This week's menu: September 24th-29th

Are we ready for another week of incredibly varied literature, encompassing centuries' worth of stories in multiple forms, embodying multiple themes? Week 6 of the Banquet of Books reading challenge starts on Monday! Here's what's coming up for you this week...

We've read some medieval stuff before in this reading challenge, but not really touched on the thrilling world of the combative, chivalrous medieval knights. From what I understand, the knights Palamon and Arcite in The Knight's Tale section of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales better represent the 'combative' aspect of being a knight than the 'chivalrous' element. Imprisoned together, they first metaphorically, then literally, joust for the affections of the beautiful Princess Emelye. I hope this second section of Chaucer's epic will shed light on the world of the medieval knights and the system of courtly love - don't feel obliged to read it in the original Middle English, by the way! If you've already read it, I can suggest Sir Walter Scott's The Betrothed, written in 1825 but set at the time of the Crusades, or the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

After looking at famous authors' earliest published works back in the first week of the reading challenge, today I'll be sampling some posthumously-published works - whether finished or not, these arguably represent writers at their pinnacle, benefiting from a lifetime of accumulated skill and knowledge. My top pick is E. M. Forster's Maurice, finished in 1914 and finally published (posthumously) almost four decades afterwards - a note found attached to the manuscript deemed the novel 'publishable - but worth it?'. Its central theme - gay love - explains why it went unpublished for so long. If you've already enjoyed the novel, I can offer up Lost Laysen, a manuscript by one-hit-wonder novelist Margaret Mitchell found and published in 1996, eighty years after it was written, or Dickens' final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, frustratingly unfinished when he died.

The antihero is a character common to countless published works over the centuries; they exist in the works of Homer, as well as in classical Greek and Roman drama, although the terminology was only created in the 18th century. Defined as a protagonist who doesn't embody typical or expected heroic qualities (but is, nonetheless, in all likelihood not a villain) and instead acts in a morally ambiguous way. Today, I'm going to read some of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, a 1955 psychological thriller which introduces the eponymous Tom Ripley, a "suave, agreeable and utterly moral" con artist and serial killer (as per Highsmith's own description). Alternatively, you can read Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Toni Morrison's multicultural bildungsroman Song of Solomon.

In English history, the Civil War of 1642-49 culminated in the execution of King Charles I and led to a decade-long Interregnum, a period without a monarch, during which the censorious and moralist Puritans took hold of the running of the country and closed all theatres - fun was distinctly off the menu. When the theatres reopened, the plays produced were livelier than ever, more vivid, raucous and bold. I'll be sampling George Etherege's 1676 play The Man of Mode to give me an idea of the party atmosphere of Restoration drama, but you could also have a good go at female playwright Aphra Behn's The Lucky Chance published a decade later, or John Dryden's renowned play Marriage a la Mode, which has been praised for combinating exquisitely-written comedy with a thoughtful reflection on the nature of sex and marriage - something for everyone!

A subject of interest in literature for a relatively short amount of time, mental health is picking up speed as a theme in YA writing nowadays, as awareness of conditions grows - whether you see these novels as exploiting sufferers or simply raising awareness is up to you. I'll be going right back to 1892, reading American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story The Yellow Wallpaper, which shines a light on attitudes to women's mental health at the time. Jumping forward, the alternative reads that I recommend are Wilfred Owen's poem Mental Cases, which describes the post-traumatic stress disorder engendered by combat, and Mira T Lee's hot-off-the-press novel Everything Here is Beautiful, whose protagonist Lucia's condition isn't even specified.

To finish off our six-course literary banquet this week, we're going to be going incredibly meta, by trawling through the previous backup lists in search of juicy tomes. As you'll have worked out by now, I always try to provide two 'alternative' reads, in case you've read the book that I'll be reading on a certain day, but I haven't had much time to read the alternatives that I suggest. Therefore, on Saturday I'll be enjoying Virginia Woolf's seminal To the Lighthouse, which I suggested as an alternative back in the very first week! Woolf's modernist novel prizes introspection above plot, so if it isn't your thing, then my 'backup list backups' (!) are John Dryden's Annus Mirabilis - yes, he's back again! - or Irish writer George Bernard Shaw's 1919 play Heartbreak House.

I am, frankly, amazed that I managed to get this post up on time - I'm busy this weekend, so wasn't expecting this to be done until Monday, to be honest. Anyway, I hope you have a wonderful week with these promising texts, and I'll be back some time the week after next to give you my thoughts on all of this. In the meantime, remember to follow me on Twitter @Banquetofbooks for all the latest updates! Happy reading!

My thoughts on Week 5

Week 5, the first week of the reading challenge after our brief hiatus, has been a fairly solid week, with texts that have neither particularly delighted nor disappointed me - perhaps that safe middle ground represents the right place to be. Read on to find out exactly what I thought!

***THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR MULTIPLE TEXTS***

This week's appetiser was Richard Yates' 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, an inspection of America's 1950s consumerist realisation of 'the American Dream' and whether it lived up to its hype. Its opening effectively cycles through the range of emotions experienced by an amateur theatre company preparing to put on a performance of The Petrified Forest by Robert E. Sherwood, Yates capturing each shared feeling with a succinct summation of the atmosphere, never focusing on one specific individual within the company to illustrate their bond. They 'stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over... an empty auditorium', its 'naked seats' analogous with their utter terror of 'making fools of themselves'; these players are nervous and overwhelmed. They 'shyly call to one another', seemingly afraid of any utterance that would remotely draw attention to themselves. Like the 'brown fields and hummocks of the earth [that] lie naked and tender between curls of shrivelled snow' on the rehearsal days, they try to protect their vulnerability with costumes - indeed, are 'ablaze with cosmetics' - because they're terrified of what they are doing.

