What I'm Reading For Pleasure

What I'm Reading For Pleasure

I'm reading grim but important books at the moment for historical research--but that's not all I read. I've recently finished William Makepeace Thackery's The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. If you saw Stanley Kubrick's movie version in 1975, yes, it captures some of what a cad Barry Lyndon is--but only somewhat. I would say that Barry Lyndon is a superior novel to Thackery's Vanity Fair, which is often considered Thackery's masterpiece. Barry Lyndon suffers far less from Victorian self-conscious self-righteousness than Vanity Fair, and is far more subtle in how it tells you that the narrator can't be trusted--and yet, unintentionally provides you enough information to figure out what a cad he really is. The opening sentence of the first chapter, once you read a few chapters in, becomes the ultimate statement of projection:

SINCE the days of Adam, there has been hardly a mischief done in this world but a woman has been at the bottom of it.

I've been reading through the Harry Potter novels--and J.K. Rowling deserves the billion dollars or whatever that she has made from writing them, and selling film and product marketing rights. They were immensely popular with kids 8-15 (at least, those that still read), and yet adults can read them and enjoy them tremendously as well. There is just enough wit to them to prevent them from being too dark--and yet, in their own parallel universe way, there are important lessons about the nature of good, evil, love, and friendship in them. And it is so nice that someone is prepared to write novels about teenagers that don't insist on going beyond very passionate kissing. I've just finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; I'm waiting for my wife (who is teaching four classes this term, and is a bit busy) to finish the seventh novel before I dig in.

In the meantime, I'm reading Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup's 1853 account of what happened when he was lured from his home in upstate New York to Washington, DC to work--then drugged, and sold into slavery in Louisiana. Eventually, he managed to get a letter to an attorney named Northup who was a descendant of the man who had owned Northup's father, before New York ended slavery, who arranged for his release.

I'm only halfway through it, but it is a powerful story. It benefits from the fact that Northup was an educated free man when sold into slavery, and was therefore more able to provide a very thoughtful and detailed account of his experiences. Like many of those who had escaped slavery, and like such fictional portrayals as Uncle Tom's Cabin, he was careful to distinguish good masters from bad, and that the core problem was institutional, not personal. In the parallel universe where I ever get to teach American history, I would be tempted to assign it. His portrayal of the separation of a slave mother from her two children at the New Orleans slave market is powerful for its simplicity and honesty--without the maudlin sensibilities of fiction of that era.

There is much in Northup's account that makes it unacceptable to those who insist on simple dichotomous narratives of good and evil. Perhaps this is why I have never seen a film version of Twelve Years a Slave, although there seems to be one out there, somewhere.