101 Years of Books: the 1920s

During April and May, I worked my way through these 10 books from the 1920s. I read 7 novels and 3 books of poetry, written by authors from the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, Lebanon, Chile, and Venezuela. I had previously read Mrs. Dalloway and had read some poems from Second April, The Weary Blues, and Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. 

1920 The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton  ★★★★★

"Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but an uncharted voyage on seas."

I absolutely loved this book. I am in awe of how well Wharton captured the complex issues of dating, love, settling, societal expectations, and women's rights. I laughed, I cried, I gasped out loud. The storytelling is masterful. I particularly enjoyed hearing from Newland's perspective how he justified his increasingly inappropriate actions, and how he thought of himself as a champion for feminism but perpetuated the stereotypes as much as everyone else. Although this book was published 100 years ago and set 150 years ago, it's still relevant.

1921 Second April by Edna St. Vincent Millay  ★★★ 

"People that build their houses inland,
People that buy a plot of ground
Shaped like a house, and build a house there,
Far from the sea-board, far from the sound 

Of water sucking the hollow ledges,
Tons of water striking the shore,—
What do they long for, as I long for
One salt smell of the sea once more?"

As with all poetry, some of these poems spoke to me more than others. There are several ESVM poems that I love, and I found some new ones to love in this book, but many of them felt quite tame to me, and the rhyme scheme made them seem sing-song rather than clever. It was a little hard to track down this book, but luckily a university library in my network had a copy that I eventually received.

1922 Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse ★★

"Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else."

Although I know that this book is very beloved by some, it was a strong case of sounding like foolishness to me. One major negative point for me was that Hesse wrote this book about a culture that wasn't his own, and that showed. I can see how the ideas captured in the novel might have been revolutionary at the time—enlightenment, meditation/mindfulness, the newness of Eastern culture to a Western audience—but I felt the book was lacking character development. Readers are told about Siddhartha's frequent changes rather than shown them through convincing circumstances, conflicts, or dilemmas, and I felt that the other characters were a missed opportunity for contrast.

1923 The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran ★★★★★

"Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul and then walks grinning in the funeral."

Now, this book actually accomplished for me what I think Siddhartha was supposed to do. The frame story was seriously lacking, much more than Siddhartha (there is certainly no character development, along with no plot), but it was actually full of wisdom that I found so powerful that I didn't care. Rupi Kaur wrote the foreword of the edition I read and said "this book serves as a bible for the twentieth-century Other. It peddled hope to a cynical world," which I absolutely believe. Beautiful and thought-provoking.

1924 Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda ★★★★

"I like for you to be still: it is as though you were absent,
distant and full of sorrow as though you had died.
One word then, one smile, is enough.
And I am happy, happy that it's not true."

I have always loved Neruda. He's from Chile, where I served my mission, so I feel a little connection. His poetry is perfectly sad, and to me, it captures so many of the feelings of love. I also love the title of this collection of poems—it's fitting that for 20 love poems, there's going to be at least one song of despair. The book I read had each poem in Spanish on one side and English on the other, and it was fun to practice Spanish by reading poetry.

1925 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf ★★★★

"There is a dignity in people, a solitude, even between husband and wife, a gulf, and that one must respect."

This book is the perfect kind of stream of consciousness to me. Woolf does third person omniscient narration exceedingly well, and she does a miraculous job capturing thought processes and all that people think in addition to everything they say and how those things are connected. I love that the story stays simple so the narration can be complicated and powerful. I have read this book before, years ago, but I loved the idea of reading it again as part of this project, and I look forward to reading a lot more Woolf.

1926 The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes ★★★★

"Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed,—
I too, am America."

Langston Hughes is a master of poetry and everyone knows that, but it was fun to read his first published poetry collection and see how things started, knowing what he would go on to publish. There were several poems I had already read as standalones, but also lots of new ones that made the book feel like a cohesive collection.

1927 The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder ★★

"Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan."

This book has a fascinating premise—5 people die in Peru when a bridge collapses and a priest decides to study their lives and figure out why they were "chosen" to die. Unfortunately, I found the execution unimpressive. Again, this book suffers from being written by a white man about another culture. It's set in the 1700s and I would have loved to see a more realistic portrayal of Peruvians in that time period, but the story seemed maybe too simplistic for its subject matter and also a little shallow.

1928 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque ★★★★

"All these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death."

A few of the other books from this decade mention the war (WWI) or remark on the effects, but as many have said before me, this is the definitive war novel for those who believe war is terrible. It is impactful to me that it is told from the German perspective since as an American, we feel the war was Germany's fault and have strong negative feelings for them. But it's not the fault of the soldiers, as the narrator discusses with his friends. It's also shocking to think that this terror was pre-WWII, and yet that still happened.

1929 Doña Bárbara by Romulo Gallegos ★★★

"The Plain frightens, but the fear which the Plain inspires is not terror which chills the heart; it is hot, like the wind sweeping over the immeasurable solitude, like the fever lying in the marshes."

As a contrast to The Bridge of San Luis Rey, this is a book set in Venezuela written by a Venezuelan (fun fact: 20 years after publishing this book, he went on to become the first democratically-elected president of Venezuela). I felt totally immersed in the plains of Altamira while reading the book and the cultural elements felt authentic, which was a benefit, even when I wasn't totally understanding them. The story centers on the conflict between intellect and mysticism and using violence as a way to get what you want, and it was apparently one of the first examples of magical realism.

My choice of books for this decade may be one of the most geographically diverse of the whole project, and it was interesting to see what topics or themes popped up more than once (enlightenment, war, marriage, religion, injustice) and which didn't. One thing lacking from this selection was books by women of color, so I look forward to those. 91 more years to go!