And yet, in the final dress rehearsal, their director notes '"You were all putting your hearts into your work for the first time"' ('allowing his moist lower lip to curl out in a grimace of triumph and pride', the noun 'grimace' conveying his reticence to concede this) and this simplest admission of success opens the floodgates for these actors to wallow in what they've done - a reader would be excused for thinking this am-dram success equal to the realisation of the American Dream itself, as the actors 'cheered and laughed and shook hands and kissed one another' - finally, their 'static, shapeless, inhumanly heavy weight' seems to have got off the ground. You could even consider the play itself allegorical of the American Dream, although likening the director, 'a funny little man', to the 5 ft 10" Eisenhower is a little far-fetched.

But when it comes to the crunch, the play malfunctions - and why shouldn't it? These actors only succeed when they 'had forgotten to be afraid', not through any confidence or even effort on their part, and so, despite Yates encouraging empathy for these people who had finally seen the successful culmination of their ambitions, a reader can only question why a 'virus of calamity, dormant and threatening all these weeks, had erupted'. If the early chapters of Revolutionary Road are allegorical of the changing society of America, then this represents how the speed of progression was prone to leaving people behind. Just as the lazy couldn't earn enough to keep up with rapidly developing consumer culture, these unsuitable and overambitious actors can't match their ambition in practice - and as readers, we feel their retribution as the tangible 'warmth of humiliation rising in [April Wheeler's] face and neck'. United until the end, the company's 'one thought now... was to put the whole sorry business behind them'. The curtain goes up, promising plaudits for its players, but when it goes down, after only an agonising hour or so, it's 'an act of mercy'. And we can't help but feel they deserve it.

This warning against people striving for the unattainable, a perfect metaphor for the American Dream and how it devolved from ideals of equality and sufficiency into bland mass-market consumerism, continues as we finally hone in on one individual - the leading lady, April, who initially excites 'hopeful nudges and whispers' and 'stately nods of pride' from an enthusiastic audience, but whose attempt at the big time crumbles around her as the whole charade wears on. Frank Wheeler 'looked more like her suitor than her husband' ('no photograph had ever quite achieved' the face he sees in the mirror), and his 'mental projection' of triumphant scenes dissolves into nothing when he comprehends the dichotomy between the dream and the reality - his wife is not 'a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing', but instead is 'the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny'. This is all sounding pretty allegorical, guys!

Revolutionary Road is alive with the feeling of this new emerging society. You can feel it banging on the doors of the theatre, demanding to be let in - savage, animal. But unwanted - the houses are 'weightless and impermanent, as foolishly misplaced as a great many bright new toys that had been left outdoors overnight', the automobiles are 'unnecessarily wide and gleaming in the colours of candy and ice cream, seeming to wince at each splatter of mud' until they get onto Route Twelve, 'a long bright valley of coloured plastic and plate glass and stainless steel - KING KONE, MOBILGAS, SHOPORAMA, EAT'. Yates illustrates the choking nature of the consumerist American Dream by recounting the perversion of the natural it has effected, throwing semantic fields of artifice and enterprise into the ring to suggest the decay of society into something devoid of personality or charm. Tissues are no longer tissues - the actors are 'blotting at their noses with Kleenex' - in this world of 'rumbling pink billows of exhaust' - and it affects the play's protagonists who seem to be on the receiving end: after the play, the audience spill out into the open, 'where the black sky went up and up forever and there were hundreds of thousands of stars'. Yates is encapsulating the idea that the American Dream has been realised in a shallow and self-obsessed way compared to the beautiful ignored world that was here before, but he's also depicting April's shocking realisation that she isn't going to achieve her dream - she is one of 'hundreds of thousands of stars', a starlet who is victim to this commercialised world, somebody who dared to dream too hard, and doesn't like the harsh outcome.

Beginning with a definition of the titular political term, J. K. Rowling sets her first novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, into motion with a lying politician. Barry Fairbrother (an article I read on Rowling's use of cratylic naming draws me instantly to his nomenclature and gives me the instinct that he is a well-meaning if unspectacular man) lies - 'to break the frost' - to his wife of nineteen years that he wants to take her out to dinner, and off they go into Pagford, a town whose 'dark skeleton of the ruined abbey' and 'point where the town petered out in a final wheeze of old cottages' perpetuate and mirror Barry and Mary's tired, worn-out relationship. They have 'very different notions of what ought to take up most space in life', but the fact that neither acts on the realisation of these differences elucidates the idea that Pagford is a sleepy, lazy place stuck in the past, tolerating its 'dirty grey houses' and 'large, ugly' comprehensive and perpetuating the status quo for want of a better thing to do. Above all, it's the kind of mundane rural sleepiness that seems far too quiet for anything of note to happen in it - in this novel, Rowling seeks to reveal the tensions hidden under the unassuming surface. The town isn't quiet; it's dormant.

The action is jumpstarted when Barry feels 'pain such as he had never experienced' which '[slices] through his brain like a demolition ball... his skull was awash with fire and blood'. Succumbing to an aneurysm outside the restaurant, Barry, through dying, vacates a seat on the local council, which sparks the plot. Before any real events, however, Rowling rapidly and effectively populates Pagford with a cast whose multifarious natures are revealed by their reactions to the death.

First there are Miles and Sam, the couple who were first on the scene. To them, as to a few others in the novel, the death is an opportunity for self-aggrandisement, attention, even the sadistic thrill of spreading the news. 'Feathery little ripples of excitement... [tickle] Miles' insides at the thought of delivering the news to his father' and, not wanting to have been beaten to it, he rings his father earlier than he'd planned to, relishing the reaction - because this couple is motivated by status, appearances and popularity. Sam's 'fading natural tan' can be topped up with Self-Sun, as she drinks 'instant coffee and synthetic coconut' - beyond this, Sam has been known, in the past, to draw attention to Miles' fake telephone voice and, whilst Miles pretended to laugh, 'there had been a row, last time, in the car going home'. This shallowness directs their reactions to the death of a friend: to them, it is a story to be elegantly constructed (indeed, Sam is portrayed as 'mentally refining the story she planned to tell her assistant'). Miles announces '"Fairbrother's dead"' as if in a punchy Hollywood blockbuster, drawing attention to details such as 'the ambulance', 'the hospital' and 'the body', bigging up his role as if he is an authority on the deceased, despite the couple only being mentioned as 'a husband and wife' in the previous chapter. When Howard doesn't seem as bothered as Miles would hope, there is 'a strange sense of anti-climax' in the kitchen - but where Miles' narrative falls down is in the actual details. He can only attribute the cause of Barry's death to '"something in his brain, they think"' - he hasn't made an effort to find out anything further than this about somebody who is ostensibly his friend, because what do fiddly little details matter in his great fiction?

