The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser – I figured I’d finish it sometime around 2034 when the Cenobites manifest. I could not put it down and finished all 18 trillion pages of it just shy of 3 weeks. Britomart – picture Samus Aran become Strider (Genesis version, IYKYK) – and Belphoebe are two of the most enchanting female war machines in all of literature. The sections on Despair and the Bower of Bliss bury all but a handful of GOAT’s.
”Christabel,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge – anyone who has unhappily woken up, scales dropped, to realize this one being he has loved above all others only and only gives hugs that hurt knows the temptation: flee with abandon to the forest of angst or raise with quickness the bridge. The more the hug, the more and more the hurt. Is this, can this even be, love? Hugs that hurt as vampiric lesbianism.
On the Lapsed, St. Cyprian – anyone troubled with my tone should take a gander at Sts. Cyprian and Jerome and get back to me.
The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence – it’s about 25 pages long and took me longer to read than the The Faerie Queene. One does not thrill to Lawrence. Once goes to him as some go to the dentist. Still, the scene of Ursula and Skrebensky on the nighttime fantasmagoric sands of the doomed riverbed of Lethe is among the most heartbreaking I’ve ever read. I nearly cried. This scene, my word this scene, is nothing less than the ravages of modernity itself condensed and presented to the perceptual level. I have a screenshot of it and gaze whenever the demons get too close.
”Howl,” Allen Ginsberg – the Beats are like if Australia and Alanis Morisette got married and spawned the literary version of a Damien Thorn who decided to eat a rusted bucket load of shrooms and try his clawed hand at a poem.
Collected Poems, Emily Dickinson – the original goth chick. Witchy woman needed some sunlight and a Michelob.
Pamela, Samuel Richardson – how does one invent in the same work both the modern and the post-modern?
Symposium, Plato – I read it every year. Plato drinks you under the table (literally) and then walks home at dawn. Tl;dr: Plato >>>> Aristotle.
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy – Nietzsche once said somewhere or other that the scandal of Christianity is that Christ first resurrected and then died. This is not even in the ballpark of sanity; yet in Blood Meridian McCarthy terrifies us with his Big Bang as Apocalypse. The End and then the Beginning. The Judge will never die. Some say he never sleeps. The Judge will never die. Some say…
Wood Faileth 