gulliver's Travels (Collector's Library), available for free here, chronicles the adventures of Gulliver as he travels about the globe. The tales should be familiar to most English-speaking people because, unless you grew up in a bubble, you've heard references to the Lilliputians and other aspects of Gulliver's travels. In picking up some older classic literature, I can see gaps in my education where I feel like I should have been exposed to these stories at some point and for whatever reason, I had to read crap like Where the Red Fern Grows or Flowers for Algernon instead of more foundational literature. Such is life with a crappy education system.

Anyway, Swift breaks Gulliver's travels into four journeys. The first lands him among the Lilliputians, tiny people who imprison him despite their stature. The second lands him among giants where he's carried about in a luxurious box as a kind of curiosity item in a way that brought to mind Paris Hilton's purse dogs. His third adventure brings him to a floating island with inhabitants that beat on each other to get each other's attention, an action I've been inspired to reproduce on my hubby when he zones out on the NCAA tournament or his blog. And last but not least, Gulliver's last trip takes him to a land of noble horses who rule with such integrity and honor that Gulliver is disgusted and depressed to return to humanity.

The text is a goldmine of ideas on various topics from how to rule to the nature of medicine or the law. My interest was piqued by Swift's descriptions of the nature and causes of various illnesses, which included his character's understanding that some people are born with maladies already upon them--an understanding of genetics without the modern frame of reference.

Would I recommend Gulliver's Travels? If you have a tolerance for political science and policy discussions in your literature, you'll enjoy it. It's not an edge-of-your-seat suspense thrill ride, but it's a slow, thoughtful journey that's interesting for what it can say to the modern reader.

The Black Sheep

Honoré de Balzac's famous tale, The Black Sheep (Penguin Classics) seemed to me to lose something in its translation from French to English, as though the original text was populated by subtle plays on words and innuendoes that were simply lost, er, in translation. Ugh. Sorry about that.

It's a gorgeous web Balzac weaves though. The plot is delicious. And here it is, in short form.

One father sires two children. He believes the second, a daughter, to be the product of his wife's infidelity and sends the ill-begotten spawn away. His first child, a son, is a dunce. The father dies and leaves his idiot son a fortune. Meanwhile, his daughter has two sons of her own: her first son is an ambitious, evil bastard and her second son is a pure-hearted artist. Her first son is her true love but even she realizes his true nature after he steals money and is generally a petty, selfish dickhead.

But that's the thing about petty, selfish dickheads. They're predictable. And Balzac counts on it.

The daughter, realizing that she's in a tight financial spot because of her son's dickheadedness decides to call on her dunce brother for a piece of the family fortune. But, her dunce of a brother is being swindled from within his own home, having fallen in love with a peasant girl. The girl is in love with a rogue from town who wants to take the dunce's fortune and is set to do exactly that. The rogue is far too clever for the daughter and her good son who fall prey to his manipulations and leave town penniless and shamed.

But the daughter's dickheaded son is just the match for the rogue. He finds himself in a position to take on the girl and the rogue and he uses his innate dickheadedness to win the day, to swindle the swindler. This is the brilliance of Balzac's plot. He uses an evil character to screw over another evil character and it's fabulous!

So the dickheaded son screws over the girl and her rogue. He gets the fortune. And then he's done in by his own dickheadedness and the fortune falls to the daughter's good son, the pure-hearted artist that Balzac clearly wanted us to adore from the start. So the plot comes full circle, good people are rewarded and evil plays its part in bringing about a happy ending.

It took me a good 150 pages to warm up to the plot but once I realized what Balzac was doing, I was enthralled. It's slow and plodding. You need patience to get into it and even then, the idea of the plot may be better than the actual application.