Three 1978 stories by A. E. Van Vogt

Via Twitter, Joachim Boaz reminds us that A. E. Van Vogt's birthday is this month.  To celebrate, I read three stories by my man Van which I had never read, from the collection Pendulum, DAW 316.  These stories all appeared for the first time in Pendulum.

Pendulum, published in 1978, provides insight into the powerful influence the first Star Wars film had on the people at DAW.  Besides the dreamlike (that's a nice way of saying "insane," right?) cover by Jordi Penavla, in which helmeted topless men use laser swords in their fight against cave men, we have the advertising pages in the back of the book, one of which is pitched directly at Star Wars fans.  The good people at DAW recommend to "Star Warriors" four of their series: Gordon Dickson's Dorsai novels; A. Bertram Chandler's space navy stories starring John Grimes; the Dumarest novels by E. C. Tubb; and Brian Stableford's Daedalus novels.  I can't assess how good these recommendations are because I'm not familiar with any of the listed books.  I have read four or five John Grimes books, and liked them OK, but none of those listed.  I've read one (non-Dorsai) book by Dickson and two books by Stableford in his Hooded Swan series, and didn't think them bad, but found them uninspiring and forgettable.  I've never read any Tubb, but Michael Moorcock considers Tubb's Dumarest of Terra books excellent, or so he says in a year 2000 article about Leigh Brackett entitled "Queen of the Martian Mysteries."      


"Pendulum"

The title story of the collection depicts a near future Earth facing a food shortage.  Our main character Hudman is a Dutch sailor working on a civilian ship employed by the U. S. Navy, lowering machinery to the ocean floor which will warm up the cold water there and make these areas of the ocean more hospitable for life and thus more productive as fishing waters.  In a bizarre turn of events (are there any other in these van Vogt stories?) these activities awaken a civilization of thirty billion people who have been in cryogenic sleep on the ocean floor for millenia.  Hudman is chosen to be the emissary between the surface people and this revived race, which it turns out has the technology to easily take over the planet.

The people from under the sea declare that their benevolent rule will improve everybody's life.  One of the first things on their agenda is to eliminate all the disparate and confusing human languages and replace them with a single logical language, which will be easy enough with their "mind-to-mind" teaching methods.  Hudman is then deluged with exhortations, threats, and bribes from people who try every possible means to preserve their own dialects from extinction.  "Pendulum" is a story about ethnic pride and what van Vogt calls "race consciousness," and the lengths individuals will go to to honor and preserve the culture and memory of their peoples.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the violence people are willing to employ to protect their own dialects and honor their ancestors is a sign that van Vogt was skeptical of ethnic pride and sympathetic to the "melting pot" view of American race/ethnic relations which, nowadays, has been abandoned.  In the end of the story, in order to protect him, the submarine people transport Hudman to a city in a distant time period - Hudman eagerly embraces the culture of his new home, "determined to fit in with no thought at all about his past."  

"The Male Condition"

From racial and cultural diversity issues to gender and sexual issues!

I think of van Vogt as a guy who often writes stuff that is kind of crazy.  "The Male Condition" definitely fits in the crazy category.  It also seems to be in part or whole a kind of joke, one which some may find in poor taste.  I cannot deny that the audacity of the story, its twisted surprises, the lengths van Vogt was willing to go, made me laugh.

We open in a government office where two academics, psychologists, are talking.  We are immediately alerted to the fact that this is a strange world when we learn that 30 is considered an old age and that the male psychologist, Jolo, is smoking a "kolo," a product introduced by aliens.

Crazier still, Jolo tells the junior psychologist, a woman 23.25 years old named Lasia, that there have been no cases of rape in 38 years.  Sounds good, right?  But this phenomenon presents the researcher with a problem: Jolo is directing work on an encyclopedia of human nature, and how can the book be complete without a rapist to study in the flesh?

