Little Big Man by Thomas Berger -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

I feel like I have my life back! After five weeks of zoom trial in the Boy Scouts bankruptcy case, I finally gave my closing argument on Tuesday and the judge heard the last of all the closing arguments yesterday. It's done! Now we all wait for the judge to mull over all the evidence and arguments and issue her ruling, which might take a few more weeks. Whew!

A long, entertaining book is exactly what I need right now and Little Big Man fits the bill perfectly! It's been on my TBR shelf forever. 

Please share the opening sentence or so of the book that caught your fancy this week. Leave the link to your Book Beginning post in the Linky box below.

MY BOOK BEGINNNG

I am a white man and never forgot it, but I was brought up by the Cheyenne Indians from the age of ten.

-- Little Big Man by Thomas Berger. 

Little Big Man was a best seller when it came out in 1964 and has never gone out of print. It is a sprawling Western saga narrated by the 111-year-old Jack Crabb. Crabb lived as a Cheyenne, then turned Indian scout, so he saw first hand much of the history of the American West. There is a 1970 movie version with Dustin Hoffman.

I just started it but it promises to be the kind of shaggy, absorbing story I love. I can understand why it remains popular. It has been on my radar because I'm working my way through the BOMC's Well-Stocked Bookcase list. 

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS

Please leave the link to your Book Beginnings post in the box below. If you share on social media, please use the hashtag #bookbeginnigns. 

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THE FRIDAY 56

Another fun Friday event is The Friday 56. Share a two-sentence teaser from page 56 of your book, or 56% of the way through your e-book or audiobook, on this weekly event hosted by Freda at Freda's Voice.

MY FRIDAY 56

From Little Big Man:

Several snows had fell and melted since I joined the Cheyenne, and I must have been going on thirteen years of age. We boys was playing war one day and Younger Bear, growing taller by the month, shot a blunt-head arrow with such force that when it struck a lad called Red Dog in the forehead he was knocked cold. 

Mailbox Monday

Thanks for joining me for Mailbox Monday! MM was created by Marcia at A girl and her books (fka The Printed Page), who graciously hosted it for a long, long time, before turning it into a touring meme (details here).

Serena at Savvy Verse & Wit is hosting in October.  Please go by and visit her wonderful blog. 

Many books came into my house last week from a variety of sources:

First, I had lunch with Larry Dennis to discuss his company, Turbo Leadership Systems doing some work with my law firm.  Larry gave me a copy of his book InFormation: How To Gain The 71% Advantage.  I don't read a lot of business books, but I'll read this one.



Second, Bob Sanchez, author and nonfiction editor at the Internet Review of Books, sent me a copy of his mystery, Little Mountain. I don't have a Kindle, so Bob was nice enough to send a paperback, but the Kindle edition is a steal at only $2.99! It looks great -- a Cambodian refugee now homicide cop in Lowell, Massachusetts.



Third, because I completed the Vintage Mystery Challenge, hostess Bev from My Reader's Block sent me a prize -- A PRIZE! For reading books. Does it get any better than that?  I chose An Oxford Tragedy by J. C. Masterman because this challenge has me hooked for good on vintage mysteries.



Finally, showing an uncharacteristic willingness to relinquish control, I gave a copy of my "Books to Buy and Read" list to Rachelle at my favorite Second Glance bookstore.  She found several nice copies for me, so I have a stack of new (to me) books, most of them on one or another of my book lists:

The Once and Future King by T. H. White (on the Burgess list)



One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (on the College Board's Top 101 List and the MLA's 30 Books Every Adult Should Read Before They Die list)



What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg (in a nice Modern Library edition; on the BOMC's Well-Stocked Bookcase list)



An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (winner of the Costa Book of the Year award)



Old Bones: A Gideon Oliver Mystery by Aaron Elkins (an Edgar Award winner)



A Case of Need by Michael Crichton (another Edgar winner)



The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (in a nice Everyman's Library reissue; on my own French Connections list)



The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award)



The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling (on the Easton Top 100 list)

Review: The Naked and the Dead

Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead is a mesmerizing look at Army life in WWII. Mailer tells the story of an Intelligence and Reconnaissance platoon on a fictional Pacific Island. There are fewer battle scenes than expected. Most of the story is about the men on daily patrols, guard duty, and a week long patrol behind enemy lines.  The realism of Mailer's descriptions -- particularly, of what it was like to hike for days and days in the jungle carrying 60 pounds of equipment -- are riveting. What those men went through!

