Stirring Shakespeare’s Tragedies: A Text Analysis Project

Introduction

A ten word topic model represented in its full chaos from the Mandala browser

I wanted to try a new way of looking at texts that I already knew and the Mandala Browser looked like it was an interesting way to “stir the archive” so that these texts would become “weird” and perhaps show me a new way to read them. Once I learned that the browser came with Shakespeare’s tragedies built into it, I began to think of things that I could look for, connections that I already knew existed but which I might be able to prove were a bigger deal or a more wide-ranging phenomenon rather than a thing that English professors just tell their students about so that they can write papers with tenuous connections to the text. Specifically, I was looking for a correlation between the way nature acted and the state’s dysfunction which appears throughout Shakespeare’s tragedies. This involved setting up magnets with groups of words like “storm gale wind tempest” and “anger ire insanity insane angry” to see what overlap there was, but that didn’t prove as useful as I wanted it to be.

I then looked to a different way of finding related words and remembered that topic modeling was an interesting option. It would give me a list of words that were related which I could then input into the Mandala browser to see what those connections would be. This proved to be a fruitful endeavor which separated out my bias and allowed the texts to show for themselves what they were about. Some of the groups of words that I used were more obvious than others, but all provided at least a few interesting speeches that I would not have connected without a lot of time spent trying to match things in my head. This was an effective way to stir the archive and see texts in a new, colorfully connected way.

Methods and Materials

The two products used for this project were Mandala Browser and TopicModelingTool, both of which are free and open source. The Mandala Browser came with a built-in document that has all the speeches from Shakespeare’s tragedies separated and indexed for ease of use. When you create a magnet in the Mandala Browser, every speech which contains that word is pulled from the edge of the screen to orbit the magnet. When you create another magnet with a different word (or words) the same happens and a mini-magnet appears in between them around which orbits the speeches which contain both words (or sets of words). This allows you to see how the two words are used together in the texts. You can create as many magnets as you want and the program will show you how they are all connected with mini-magnets, but anything over 4 magnets quickly became unruly to work with.

Once I realized that wasn’t really doing anything with my initial method, I looked for a quick and easy topic modeling tool and lo, the creatively named TopicModelingTool, found on Alan Liu’s DH Toychest, was exactly what I was looking for. I had to create a .txt document of all the tragedies and strip out excess information from the Gutenberg Project and other sources. Once I had a file, I put it through the TopicModelingTool on the default settings (200 passes through the text, 10 topics with 10 words per topic) and got some interesting results. I tried putting each word of the first topic into Mandala with a different magnet for every word. 10 magnets, though, is too much and the Mandala window became a mess of lines and circles and colors.

So I went back to TopicModelingTool and gave it different parameters (1000 passes through the text, 20 topics, 3 words per topic). This produced much more manageable results and when I put each topic into Mandala in the same way and got a nice, easy to read and work with result. Each one that I tried produced connections from various plays and expanded beyond what I had previously thought about Shakespeare’s plays when I conceived of them as individual works rather than parts of a body of work. What this project provided me was not a deeper understanding of Shakespeare’s methods or writing style but rather an alternative way of reading his plays. The Mandala Browser makes each speech a separate “work” which it then mixes and matches based on the user’s input. What is shows is not groundbreaking new ways to understand a text, it is a way to deform and distort the texts so that the user can read them with new eyes.

Results: Some Case Studies

Good Night Friends

When I first saw this topic appear in the TopicModelingTool it seemed like such an obvious trio, especially in that order. It is no wonder that the words “good” and “night” and “friends” would appear near each other in Shakespeare’s texts because they appear so frequently in my own life. But when I entered them into the Mandala Browser, I found some surprising connections between them, or lack thereof.

It turns out that while there are a good number of speeches where both “good” and “friends” appear (38 total) and even more where “good” and “night” share a space (89), only two speeches in the entirety of Shakespeare’s tragedies share all three words. The first is Hamlet’s in Scene 2.2:

“Very well. Follow that lord; and look you mock him not. My good friends, I’ll leave you till night: you are welcome to Elsinore.”