The rapist shortage, apparently, is the result of an additive in drinking water that makes people unable to feel anger.  Jolo proposes injecting himself with something that will make him a rapist(?) and having Lasia act as observer, which is to say, rape victim(!).  Lasia needs the money, so she signs onto the project!

This 13 page story is stuffed with wacky elements: aliens only women can see, psychologists whose whole therapy technique consists of having sex with their patients, a computer database put together by a feminist government agency which lists men with whom women are forbidden to have sex (if this story had been written after 2001 presumably this would be called the "no-fuck list.")  Lasia turns to a male psychologist for help, but he takes advantage of her, so she then fools Jolo's wife into taking her place as rape victim.  The intervention of aliens into this demented slapstick leads to murder, necrophilia, and a jury trial at which the aliens save the surviving characters from going to prison.

Crazy man, crazy.

"Living with Jane"

This story, with its convoluted plot and characteristically van Vogtian sentences, was a little hard to follow.

The year is 2288.  Androids are on the market which are almost impossible to distinguish from real humans.  Parents of young children who get divorced routinely buy an android replica of their former spouses, so that their children will not suffer the psychological problems that result from living in a single parent home.  In a way that van Vogt explains but which I didn't understand, living with androids has given our heroine, teenaged Jane, what amount to psychic powers.

A new type of android has been built, a model even more human-like.  Unfortunately, these super-androids have decided to take over the world.  Jane's father, a scientist, is the natural leader of the resistance to the android takeover, and a natural target of the androids, who contrive to enter Jane's home and hold her and her mother hostage.  The androids threaten to kill his family if Jane's dad doesn't cease working against their takeover.

Fortunately, Jane's high intelligence and mental powers mean she is up to the task of neutralizing her captors.  Jane saves the day, not through any kind of violence, but through charm, persuasion, and logic.  Having lived her entire life with androids, Jane likes them and understands them, and is able to manipulate and even befriend them.  The story has a happy ending; Jane will be able to assure peace and freedom for everybody, human and android, and now she has an android duplicate of herself who will be the twin sister she has always wanted.        

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It is hard to recommend such strange stories to other people, but I enjoyed them. 

Pendulum contains three more pieces of fiction which I have not read before, so I will be grappling with Van Vogt's weird plots and clunky verbiage in the near future.

Out of this World Science Fiction Classics from Bantam, 1983

In the back of my 1983 copy of Samuel Delany’s Empire Star is this advertisement for Bantam’s “great series of science fiction classics,” full of fancy, terror and adventure.  What is the story with these ads?  Why do some paperbacks have them, and others do not?  Was Delany annoyed that his book contained ads like this?  How were the books chosen for the ad... are these books Bantam is proud of, or are these books they printed too many of and are scrambling to unload?  If Ursula K. LeGuin saw this page back in 1983 would she say, "Awesome, my buddies at Bantam are really working hard promoting my work!"  or would it be more along the lines of, "Cripes, Bantam must really be having trouble selling all those copies of my Earthsea books to the stores."  How many people actually used this "handy coupon" to order books from Bantam?  What percentage of Bantam's gross revenue came from such orders?       

Four of these books are by Ursula K. LeGuin, whom I’ve never read, and three of them are by Warren Norwood, whom I’ve never even heard of, but I am familiar with several of the listed books.

Sundiver by David Brin

I read this in the ‘90s, in fact I think it was the first SF book I read after a few years of avoiding SF and reading mostly history and poetry, the period when I thought I might actually finish grad school and get a degree.  I thought Sundiver was just OK; I liked the sciency stuff of flying into the sun, but wasn't impressed by the murder mystery stuff (the guy with laser eyes did it.)  I never read any more of Brin's fiction, though his critique of Star Wars (that it is elitist and promotes hereditary aristocracy), which I must have read in Slate right after "Phantom Menace" came out, I found very interesting and has stuck with me.  