Once the Price family's reactions to the death are divulged, it becomes clear that Rowling has established another of her themes - class. The deliberate repetitive structure (conveying the news to the family, hearing their reactions) allows the disparity between the reactions to be clearly observed - Ruth Price gives Barry's first and second names when announcing his death to her family and attributes his death to '"an aneurysm, they think"'. The loss of a family man encourages her motherly instinct to kick in, berating her son Paul for his hair being '"completely matted at the back"'. This family is much more genuine, based on real emotions rather than fakeness, no matter how visceral or unpleasant - and indeed, the Prices are the flipside to Miles and Sam, each fully succumbing to their emotions. There is Ruth, hopelessly devoted to her husband, desperate for 'a few more minutes' with him before he goes to work; the son Andrew's mind is a battlefield of 'furious contempt' for his 'self-satisfied fucker' father - Rowling overloads the prose with expletives to convey that common teenage sense of the fury that results from being unable to express your original fury for your parents. Continuing her perceptive connection with the teenage mind, Rowling creates one of the most vivid characters in Andrew, who 'dreamed of London and of a life that mattered', and is given his only hope in the world by the new arrival on the school bus - cratylically (aptly), her name is Gaia, because she is his entire world; when he enjoys 'indulging in a little fantasy in which his father dropped dead' and disparages Barry's daughter for her 'distasteful tendency to shadow his movements for a while' after they 'got off' at a school disco, Gaia is the one individual whom he passionately does want to be close to. Finally, there is the troglodytic father Simon, whose family relationships have clearly broken down in a more aggressive way than Barry and Mary's - he laments the way his 'lazy little shit' of a son 'fucked up his mocks', entreats 'you want fags, you buy 'em' and relishes 'the sight of Andrew's hanging head'. Very vividly, Rowling has created a father character who just stays within the bounds of credibility, whom the reader can imagine claiming that he only says what he says for his son's own good. Simon takes 'stamping steps' towards his petrified wife and bangs his chest like an ape - whilst this is an excessively primitive show of emotion, it's emotion nonetheless, drawing a dividing line between the animated domestic life of the Prices and the tedious artifice of Miles and Sam; their only shared factor is that they're both eating toast when they learn of the news.

Rowling continues the pattern, cycling through the personalities of the story and emphasising their different backgrounds - from Kay, with her 'cheap pine bed' and 'carpetless stairs' and to whom 'Barry Fairbrother was no more than a name' - to Howard, who shares his son Miles's sadistic pleasure in stringing out the telling of the news, to his wife Shirley, who sleeps in a single bed in the same room as Howard's double, yet they are nonetheless 'as one in all their friendships and enmities'; she exhibits possibly the most callous reaction to the shocking news, 'savouring' it with 'avid interest and feverish speculation'. Throughout this, two key themes emerge: appearances and class. 'The Fairbrothers had been the most devoted couple [Kay's boyfriend Gavin] knew' (yet Rowling's use of dramatic irony allows the reader to spot this as an intriguing false appearance) and although student Stuart Wall's 'trenchant humour, detachment and poise set him apart', it was his size that made him 'the most nicknamed boy in school', and he is embarrassed at having a 'frumpy, overweight guidance teacher as a mother'. The idea of appearances and perceptions being essential to human interaction dovetails into the theme of class; Rowling weaves a tapestry of working-class (Andrew 'stow[s] the rest [of his cigarette] back in the packet' for later) and upper-class characters, allowing for a delicious atmosphere of conflict waiting to explode - only a fool would assume that Barry's death (and the vacancy of his council seat) won't be the key that opens the door. Shirley seems out for blood from the off, satisifed that the 'arrogance' of 'the Fairbrothers of the world', with their 'university education', 'had received a nasty blow today'.

In one of the earlier chapters' quieter moments, Miles remembers 'watching Mary emerge from the room where Barry lay, all futile aids to life removed' - whilst this more obviously refers to the unsuccessful attempts to resuscitate Barry, it also serves to describe Mary, uncertain of how to live her life post-husband - this marital devotion is shared by Shirley, to whom 'Howard's presence on earth was... a given, like sunlight and oxygen', and of course, Gaia is all Andrew has to enjoy about life at this point. So far, The Casual Vacancy is prioritising characterisation over action (after the initial big bang which begun the story), but in typical enchanting Rowling fashion, it's effective, largely subtle, clever character work which lays the foundations for conflict, establishes tension, designates outsiders and warriors and victims, and divulges further details about the world of this narrative - a world that I can't wait to explore further.

Searching for some juicy Greek drama, I happened upon Sophocles' Antigone, which tells of Oedipus' daughters, the headstrong Antigone and more timid Ismene, attempting to bury their dead brother Polyneices, contravening King Creon's orders to let the corpse rot in the fields (on the other hand, their other deceased brother Eteocles is given 'military honours' and 'a soldier's funeral'). Antigone 'cannot imagine any grief' that the two sisters haven't gone through, and yet sees this as the pinnacle; in a way, it's touching, how vividly rendered is the mourning girl's devotion to her brother and outrage at the desecration of the family name - because that's what Creon's decree represents to Antigone, the idea that one of their family members is worthless, despite Antigone recognising that he 'fought as bravely and died as miserably' and is 'a sweet treasure'.

