the 100 greatest challenge

I've always been a huge fan of lists. Little did I know, but shortly after I met Croftie I found she was very found of a particular list. She had been steadily marching through the 100 greatest novels of all time, but I have made up some ground. Together we are unstoppable.

A code for below. The books I am certain that just I have read are in blue. Those I know Croftie has read are in red. Books we've both read are in green.

1. ULYSSES by James Joyce
2. THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
4. LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
5. BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
6. THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
7. CATCH-22 (not entirely sure C has read this...)
   
8. DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler
9. SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
10. THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
11. UNDER THE VOLCANO by Malcolm Lowry
12. THE WAY OF ALL FLESH by Samuel Butler
13. 1984 by George Orwell
14. I, CLAUDIUS by Robert Graves
15. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by Virginia Woolf
16. AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser
17. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER by Carson McCullers
18. SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE by Kurt Vonnegut
19. INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison
20. NATIVE SON by Richard Wright
21. HENDERSON THE RAIN KING by Saul Bellow
22. APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA by John O'Hara
23. U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos (I've read the first volume)
    
24. WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson
25. A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster
26. THE WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James
27. THE AMBASSADORS by Henry James
28. TENDER IS THE NIGHT by F. Scott Fitzgerald
29. THE STUDS LONIGAN TRILOGY by James T. Farrell (again, read bk1)
    
30. THE GOOD SOLDIER by Ford Madox Ford
31. ANIMAL FARM by George Orwell
32. THE GOLDEN BOWL by Henry James
33. SISTER CARRIE by Theodore Dreiser
34. A HANDFUL OF DUST by Evelyn Waugh
35. AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner
36. ALL THE KING'S MEN by Robert Penn Warren (began this but couldn't stomach it)
    
37. THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by Thornton Wilder
38. HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster
39. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN by James Baldwin
40. THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene
41. LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding
42. DELIVERANCE by James Dickey
43. A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME (series) by Anthony Powell
44. POINT COUNTER POINT by Aldous Huxley
45. THE SUN ALSO RISES by Ernest Hemingway
46. THE SECRET AGENT by Joseph Conrad
47. NOSTROMO by Joseph Conrad
48. THE RAINBOW by D.H. Lawrence
49. WOMEN IN LOVE by D.H. Lawrence
50. TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller
51. THE NAKED AND THE DEAD by Norman Mailer
52. PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth
53. PALE FIRE by Vladimir Nabokov
54. LIGHT IN AUGUST by William Faulkner
55. ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac (hated it!)
    
56. THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett
57. PARADE'S END by Ford Madox Ford
58. THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
59. ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm
60. THE MOVIEGOER by Walker Percy
61. DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather
62. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones
63. THE WAPSHOT CHRONICLES by John Cheever
64. THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by J.D. Salinger
65. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by Anthony Burgess
66. OF HUMAN BONDAGE by W. Somerset Maugham
67. HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad
68. MAIN STREET by Sinclair Lewis
69. THE HOUSE OF MIRTH by Edith Wharton
70. THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET by Lawrence Durell
71. A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA by Richard Hughes
72. A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS by V.S. Naipaul
73. THE DAY OF THE LOCUST by Nathanael West
74. A FAREWELL TO ARMS by Ernest Hemingway
75. SCOOP by Evelyn Waugh
76. THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE by Muriel Spark
77. FINNEGANS WAKE by James Joyce
78. KIM by Rudyard Kipling
79. A ROOM WITH A VIEW by E.M. Forster
80. BRIDESHEAD REVISITED by Evelyn Waugh
81. THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH by Saul Bellow
82. ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner
83. A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul
84. THE DEATH OF THE HEART by Elizabeth Bowen
85. LORD JIM by Joseph Conrad
86. RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow
87. THE OLD WIVES' TALE by Arnold Bennett
88. THE CALL OF THE WILD by Jack London
89. LOVING by Henry Green
90. MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie
91. TOBACCO ROAD by Erskine Caldwell
92. IRONWEED by William Kennedy
93. THE MAGUS by John Fowles
94. WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys
95. UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch
96. SOPHIE'S CHOICE by William Styron
97. THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles
98. THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE by James M. Cain
99. THE GINGER MAN by J.P. Donleavy (think C started but never finished)
    
100. THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by Booth Tarkington

That Barack Obama Sure Is One Nice Guy

If indeed the power's that be monitor blogs, suffice to say I'm likely to be whisked away to some sort of detention center for the story I am about to tell.

Last night, to the surprise of nobody, least of all me, I was cruising around Hyde Park with Barack Obama in his black SUV with the bullet proof tinted windows. It was just me and Obama, 'chewing the fat' as they say, until the driver was forced to pull down the wrong alley and all hell broke loose. Suddenly, the other black SUVs that had been flanking us were nowhere to be found and it was like some scene out of a Harrison Ford as President movie. The windows around us began to crackle with the 'pack-pack-pack' of bullets being refused entry until enough got through and the driver was scagged. 'oh no!,' I yelled as I turned to the side to take any incoming fire that our good president might receive from my side of the truck. But this was all unnecessary as Barack had a plan.

Before escaping I went to help the driver and was told not to worry, he was merely a highly convincing robot. Obama and I then made our getaway, ducking and rolling out all action hero style before some sort of explosion destroyed the vehicle in a riotous orange fireball. The entire time our president elect was one cool customer, and all I could lament as we used a top secret path back to his home was the utter ruination of my shoes, befouled by oil and blood from the inexplicably bleedy robot driver.