The Dinosaurs by William Stout, Byron Preiss and William Service

I love this book to death, and have spent many hours admiring the beautiful illustrations.  Stout works in various media and various styles, so even though its dozens and dozens of pictures of dinosaurs by the same guy, each page is fresh and exciting.  I can still remember seeing this in the bookstore in the mall for the first time, and then buying it on a subsequent trip.  The store only had one copy, and it was a little shopworn, but I put a piece of masking tape on the spine and the book is still in one piece, 30 years later.

Harlan Ellison also loved The Dinosaurs, and wrote a gushing blurb-sized review for it in the February 1982 issue of "Heavy Metal," which I learned on tarbandu’s blog, The PorPor Books Blog, back in February of 2012.   There is also an enthusiastic preface by Ray Bradbury. 


The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury 

As I have said earlier, I don’t think I have read every story included in all the different editions of Martian Chronicles, but I have read many of them here and there, and liked them.  I think Thomas Disch's criticisms of Bradbury (that Bradbury can be too sappy and sentimental) have some merit, but in the same way that I still like Star Wars even though David Brin scores some points against George Lucas, I still like lots of Bradbury's work.  "The Silent Towns," one of the stories included in Martian Chronicles, isn't sappy or sentimental at all. 

Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

This book is on Half Price Book's list of 100 SF books, and its Wikipedia entry makes it sound like it might be good. 

The Man Who Fell To Earth by Walter Tevis

I saw the movie of this with David Bowie. I really like Bowie, as a musician and just as an appealing character who livens up the TV screen whenever he appears, and the movie had some memorable images and scenes, but also felt too long and a little too silly.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr.

I read this in the mid '90s, when I worked at a bookstore in New Jersey, after graduating college but before moving to New York and starting grad school.  This may have been the last SF book I read for a long time, before the SFless period ended by Sundiver. (Though I read Dave Wolverton's On My Way To Paradise and two Serpent Catch books around the same time.  I enjoyed those books, and remember them pretty well.) I remember very little of A Canticle for Leibowitz, except a vivid discussion of how you shouldn’t try to euthanize a sick cat.  I should probably read A Canticle for Leibowitz again.   

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If you want to join Harlan, Ray and me in gushing about Stout’s The Dinosaurs, or if you want to tell me who Warren Norwood is and why I should know him, or say anything at all about these Bantam books or David Bowie, feel free to do so in the comments.   

Half Price Books' List of 100 SF Novels: 51 to 100

Here we are as in olden days, considering Half Price Books' List of 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy books worthy of "geeking out" over.  Oh those kids and their wacky slang.  Today we are cutting a rug with selections 51 to 100, chosen by 3,000 "bibliomaniacs."  That's right, over the objections of the union, we are doubling production for this post.

51, 52 & 53) The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, Dies the Fire by S. M. Stirling, and Old Man' s War by John Scalzi
These are all books I have not read by authors whose books I have not read.  I remember people on the SF newsgroups praising Anubis Gates, and I have considered reading Stirling's books about people going to Venus and Mars, and John Scalzi gets a lot of attention in what the kids are calling "the blogosphere," but somehow I have not read any of their books yet.

54 & 56) The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers and The Electric Church by Jeff Somers
I haven't heard of these books or authors before.  Am I getting a magic realism vibe?

55) The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson  
This gets good press, but I'm not moved.

57) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I might read this some day.  It is my understanding that it is a condemnation of the Allied policy of raining bombs on Nazi Germany.  Maybe we've found something on which Vonnegut and John Ringo of Watch on the Rhine fame can agree.

58) Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
I own the very edition chosen by the bibliomaniacs to illustrate their list.  This is Volume II of the Gormenghast Trilogy.  I own all three of the books, and have read Volume I, Titus Groan. I wanted to like it, and I finished it, but it seemed very long and slow - its over 500 pages of tiny little print, like 38 lines to a page!  There wasn't much plot that I can remember.  A bunch of weirdos live in a huge castle and have difficult conversations with each other, then there is some kind of climactic one on one fight, then a funeral.  I must be forgetting something; I am told this is one of the greatest classics of 20th century British literature.