Sophocles focuses the first scene on the interplay between the two sisters, quickly constructing a rapport which allows the audience to examine the power relations between the characters. Ismene is confused by her sister's actions, proclaiming her 'mad', but denies herself agency (citing as reasons, among others, 'the danger' of what Creon will do, a necessity to 'give in to the law' and the fact that 'we are only women,/We cannot fight with men') and acts as merely a meek foil for the zealous Antigone. Antigone is about relationships; in a family where the reasoning that 'he is my brother' allows the titular character to excuse her crime, and where their mother Iocaste 'twisted the cords/That strangled her life' due to the despair of losing her husband, familial bonds are clearly of key importance to the sisters, yet Sophocles cleverly weaves this theme into the sparky and uncertain interactions between the characters, allowing plot and themes to develop as one. Antigone's proclamation that she would 'lie down/With [Polyneices] in death' evidences their close connection whilst characterising her as rebellious and strong-willed, creating a sharp contrast to her sister who 'must yield/To those in authority'.

Another aspect of relationships is power, and in this narrative, King Creon holds all the cards - he explains, at length, why he plans to treat Polyneices' memory in this way, attributing them to his 'principles' and 'wisdom' - sound enough logic, but evidence perhaps that his desire to maintain a powerful position precludes his understanding of true family connections, such as those that Antigone feels. Additionally, he challenges the choragos (the leader of the Greek chorus, because of course there is one in this play, as in most ancient Greek tragedies) by denying any suggestion that 'the gods favour this corpse' - that he dares to assume the gods' thoughts (and that he threatens to string one of his sentries up alive) earmarks him out as a villain. Yet, all of his grabs at control seem shallow and futile against the hypnotic, powerful force of Antigone's great monologue when, captured for her crime, she explains herself, reasoning 'Your edict, King, was strong,/But all your strength is weakness itself against/The immortal unrecorded laws of God.../Operative for ever, beyond man utterly.../can anyone/Living, as I live, with evil all about me,/Think Death less than a friend?'

Relatively unchallenging in its themes, its characters largely adhering to archetypes (the headstrong female, the cruel new king), you'd be forgiven for thinking Antigone deserves a spot at the bottom of the pile of ancient Greek drama - but it just feels sparky, vibrant and a little subversive, thanks to its independent and active female lead and the delicious conflict brought about by her exchanges with other characters. Antigone is a very short play (I read about half of it for this review), and I can imagine happily enjoying the rest of it.

Activist, poet and many other professions besides, Maya Angelou is best known for her 'fictionalised autobiographies', beginning with the most famous, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. From the beginning, the loathing Angelou feels for the body that she is trapped inside, and indeed for her entire existence as an entity, is apparent; indeed, displacement is one of the overriding themes of these early chapters. Angelou conveys a sense of dysmorphia when describing how, wearing her new dress, she 'was going to look like one of the sweet little white girls who were everybody's dream of what was right with the world', conveying a passionate desire to be anything other than a character in a 'black ugly dream'. Not only does Angelou pine for a place in the white in-crowd; she actively rejects her current life as a 'dream', her assertion that 'I was really white' speaking volumes by revealing her desperate denial of such a cruel and racist life (the book is set in the incredibly-racist Arkansas of the 1930s, a time of segregation and inequality). Ultimately, however, the young Angelou is dealt a disappointing reminder of her inability to escape her inferior situation: the pride she feels for her new dress dissolves as she comes to see it as 'a plain ugly cut-down from a white woman's once-was-purple throwaway', whilst the clay she uses as a beauty product makes her 'skin look dirty like mud', with the noun 'mud' a representation of both her impurity (in the eyes of the society around her) and her inferiority that stems from this view. The reasons for Angelou's flights into fancy and desperate attempts to will herself white are given by the author, who argues that 'if growing up is painful for the southern black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult'.

It is made clear by the cultural landscape that Angelou paints into the autobiography that her dislike of her own race stems from the appalling levels of racism present in her society. When she and her brother, at the ages of three and four, are shipped to their grandmother's house to live there, the porter charged with their welfare 'got off the train the next day'; although 'softened by nature's blessing of grogginess [and] forgetfulness' in the mornings, the afternoons in the cotton fields of Arkansas 'revealed the harshness of Black Southern life'; the young Angelou finds the sheriff's confidence that 'every... Black man who heard of the Klan's coming ride would scurry under their houses to hide in chicken droppings' to be 'too humiliating to hear' (and you can understand why, as it seems a painful opportunity for the black population to reflect on their unpopularity, their inferiority and their helplessness to assert themselves); and, working on 'the remains of slavery's plantations', the workers end up dragging themselves along the ground 'in the dying sunlight', exhausted from backbreaking low-paid labour. Yet it is not just those of working age who experience the stifling climate of inequality - still a girl, Angelou knows enough about the KKK's activities to feel 'the sense of fear which filled [her] mouth with hot, dry air, and made [her] body light', and cowers from 'eyes of hate that burned the clothes off you if they happened to see you lounging on the main street downtown on Saturday'. Feeling so oppressed, and needing to cling onto something (anything), Angelou dreams 'of the days when I would be grown and able to buy a whole carton [of pineapple rings] for myself alone', exhibiting a bewildering devotion to something that she 'only tasted... during Christmas'.

Beyond racism, Arkansas is a generally intolerant society to anybody not fitting the Aryan profile - Angelou's crippled uncle faces threats of death and lynching as well, culminating in a touching and deeply revealing moment where, serving customers at the family's general store, he deliberately discards his stick and attempts to appear fully able-bodied throughout the whole conversation - Angelou believes 'the looks he suffered of either contempt or pity had simply worn him out, and for one afternoon... he wanted no part of them', revealing Uncle Willie to be akin to Maya in their mutual need to escape who they are. She likens his actions to what happens when 'prisoners tire of penitentiary bars and the guilty tire of blame' - Willie, like Maya, knows that he can never be the person he wants to be, and must live the most subhuman of all lives, 'the tragedy of lameness' which is 'so unfair to children that they are embarrassed in its presence'. Even to the children, Willie is one of nature's jokes, evincing the toxic and unwelcoming nature of the Arkansas society and how this influences Angelou's development.