Inside Mr Obama's home I found spacious, comfortably furnished rooms, fancy yes, but not the kind of fancy where you don't sit on the sofa. The kind of fancy where you maybe even put your feet up on the ottomans. For some reason the Obamas hadn't switched over DVD or Blu-ray yet and had a vast collection of VHS movies. I'm pretty sure Barack told me to pick one out that I could borrow while he went and got me a new pair of shoes from upstairs, you see, we're the same size.

Of course this was an incredibly lucid dream and not reality. I realized this when Obama and I left his place after some time and both transformed into vigilante werewolves, saving the Hyde Park populace from a plague of rogue timberwolves that had wandered down from Canada because of the severe cold. Unfortunately, I ended up losing the VHS copy of Big Trouble in Little China to the ravenous maw of a wolf.

However I'm left with the impression that Barack Obama sure is one nice guy.

Destroyer

This post will likely win me TMI of the year. In fact, TMI is probably a little too cutesy a way of warning that the following might be, cue the italics and scary local news threatening music, too much information. Also, in fine Thunderclap tradition, we return to a scene detailed all too frequently in this blog. I'm talking about, of course, the men's bathroom at my work.

Yesterday was new urinal cake day. Where before there was nothing but a hollow white porcelain bowl, more and more musty with each passing day, now there is a cake, brilliantly pink, a color not found anywhere else in nature, sanitzing and perfuming the entire bathroom from its quiet resting place. And I know you girly readers will have no frame of reference here, but it is a powerful feeling that sweeps over a man, er, possibly just this man, whereby I am encouraged, nay, compelled, to try as hard as I possibly can to destroy said dainty pink cake with my urine.

It becomes a target, a beacon too attractive to ignore, a bullseye, but that bitch is tough. After several days worth of visits I'll manage to make a slight dent in its center, while the whole cake is diminished by countless others disgracefully directionless micturation. Gradually the days will pass, eventually I will be able to move the shrunken cake around with carefully placed stream, and I'll be honest with you, it's kind of fun. But back to the point, I am forced to destroy that damn cake from the center of my being, and nothing less than its complete eradication will do.

At least until the janitor decides to place another in an apparently endless supply of cakes back in the urninal.

A man's work is never done.

Let the Right One In

It's official. It's that time of year when good movies are back in the theaters, even if the one I just saw had to get here by making the long journey from Norway.

Let the Right One In is horror film in the strictest sense. It takes the little things that make up our lives, and magnifies them to the point where things get awful in a hurry. Divorce, lonliness, bullies. On the one hand, Let the Right One In is the story about a child outcast in a fractured single-parent home named Oskar who lives in an isolated Norwegian town and has become the butt of his local classmates jokes. The film is preoccupied with how unfair it is that we are made who we are, literally 'composed' by those we spend time with. That many times we don't have much of a choice who these people are to the point where most times we have to sludge through the day surrounded by the folks we'd least prefer to be around. They shape us anyway, and nobody gets out of middle school unscathed.

The film begins when a young girl moves in nextdoor to Oskar. Oh yeah, she just happens to be a vampire.

That plot point seems initially to be perfectly incidental. It just so happens that his neighbor is a vampire. His real life is horrible enough, a creature of the night isn't going to make any difference. And at first it appears her arrival will only improve his circumstances. Eli befriends Oskar, and the two share a wonderfully strange and awkward relationship. Less awkward because of the whole undead thing, and more because these two kids are just odd and want friends but aren't exactly used to folks accepting them for who they are. It is this relationship that is the film's very strong beating heart.

[spoilers ahead]

But like the film's title suggests, we may not be able to choose who we have to associate with on a day to day basis, but we can control who we really let into our lives. Who we allow to really mater. In one devastating sequence shortly after Oskar finds out Eli is even stranger than he first thought, the girl asks to be let inside his apartment. Thing is, she needs to be invited. Classic vampire mythology. And Oskar mocks her. Says something like "What is stopping you from coming in?" and refuses to invite her. Eli stubborns walks in anyway, and then begins to physically deteriorate from the inside out. And Oskar lets this go on for far too long, as if proving a point and showing Eli that he has power over her too.

On the one hand the film seems to be saying that without friends we're as good as dead. But on the other hand the person Oskar chooses to befriend is a monster. She will bring violence and death with her wherever she goes. Eli does teach Oskar to stand up for himself against the bullies. But just like her, he lets the violence get out of hand. When he finally smashes a bullies ear with a stick it only invites retribution from the bullies in kind. And this time simple name-calling isn't going to cut it for their amusement.

It is a surprise to no one that the film ends in a Columbine like manner. Yet here we are, with the 'good guys' doing the slaughtering. And I use the scare quotes because the film is careful to shade everything and everyone in a very gray moral spectrum. This messiness lays in the stark contrast to the blisteringly pure snow that covers the trees and ground and occupies so many of the films quiet natural shots. When the blood seeps in, it only shows up that much more on such a stark background.

Yet the most disturbing aspect of all is how cyclical the film resloves. As the film opens, Eli is chaperoned into town by a haggard old man who has little to offer young Eli except for a methodically evil way of acquiring her human blood. There is a relationship here, but something is not quite right. There is no mention of the man being her father. We are given no information regarding this odd pairing. Eventually through the course of the movie, he fails and she disposes of him. In the end, one has to wonder as Oskar rides out of town with Eli in a box at his feet, at what point will he too become that haggard old man? At what point will their own friendship bleed out? Loaded with interesting questions and moral quandaries, Let the Right One In provides no easy answers.