Gormenghast looks to be even longer than Titus Groan. 

I like Peake's illustrations to the book; will that protect me from charges of philistinism?

59) Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
People are always hailing this as a masterpiece, so I am not surprised it is on the list.  I don't find overpopulation and ecological scare books very interesting, though, and the only John Brunner book I have read (Maze of Stars) was very weak.  Also, this thing is over 500 pages long.

Add another charge of philistinism to my record.

60) Mort by Terry Prachett
I read the first Discworld book when it came out, and it didn't make me laugh, so I have never read any more Terry Prachett books.  I'm not crazy about SF books whose main goal is to be funny or to be a parody of other SF books. 

In a brush with fame, on June 30, 2003, I posted something banal on the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup, and Terry Prachett, or someone using the name, agreed with me.

61) Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
I remember women in the office reading this during the Harry Potter craze, and my wife read it as well.  Wizards during the Napoleonic Wars?  Not for me.

62) Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
I've enjoyed some Zelazny, like This Immortal and Damnation Alley and some short stories, and disliked some, including the first Amber book which I read as a kid, disliked, and then tried as an adult, and disliked again.  Lord of Light I have not attempted.  Maybe someday.

63) Ladyhawke by Joan Vinge
Ladyhawke?  I laughed when I saw this on here.  Joan Vinge is a respected writer, but a movie tie-in for a B movie?  Are the bibliomaniacs just recommending it because Michelle Pfeiffer is so good looking?   The cover image of the paperback is an arresting portrait of Pfeiffer, no doubt.

I hate going to the movie theater, smelling other people and listening to them eat.  I can recall all the films I have seen in a theater, because the number is so small.  Ladyhawke is one of the movies I saw in a theater with other kids when it came out.  We thought it was silly - we were cynical kids.  There is a scene in which we see the interior of a castle from the point of view of a fighting man in a visored helmet; we laughed because looking through the slots of the visor as the soldier advanced looked like the view from inside a TIE fighter.  The double crossbow also made me groan.  I was a real killjoy.     

Seeing the Ladyhawke tie-in here makes me wonder why there are no Star Wars or Star Trek books on this list.  If those movie/TV tie-ins were excluded, why not this one?  Half Price Books' bibliomaniacs work in ways mysterious.

64) I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
I read at least some of these stories as a kid, and of course like everybody I know the Three Laws of Robotics.  I can't recall anything about these stories, though.  I'm guessing they are puzzle stories, in which a robot behaves oddly and the human characters sit around and figure out the peculiar way the robot interpreted the Three Laws of Robotics.  Very droll.

65) Armor by John Steakly
I've already described my thinking about MilSF.

There's quite a bit of MilSF on this list, but not the series I thought was famous, one I have actually read a little of, David Drake's "Hammer's Slammers."   

66, 67 & 75) The Lathe of Heaven, The Wizard of Earthsea, and the Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
I've never read any LeGuin.  I've always assumed these books would be some kind of feminist polemic.  I got my fill of feminist polemic at Rutgers and CUNY. Maybe I am missing out.  My wife has read some LeGuin, but I think they were "mainstream" books, not any of these.

68) The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffery
I might have read this when I was reading those Pern books, or maybe I just read about it.  The idea of imbedding a human intelligence in a machine is of course a good idea.  Probably I wouldn't read this today.

69 & 71) Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell and Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
I must be out of touch; these I have never heard of.

70) War with the Newts by Karl Kapek
Here we go with the esoterica, a book written in Czech in 1936.  Maybe people are reading this in college?

According to Wikipedia this is an attack on racism, fascism, nationalism, consumerism, and scientism that lacks a central character.  Sounds like fun.  The film was scheduled to be released in 2013, and is still in production.  Don't pulp all those extra copies just yet, Half Price Books people! 

72 & 76) To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
I've never read anything by Willis.

73 & 99) Stardust and Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
I've not read anything by Neil Gaiman. This is magical realism, right?  My wife, Gene Wolfe, and Tori Amos all like Gaiman, but so far I have resisted their blandishments.

74) Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link  
You're not going to be shocked to hear I haven't encountered this one before.  The cover is a "reimagining" of my favorite painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, "Lady with an Ermine."  I think Leonardo is a little overrated; I like Leonardo, but I think Michelangelo, Rafael, and Botticelli are all superior.  One mark of their superiority is that the secret codes embedded in their paintings have yet to be deciphered.

77) Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
I remember the women in the office back in New York lugging this around.  This is a romance novel about a woman who goes back in time to fight in some sexy Anglo-Scottish war, right?  I can't really poke fun at this after gushing about Princess of Mars, can I?

Wasn't it annoying when every time Scotland came up in conversation somebody had to perform that "we got colonized by wankers" soliloquy?  I don't miss those days.  

78 & 79) Mockingbird by Walter Tevis and This is the Way the World Ends by James Morrow
These are books I've never heard of.  I've been living under a rock!

Mockingbird sounds like it might be interesting, and would give me excuses to reminisce about New York.

Morrow is one of those guys who makes sure his pets are mentioned in his Author's Bio.  Woof!  This is the Way the World Ends takes an audaciously bold stand and tries to awaken the public to the possible negative effects of a nuclear war.

80) Robotech: Battlecry by Jack McKinney
Ladyhawke doesn't look so crazy now, does it?

When it was first on U.S. TV I loved loved loved the Macross sequence of Robotech.  I thought the mecha designs and the Zentraedi space ship designs were brilliant, and I even thought the soap opera story of the Rick Hunter/Lynn Minmay/Lisa Hayes love triangle and the Romeo and Juliet story of Max and Miriya Stirling worked.  (On the inside I am a sentimental sap.)  I loved the background music and the funny subplot about the three alien spies (it's like Ninotchka, isn't it?). I bought Macross comic books and role playing game books, I drew Zentraedi battle pods in my notebooks during boring college classes. I was hooked.

When I first saw these Jack McKinney novels I was past my Robotech phase.  The story of how they came about, which I just read on Wikipedia, is pretty interesting.  Jack McKinney is a pen name for two writers, one of them Brian Daley.  As a kid I read Brian Daley's Han Solo's Revenge.  The other kids in school saw me carrying it around, and so, one day, when they were trying to start a fight between me and some other kid, one of these little bastards told me, "You need to get revenge on him, like Han Solo!" 

81 & 82) Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marrillier and Resurrection by Arwen Elys Dayton
These must have been published while I was in that coma.

83 & 84) Parable of the Sower and Kindred by Octavia Butler
I haven't read any Octavia Butler.  We were supposed to read a Butler book in my Science Fiction class at Rutgers, but either we didn't get to it, or I just neglected to read it.  I wasn't a very conscientious student.

85 & 86) The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass by Phillip Pullman
Covered these already.

87 & 88) Grass by Sheri Tepper and Three Days to Never by Tim Powers
Nothing is coming up on the scanner.

89) Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
Often, at the New York Public Library's Mid-Manhattan Branch, I would pick up their hulking copy of this book, feel I should read it, then put it back as appearing too forbidding.  I had read Delany's Nova and The Ballad of Beta-2, both of which I thought were just OK.  Today I can remember almost nothing about either.  

The Wikipedia page for Dhalgren makes the book sound very exciting, with titans of SF ranged on both sides, ecstatically for or against the book.  800 pages full of typos, however, is an investment I am not currently willing to commit myself to. 

90) That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis
I was disappointed in Out of the Silent Planet, so didn't get to this one.

91) Logan's Run by William Nolan and George Clayton Johnson
I've seen this movie, and never considered reading the novel. 

92) The White Mountains by John Christopher
I read the three Tripods books as an adult, and enjoyed them.

93) Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov
I thought this movie was fun because of the art direction, special effects and cast, but I never thought to read the book Asimov came up with based on the screenplay.