Here Hamlet dismisses his buddies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern after setting their plan to have a play out his evil new dad’s murderous ways. It is a somewhat standard farewell and only the “good” modifier of friends gives any indication and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are more than just hangers on. The other speech comes from The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra as Antony asks his servants to tend to him one last time:

 Tend me to-night; May be it is the period of your duty: Haply you shall not see me more; or if, A mangled shadow: perchance to-morrow You’ll serve another master. I look on you As one that takes his leave. Mine honest friends, I turn you not away; but, like a master Married to your good service, stay till death: Tend me to-night two hours, I ask no more, And the gods yield you for’t! (4.2.24-33)

The “good” in this speech is related not to the quality of the friendship but to the standard of service that Antony’s reliable house servants have provided. And “friend” is modified by “honest,” an entirely different although no less heartfelt descriptor of what a friend might be. Finally, “night” seems to appear thanks to the hyphenated version of “tonight,” but I do not see that as a mistake, rather it is an evocation of a time and a melancholy that haunts the entire scene. It is soon Antony’s end, and he has few to spend his short remaining time with than those whose job it is to serve him. He still has genuine affection for them or he would not call them “honest friends,” but they are no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

This is one of the interesting outcomes in a topic model. Even with a relatively small sample size there are still patterns to see. A brief glance at the speeches which held both “good” and “night” in their length showed a roughly equal number of examples which paired the two together in their standard farewell meanings and those which scattered them among many more words, though they were often used more than once in a given speech if they were not connected directly. It is this kind of nebulous connection made more concrete that topic modeling visualized through the Mandala browser can provide. A topic need not be entirely connected by each element equally and wholly, but strong connections between each element individually will make for a stronger whole. With this topic we can see Shakespeare construct night-time gatherings of friends or people brought together by a common cause across plays.

Life Nature Death

This is the most interesting topic produced by the TopicModelingTool because it shows more of a strong core connection between all three words (7 instances of all three words appearing in one speech), each of which is a huge topic in its own right in Shakespeare’s tragedies, and which also demonstrates a glitch in the system which may yet prove meaningful.

Since this is not a giant research paper, I’ll only examine two of the speeches which contain all three topic words. The first comes from Act 2 Scene 2 of Macbeth as the title character tells his wife of his completed assassination:

“Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature‘s second course, Chief nourisher in life‘s feast,–” (2.2.46-51).

Although the scene is entirely about life and death, and the nature of murder, this particular speech is actually about the quality of sleep which Macbeth imagines he has murdered along with his friend and king in his quest for the throne. And yet, all three words appear in the last line of the speech, the point where he extols the virtues of sleep and laments the way he has killed it for the foreseeable future. The topic words combine in a way both expected, all together and in the aftermath of an assassination, and unexpected, in reference to sleep.

I mentioned above that this topic did encounter a glitch, and it is due to the name of one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays, The Life of Timon of Athens. I have not read this play and I have no real context for it, but the title’s use of the word “life” means that of the 7 speeches where all three words overlap, 3 come from this play. In all three cases, the only occurrence of “life” is in the title of the play, which counts for Mandala but not the TopicModelingTool. This is an instructive glitch, because it highlights the issues that may occur when going from one tool to another. There is no way of telling Mandala to ignore the title of a play when it searches for these speeches containing a word, even though the other tool does not “see” the title of the play. Perhaps this is also a nudge towards the real use of topic models, which is as a loosely defined and even more loosely connected set of words which may have some deeper meaning to them. Like I said earlier, it is not necessary to only examine the speeches where all three topic words appear and in fact, the number of speeches containing two of the topic words (78 in total for this topic) are probably the more fruitful areas of interest for a more in depth research project.

Discussion

There are two large takeaways from this project. The first is the efficacy and even necessity of using multiple tools in conjunction with each other. How one tool informs another is a relationship that cannot be fully understood until you just play around with them for a bit. Experimentation and serious playfulness will lead a researcher such as myself to connections that I might not have guessed at on my own and with a rudimentary understanding of how the tools work. It takes fiddling to fully grasp the potential of a tool, it takes breaking it by asking it to do something it cannot do and it takes asking it to do something strange that it ends up being great at to really discover the multitude of possibilities. And then it takes even more fiddling with the tools in relation to each other to discover how they might work together. Each tool is good for some things and not good for others. In this case, the TopicModelingTool is good at creating these topics but it is terrible at actually letting you read the texts or see how the topics are formed by their signifying words. That is where the Mandala browser enters the picture, as it both visualizes those connections and brings the researcher back to the original text. Each tool might serve its own small purpose in a research project, but it is only when they are used together that they become as powerful as they can be.

