Books

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Arthurian knight Gawain decapitates the green knight. The green knight collects his head and departs with a challenge to Gawain that sets him on a quest. 

My boys and I listened to the Simon Armitage translation on Simon Sarris’s recommendation. It does a great job conveying the lilting alliterative verse of the opaque original Middle English version. 

The language is hypnotic to the extent that the story doesn’t have to carry much weight for young listeners. If you’ve ever read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom to a 1yo, you know what I mean. 

But the story holds up, though it feels bizarre and very foreign. 

If you’re ever in the mood for something short and way out of the ordinary, this will fit the bill. 

Feeling fair, I favor it with four stars for fanciful flowing fiction.

The Godfather 

Mario Puzo invents the Corleone family and tells us some of their stories. 

It would be hard to do justice to this book, even without the headwinds generated by its cinematic progeny. 

Instead of just begging you to treat the book as a separate entity, unburdened by subsequent mob content, I’m going to tackle a few matters head on. 

Throw away your mental imagery of a smirking, sneering, skull stomping Joe Pesci. The Scorsese mob movie has a very different relationship with violence. Even if we don’t fall into the trap of saying that they glorify violence, we still have to concede that they’re blasé about it. 

That’s not this book. That’s not even the movie. Seriously, watch it again and see if you can spot a Don Corleone who increasingly abhors violence. Yes, he’s got a different relationship with coercive force than most of us. But the movie, and the book even more, are very fucking far from Scarface. 

(Continued in the thread)

Uniformly evil characters are boring. But I wouldn’t trade a consistently virtuous Don for the one we got, either. I believe, for readers capable of filtering the despicable uses of violence, Don Corleone can be an inspiration. Smart, capable, masculine characters are an increasingly rare commodity in the last fifty years.

We should appreciate the Don for what he is. At the very least, we should not attribute to him all of the sleazy, senseless, insipid acts of violence that have formed into a mob movie trope since The Godfather debuted. And we should not confuse the cheap machismo of run of the mill mob movie characters with the nuanced manliness of Vito Corleone.

Alright, I’ve run on way too long, so I guess I’m gonna fall back on begging you to look at this book with fresh eyes after all.

(Continued)

Some quick facts:
- there’s a hilarious subplot about how well hung Sonny is
- we hear the story of young Vito that we know from TGII in this book
- Clemenza and Tessio are more developed than in the movie
- Michael is much more of an outsider in the book than he is in the movie
- I plucked this from the list of best selling books and was once again incredibly pleased with the result 

Part of me still revolts at the thought of taking the book as seriously as I’m trying to convince you to take it. So I don’t expect you to believe me entirely. 

But at least smuggle it onto your list as a guilty pleasure beach book. See if you aren’t pleasantly surprised.

This is one of those rare books where the sugar of genre helps the medicine of real literature effortlessly go down. 

I read everything from the bible to Bukowski to Jane Eyre to Blood Meridian last year. None of those made it to my highlights list. This did. 

Five stars, one of my favorite books of all time. Don’t miss out because of prejudice.

If you’re inclined to turn your nose up on the grounds that this book glorifies violence, consider the perspective that Don Corleone merely tolerates violence. The real goal is commerce, though admittedly a strain tinged and obscure. 

But even more than commerce, the values he holds in greatest esteem are loyalty and family. 

If the Don’s famous line “A man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man” sounds like something an Italian grandmother would say, that’s because it’s a line from Puzo’s mother. 

Quoting him:

“Whenever the Godfather opened his mouth, in my own mind I heard the voice of my mother. I heard her wisdom, her ruthlessness, and her unconquerable love for her family and for life itself, qualities not valued in women at the time. The Don’s courage and loyalty came from her; his humanity came from her.”

Vito Corleone is tough, courageous, severe. But he’s also tender, loving, and protective. In short, he’s a complicated man. 

(Continued below)

This book is why you should always read the book after you watch the movie.  It fills in the gaps.

The movie is a masterpiece, but can only show a bit of what is going on.  A book allows the reader to hear people’s thoughts and see mundane things you’d never see on screen.

It’s a great book!  There are a couple of other Puzo-attributed Godfather books worth reading too.