94) Mister Monday by Garth Nix
I see this guy's name in the anthologies I take out of the library.  Is this a kid's book?

"Tuesday Afternoon" by the Moody Blues and "Drive In Saturday" by David Bowie are great songs.  When I was a kid I went through a U2 phase, and loved "Sunday, Bloody Sunday."  

95) Ringworld by Larry Niven
This is a good novel, but has a bunch of nagging problems.  The characters are too much like caricatures, you can't take them seriously and you can't care about them.  The book's tone is too silly and light.  Also, Niven's idea that "luck" is not only real, but hereditary, is irritatingly stupid.

96) The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans   
I kind of want to read this.  When I was young I read Watt-Evans' Cyborg and the Sorcerers and really enjoyed it.  I'd like to read that again.  

On a side note, I like many of the realistic cover paintings Darrell K. Sweet and Michael Whelan have done over the years.

97) Robopacalypse by Daniel H. Wilson
I feel like I just failed a spelling test. 

98) The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor
Looking Glass War is my favorite novel by John Le Carre.  Is this the sequel?

100) The Giver by Lois Lowry
This is SF?  Who knew?

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Final notes on omissions
  
There is no Frankenstein, no Dracula, no I Am Legend, and no H. P. Lovecraft.  Maybe the Half Price Books bibliomaniacs consider that those popular and important books belong in the horror category.

There's also no H. G. Wells or Jules Verne, which is odd, especially when we see Karl Kapek on there.

Gene Wolfe and Jack Vance are not represented. Wolfe and Vance have devoted followings in the SF community, and are the kind of SF writers who receive praise from prestigious mainstream institutions like The New York Times, so it is noteworthy that the bibliomaniacs left them off but put a cartoon tie-in and a movie tie-in on there.

There are fantasies I've never heard of on the list, and fantasies the critics frown on as Tolkein clones, like Sword of Shannara, but no Conan or Elric.  Robert Howard and Michael Moorcock have been very influential, have critical defenders, and Conan and Elric are very popular, so it is a little strange.

If Lord of the Rings and the Pullman thing had been considered as a single book there would have been space for representative works of famous authors like Arthur C. Clarke or Harlan Ellison, writers important to the history of the SF field like Poul Anderson or A. E. Van Vogt, or acknowledged classics like Pohl's Gateway and Haldeman's Forever War.

Still, this is a fun list of SF books, and I encourage everyone to rush to the library to seek them out.  I mean to Half Price Books.  And keep an eye out for the faithful adaptation of War with the Newts starring Will Smith coming soon to a theatre near you.

Half Price Books thinks I should read these "classics"

I got a free calendar at Half Price Books, but this wasn’t a sign of unconditional love. Half Price Books includes on the page for August (I still got time!) a reading list. A reading list! Is this what I have to do to show I am worthy of Half Price Books and their free calendar? Let’s see, maybe I’ve got a head start on my assignment.

1) To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
I read this in school, and thought it was pretty good. And of course I saw the movie. All you science fiction fans out there already know that Scout was the model for the young woman in Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage, a decent SF novel in the style of a Heinlein juvenile.

While I think To Kill A Mockingbird is good, I always suspect it is on these kinds of lists (and on the top of this list) because it advocates for the values the people who make these lists want us all to have and fear we don’t have. Is To Kill A Mockingbird really the best book of all time, or the book you most should have already read or whatever? I am skeptical.

2) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Everyone is constantly talking about how great this book is, but somehow they have yet to overcome my sales resistance. Part of the problem is that I feel like I know all the ins and outs of the plot from seeing it on TV three hundred times, mostly the long version starring the pretty girl from “Absolutely Fabulous” and the pretty girl from “House of Cards.” The lead actress is also pretty, but I’ve never seen her in any other show, so I call her “the pretty girl from ‘Pride and Prejudice.’”

Maybe someday I’ll read Pride and Prejudice and be amazed at how great it is. But not before August.