 

The other lesson learned is that it is ok and sometimes even necessary to throw out a research question if it is not working with the tools you are using in a data analysis project. I had this initial idea to look at the way nature interacts with the state of a character’s inner mind at the outset of this project. But that yielded no fruit. Instead, I found that the tools led the way, at least in this preliminary, exploratory setting. If I wanted to revisit that initial research question, I might try to find topics using the TopicModelingTool which coalesce around nature, and perhaps see what speeches contain those words and then investigate whether those speeches are in response to a change in a character’s being. I would have never known to do that, though, without this prework of discovering what the tools do separately and together, and how I might use their disparate abilities to answer that initial question. The scope of this project does not align with the scope of that question, but I am glad to have gotten the preliminary discovery work out of the way so that I might use these two tools in future projects, and so that I have a path to follow if I want to find out how other tools work.

Shakesp-Year: First Encounters

I went to the library today to get some Shakespeare stuff. I got a few movies, of course, but I also got a book called Will & Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life. It’s a memoir by Dominic Dromgoole, which is a great name, especially for a guy that is the Artistic Director for the Globe Theater. He talks early on about how everybody remembers where and when they first encountered Shakespeare, how they felt about him and what was happening to them as they read or saw or heard their first play. “Hey,” I said to myself, “that sounds like an excellent way to start off this whole project.” So here begins a recollection in two parts of my first encounters with the Bard and his works.

First Encounter: The Lion King

A young man’s first foray into Shakespeare can be scary

I can’t be absolutely certain that this was my first encounter with Shakespeare but I’d guess it’s close enough as makes no difference. Of course, I didn’t know going into the theater that it was based on Hamlet because I didn’t know what Hamlet was. I was 6, I knew it had lions and kings in it. And boy did it make an impression. Looking back I can see how some of the more Shakespearean elements enriched the film for even my juvenile enjoyment. The evilness of Scar, the tragedy of Mufasa’s death at the hands of his own brother witnessed by the helpless prince, even the comic relief in the jungle versions of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They all blend together with fantastic animation and some of the most memorable songs in movie history to become a timeless treasure. I knew instantly, in the way kids do, that it’d be a favorite for the rest of my life and it has been. I’m excited to do a rewatch at some point in this project and focus on the Shakespearean elements.

And as for where I was at the time and how it shaped me, I’d say that, along with Aladdin, The Lion King is what made me into a film fan for life. I was born in a wonderful time for animated films, a newly energized Disney pumped out classic upon classic and Pixar started a revolution in computer animation. Movies are my hobby and they became a big part of my education. This project stems off of my academic interest in Shakespeare and my own pet interest in how we adapt and change works to suit our own ideas. A lot of crap is given to movies and books that take a well known story and retell it. I’d argue that this is an essential part of our cultural process and one that Shakespeare participated in himself. It’ll be a fun thread to follow throughout this expedition.

Second Encounter: Julius Caesar

My first introduction to Shakespeare in his standard form came in Freshman year of high school. I’m sure that’s a pretty universal experience, though I’d guess that Romeo and Juliet is the more popular choice. I’m glad that my teacher went down the road less traveled. Though I had some trouble keeping all the people with the same name ending (how many “-us”es did we really need?) I really enjoyed the political plotting and just the idea of the Ides of March was intriguing to me. How many days have their own titles? And the various un-natural occurrences which portend Caesar’s untimely death were fun to see in my mind’s eye. Little did I know that this was a big thing for my buddy Shakes and I have enjoyed following how his characters’ disturbing natures disturbed nature itself. It’s a trope that I can really get behind for whatever reason. Perhaps I’ll discover why as I go along here.

I also saw my first straight adaptation of a Shakespeare work in this class with this play. It was not a current film, though I don’t actually remember which one it was. Maybe I’ll find in the coming year. But anyways, it was fun to see professionals say these tough lines and some real production value on screen. I remember Caesar’s ghost going around the battlefield and wondering at the kind of strange structure that the play had. You’d think the assassination would be the climax but it happens much earlier than all of that. I didn’t know many of these words at that point, of course, but I felt it and that’s pretty cool for a teenager. Shakespeare can do that to you, make you feel something about structure or character or theme that you don’t even have the words for. Hopefully I’ll be able to find the words now in my advanced age of 24. Even if I can’t, though, it’ll be a great trip. Follow along!

Now that I’ve given you my first memories, I’d be interested in hearing yours. When and where did you first meet Shakespeare? How’d it go? Did you get a second date? Leave some thoughts in the comments if you’ve got something to share! Also, follow me on twitter for updates on what’s coming up next in this crazy project of mine and some fun conversation. @Junior1919.

