Long days and extended hours at home make for an ideal reading binge. Rather than filling your hours with movies and shows and social media, books can help you re-engage your focus and thinking, learn something new, and instill you with a feeling of productivity.
I have tried to reinforce this mindset moving through the weeks of social distancing. I myself have been using a Kindle E-reader, which makes it easy to download books digitally so I need not worry about ordering books and waiting for a potentially delayed delivery.
Through March I read four books, each written long ago and by true masters of literature.
The Sign of Four (1890) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
This is the second Sherlock Holmes novel written in the long series of brilliant stories.
The writing and dialogue is intelligent and witty; the observations and deductions made throughout the chapters by Sherlock Holmes are illuminating. The story is told through the perspective of Dr. John Watson, so the reader gets a first-person perspective of what Sherlock does and who he is as a man and a friend and a genius.
In The Sign of Four (the renowned BBC show Sherlock does a fantastic portrayal of this episode) the reader meets Mary Morstan, a primary character moving forward in the books. The mystery seems obvious and easy to comprehend at first, as they always do, then several twists in the plot make the conclusion altogether unanticipated.
I have come to love the Sherlock Holmes stories—there are 60 stories in total, all of which were written before 1927—and plan to continue weaving these fast-paced short books into my regular reading.
The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
Kafka’s short novel is popular and has withstood the test of time, widely read in literature courses and philosophy courses all around the world. It is the strange and uncomfortable story of a man who woke up one morning as a massive beetle-like bug.
The story unfolds and we see the main character, Gregor, become more and more isolated, decrepit, lonely, and dehumanized. The character is ostracized by his family; they remove all the furniture from his room and feed him scraps each day. The story is detailed and well-written and gruesome.
Despite the success of the author and the story, I could not enjoy this story. It felt moderately redundant, without much of a narrative to really carry the reader along. The story is meant to be an allegory for the deprivation of man and how society and loved ones can abandon you once you lose your usefulness (Gregor can no longer work and earn a living to support his family, and they thoroughly resent him afterwards).
Though I am happy to have completed the book for it is a well-regarded “classic,” it was not one of my recent favorites.
The Moon and Sixpence (1919) by W. Somerset Maugham
Maugham has strung together brilliance in this novel. He has quickly become one of my favorite writers for his beautiful style of prose and poetic language, in addition to his genius capacity for telling a story. The Moon and Sixpence was yet another occurrence of this and it was thoroughly ravishing.
The novel follows the life of Charles Strickland, a middle-aged man who leaves a respectable job and his family in London to pursue the path of an artist in Paris. He embodies up the typical “starving artist” stereotype, and the reader witnesses his journey from mediocrity to fame. Strickland left a trail of social destruction behind him, as he was sociopathic and single-mindedly driven; he cared not for people or family, only art for the sake of art.
The narrator is Maugham as a character in the story, a role he gives himself often in his works, which gives the story a realism, as the reader can only see one angle of each character because it is told from a first-person stance of someone within the story. He captures the focus and spirit of an artist who does not create art for fame or accolades, but the artist who cannot continue living unless he can create art.
A brilliant novel by a 20th century master.
The Summing Up (1938) by W. Somerset Maugham
Somerset Maugham enjoyed a prolific writing career as well as a great deal of fame during his entire life. He achieved success early on as a playwright before turning to writing novels. This is his attempt at a memoir, a summing up of his experiences, philosophies, and reflections on a life as a writer.
The book is endlessly quotable with bits about his habits as a writer of plays and novels, his appreciation for observation insofar as its relation to storytelling, and his philosophies concerning religion, fate, and love. Though it was meant to be a “summing up” of his life, he went on to live and write for another 30 years after its publication.
The book reads smoothly due to the poetic and lovely language Maugham seems to effortlessly put down, though the book seems primarily written for those interested in writing and the life of a writer.
Personally I enjoyed the memoir and details of his life. But this is the sixth book of Maugham’s that I’ve read, so I do hold a bias.
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