Who's ready for another week of incredibly varied literature, encompassing centuries' worth of stories in multiple forms, embodying multiple themes? Week 8 of the Banquet of Books reading challenge is here to broaden your literary horizons! Will eight be great? Here's what's coming up...
The civil rights movement in America, primarily focused within the 1950s and 1960s, catalysed immense change and, like many social developments, brought about a wave of culture. My prime illustration of this will be Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, an evaluation of the racial injustice of African Americans in the early twentieth century which covers black nationalist movements and the links between civil rights movements and Marxism, appraised by TIME Magazine as 'the quintessential American picaresque of the twentieth century'. I write this a few hours after the broadcast of Malorie Blackman's incredible Doctor Who episode; her young adult novel Noughts & Crosses, posing the question 'what if Africans had made Europeans their slaves?' is one of my backup options, should you have read Invisible Man already, as is Harper Lee's highly-regarded To Kill a Mockingbird.
Yes, okay, that title is terrible (my other options were 'subdue or show off' and 'repress or express', just so you know the atrocious thought process that led to that!). On Tuesday, I'll be delving into the 18th-century, examining whether its stereotype of stuffiness really holds true. On the one hand, my alternative reads for today (such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded) take a didactic approach to women's conduct and attempt to encourage modesty and virtue. On the other hand, my top pick for today, John Cleland's Fanny Hill, is this blog's first ever raunchy sexfest! I hope you enjoy 'the first original English prose pornography'. Over in backup corner, it's a true Fannyfest today (stop sniggering at the back), as Fanny Burney's Evelina is an alternative option; like Pamela, it opposes Cleland's novel in its advocation of repression.
Who doesn't love the thrill of detective fiction? Aside from their varied casts of characters and furiously-maintained suspense throughout, crime stories pull you in by the brain, urging you to put the pieces together and work out 'whodunnit'. On Wednesday I'll be diving into the genre headfirst and sampling some of Agatha Christies The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; the third appearance of supersleuth Hercule Poirot constitutes the epitome of 1920s 'Golden Age' crime and was voted the best crime novel ever by the British Crime Writers' Association in 2013. If, for whatever reason, the best crime novel ever doesn't appeal to you, feel free to read the genesis of the genre (Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone) or a postmodern example (Kate Atkinson's superb When Will There Be Good News?) and think about what you've done.
The Middle Ages in Britain are generally (but please, if you're a historian don't badger me about this) regarded to have ended with the onset of the Tudor dynasty in 1485, so for Thursday's reading I'll be creeping as late into medieval literature as I dare! It's (hopefully) going to be a fun one, because I'll be sampling A Gest of Robyn Hoode. Yes, you all know the one - men in tights, steal from the rich and give to the poor. Believed to have been written around 1450 and first printed four decades later, this Middle English ballad romanticises its 'Good Outlaw' hero. Alternative options for today, if you've already read Robin Hood or just want something meatier, are Christine de Pizan's The Treasure of the City of Ladies (you can find my thoughts on her other novel The Book of the City of Ladies here) or the slightly flimsy Italian erotic romance The Tale of Two Lovers.
Far from evincing a writer's lack of original ideas, stories based on real events often successfully utilise the verisimilitude of true occurrences to catalyse action, building up layers of atmosphere around the core of a real event. I'll be investigating this phenomenon on Friday with Truman Capote's celebrated work In Cold Blood, so much based on a true story that Capote himself labelled it non-fiction; the bestseller recounts Capote's six-year-long investigation into the criminals who committed a quadruple murder in 1959. One of today's alternative choices is unintentionally based on a true story - despite living half an hour away from serial killer Ed Gein, Robert Bloch was unaware of the similarities between Gein and his antagonist Norman Bates when writing the thriller novel Psycho. You could also read Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave, the immensely moving recount of a slave's life.
Throughout this reading challenge, my visits into other countries have had fairly mixed results, so let's see what Eastern European literature has to offer. My top pick for Saturday's reading is Romanian writer Gabriela Adameşteanu's Wasted Morning, whose seventy-year-old protagonist Vica Delcă is inextricably tied to the 'old Romania' whilst living in its present; the author's use of stream-of-consciousness and realist styles allows for an examination of the country's past and present. Frequently-censored Albanian scribe Ismail Kaldare's The Fall of the Stone City satirises the irrepressible distortion of communist theology. If the heavy stuff doesn't sound like your cup of tea, try out Croatian author Ranko Marinkovic's rewriting of the Cyclops myth. To be honest, all three of my options for today sound really intriguing, so I might end up having a go at a few of these. Hope you enjoy them too!
Let's make this week a good one! I hope you have a wonderful time with these texts - they certainly look like they're going to be a whole lot of fun! - and I'll see you back here towards the tail end of next week to share all my thoughts on them. Will eight be great? See you back here next week for the answer! In the meantime, remember to follow me on Twitter @Banquetofbooks for all the latest updates and notifications on when new posts go up.
Happy reading!
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