Alternative Entrees

This post will be devoted to book length works, fiction and non-fiction, but not those listed on the site's Reading Habit/Reading List page. These are also unlikely to be found on other reading lists students will get in their college courses.  But they are compelling reads and might completely engage non-course students.

For several of these there is a movie version.  My suggestion is to read the book first.  Then either don't watch the movie at all or watch it only after having read the book.  Nowadays, many people view watching the movie as a substitute for reading the book.  For those in the non-course, it is not a substitute.  And quite often the movie excludes so much from the book that the story is lost.  I will provide brief movie reviews after giving the annotated list of books.

Full Length Books:

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel 
This is historical fiction.  Other references will say it is about the Armenian genocide by the Turks.  My view is that while it is about that era, it is more about casting the Armenians as a noble people.  I learned about this book from my mother, a Holocaust survivor.  It is said that the Armenian genocide is what gave Hitler the idea to kill the Jews.  My mom wanted me to read it when I was a teenager.  I eventually read it sometime in my 50s.  Werfel is a very skillful storyteller and this book is a great adventure story, quite apart from the historical context.  I felt sad when I got to the end of the book and there was no more of it to read.

Lust for Life by Irving Stone
This is biographical fiction about Vincent van Gogh.  Before he became a painter he was a member of the clergy, assigned to a very poor mining region called the Borinage.  What he had been trained to do in his religious studies seemed unreal to him in providing spiritual guidance to these people, so he actually went into the mines to minister to the miners.  This passion presaged how he would go about his painting, which he did as a hobby while a minister, but which he turned to full time after his health failed and he was kicked out of the church.  Van Gogh is famous for cutting off his own ear, an externalization of the mania that haunted him, but that may also have been a big driver of his creativity.  At the time, the mania was diagnosed as a kind of epilepsy.  Recently other alternative explanations have been proposed.

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar (This book is too recent for it to be freely available.) 
This is biography, non-fiction.  It is about the life of John Nash.  If you study economics or mathematics, you will immediately recognize Nash as a giant in the field.  His noncooperative equilibrium concept is central in game theory and in its application, such as in the study of imperfect competition.  But if you're outside of those fields, you might not have heard of him, which makes him unlike van Gogh, a household name.  But like van Gogh, Nash too had mental illness, in this case schizophrenia.  His most creative worked happened before this was diagnosed.  So, this is another example of a seeming tie between genius and mental illness, a theme that can be captivating.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (I could not find a free version online.  I did see several recent sites (within the last 5 years) that discuss the relevance of this book to the present.  So it might very well appear in a current college course.  Nonetheless, it satisfies the other criteria for my choice of books here, so I'm keeping it on the list. 

This is a fantastic novel, recounting the life of the main character, a Black man, from one episode to the next, as he grows older and as he moves generally in the direction going north.  The full trip from the deep south to Harlem gives the path of the adventure.  Invisible in the title is a metaphor from how Black people appear in the larger society and how they see themselves in that society.  It is not a protest book, but it does offer a scathing critique of America as a supposed society where all are equal.  

The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly
This is non-fiction. I read this book in college, I think it was the spring semester 1975.  It was one of the required readings in a course on American political thought.  Some of the readings were over my head (particularly a book by Heimert) while other readings were manageable and engaging.  But this book went to still  another level for me.  I thought it a revelation.  It is one of the main texts of the Progressivist Era in American politics.  In Croly's book, the hero is Abraham Lincoln, for he saved the Union.  I confess not to remember it much beyond that, but the emotional impact it had on me is something that stays with me even now.

Network by Paddy Chayefsky
This is a screenplay, so fiction but not in novel form.  It was published in 1976.  It is all the more amazing in retrospect, since a feature of the story is a news media star, Howard Beale, telling members of his audience to get madder than hell and not take it any more. This idea that media personalities influence their audience, in a way to make them very angry, was quite alien at the time Network was published.  Most of us watched TV News on over the air channels (these required rabbit ear antennas to pick up the signal).  The most famous newscaster of the day, Walter Cronkite of CBS, was very staid in his demeanor.  The newscasters on NBC and ABC also were very staid.  Cable began to change that, particularly the show Crossfire.  Rush Limbaugh then changed it for radio.  Of course, stoking the audience is a normal feature of news programming now.  It's as if Chayefsky knew that was coming.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
This is science fiction, but not in the mold of Star Wars.  The title is a reference to the temperature at which paper will burn spontaneously.  And the theme is that society is now searching out books to burn them, in effect to nullify reading.  There is a small group of like minded people who are committed to preserving books. They are the heroes of the story.  Literally, the science part of the story is dated, as many people read online now and digital preservation is a different animal from paper preservation.  Metaphorically, the story still works quite well.  Smart phones, Twitter,  as well as TV and online programming that stokes the audience, all seem aimed at getting people to make snap judgments about things and not read anything slowly and carefully.  Indeed, this book might serve as the flagship for the non-course.

Dubliners by James Joyce
This is a collection of short stories, so conceivably could have been included in the Appetizers page, but Joyce is a challenge to read, even as he is considered among the best writers of the 20th century.  (I've read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and started Ulysses twice, but never made it very far.)  So I'm including it here, as the last item on the page.  Readers need practice with other works before trying this one.  Joyce grew up in Ireland, but then left to live in France.  I believe these stories were written while in France, based on earlier memories he had from growing up.  Some of those memories were bitter (otherwise, why leave?) and the stories might be seen as criticism of Irish society at that time.  But there is an elegance and artistry in writing, that makes it a pleasure to read.  

Movie Versions:

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh - the movie is terrible.  I only watched it a little.  That was enough.

Lust for Life - the movie stars Kirk Douglas, who looks somewhat like Vincent van Gogh.  I thought the movie was rather well done, but it is an old style, unlike contemporary movies. 

A Beautiful Mind - quite a lot is omitted from the movie that is in the book.  Further, the movie makes a certain device for showing the hallucinations that Nash had, they become characters in the film, that shows the difficulty of describing hallucinations that are fundamentally inside the head of Nash.  The movie is entertaining, but is somehow other than the book. 

Invisible Man - Ellison apparently didn't want a movie made of the book.  He has since passed away.  From my little bit of online searching, I learned that Hulu will be releasing a TV series based on the book in the near future. 

The Promise of American Life - there is no movie associated with the book.  

Network - the movie is excellent.  Peter Finch, who played the character Howard Beale in the movie, and who died soon thereafter, won the Academy Award for best actor.  The award was given posthumously.

Fahrenheit 451 - I may have seen the movie from 1966, but I don't remember doing so.  (In trying to remember it, I started to recall Jules and Jim, another film that starred Oskar Werner.) Another movie version was made in 2018.  I haven't seen it.  

Dubliners - The last story in the collection is called The Dead.  Some have called it the best short story ever written.  John Huston, the famous director and I believe of Irish decent, made a movie of The Dead, the last movie he made.  The production is meticulous in following the story and the sets are perfect.  Yet at the crucial juncture in the story, I thought the movie failed, again because the action was happening in the head of the protagonist, and it's impossible to convey that in a movie.  I don't know whether there have been movies made about any of the other stories in Dubliners.  That would be something to check out.