The solace which just about counterbalances the racism is a sense of community. The writer opens with a memory of herself singing in the 'children's section of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church', which seems welcoming enough; however, after messing up her solo, 'the giggles hung in the air' and Angelou eventually feels joy at 'being liberated from the silly church'. Stung once, she later becomes part of several more accepting communities which constitute the bedrock of her identity - whereas, when she and her brother Bailey 'had arrived in the musty little town', the only clue to her identity was a tag on her wrist confirming 'to whom it may concern' her name and origin (again indirectly insinuating that black people were valued less, as these black children are presented as property to be shipped to their receivers), she soon becomes more than that - she recognises herself one of thousands of 'frightened black children travelling alone to their newly affluent parents', is 'warmly, but not too familiarly' embraced by the town, and 'became familiar enough to belong to the Store and it to us'. The Store (the general store owned by Angelou's grandmother which 'was always spoken of with a capital s', presumably for the prosperity it brought to the family, which in turn helped elevate them above their poorer neighbours) is the hub where Angelou grows and develops; she feels close to it, contented - she alone 'could hear the slow pulse of its job half done' in the afternoon, whereas in the morning 'it looked like an unopened present from a stranger'. Whilst connected to the black community through the cotton-pickers who pick up supplies there, constantly grumbling 'about cheating houses, weighted scales, snakes, skimpy cotton and dusty rows', she possibly can forget the fact of blacks' inferior status in society when caught in the Store's 'soft make-believe feeling'.

Angelou recounts her view that 'the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect'; the tricolon which equalises the status of these three groups encapsulates the inferiority and paranoia of Angelou's troubled childhood, neatly linking some of the book's themes. Within a relatively short number of pages she accurately molds her experiences into an engagingly-written narrative bursting with character, action and poignancy. A stunning beginning.

I'm really not sure about the seminal 20th-century poet W. H. Auden's Funeral Blues, alternately known as Stop All the Clocks. Famous nowadays for its use in the rom-com Four Weddings and a Funeral (of which I was unaware when I chose it for this week), its message is simply the conveyance of grief and how it seems to make everything stop. Why not 'stop all the clocks', when time itself is meaningless and immaterial now?

Its first appearance was in a play Auden co-wrote entitled The Ascent of F6, the culmination of a mountaineering tragedy that has unfolded. It appears to commemorate the death of the civil servant Sir James, who has died after co-opting his brother Michael into climbing the titular mountain with him. Funeral Blues, therefore, was written specifically (albeit in a nascent form) to satirically memorialise this play's characters - it has been viewed as 'a ragged, satirically pantomimic version of the ostentatious trumpery involved in a state funeral'.

In its revised form, however, it was a cabaret song set to music by the great composer Benjamin Britten, the solemn music allowing the fairly knockabout, fairytale lyrics (due to their simple ABAB rhyme scheme repeating throughout) to appear more earnestly as the embodiment of a heartbreakingly sad message. Therein lies my problem with the poem: divorced from the 'unifying agency' of the sombre incidental music, all that remains are the words, with the rhyme scheme giving them a jarringly jaunty tone, the melding of the solemn and the celebratory never quite fully achieved. Partly this unfinished sense is delivered by the awkwardly constructed phrases; whilst mimicking the fragmented speech of the bereaved and mourning, lines such as 'Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone/Prevent the dog from barking with the juicy bone' seem to lack any consistent metre when read (as opposed to being sung), and this harms the poignancy of the speaker's impossible, exigent demands to the universe (although these do undeniably allow for some outstanding imagery, as the speaker entreats 'the stars are not wanted now; put out every one./Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun'). Similarly, the poem is brimming with caesural pauses, seen where Auden urges 'silence the pianos and, with muffled drum,/Bring out the coffin. Let the mourners come' - again, whilst the influx of mid-line punctuation mimics a mourner's breathy, incoherent speech, it disturbs the coherence of the poem and hinders the conveyance of its message. If Auden was really recreating mourners' talk, there would be patchy enjambment, frantic false starts and 'and's linking trains of clauses. But no - Funeral Blues is a set of lyrics, not a poem, designed as a disposable cabaret song to pass a minute or two. That's my problem with trying to view it through the prism of literary analysis - it simply wasn't designed for that.

Nevertheless, to conclude: Funeral Blues is about grief, but it's also about the impact of love on a person's life. Perhaps it's love they didn't even realise they felt until the loss of the loved one; now, the speaker wishes aeroplanes to 'circle moaning overhead' - I doubt anybody would consider an aeroplane's noise to constitute 'moaning'. They desperately desire to honour the deceased with grand pomp and ceremony, because they have just realised how much that person meant to them, how 'nothing now can ever come to any good'. The lines are truly heartbreaking in places, but I worry that, left bare and exposed on the page, they're lacking a little.

Finally, I ended the week reading something French - as I'm not a masochist, I sampled Arthur Rimbaud's surreal drug-powered masterpiece Une saison en enfer ('A season in hell') in a translated English version of the text (although I did try the prologue in French, but I was on the bus and I was tired and so the escape route of the translation seemed suddenly very appealing!). I'll just admit from the off that I didn't have the time to read as much of this as I'd have liked, but I sampled enough to give me a feel for this introspective, dark and almost mournful work.