Shakesp-Year: The Beginning

Clever? No? Okay. Well, I like it. I like a few other things, too, including the works of everybody’s favorite playwright, William “Billy” Shakespeare. A few years ago I received a degree in English Literature from the University of Connecticut and while I was there I took a course on Shakespeare, which was a wonderful learning experience. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten a bit away from the Bard after graduating. It’s hard to read Shakespeare, literally. Heh. Anyways, basically, I feel like I have to force myself to read some of his works and interact with them in all their various ways. And thus, Shakesp-Year.

Shakesp-Year will be 52 weeks long and will feature at least one post per week on some form of Shakespeare work. I hope to read some plays, maybe some alternate adaptations (Romeo and Juliet and Vampires, perhaps?), movies (both standard and more imaginatively adapted versions), filmed plays, audio versions, comic books (do those even exist?), whatever I can get my hands on. And I haven’t ever seen an actual stage version of any of his plays, so I hope to get to one of those as well. We’ll see what pops up in my area. Basically, if it’s got Shakespeare in it, on it, or around it, I’m there.

Partially, I’m going to need to rely upon you, my adoring audience, for some direction on where to go. What do you like? Who does the best Hamlet? The worst? I’m interested in everything, so lay it on me. Leave suggestions in the comments of this post (or any other upcoming Shakesp-Year posts). You’re an integral part of this process!

Penultimately, a few things I’m interested in watching/reading/listening to:

All’s Well That Ends Well

• BBC Television Shakespeare version (1981)

As You Like It

• BBC Television Shakespeare version (1978)
• UK TV version (1963)

The Comedy of Errors

• BBC Television Shakespeare version (1983)

Cymbeline

• BBC Television Shakespeare version (1982)

Love’s Labour’s Lost

• Musical version (2000)

Measure for Measure

• Performance version (1995)

The Merchant of Venice

• Play of the Month version (1972)
• US version (1973)
• US version (2004)

The Merry Wives of Windsor

• Chimes at Midnight

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

• US version (1935)
• Royal Shakespeare Company version (1968)
• The Animated Shakespeare version (1992)
• US version (1999)

Much Ado About Nothing

• UK version (1993)
• ShakespeaRe-Told version (2005)
• US version (2012/2013?)

The Taming of the Shrew

• US version (1929)
• US version (1967)
• BBC Television Shakespeare version (1980)
• Quantum Leap episode
• Moonlighting episode
• 10 Things I Hate about You (1999)
• ShakespeaRe-Told version (2005)

The Tempest

• US version (2010)
• Forbidden Planet
• Twelfth Night
• UK version (1996)
• UK TV version (2003)

Antony and Cleopatra

• 1972 version

Coriolanus

• BBC Television Shakespeare version (1984)

Hamlet

• UK version (1941)
• UK version (1996)
• US version (2000)
• The Bad Sleep Well
• Strange Brew
• The Lion King (rewatch)

Julius Caesar

• US version (1953)
• US version (1970)

King Lear

• US TV version (1953)
• New York Shakespeare Festival version (1974)
• UK TV version (1983)
• Royal National Theatre version (1997)
• Ran
• King Lear (1987)

Macbeth

• US version (1948)
• Roman Polanski version (rewatch)
• Royal Shakepeare Company version (1978)
• Scotland, PA (2001)
• ShakespeaRe-Told  (2005)

Othello

• US version (1952)
• Royal National Theatre version (1965)
• Royal Shakespeare Company version (1990)
• US version (1995)
• O (rewatch)

Romeo and Juliet

• US version (1936)
• Italy version (1968)
• Romeo+Juliet (rewatch)

Titus Andronicus

• Titus (1999)

Henry IV Part 1

• An Age of Kings (1960)
• The Hollow Crown Henry IV, Part 1 (2012)

Henry IV Part 2

• An Age of Kings (1960)
• The Hollow Crown Henry IV, Part 2 (2012)

Henry V

• UK version (1944)
• An Age of Kings (1960)
• UK version (1989)
• The Hollow Crown Henry V (2012)

Henry VI Part 1

• An Age of Kings (1960)

Henry VI Part 2

• An Age of Kings (1960)

Henry VI Part 3

• An Age of Kings (1960)

Richard II

• UK (1997)
• The Hollow Crown Richard II (2012)

Richard III

• UK version (1955)
• An Age of Kings (1960)
• UK version (1995) (rewatch)
• Looking for Richard (1996)

Other things

• Shakespeare in Love
• Doctor Who episode: The Shakespeare Code
• Playing Shakespeare UK TV series
• The Black Adder series 1

So, let me know what I missed in there. Those are strictly filmed versions. If you know of a written adaptation in any medium that’s good to read, let me know that, too.