3) Lord of the Flies by William Golding
We read this in school, and I read it once as an adult as well, and it is pretty good. We were all saying “Sucks to your assmar” for months afterwards. I mean as a kid, not when I read it as an adult. Well, not as much.

4) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Like Lord of the Flies we read this in school, and then I read it as an adult. Somehow it didn’t make the impression on me that it makes on a lot of people; I thought it was just OK. The thing I always remember about it is that it was the first time I saw the word “holocaust” outside the context of the German program to exterminate the Jews, without a capital letter.

Anyway, I think the “Great American Novel” is Moby Dick.

5) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
I read this once as an adult, and it is pretty good, due to the plot and ideas. I don’t remember thinking the style was very good.

6) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I haven’t read this one. I read Cat’s Cradle at Rutgers, and I read at least one other Vonnegut book as an adult, but I wasn’t blown away by them, and have not read any more Vonnegut. (Well, we read “Harrison Bergeron” in high school, which was not bad.) Someday I may read Slaughterhouse-Five, but probably not before August.

7) The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
I have not read this, and am quite unlikely to. I read The Three Musketeers as an adult, and was amazed at how lame it was. A boring adventure story full of lame jokes? I couldn’t believe it. Not only was the alleged adventure boring and the alleged jokes not funny, but after spending my whole life being sympathetic to the Huguenots, in The Three Musketeers I am supposed to think of them as the enemy? I kept hoping a Huguenot sharpshooter would kill Balthazar, Melchior and/or whatever the other guy’s name was.

I think maybe Half Price Books is going to break up with me.

8) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Like Pride and Prejudice, this one has lots of good PR, but I have yet to be sold on it. Like Pride and Prejudice I have seen more than one version on TV, and the plot seems OK. Maybe I’ll read this one day.

Or maybe not. In college (on the banks of the old Raritan, as we say) I read Hard Times, and didn’t think it was very fun. (I had a hard time reading it, ha ha.) My other exposure to Charles Dickens, like everybody else with a pulse, is from seeing three million versions of "A Christmas Carol," three million times each. As a kid I always thought Grand Moff Tarkin, Darth Vader, and Boba Fett were cooler than Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, and I had the same thing going with Scrooge and all those nags trying to get him to stop saving his money. When the Death Star explodes, or Boba Fett gets eaten by that, uh, well, we all know what it looks like, I feel a little deflated, and I always feel a little deflated when Scrooge gives in to the nags and starts throwing his money around, trying to buy their love or maybe their silence. I don’t know if Great Expectations is a celebration of nags and a denunciation of frugality, but I fear it could be.

9) Animal Farm by George Orwell
Orwell is a good writer with a very good style, and this is a good book. Of course, I may be vulnerable to the charge that I like this book because I am hostile to the Soviet Union. Maybe there are Bolshevists out there who think Animal Farm sucks, and suspect it is on these kinds of lists because the people who write these lists are members of the bourgeoisie and are trying to brainwash the proletariat. Maybe it is on this list at number 9 as a sop to those of us who are going to roll our eyes when we get to number 10 and it is The Grapes of Wrath.

10) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
I haven’t read this, and I doubt I will. I saw the movie and it seemed about as subtle as a sledge hammer and sickle. If I want to hear somebody’s extravagant moaning about being poor, I’ll call up my mother.

And as I’ve already said, I think Moby Dick is the “Great American Novel.” Captain Ahab uber alles!

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Alright, let’s look at the totals. I’ve read half the books Half Price Books thinks I’m supposed to read. But I’ve read some of those twice, so maybe Half Price Books will cut me some slack. And maybe I’ll get some bonus points if I’ve read some of the 30 additional books on the list at the website. (A reading list of 40 books! Half Price Books is high maintenance!) I haven’t looked at this full list of 40 books yet, and I sure hope Homer, Virgil, Dante, Nabokov, Boswell, Proust, and Melville are Half Price Book’s idea of “classics”; if J. K. Rowling and that The Life of Pi guy are on the list, I may be in trouble.