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With one complete cycle under his belt, Alan Walker, our Senior Director of Academic Marketing and Sales, embarks on yet another Penguin Classics reading marathon of one book by an author per letter of the alphabet. Check out the Penguin Classics website for Alan's latest blog entries (anonymous to A), as well as his entire first marathon.

Anonymous

Having read a Penguin Classic by author for each letter of the alphabet I thought it would be appropriate to start my next round of reading with a book written by that noted author of over 120 Penguin Classics, that illustrious literary figure who has written in every genre through every historical period known as Anonymous. The translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh by N. K. Sandars is really an amazing feat of literature for its accessibility, considering that the tale of Gilgamesh's search for immortality was uncovered by archaeologists in excavations of ancient Middle Eastern cities, predated Homer by at least fifteen centuries (maybe up to twenty), and was originally written on over 25,000 clay tablets. The introduction to this edition covers the historical and literary background of this epic, and is truly fascinating. And I am just sitting here and wondering if the switch from clay tablet to parchment paper was as controversial as the bound book to eBook debate is today?

A

Mulk Raj Anand was considered in his day as his country's Charles Dickens for his detailed portrayals of the poor in traditional Indian society. The short novel Untouchable written in 1935 is a case of a Classic that is truly ripe for rediscovery for it's empathetic exploration of the conflicting emotions, humiliations and repressed desires of a sweeper, a latrine cleaner basically, and member of the lowest caste of Indians known as the Untouchables. The members of this caste were subjected to intense discrimination, and if someone from a higher caste came into physical contact with them, they were considered to be defiled and would have to be bathed thoroughly to be purified. A similar scene actually takes place in the book and is referred to in E.M. Forster's introduction to our Classics edition as "the touching". In Bakha the sweeper, the author paints a vivid portrait of the daily life of a strong and handsome young man who has to repress his anger at his place in society, and yet whose lack of a future and any hope to improve upon his position limits his own awareness of his own feelings. Near the end of the novel you also get to see Gandhi and the unnamed Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, speak at a rally, all though Bakha's own eyes.

B

Ever since my first round letter B choice of Bulgakov, I've been looking forward to trying Borges for the first time. With quite a few titles in Penguin Classics from which to choose, I decided to read Brodie's Report which was Borges' return to fiction at the age of 70, after twenty years of focusing on poetry and nonfiction. All of the stories in the book are just a few pages in length, all representing some form of duel, whether between gauchos, hardened criminals, academics, or competing artists. My favorite story here is called The Other Duel, about two ranchers who were lifelong enemies. Despite having never come to actual blows, their rivalry was renowned. Their final duel came about when both were captured by the Reds while fighting for the Whites during the 1870s Civil War. The Reds, who put to death all prisoners, settled the lifelong dispute between these two men by staging a dual, letting everyone (both captors and soon-to-perish prisoners) bet on which of the rivals would be able to run the farthest once their throats were slit. Macabre and disturbing yet somehow whimsical, Borges' style is wholly original and highly entertaining. This is a real discovery and I look forward to mining his other works in Penguin Classics!

C

"The horror, the horror!" My letter C pick for this go-round is that turn-of-century (1899) classic Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's deeply psychological tale of a riverboat journey into the Congo in search of the infamous ivory trader Mr. Kurtz. Maybe the most difficult thing for me in reading this book for the first time was trying to rid my mind of Marlon Brando's image as the story progressed. Of course, Brando played Kurtz in Apocalypse Now—the modern film retelling of Conrad's novel with Vietnam as backdrop in place of Africa. At least I don't recall Brando being "a malformed seven-foot-long puppet creature" (from Owen Knowles' introduction). The introduction itself is literary criticism in its highest form, and almost as entertaining as the book itself. Knowles discusses how Heart of Darkness played no small part in shifting attitudes towards "imperialism" which until then was a term with a more "reputable association" and was a form of "unthinking national self-congratulation."