Finally, I have two reviews of Shakespeare based movies on this site so far, so to quench your thirst until Shakesp-Year begins  (I’m thinking the start of December), check out my reviews of Coriolanus and Throne of Blood.

Top 50 Books List (2012 edition): 15-1

We’ve arrived at the end of our journey. These are my top 15 books of all time, and as such, they deserve a little more love. I’ll include not one but two whole quotes for each book, because they deserve it. As always, series count as only one entry, and any book that I have reviewed here have links to those reviews in the title of the book. Enjoy.

15. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

“Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides… I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.”

“As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.”

This book is so new to this list that I hadn’t finished it yet when I added it. By the time I’ve gotten around to doing a write up here, though, I have finished it and it is glorious. The structure is great, the first half of six stories, each interrupting the one before it and interrupted by the one after it, followed by the back halves in reverse order. And each story is remarkably different in style. From nautical journal to post-WWI letters from one friend to another, a 70’s style pulp novel, then a prison break-out short, then a strange corpo-future, and finally a post apocalypse oral history. It’s a huge book in it’s scope and Mitchell pulls it off beautifully. His prose is wonderful to read, and his themes are diverse and well developed.

14. Bone – Jeff Smith

“CONTROL MYSELF?!! I’m a MONSTER! Monsters don’t control themselves! That’s the whole IDEA!”

“Here’s your problem Fone Bone! We’re off the map! Get a bigger map!”

Bone is an odd duck. It starts off as a total kids book (or series of books), full of slapstick and over-the-top-ness. But as it goes along it turns epic (the collected book is massive) and despairing. It’s an anti-war book and a journey to save a land. It’s a great demonstration of what comic books can do, and the black and white art is real pretty.

13.  Macbeth – William Shakespeare

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

“I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

Such a bloody play! I love the violence on display here, it really heightens the mood. It’s a horror story, really, full of ghosts and witches and moving forests. Macbeth is a man whose insanity is matched only by that of his wife. When the bodies start to pile up, they continue to break down. I love the connection between the rulers and the state of nature, to the point where it even uproots itself to rid the land of the contaminated king.

12. Slaughterhouse V – Kurt Vonnegut

“And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”

“There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

How did a sci-fi book about a man taken to be in an alien zoo alongside a B-movie actress. As he lives on exhibit he becomes unstuck in time, able to see all points of his life at once. This forms the structure of the novel, as the story jumps around between his time on the alien planet and the rest of his life, including his time at Dresden during WWII as a POW before the city was fire-bombed. It’s not exactly anti-war, though. The thesis here is that everything that happens happens, the best thing to do is to go along with it. That’s kinda nice.

11. Blankets – Craig Thompson

“On my first visit to the public library, I was like a kid at a candy store where all the candy was free.

I gorged myself until my tummy ached.”

“And slowly the snow began to melt. First, doing a number on children’s constructions; Then retreating to the foundations of barns and other buildings. Mangy grass poked through the receding snow. Patches of white were swallowed up in the till of the fields. New shapes emerged. Areas of the forest became INACCESSIBLE now that the snow no longer weighed down the weeds and brier. …Nothing fits together anymore.”

Blankets is a memoir disguised as a comic book. It tells the story of Thompson’s adolescence, his first love, and his loss of religion. It’s a deeply heartfelt book, often dealing with very straightforward topics in very straightforward language. It can do that, though, because what he’s saying is so true, and the images he matches the words to so beautiful (again black and white only) that they elevate to true art.

10. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World – Haruki Murakami

“Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in fight, searching the skies for dreams.”

“Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. I’d move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I’d meet Ingrid Bergman. Or more realistically – whether actually more realistic or not – I’d tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self. Toward that end, I had to undergo training. I read The Greening of America, and I saw Easy Rider three times. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn’t anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.”

Half sci-fi adventure, half fantasy mystery, this book is all great. Murakami is distinctly Japanese, but writes with an impeccable sense of American pop culture. It’s two disparate stories that might not be so disparate as they seem. It’s magical realism, my favorite genre, and it’s the best of what Murakami can do.

