Happy Birthday Doctor Who

I'm going to just go right out and say it: Doctor Who is the best thing to happen to television.

Last night I watched the 50^th anniversary special of Doctor Who and it's got me thinking as to why I love Doctor Who so much.

It is a very silly show at times. There is a whole storyline about farting aliens that look like giant green babies. Of course, it's also very serious at times. I've been watching some old episodes and the body count is through the roof. It's serious and silly, funny and scary.

So let me get a bit... me-ish here.

The show is, to me, a story about the base concepts of reality. The Doctor is a fallible force for good that relies on us as we rely on him. When I say “us” I mean humanity represented by the human companions.

Right now I'm watching episode 168, “New Earth” where Rose has been possessed by Cassandra and the Doctor his investigating a New Earth Hospital... There is a bit of a zombie thing going on and it's, well, one of the more basic episodes especially when you compare it to some of the Steven Moffat episodes.

And cat nun doctors. There are cat nun doctors as well. 

Still, it's pretty darn deep with a lot to say about humanity in the tradition of some of the best science fiction.

IT makes me long for the days of college. Aside from the assignments and some of the maddening arbitrariness that can come in academic life, there was always a group of clever folk to dissect and unpack whatever needed to be. Lucky for me, my wife is pretty smart and can talk “Doctor Who” till the cows come home.

She say's she loves Doctor Who because she likes the idea that the companions can basically run away from life without consequences. I can see the appeal of that- though it goes deeper. The Doctor always promises to protect his companions- even says he will return them back the same- but he never does.

Contact with the Doctor is a life-changing thing. As I think through what happens to his companions- apart from the constant mortal danger they are in, they can't be returned to normal... well (SPOILER ALERT) except for Donna Noble but that is almost the most tragic story of all.

This is a very sad moment... though it's sort of how you feel after you watch a few episodes. 

I've read in numerous places the theory that Doctor Who is so appealing because the Doctor is a stand in for God, but a very personal god who needs humanity as much as humanity needs him- which isn't a too far fetched concept of god now that I think about it.

That said, perhaps the moral of the story is that humanity can't have contact with the divine and have a normal life afterwards. And, if we see god as a personal character rather than a cosmic power- as some characters in the show believe the Doctor to be- then god cannot have contact with humans without changing himself.

At Episode 169 now, “Tooth and Claw.” In the span of less than a minute there was a reference to “The Muppet Movie” and Queen Victoria, so that's good to. Queen Victoria is going to fight alien werewolves in this episode.

If nothing else, it's been 50 years since the first episode aired- where the Doctor and his granddaughter, along with a couple of school teachers, go back in time in a police phone box to caveman days, leaving the first of many many many many cliffhangers to come. Unlike other shows that petered out and were left forgotten, or that have been the target of highly unsuccessful reboots, Doctor Who is stronger than ever. Maybe it's because the show, in a way, connects us to the divine. Or maybe it's the historical characters fighting aliens.

All I know is I want this show to be going in another 50 years so when I'm 84, I can take watch it with my grandkids and bore them with my over analyzing of everything while they get scared of Weeping Angels. 

"The weeping angels represent.."
"Grandpa! Shhhhh!"

Happy Birthday Doctor Who!

Hundred Book Challenge #3: "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen

So.... “The Corrections.”

I went into this novel completely blind. Somehow I missed the whole brouhaha with author Johnathan Franzen saying he didn't care that it was chosen as an Oprah book of the week book and the seemingly billions of copies that are floating out around there.

Divorced from all that, this book is not safe. I mean that in the “Never Ending Story” way.

What this book does is take all the little weaknesses and disfunction that exists in family life and explodes it out in a way that is not uncommon enough to let you remove yourself from the situation. In other words, you can't pretend that the characters in the book have nothing in common with you and your family.

Let me tell you, briefly, about my family. We are pretty darn close to perfect. Out of my siblings, no one is estranged, we all get along with each other and with our parents. Children outnumber adults by a pretty good number.

I say that to stress the fact that my family is nothing like the family in “The Corrections.” And still... and still...

Here are the basics. “The Corrections” feature the Lambert family. Alfred, the patriarch, is emotionally stunted and overbearing. He is also falling into the depths of dementia. His wife, Enid, suffers under Alfred's tyranny and survives by turning passive aggressiveness into an art form. Alfred and Enid have three grown children. The oldest boy, Gary, is a successful banker who believes his wife and kids are conspiring against him. Chip, the middle child, is a Marxist failed academic who can't get a handle on life. Denise is the youngest and a successful chef, but has issues based on her sexual confusion.