D

I don't want to date myself here but it struck me as I was reading Hard Times that I had not read a Charles Dickens novel in over three decades. I was an annoying thirteen year old adolescent when I devoured A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield and Great Expectations in the summer of '77, alongside every P.G. Wodehouse book ever published and the latest issue of Mad Magazine! Well, I can safely report that not much has changed (except I don't read Mad anymore and I have to shave now). Like all those other Dickens novels, this book was hard to put down and the quirky characters were both unique and memorable. The names of the characters are classic Dickens here: school owner Thomas Gradgrind, the "bully of humility" Josiah Bounderby, circus girl Sissy Jupe, and my favorite name of all, the school teacher Mr. M'Choakumchild! Hard Times takes place in a factory town called Coketown, where children have facts drilled into them from inception, and where little credence is given to imagination, creativity and intuition. This indeed is a book with a lot of contemporary relevance in these days of No Child Left Behind with the heavy emphasis on standardized testing and the recording of facts for our youth. I guess not much has really changed since 1854 when Dickens wrote Hard Times! As for me, I will try not wait another thirty years for my next Dickens read (there are only twenty other Dickens titles in Penguin Classic editions, that is if I decide to re-read the first three some day).

E

I am certain if I made an attempt at interpreting any of the poems in The Waste Land and Other Poems by T. S. Eliot, the poet himself would most certainly respond to me with his own lines from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock which starts off this collection: "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all." Yet despite my confusion, I have to say that I enjoyed these poems much more than when I read them in high school, when I considered them a form of canonical punishment. In The Waste Land alone there are more literary allusions than I can count, and if one was to trace back each one (and one could just through Penguin Classics editions) one could start a wholly different kind of Classics marathon: from Virgil, Homer, Augustine, Ovid, Dante, Laforgue, Nerval, James Frazer, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Conrad, Whitman, Marvell, Milton, Chaucer….I could go on. I would read each poem straight through, then go back and read it flipping to the extensive notes at the back of the book, and then read it once again with that extra perspective. I found this helped the reading experience. Yet, I was most moved by sections when the literary and historical references took a back seat to Eliot's language, as in the fifth and last section of The Waste Land, What the Thunder Said. Frank Kermode's introduction and notes to the poems are also illuminating, and fascinating in their own right, and definitely help as a guide into the mind of Eliot. In the introduction Kermode includes a great quote from Eliot concerning the critical reception of The Waste Land as a piece of social criticism: "To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life: it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling."

F

In the back of an old Penguin Classic I discovered this quote from Ismail Merchant about growing up a reader in Bombay: "So reliable was the Penguin imprimatur that I was never once disappointed by the contents...Perhaps it's no coincidence that so many Merchant Ivory films have been adapted from great novels, or that those novels are published by Penguin." With this in mind I read E. M. Forster's novel A Room With a View, a story I feel like I have already read having seen and enjoyed the film many times. Reading the book only made me appreciate the film even more for its close rendering of the novel's humor, its absurd characters—most notably the arrogant Cecil Vyse and the grating Aunt Charlotte—and for the actors' painstaking portrayals of the many layers of "muddle" through which each of the main characters must wade—particularly Lucy Honeychurch on whose actions the book turns. I guess I am a sucker for a novel about repressed upper class Brits at the turn of the 20^th Century, especially when juxtaposed against the raw passion and beauty of Italy. If you are like me, whether you've seen the movie a hundred times or not, Forster's novel will make you want to ask the great questions and maybe on a future trip to Florence plan a day trip to a nearby Fiesole hillside!

G

For the letter G I dipped into Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 novel North and South, originally entitled Margaret Hale, but apparently renamed by Gaskell's own editor, Charles Dickens, to emphasize the class politics at the heart of the love story between Margaret and Mr. Thornton who come from different classes and opposing backgrounds. The proud and beautiful Margaret moves to the North from a peaceful Southern hamlet after her pastor father loses his faith, rescinds his position in the church and takes a tutorial position in the industrial town of Milton. There they both meet Thornton, a young, but inflexible cotton mill owner who signs up to study the Classics under the tutelage of Mr. Hale. Despite growing up in poverty, Thornton has become a man both respected and feared despite conflicts with his own workers who strike against him when their wages are cut. Both characters go through their own awakening as they come to terms with their own prejudices, and at the end of the book there is a remarkable role reversal as Margaret stakes her claim in a male world and Thornton learns humility and appreciation of his workers. What makes this the novel hard to put down though is the love story between these two. Novelist Margaret Oliphant (see the letter O from my first round of Classics reading) wrote of Margaret and Thornton: "Here is love itself, always in a fury, often looking exceedingly like hatred." For a modern pop culture reference you can see where the Sam and Diane characters from television's Cheers have their roots in these characters. The love story does not resolve itself until the last few paragraphs of North and South but of course you'll have to read it yourself to find out how it ends.

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