9. The Giver – Lois Lowry

“For the first time, he heard something that he knew to be music. He heard people singing. Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps, it was only an echo.”

“Always in the dream, it seemed as if there were a destination: a something–he could not grasp what-that lay beyond the place where the thickness of snow brought the sled to a stop. He was left, upon awakening, with the feeling that he wanted, even somehow needed, to reach the something that waited in the distance. The feeling that it was good. That it was welcoming. That it was significant. But he did not know how to get there.”

I was assigned this book to read in middle school and I took it home and finished it in one night. It’s a beautiful book, a utopia that isn’t quite what it seems. There’s no color, and no lying, and no history. Jonas is picked to be the receiver of memories. As he is given these memories of love and death and war and music and color, he discovers how much the rest of his community is missing. It’s a great book, the best of the YA dystopias.

8. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

“Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop”

“Do you think I’ve gone round the bend?”
“I’m afraid so. You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”

Alice is one of literature’s greatest characters. She navigates the insanity of Wonderland, taking all of the oddness in stride. What happens when people mean what they say and say what they mean? It’s a book about language and logic and learning and growing up and it’s devilishly funny. Talk about subversive!

7. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Jonathan Safran Foer

“I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.”

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone’s heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone’s hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don’t really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn’t have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”

A family history told in three parts by three different characters, this book is a deeply emotional work about love and loss. It incorporates 9/11 without exploiting it, the main story is of young Oskar’s search for the hole which is unlocked by a key left behind by his father, who died that horrible day. Foer weaves in the terror of WWII and the breakdown of a long marriage as well. It’s a huge book crammed into a relatively small number of pages, messy and all over the place. And that’s why I love it.

6. The Sandman series – Neil Gaiman

“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.”

“October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: “It is simply a matter,” he explained to April, “of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.”

The Sandman series follows the titular character, one of 7 Endless who each reign over a different aspect of the human condition. There’s Death and Destiny and Destruction and Despair and Desire and Delirium and Dream. Dream is the master of stories, and the series often deals in metafiction, stories about storytelling. It’s a huge work, complete with gorgeous artwork and some of the most beautiful writing I’ve read. There’s nothing like it.

5. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

“That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.”

“That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.”

“In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know where he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.”

Here’s an experiment of a book. A family goes through rough times in the south following the death of the matriarch and must bring her body to a town a distance away. Each member of the family gets some chapters to narrate for themselves, including the youngest, who muses that his mother is a fish, and the mother herself, post-mortem. It’s audacious, a quality matched only by its emotional breadth and depth.

4. Dubliners – James Joyce

“It was cold autumn weather, but in spite of the cold they wandered up and down the roads of the Park for nearly three hours. They agreed to break off their intercourse; every bond, he said, is a bond to sorrow.”

“He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.”

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Short stories are too often neglected when it comes to literature. You read some in school and then you move on to more adult novels. But short stories can accomplish things just as Igreat as novels can. Joyce’s Dubliners is the ultimate example. Each story is set in the same world, though they tell very different stories. His language and sense of place is perfect. The final story in this collection, “The Dead”, is the very definition of literature. It should be given to you at birth and read every year on your birthday and then finally on your deathbed. It’s affirmation and melancholy rolled into one miniature piece of perfection.

3. Calvin and Hobbes – Bill Watterson

Calvin and Hobbes were a force throughout my childhood and into my adulthood. Watterson masterfully captures the joy of childhood, the ability to question and go along with things at will. The imagination and the limits placed on children become who we grow up, and Calvin and Hobbes is that at its best.

2. A Song of Ice and Fire series – George R.R. Martin

“You’re mine,” she whispered. “Mine, as I’m yours. And if we die, we die. All men must die, Jon Snow. But first, we’ll live.”

“It all goes back and back,” Tyrion thought, “to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance in our steads.”

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies,” said Jojen. “The man who never reads lives only one.”

Martin is a man of certain abilities. He can create a superbly realized world. Westeros is by far the best fantasy realm I’ve ever read. He can write with many voices. Each book is filled with numerous POV characters, some noble, some shrewd, some insane, some broken, some proud, some shameful. And more importantly, he allows each character to be a real person. They grow, change, live. And die. That’s his other ability. He kills without remorse. Nobody is safe, and that makes everything mean something, even in the fourth book, where things slow down for a time. It’s a war of good and evil when nobody is truly good or truly evil. It’s remarkably complex.

