All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy

It’s like a good Western movie from start to finish. The hero leaves town to find his true self, others get the hero in trouble, he narrowly escapes, he gets himself in trouble because of a woman, he narrowly escapes, he then looks back at his life, learns his lessons, and rides on.

Despite being really rather predictable overall, this is a great book. The section set in the prison is as good, impressive, and nerve-wracking as it gets. Yet, in spite of all this, I pretty much refuse to read the other books of the Border Trilogy, at least for the time being, and why? Simply because I am afraid they’ll be virtually identical to All the Pretty Horses, and the magic of this book for me will be lost.

The Golden Age – Gore Vidal

This was my first encounter with Gore Vidal – arguably I shouldn’t have started from the last book of his Narratives of Empire, but hey. As a historian of the 20^th century, I had great expectations form this novel. Surely, it does offer an interesting angle to the presidency of FDR, and is undoubtedly very daring when it tries to debunk the myth of one of the most loved presidents in American history.

The problem is that Vidal himself appears to me as a rather awful man: he and his grandfather are portrayed as always the most acute observers, the best thinkers, and, ultimately, the great owners of the world’s truths.

I just hate it when people use their art to glorify themselves, be that Gore Vidal or Julian Schnabel (I still can’t get over the way he portrayed himself in Basquiat – and I also think that Gary Oldman, who played Schanbel in the movie, is way better looking than him).

Lord of the Flies – William Golding

The daring teacher of my English B IB course (i.e. English for the linguistically impaired) had us read Golding’s book for her class. Granted, it did take most of us a couple of months to finish it, but we did manage to get some interesting class debates going – despite the fact that our English at the time left a lot to be desired.

The book has every right to be considered one of the greatest ones of the last century, it’s just not one of my favourites. I’m not a fan of allegories depicting the darkest aspects of human nature (I am pretty aware of the fact that mankind is awful without needing authors to tell me that). I am even less of a fan of works that seem to draw a bit too much inspiration from Christianity...

And, in all honesty, I would rather see a book like this end with total and utter destruction, rather than the – relatively speaking – happy ending.

Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust

This was the last book of my collection of great 20^th century novels. I kept it for last not because I wanted to save the best for a grand finale, but rather because I had the dreadfully mistaken idea of potentially reading the remaining books of In Search of Lost Time after this one.

Needless to say, after crawling my way through this thick endless flashback, I didn’t feel the need to immediately follow it up with more Proust. I still don’t, and I don’t think I ever will.

I wonder whether people praise Proust essentially just for the sheer scope and ambition of his work and nothing more, because I really couldn’t see much great literature in this pointless (yes, there I said it) book.

I want to meet someone who’s actually managed to read the whole of Proust (for real, no cheating) and actually explain to me why this is a great work. Call me boring, but I actually need to see something happening in order to like a book...

Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury

I wonder whether, when he wrote this, Bradbury had actually predicted how little the world would have come to care about books by the start of the 21^st century. This dystopian novel was written at a time when the market wasn’t yet saturated with dystopian novels, and the idea of re-thinking the role of the firemen is undeniably a stroke of genius.

Having seen Truffaut’s movie before reading the book, I would have expected it to have a much more rigid structure and style. I also expected it to be dated, but I was wrong. Lastly, I also wasn’t expecting the book to scare me, but the mechanical dog is one of the most frightening creations I’ve ever come across.

Fahrenheit 451 remains a seminal book in the literature of the 20^th century. I am just afraid that in the near future we won’t need firemen to dispose of our books, we’ll happily throw them away ourselves.