Believing himself dying, the narrator, a self-confessed 'damned soul' (surely more than a little inspired by Rimbaud's own experiences) recalls how 'once... my life was a feast where all hearts opened, and all wines flowed' before sharply contrasting this description of enjoyment and joviality with the recollection of how he 'found [Beauty] bitter - And I reviled her'. Without sharing the cause of his actions, he gives the reader an overview of his maladjusted actions, such as how he 'made the wild beast's silent leap to strangle every joy', before concluding the sequence lamenting how 'spring brought me the dreadful laugh of the idiot'. I admire how particularly effective Rimbaud is here in painting broad brush strokes to rapidly convey a sequence of emotions. The prologue to Une saison en enfer combines a sense of intrigue with a beautiful writing style (although bear in mind that I'm reading a translation) - Rimbaud's glorious metaphors include him recounting how he 'armed [himself] against Justice' and 'dried [himself] in the breezes of crime'. Instantly, I want to know more about the stages of the narrator's life that have been oh-so-briefly touched upon here. I want to know more about the narrator himself - he seems caught in an intriguing conflict with Satan, who tries to tempt him to 'win death with all your appetites; your egoism, all the deadly sins', seemingly to no avail, although I'll be interested to find out some of the details behind this conflict. Were Satan and the speaker in some kind of pact beforehand? Is Satan merely a metaphor for the darker, more harmful sides of the speaker's nature? What has prompted this conflict? And will our narrator triumph over the temptation to return to his former sinful life? With Chapter 2 (of 9), "Mauvais sang" ('Bad blood') looking set to begin the explanation of how Rimbaud's protagonist got themself into this mess, I'll definitely give this a fuller, longer read - Rimbaud may have been heavily smoking opium when he wrote these pages, but they've resulted in a captivating introduction which opens up myriad questions to be answered later.

All in all, Week 5 of the Banquet of Books Reading Challenge has been a relatively good one: not soaring to the heights of Week 4, where every single one of the six texts was instantly captivating, well-written and a pleasure to read - but enjoyable nonetheless. It's introduced me to several key aspects of our literary history, including French works, the 1950s American consumer culture, and the beautifully-written works of Maya Angelou. To be completely honest, whilst I'm very keen to read more of most of this week's texts (certainly I'll be giving the Rimbaud a proper read), there have only been two that have really stood out to me as something special, those being J. K. Rowling's fabulous local council thriller (is that now a genre?) The Casual Vacancy and Maya Angelou's gorgeous autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, so I'll be adding those to my growing 'to read' list, and hopefully be making return journeys to Sophocles and Rimbaud along the way.

I'll be back on Sunday (or, regrettably, possibly even Monday - sorry!) with next week's menu, which will tackle a range of historical and thematic texts spanning a good half-century - it'll kick off with a bang, a hard-to-analyse-and-tricky-to-read bang, but stick with it because there's some stuff that sounds really interesting coming up! Until then, you can follow me on Twitter @Banquetofbooks for updates and notifications, and I'll see you soon - happy reading!

This week's menu: September 10th-15th

Welcome to week 5 of the Banquet of Books reading challenge! We've taken a few weeks off, so we're hopefully coming back with a bang - I've lined up six varied texts spanning well over two millenniums! Here's what I (and hopefully you) will be sampling this week.

'The American Dream' encapsulates all that is good about America - a set of ideals encompassing liberty, equality, prosperity, happiness, enterprise, mobility. It's the white picket fence, the 2.4 children and the dog. More relevant than ever in these challenging political times, the American Dream has translated itself onto the page an uncountable number of times over the past century, including in Richard Yates' 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, recently adapted for the screen by Sam Mendes and described by the NYT as "beautifully crafted" but "deeply troubling" in its depiction of a couple who embody the growing realisation that 1950s America's conformist consumer society didn't represent the fulfilment of the American Dream. If you've already read this morally probing work, by all means try a little of Sylvia Plath's sole novel The Bell Jar or the 'American Dream novel', The Great Gatsby.

No matter which genres of fiction you're partial to - and I'm a particular fan of 18th- and 19th-century Gothic - you cannot deny that this century's scribes churn out some incredible stuff, subverting established genre conventions and playing fast and loose with readers' emotions. To represent what makes 21st-century literature so vivid and exciting, on Tuesday I'll be sampling J. K. Rowling's first post-Harry Potter work, 2012's The Casual Vacancy, which draws themes of racism and community into its political tale of a fraught local election. If it's something you've already read, the same year's thriller Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, and Hilary Mantel's 2009 historical novel Wolf Hall are my other picks - all three of these have spawned popular TV or film adaptations, so that's another way to experience these if you wish!

United by common tropes such as the presence of the Chorus who comment on the action throughout, the plays of Ancient Greece are the genesis of modern drama, and many remain enduringly popular - find out if it's a genre you're into by sampling Sophocles' tragedy Antigone on Wednesday (written in 441BC, it's the earliest text ever featured on the blog!). Should you have already read this tale of law and loyalty, there's always Euripides' succinct and very accessible Medea or, for those in the mood for a laugh (in the Ancient Greek sort of way), Aristophanes' Assemblywomen.

It's something of a travesty that the UK government adopted a racist approach when selecting the set works for GCSE and A Level English studies, choosing an imbalance of works by old white English writers and shutting the door on the buzzing multiculturalism that drew so many teens to the old English specifications - for the fourth course of this week's banquet, I'm going to be going back to those happier times and reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, an autobiography written in the style of coming-of-age fiction by poet and activist Maya Angelou. A couple of other texts excised from the English syllabi that you could choose to read are Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's seminal debut Things Fall Apart, a critique of British colonialist attitudes, and fellow Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, another postcolonial work.

The prolific English bard Wystan Hugh Auden engaged with myriad themes in his work, from politics to the complexities of love to religion, his poems representing a vast variety of styles, tones and structures. I've selected one of his finest to read on Friday, Funeral Blues, originally set to music by Benjamin Britten, and I offer up two other Auden heavyweights for your delectation - September 1, 1939 and For the Time Being, so you can sample the work of this perenially influential and entertaining wordsmith.

We're going to finish the week off with a final course inspired by the successes of previous excursions into Ireland, Russia and Lebanon, and gorge ourselves on some tasty French literature - either in translation, or in the original language, if you're up to it! I confess that whilst I could probably understand the original French, it would take me a substantial amount of time compared to reading the translated version! We're going to have a go at Arthur Rimbaud's surreal epic poem Une saison en enfer (A season in Hell), an enigma written on drugs and doing exactly what it says on the tin by describing a man's damnation. If it's too daunting a task, you could also end the week on that perennial favourite Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, or Colette's novella Gigi.