Each member of the family is horrible in their own way but all of them share a disastrous flaw in that they can't help but try and force the world into the illusions they create.

Above and beyond this, the story has tendrils poking into a lot of different concepts. There is the old world being swallowed up into the new world. There is the tyranny of capitalism gone crazy. There is sexism, racism, ageism and so forth.

At the bottom of it all, however, is the story of a family trying to have one last Christmas together.

Remember how I said each character is terrible? Well, the are. And I kind of want to talk about that.

Often, when I relate to people about a story I experienced wherein the characters are horrible people, they don't see the point in it. They don't want to watch a story where people are bad. They want a hero to root for. They want someone to identify with- but only the parts of them that are good and hopeful. They don't want to see the other side of humanity without a huge redemption.

This book is called “The Corrections” and that is important. What happens in this story is not a hero's journey, it's about people making corrections to their lives.

Why do I like these stories about characters that are-I almost said unrelateable but that's not the right word- deeply flawed? It's, perhaps, because they are so relateable.

The Hundred Book Challenge: The List

Republished here, the original post for my Hundred Book Challenge, original here from May 15, 2013.


Also, I will link the story to my reactions as I read them.


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I love to read like I love to breathe and eat. Lately, however, I haven’t been reading as much or as well as I used to.


I’m the kind of guy who walks into a bookstore, stares at the wall of “Classic Literature” and beams in internal pride of having read everything on the shelves. I’ve read every novel by Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austin, John Steinbeck, Douglas Adams, J.R.R. Tolkien, and half a dozen other prominent and important writers. I’ve almost read all the Stephen King novels which is, if I do say so myself, pretty darn impressive.


But still, I realized a large hole in my reading world existed- mostly of English language novels written in the last hundred years that weren’t J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchet or Chuck Palahniuk- not that there’s anything wrong with these writers- I’ve just been feasting on them almost exclusively for a while and need something else.


In my quest to quench my literary thirst, I stumbled upon TIME’s list of the best “100 novels of all TIME”- meaning the best novels written since TIME magazine was a thing.


I’m usually wary of such lists, but a glance over the books chosen by book critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo I found a number of books I have always classified as “I should read that someday.” These aren’t the most popular books and almost none of them are included when I make a random Facebook query as to “what should I read next?” After looking into every book on the list I realized that all of them piqued my curiosity so I decided to read them all. Some are young adult, some are mystery and some are science fiction or fantasy. There’s even a graphic novel in the mix.


The best thing about this list is I’ve never read the vast majority of them. I’ll be honest and say that this is one of the few “best books” lists where I haven’t even heard of more than half of them.


A few caveats: First, I have read some of these books before and I will read them again. Yes, Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” is on the list and I have great swaths of that book memorized, but I will still re-read it. Second, my subscription to Audible.com will come in handy as I listen to the audio version of whatever books I can find. I listen when I walk my dog, when I drive in the car and whenever the physical act of reading is not ideal. This will allow me to be reading several books at the same time. I won’t touch abridged versions of books. Third, I’m not giving myself a time limit. Most of these are dense novels and demand to be savored slowly. Others are monstrously long. Fifth, I am not a literature critic, but I will be blogging my reading experience here on the Nerd’s Eye View blog as I go along. Sixth, I’ll be reading them in order of when I find them or when I want to read them.


Sound good? Here are the books in alphabetical order:

1. The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow
2. All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
3. American Pastoral –Philip Roth
4. An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
5. Animal Farm – George Orwell
6. Appointment in Samarra – John O’Hara
7. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret – Judy Blume
8. The Assistant –Bernard Malamud
9. At Swim-Two-Birds –Flann O’Brien
10. Atonement – Ian McEwan
11. Beloved – Toni Morrison
12. The Berlin Stories- Christopher Isherwood
13. The Big Sleep- Ramond Chandler
14. The Blind Assassin –Margaret Atwood
15. Blood Meridian –Cormac McCarthy
16. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
17. The Bridge of San Luis Rey –Thornton Wilder
18. Call It Sleep –Henry Roth
19. Catch-22 –Joseph Heller
20. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
21. A Clockwork Orange –Anthony Burgess
22. The Confessions of Nat Turner –William Styron
23. The Corrections – Jonathon Franzen
24. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
25. A Dance to the Music of Time- Anthony Powell
26. The Day of the Locust –Nathanael West
27. Death Comes for the Archbishop –Willa Cather
28. A Death in the Family –James Agee
29. The Death of the Heart –Elizabeth Bowen
30. Deliverance –James Dickey
31. Dog Soldiers –Robert Stone
32. Falconer –John Cheever
33. The French Lieutenant’s Woman –John Fowles
34. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
35. Go Tell it on the Mountain –James Baldwin
36. Gone With the Wind –Margaret Mitchell
37. The Grapes of Wrath –John Steinbeck
38. Gravity’s Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
39. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
40. A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
41. The Heart is A Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
42. The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
43. Herzog - Saul Bellow
44. Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
45. A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul
46. I, Claudius - Robert Graves
47. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
48. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
49. Light in August - William Faulkner
50. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
51. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
52. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
53. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
54. Loving - Henry Green
55. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
56. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
57. The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead
58. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
59. Money - Martin Amis
60. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
61. Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
62. Native Son - Richard Wright
63. Neuromancer - William Gibson
64. 1984 - George Orwell
65. Never Let Me Go- Kazuo Ishiguro
66. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
67. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Kesey
68. The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski
69. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
70. A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
71. Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion
72. Portnoy’s Complaint - Philip Roth
73. Possession - A.S. Byatt
74. The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
75. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
76. Rabbit, Run - John Updike
77. Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
78. The Recognitions - William Gaddis
79. Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
80. Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
81. The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
82. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
83. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
84. The Sot-Weed Factor - John Barth
85. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
86. The Sportswriter - Richard Ford
87. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
88. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
89. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
90. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
91. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
92. Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
93. Ubik - Philip K. Dick
94. Under the Net - Iris Murdoch
95. Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
96. Watchmen - Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
97. White Noise - Don DeLillo
98. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
99. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
100. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold - John leCarre

Hundred Book Challenge #1: “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess

Here, I here republish the first book I completed in Hundred Book Challenge originally published here on May 28, 2013. 

What’s it going to be then, eh?

This 1962 novella by prolific British writer Anthony Burgess reads like a bead of water skittering across a hot skillet.

The story follows our “faithful narrator” Alex, a 15-year old-gang leader in a vaguely futuristic and dystopian England. Alex first shows readers a life of crime and debauchery followed by being institutionalized and “rehabilitated” by an oppressive government using nightmarish methods to force Alex to associate criminal behavior with physical sickness- a method that works, forcing Alex to do good to people rather than evil. The opposition to the government then attempts to use Alex as a poster boy for government gone wrong, ultimately sending him on a suicidal jump out a window before being reverted back to his previous, violent ways by the government afraid he would become a martyr against the establishment. The final chapter, excluded from U.S. publications of the book and the Stanly Kubric movie, shows Alex as a more mature 18 year old growing tired of crime and violence and thinking about the future of a wife and child.

Much has been said and written about the story thanks mostly to Kubric’s movie adaptation. I saw the movie years before I read the book and I have to say the book is a more beautiful creation using the invented slang called Nadsat to punch around the more violent and awful portions of the story- of which there are many- as opposed to the movie’s stark images of nudity and violence. The violence and disturbing scenes are still there, it’s just done so in a way where the character of Alex is highlighted rather than the shock of seeing the violence happen under bright, harsh lights.

Bringing beauty to the violent and horrible seems to be an early theme in the 100 book challenge’s early entries as I chose, by complete random selection, to listen to “A Clockwork Orange” at the same time as reading “Lolita.”

Anyway, much has been said. I didn’t find myself at any point rooting for the future of young Alex who seemed aloof to the whole situation. Instead I found myself riveted by concepts of leadership and government.

At no point is any form of leadership given in a positive light. Alex’s trouble starts because he tries to force his leadership on his small gang. Both the government and the opposition try to force Alex to their side- or rather try to force Alex’s condition to their side.

Yeah, we never see that sort of thing now, right? Natural disasters, murders and huge news stories aren’t commandeered by opposing political or social forces causing the humans involved to lose their humanity.

Indeed the government seems to be to blame for the packs of wild youth terrorizing the world by night in the book. Alex points out that the only question asked by authority is why do kids act bad, never why do they act good.

The point being the need for free will is paramount to all other needs. Safety, security and all other options are secondary to free will. As the prison chaplain said in response to Alex’s treatment:

“What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?”

Or, as Alex says several times:

“What’s it going to be then, eh?”