1. The Phantom Tollbooth – Norton Juster

“Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn? Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven’t the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause of a room full of people when someone is just about to speak, or, most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful if you listen carefully.”

“I know one thing for certain; it is much harder to tell whether you are lost than whether you were lost, for, on many occasions, where you are going is exactly where you are. On the other hand, if you often find that where you’ve been is not at all where you should have gone, and, since it’s much more difficult to find your way back from someplace you’ve never left, I suggest you go there immediately and then decide.”

“I don’t think you understand,” said Milo timidly as the watchdog growled a warning. “We’re looking for a place to spend the night.”
“It’s not yours to spend,” the bird shrieked again, and followed it with the same horrible laugh.
“That doesn’t make any sense, you see—” he started to explain.
“Dollars or cents, it’s still not yours to spend,” the bird replied haughtily.
“But I didn’t mean—” insisted Milo.
“Of course you’re mean,” interrupted the bird, closing the eye that had been open and opening the one that had been closed. “Anyone who’d spend a night that doesn’t belong to him is very mean.”
“Well, I thought that by—” he tried again desperately.
“That’s a different story,” interjected the bird a bit more amiably. “If you want to buy, I’m sure I can arrange to sell, but with what you’re doing you’ll probably end up in a cell anyway.”
“That doesn’t seem right,” said Milo helplessly, for, with the bird taking everything the wrong way, he hardly knew what he was saying.
“Agreed,” said the bird, with a sharp click of his beak, “but neither is it left, although if I were you I would have left a long time ago.”

This was the book that made me a lifelong reader. It’s a journey through a fantasy land where Conclusions is a place you literally jump to and you must be careful to avoid The Terrible Trivium, or else you’ll spend all your time moving grains of sand from one pile to another. It’s a place where the colors and time of the day is played by an orchestra which should not be disturbed. It’s a place where a little boy bored by everything can go and be interested in anything. That’s what literature does.

Top 50 Books List (2012 edition): 30-16

You’ve seen my 50-31 books of all time, now it’s time for the next 15. Get ready for 30-16. Remember, series only count as one spot. Click on the titles that are links for fuller reviews.

30. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami

“It’s like when you put instant rice pudding mix in a bowl in the microwave and push the button, and you take the cover off when it rings, and there you’ve got ricing pudding. I mean, what happens in between the time when you push the switch and when the microwave rings? You can’t tell what’s going on under the cover. Maybe the instant rice pudding first turns into macaroni gratin in the darkness when nobody’s looking and only then turns back into rice pudding. We think it’s only natural to get rice pudding after we put rice pudding mix in the microwave and the bell rings, but to me, that is just a presumption. I would be kind of relieved if, every once in a while, after you put rice pudding mix in the microwave and it rang and you opened the top, you got macaroni gratin. I suppose I’d be shocked, of course, but I don’t know, I think I’d be kind of relieved too. Or at least I think I wouldn’t be so upset, because that would feel, in some ways, a whole lot more real.”

I reviewed this book a few weeks ago and it won’t even be the most recent entry onto this list. Just go read that review to find out why this books is so awesome.

29. The Commitments – Roddy Doyle

“Soul is the music people understand. Sure it’s basic and it’s simple. But it’s something else ’cause, ’cause, ’cause it’s honest, that’s it. Its honest. There’s no fuckin’ bullshit. It sticks its neck out and says it straight from the heart. Sure there’s a lot of different music you can get off on but soul is more than that. It takes you somewhere else. It grabs you by the balls and lifts you above the shite.”

A hilarious novel about trying to form a soul band in northern Dublin. Doyle writes music better than anybody else I’ve seen. It’s hard to do but he pulls it off.

28. Danny the Champion of the World – Roald Dahl

“I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile because it’s impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren’t feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I’ve also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It’s sure to be a phony.”

This story is the definition of ‘wonderful’. Roald Dahl is one of the best kid-lit authors there ever was, and this charming tale of a boy and his dad and their pheasant-snatching escapade is top notch Dahl.

27. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell – Susanna Clarke

“I mean that two of any thing is a most uncomfortable number. One may do as he pleases. Six may get along well enough. But two must always struggle for mastery. Two must always watch each other. The eyes of all the world will be on two, uncertain which of them to follow.”

