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!
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