So, that's your lot! I'll be back here sometime the week after next, to give you my thoughts on everything I've just listed above - until then, follow me on Twitter @Banquetofbooks for all kinds of updates, and, however you choose to spend the next week, happy reading!

The Story So Far

It's been a busy couple of months for the Banquet of Books reading challenge - I've sampled twenty-four texts so far, spanning over half a century of some of the world's finest literature in English. Heartbreaking Lebanese anti-war polemics, multilayered Shakespearean comedy and subversive feminist allegory have enchanted, delighted and challenged me over the first four weeks of the challenge, so it's time to reflect on the story so far.

Week 1 involved works ranging from Percy Bysshe Shelley's sublime Romantic poem Mont Blanc, which I admired for its Wordsworthian concession that the breathtaking beauty of the natural world can conceal its haunting power, to one of this year's hottest crime thrillers, Mark Billingham's The Killing Habit, which I worried to be a little 'crime by numbers' despite its intriguing narrative decision to take the real-life M25 Cat Killer as its basis. Ultimately, my favourite book of the week was Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín, whose opening chapter was a stunning portrayal of loss which recognised every little facet of the grieving process. I've bought the book, but haven't had time to read it yet, and am also keen to dive back into the worlds of Dickens' The Pickwick Papers and Woolf's Between the Acts in the future. My Week 1 reviews can be found here.

Week 2 encompassed an even wider spread of texts, allowing me to sample curios such as Carol Ryrie Brink's Baby Island, a work of Robinsonade fiction translating the Crusoe story for younger audiences, and the exceptionally communist Mother, in which Maxim Gorky skilfully balances an allegorical description of the gruelling factory conditions with the human drama of a mother feeling herself losing her son to the blossoming ideology of communism. I've searched in vain for Mother in bookshops, however I have bought Shakespeare's Richard II - mainly due to a sense of duty to read a Shakespearean history, Richard II seeming a solid enough example - and read Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, which, once I'd got my head around what was happening, surprised me by being a probing exploration of loneliness wrapped inside a well-plotted, if slightly unbelievable, thriller. I wouldn't have continued reading this unless obliged to by college, so this is a lesson to not judge a book by its opening chapter. My Week 2 reviews can be found here.

In the third week, I faltered a little, faced with four texts that I either perceived as weak or thought were just not to my taste - Margaret Cavendish's Poems and Fancies struck me as an intriguing but uninspiring attempt to unite the spheres of chemistry and poetry, whilst E. Lockhart's We Were Liars was so replete with purple prose and tricolons that I didn't have the energy to wait to see retribution fall on the greedy Sinclairs, although I acknowledge that it is (unusually, for a work of contemporary YA fiction) a slow-burner. The two gems came at the end of the week, and I've managed to buy both of them and read the latter: Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad told the kleptomaniac Sasha's tale through an innovative framing device of a conversation with a psychiatrist, and was replete with masterful character work; I can only hope that the other characters in this ensemble piece live up to the stylish and gripping introduction. Having finished reading Shakespeare's convoluted, yet still lightweight, farce The Comedy of Errors, I can say that I found it amusing from the start through to the end, yet ripe for analysis (or possibly for comparison with contemporary texts such as Twelfth Night, with which it shares thematic similarities and motifs). My Week 3 reviews can be found here.

Week 4 picked up some steam and delivered six texts that were joyous to read, all worthy of classic status and each a perfect example of their genre. The week was exciting and enticing; reading what emotional wonders Emily Nasrallah can create in just a few short pages was a transformative experience, as was almost feeling Stephen King building up the tension throughout the climactic opening of Carrie. I've bought G. K. Chesterton's Edwardian thriller The Man Who Was Thursday, hooked by its strong character descriptions and intrigued by its subtitle of A Nightmare, and whenever I've finished reading all my unread books, Edmund Spenser's 1590s epic poem The Faerie Queene is going on the list, as it skilfully blended an intricate structure with fairytale abandon and developed themes. It's incredibly difficult to pick a favourite from this week, but on balance I'd have to go for The Man Who Was Thursday, seeing how it managed to grip me right from the start. My Week 4 reviews can be found here, here and here.

The reading challenge will be back next week (from Monday 10 September; you can follow me on Twitter @Banquetofbooks for notifications and updates), and I'll be back here over the weekend to bring you the menu for what we're going to be gorging ourselves on - until then, I hope you enjoy whatever you're reading!

Week 4 add-on: The Man Who Was Thursday

Hello everyone! As promised (and surely eagerly awaited?), here's my full review and analysis of G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, the first chapter of which I read as part of the fourth week of the reading challenge. If you're interested in more of these longer reviews, you can check out my review of Edmund Spenser's seminal 16th-century epic poem The Faerie Queene here, and I'll be back on Tuesday with a post detailing 'The Story So Far'... Happy reading!

On Tuesday I was ravenous for some Edwardian fiction, and plumped for G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, which intrigued me in that it’s an ever-so-slightly meta thriller revolving around an anarchic poet who enlists his more law-abiding counterpart into a secret anarchist cult. In the opening to the novel, Chesterton observes a careful structure, introducing his setting, followed by his protagonist, followed by the appearance of the unknown element which disrupts this system – each of these distinct sections is beautifully handled, beginning with the effective depiction of the suburb of Saffron Park, ‘as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset’, ‘not only pleasant, but perfect’. The setting is superbly linked to the book’s rather meta theme of the purpose of writing fiction, by way of an extended metaphor characterising this idyll as ‘a frail but finished work of art’ where ‘if the people were not "artists," the whole was nonetheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face… was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem'. It becomes immediately clear that The Man Who Was Thursday actively celebrates artistic expression, seeing it as something prevalent and prominent and living – this is a novel whose setting is clearly artificial, both a product and a hub of vibrant artistic creation, an ‘attractive unreality’ surrounded by an ‘impossible sky’, whose ‘social atmosphere’ is ‘a written comedy’ (and Chesterton confessed that ‘The book… was not intended to describe the real world as it was’). The uniqueness of this setting – its unreality and its impossibility – is rendered explicit by ‘all the heaven’ being ‘covered with a quite vivid and palpable plumage… the whole was so close about the earth’ – Saffron Park is evidently a unique place, tightly cut off from everything else, and thus the perfect backdrop for the debates about art which form the spine of this first chapter.