Mailer personalizes the characters by interposing flashbacks highlighting the pre-war lives of several of the men. He also switches the point of view among the various characters. Still, the characters are never fully developed, which, oddly, made the story more realistic. The reader gets the kind of impressionistic views of each man in the troop that the men had of each other. These men were all thrown together to serve under horrible conditions, but they had nothing in common to start with and really did not know each other.

All in all, a great book. It is long, but it is a fast read. In Mailer’s introduction to the 50th Anniversary edition he self-deprecatingly explains that the book (his first) was a best seller and was written in the flashy language of all best sellers. But it is not the language that makes the book so good, it is the story.


OTHER REVIEWS

If you would like your review linked her, please leave a link in a comment and I will add it.

NOTES

Mailer's best seller did not win any prizes, but it did make it to the Modern Library's list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century, Radcliffe's competing list, The Book of the Month Club's "Well Stocked Bookcase" list, and Anthony Burgess's list of his favorite 99 novels.

The Well-Stocked Bookcase: BOMC's List of 60 Favorite American Novels

In celebration of its 60th anniversary, The Book of the Month Club compiled a list of 60 American novels, published between 1926 and 1986, whose "impact still endures — novels that have changed how we Americans talk, think, write, feel and see ourselves." The club published its recommendations in a book called The Well-Stocked Bookcase.

(They have since updated the list with a new edition, expanded to 72 books through 1998.  I've stuck with the original.)

The list is in chronological order. Trilogies are listed as one book, by the date of the first volume. Two of the trilogies are available in one-volume editions and are linked as such.

Those I have read are in red. So far, I have read 44 of the 60 – or 50 of the 66, if you count the separate volumes of the two trilogies, U.S.A. and Studs Lonigan. Those currently on my TBR shelf are in blue, although I intend to get to them all some day, mostly as they double up with other lists.

As always, if anyone has adopted this as a "Must Read" list, and would like me to link their progress post, I would be happy to do so. Just leave your link in a comment and I will add it.

Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (reviewed here)

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

U.S.A. by John Dos Passos

Light in August by William Faulkner

Studs Lonigan by James T. Farrell (reviewed here)

Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James Mallahan Cain

Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

Vein of Iron by Ellen Glasgow

Heaven's My Destination by Thornton Wilder

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

The Late George Apley by John P. Marquand

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson Mccullers

Trees by Conrad Richter

What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford

Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (reviewed here)

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

The Wall by John Hersey

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

From Here to Eternity by James Jones

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron

The Recognitions by William Gaddis

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore

The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

The Assistant by Bernard Malamud (reviewed here)

The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

The Magic Christian by Terry Southern

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley

Them by Joyce Carol Oates

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (reviewed here)

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

Burr by Gore Vidal

Nickel Mountain by John Gardner

Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

The World According to Garp by John Irving

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler


NOTE

Last updated on December 28, 2022.

OTHERS READING THE BOOKS ON THIS LIST
(If you would like to be listed here, please leave a comment with links to your progress reports or reviews and I will add them here.)

Review: The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury is much easier to understand if you realize that it cannot be understood from the get go, but only when it is complete. To borrow a line from The Big Chill, sometimes you have to let art flow over you.

The book is divided into four parts, the first three of which are told in first-person, stream of conscious narrative from the perspective of three Compson brothers: Benjy, Quentin, and Jason.  Benjy’s section is particularly difficult to follow because he is mentally retarded and does not talk, but only narrates what he hears, in no particular chronological order.  Quentin’s and Jason’s sections are progressively more comprehensible as pieces of the story develop.  The final section is told by an omniscient third-person narrator, ties the loose ends together, and brings the story to its exciting close.

The first-person accounts are made even more confusing by the multiplicity of names.  Because this is the story of a large Southern family, many family members share first names.  There are two Moreys, although the younger of the two is renamed Benjamin, the first narrator.  The two Jasons, father and son, can usually be told apart, but the two Quentins, uncle and niece, are particularly confusing when introduced in Benjy’s section because the absence of chronological consistency brings both Quentins into the story at the same time, although the niece was born after the uncle’s death.

Reading The Sound and the Fury is like watching a masterpiece being painted.  Each brushstroke brings out more of the picture until the whole, beautiful composition is revealed.

OTHER REVIEWS

If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.

NOTES

Reading The Sound and the Fury is also particularly satisfying for compulsive "list" readers, since it shows up on so many "best of" lists, including the following:

Books by Nobel Prize winners
The Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century
Radcliffe's competing list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century
Time Magazine's All-Time Best 100 Novels (1923 to the Present)
The Well-Stocked Bookcase (Book of the Month Club)