The final chapter seems a bit at odds with the rest of the book. The supposed message being that violence and control is something you grow out of. Burgess comes right out and says that’s his point and his view on the purpose of a novel. Without any sort of change in character it’s not a proper novel, Burgess says, but rather a fable. Of course, it doesn’t jive with the rest of the story where you see adults working for the government still in the thrall of violence. Alex describes a teenager as a wind-up toy that looks like a real person but only travels straight ahead bumping into things as it goes. It’s given as an unavoidable that teenagers will want nothing more than to rape and pillage through life and then become sensible as adults. Again, this doesn’t seem to be a realistic approach in real life or the fiction Burgess created.

Two things:

First, there is no such thing as a clockwork orange. The image is supposed to create a sense of a fake human- something as fresh and juicy as an orange but with nothing real inside. It’s the title of a fake book within the novel that seeks to change the government from such totalitarianism- arguing that people who are controlled all the time are as lifeless as a clockwork orange.

Second, if at all possible, listen to the audio book version like I did thanks to the advice of my friend Mary Einfeldt. Not only is it probably the easiest way to approach the thick Nadsat slang, it’s also a pretty wonderful performance.

Hundred Book Challenge #2 “Lolita” by "Vladimir Nabokov

So, what has become of my hundred book challenge? It's was back in May when I posted the first of this series and wrote about “A Clockwork Orange” and now we are knocking on the door of a new year. Have I stopped reading? No. After finishing “A Clockwork Orange” I ripped my way through Vladimir Nabokov's “Lolita” and started on “A Dance to the Music of Time” which happens to be not a single novel but a cycle of 12 novels. I've been pretty much washed up in that world for most of the year. I also got blindsided by Stephen King's new novel and am nearly done listening to “The Corrections.” Because of this I entirely forgot, with my moving and changing jobs, to write about “Lolita.”

Well, that's not entirely true. The problem is that “Lolita” is a tricky novel to talk about. It's (in)famous to everyone because of its subject matter- that is a sexual relationship between a middle-aged man and a prepubescent girl. I may have been purposefully avoiding writing about it. It's an uncomfortable book, but maybe not for the reason you may think.

 Unfairly labeled as an erotic novel, the actual depictions of sex are almost non-existent. No, this novel is uncomfortable because it seduces the reader just as much as the narrator, Humbert Humbert, seduces 12-year-old Dolores and it's just as effective. That is to say, the book is a thing of pure beauty, light humor and total horror.

 As a narrator, Humbert is -almost- impossible not to love. He is witty, clever, funny and charming. Written in the form of a self-described fictional account of the life of the narrator, the book has you laughing even while your skin crawls. He is also a hebephile and goes to great length to explain exactly what sort of girl he likes. These passage are pure slime, but pretty slime still.

 There is much to say about this novel from a feminist point of view- how the desire of a man dehumanizes women and so forth, but that's not how I read it. I read it from the point of view of a man. Really, I think this is not a story of sexual conquest. It's a story about obsession. The obsession Humbert has towards Lolita is the same sort of thing anyone faces once their entire life's purpose can be boiled down to a single thing.

 This may be somewhat tangental, but the story really reminded me of people I used to go to church with. I'm an active, practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and one thing about our church is how many facets there are to our faith. Growing up, however, I encountered several people who would cling to one particular point of doctrine or practice to the point of obsession. They would pick one point and never deviate from that religious location. In the end, these people all seemed to face an ironical punishment for their obsession. A woman obsessed with family history ended up losing her living family because of it. A man obsessed with eating healthy ended up with vitamin and protein deficiencies. A man obsessed with missionary work ended up scaring people away from the church. It's not unless you accept life as a wide banquet of opportunity to you get any real joy out of one specific dish.

 Of course, Humbert's obsession is fundamentally evil and that's where the analogy falls apart. Still, perhaps there is a lesson there as well. What small hint of a shadow living in our periphery would grow to be a monster if we allow it to step out into the open? What small lust or anger or pride or other deadly sin that we stifle would become our obsession if we gave it just the smallest bit of growing room?

 A couple of things:
1. I found it almost impossible to read this book in public or research it on the Internet. The term "Lolita" is so connected to pedophilia that I was afraid a FBI team would raid my house at any moment.

2. The infamous reputation of this book is not, I think, totally fair. I think the stories you hear of an evil erotic novel knee-jerk reactions from people who never read the thing.