Chesterton ties the Saffron Park setting into his theme of relations; the suburb is a tight-knit community, the names of none of whose members we learn, instead being presented with a suburb that feels like a single gestalt that lives and moves as one, rather than a conglomeration of different people unified simply by where they live – if Saffron Park’s ‘social atmosphere’ is ‘a written comedy’, then they are its cast of characters. The author relates ‘many nights of local festivity’, describes ‘one particular evening, still vaguely remembered in the locality’ and how ‘all the Saffron Parkers looked at [Syme] as if he had that moment fallen out of that impossible sky’ – the determiner ‘all’  and lack of individual names reveal that these people all share the same thoughts and memories. So intensely does Chesterton construct an almost tangible atmosphere of harmony that the discord created by the antagonistic interplay between resident poet Gregory and new arrival Syme becomes even more heightened than it would if the book had begun with it (instead of the introduction of the setting). In turn, this hostile atmosphere is so effectively created that when Gregory draws Syme into his world later on, this is all the more shocking; one can’t help but admire G. K. Chesterton’s skill in so vividly establishing a back and forth ebb and flow within the piece, even contained within a single chapter.

Possessing dichotomous opinions and exhibiting wildly personalities, Lucian Gregory and Gabriel Syme are united by their outsider status, the latter as a new arrival in Saffron Park and the former as somebody who doesn’t seem to fit with the others. Gregory has an ‘impudent freshness’ and his appearance an ‘arresting oddity’; beyond even conventional androgyny, the juxtaposition of his ‘dark red hair… like a woman’s’ and ‘his face projecting suddenly broad and brutal’ implies him to be like a Frankenstein’s monster made up of different parts – indeed, he is likened to ‘a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape’, a delicious simile which shows him to be the kind of odd societal reject ripe for the anarchic lifestyle. On the other hand, Syme is ‘a very mild-looking mortal, with a fair, pointed beard and faint, yellow hair’ – nothing about him is particularly noteworthy, everything contained, repressed, ‘faint’, ‘mild’, humble and respectable. The reader can sense the building tension for the moment when these two forces clash – Chesterton’s description of how ‘an impression grew that [Syme] was less meek than he looked’ is the key that turns in the lock and throws open the door for a confrontation.

The two poets’ conflict revolves around the nature and purpose of poetry, allowing for the metaphysical debate which distinguishes this novel from others of its time and genre (though what that genre is isn’t exactly clear at this stage), and allows the novel to comfortably assume the ‘highbrow’ label at a time when the distinction was beginning to be drawn between popular and highbrow fiction. The anarchist Gregory’s argument, far more vehement and visceral than Syme’s, is that ‘the man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything… the poet delights in disorder’ whilst the cool, collected Syme argues that ‘the  rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it’. Between them, they represent diametrically-opposed viewpoints, and each has convincing points that really do stimulate some discussion – is chaos dull and man a magician, as Syme argues? Or, as Gregory opines, is anarchy ‘rich, living, reproducing itself?’ Certainly, Chesterton gives both arguments time to develop, and treats both sides equally – whilst the denigration of ‘your precious order’ (by comparing it to ‘that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren’ seems full of the author’s fervour as well as Gregory) seems to favour the anarchist’s side, Syme’s reasoning that ‘revolt in the abstract is revolting’ is equally developed and convincing, and he bests Gregory by using sickening examples about vomiting in his reasoning – Gregory reacts with indignation, only for Syme to remark ‘“I beg your pardon… I forgot we had abolished all conventions”’. Put some ice on that burn! Whilst Gregory’s views come straight from the heart, raw and unfiltered, leading him to bash up lampposts and the like, Syme is more considered and logical in his discussions – the two men are undoubtedly wholly different in character, and ultimately, perhaps it’s up to us who we favour. In the end, anyway, the whole thing dissolves into farce (Syme exclaims ‘let me read a time table, with tears of pride’), because when all is said and done – as Syme points out – there are better things to do than debate the purpose of poetry; Syme is right to ‘“think very little of a man who didn’t keep something in the background of his lie that was more serious than all this talking’”.

All literary texts can be considered on different levels – whilst I’ve been trying to highlight and appraise the technical aspects of Chesterton’s craftsmanship, evaluating his use of themes, devices, etc., it bears repeating that a book cannot merely be a thing to study, it has to be a thing to love as well. In terms of sheer enjoy-ability – surely the best indicator of a work’s success – The Man Who Was Thursday ticks the boxes as well. As was The Faerie Queene, it is brimming with little touches that make the prose coruscate and dazzle, such as the contrast between Gregory’s ‘knotted fists’ and Syme’s cool condescension, or the description of ‘big Chinese lanterns [glowing] in the dwarfish trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit’. In terms of the Edwardian-ness of it all, the book sits comfortably into the period’s writing style, which can be said to be a bridge point between verbose antiquity and punchy contemporary prose, and references the suffrage movement in the kind of way that suggests Chesterton doesn’t think it’ll go far – in Saffron Park (itself based on the trendy new Bedford Park suburb), ‘most of the women were of the kind vaguely called emancipated, and professed some protest against male supremacy. Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extravagant compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while he is talking’. Maybe the other texts this week might be a bit more positive towards women – we’ll have to wait and see. The fact remains that The Man Who Was Thursday’s opening is a triumph melding uniquely crafted descriptive work with two engaging characters who quickly spring to life on the page – I can’t wait to find out what they get up to.