This, like the Magician series in the previous post, came out after the Harry Potter boom. It deals with magic and magicians, although in a completely different manner. It takes place during the Napoleonic Wars and it is written to emulate the literary style of the time. There are two magicians with wildly differing points of view on how magic can be used to beat the short Frenchman which, of course, builds to an epic rivalry. It’s a large book but completely worth the length.

26. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut

“People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.”

What starts off as a man on a quest to write about the invention of the atomic bomb becomes the funniest post-apocalypse story you’ll ever read. Vonnegut does the sci-fi and the humor perfectly, as always. And the Koans of Bokonon, some guy who made up his own religion, are delightfully insightful while also making fun of the idea of religious living.

25. The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis

“A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. It was hardly a tune. But it was beyond comparison, the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.”

I first heard this series as my father read it to me every night before bed. Then, when I got older, I read it myself. I went back and reread it again semi-recently and it was just as good. Lewis’s Narnia is a vast and intriguing universe with all kinds of different stories to be told within it.

24. Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories – Dr. Seuss

“And the turtles, of course…all the turtles are free, as turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.”

This is basically a stand-in for all Dr. Seuss books. They formed such an important part of my childhood that they must have a place on this list. His felicity with the English language is something all writers should strive for.

23. Maus – Art Spiegelman

“Sometimes I don’t feel like a functioning adult”

This book (or pair of books) is a memoir and a family history of the author’s father and mother and their fight to stay alive during the Holocaust. Also, they’re all mice. The device of making each nationality a different species is the hook, but the meat is probably the best Holocaust story I’ve ever encountered in any medium.

22. The Lieutenant of Inishmore – Martin McDonagh

Martin McDonagh is growing his talent. He started by writing plays, then he moved on to short films (he won an Oscar for Six Shooter), and this year he’s releasing his second feature film, Seven Psychopaths. All of his stories, regardless of medium, share a dark sense of humor and a distinct sense of place. There’s also a surprising amount of heart in each of his stories. It’s quite a feat to get so dirty and then pull out an emotional climax.

21. Watership Down – Richard Adams

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you; digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed.”

This is the story of talking rabbits. It should not, however, be confused with kid-lit. It is a very adult book, full of allusions and philosophical musings. It’s a road book and a settling book and a war book and an escape book. It’s a book about talking rabbits that is as profound as anything else on this list.

20. Hamlet – William Shakespeare

“Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.”

Shakespeare is a funny guy. Even his tragedies have wordplay and clever little exchanges like the one quoted above. I don’t know why, then, I don’t like his comedies all that much. He’s a master of tragedy (historical or not), but the comedies never come together for me. Give me Hamlet’s sarcasm any day of the week. Also, ghosts.

19. Cosmicomics – Italo Calvino

“I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.”

Here’s a strange book. A collection of short stories, some with an idea of a recurring character, though he takes different shapes depending on the story that is being told. Each story takes on a scientific concept and extrapolates it out into a kind of fairy-tale. Calvino’s mixture of science and fiction is unlike any other sci-fi you’ll read.

18. Winnie-the-Pooh – A.A. Milne

“What I like doing best is Nothing.”

“How do you do Nothing,” asked Pooh after he had wondered for a long time.

“Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, ‘What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?’ and you say, ‘Oh, Nothing,’ and then you go and do it.

It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

“Oh!” said Pooh.”

Pooh is a bear of very little brain. That doesn’t make him useless. He’s a vital part of our cultural heritage and the world would be a better place if everybody read this collection of short stories every five years. Sometimes it’s important to remember how things really work, and how to have fun, and what’s important, truly. Pooh, despite his very little brain, remembers.

17. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer

“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder.
Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”

Both of Foer’s fiction works have been adapted into films. Both films lose large chunks of the story in order to fit everything into a two hour package. It is those missing chunks that are vital to the power of his stories. They are about everything. Love and loss, happiness and sadness, history and family. This book incorporates two timelines, a diary, a fictionalized version of the author, and a magical realist book that tells the history of a small town in Eastern Europe. It’s beautiful.

16. The Dark Tower Series – Stephen King

“Jake went in, aware that he had, for the first time in three weeks, opened a door without hoping madly to find another world on the other side. A bell jingled overhead. The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming home.”

I could have just as easily picked another quote from this series to stand in for all seven books worth of writing: Go, then, there are other worlds than these. It is a eulogy of sorts in the book, but it gets at the overriding idea of the series. It connects most of King’s works into a grand universe unparalleled in fiction. It’s a huge series, full of pulp and profundity, like all of King’s works.