The CCLaP 100: Volume 1

by Jason Pettus

(Not available at Amazon! Not for sale at stores! Find this book exclusively [and for free if you'd like] at http://www.cclapcenter.com/100book .)

Join Jason Pettus, executive director of the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, as he takes an informed yet irreverent look at the subject of "literary classics," reading for the first time a hundred such books then penning funny, insightful guides to whether or not they deserve the label. Already a cult hit online, this is the first bound collection of these essays (this first volume collecting up the first 33 in the series), covering authors from the ancient Greeks to postmodernist hipsters and everyone in between; and as released under CCLaP's well-known "pay what you want" system, it even makes the book technically free if so desired. Stop bluffing your way through cocktail parties! Pick up volume one of the CCLaP 100 and see for yourself what truly constitutes a classic in our contemporary times.

Genres: Nonfiction

112 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Former owner of an indie press, currently a freelance developmental editor for self-publishing and small-press authors (email me at ilikejason@gmail.com for more, or see my freelancing website or my Upwork profile). Happy to accept your ARC for review, but be aware that I will treat it like any other book, even if I think it's terrible. I also write about movies at letterboxd.com/jasonpettus. Other interests include cooking, bicycling, international travel, sci-fi universe creation, and being a smartass. Based in Chicago.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A long time ago when pterodactyls swooped over the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan and plesiosaurs frolicked in the Thames a steady stream of great reviews of classic novels appeared on Goodreads from Jason Pettus. He ran an outfit called the CCLaP which iis some kind of arts thing in Chicago, and he had decided to read 100 allegedly classic novels he’d never read before and report back on whether he thought they were really classics. Okay, I know, we could all do that, but over the months of 2008/9 I realised that JP’s casual but excitable style was perfect for his project and his opinions were rock solid. He gathered up the first 33 reviews into this volume which is downloadable here :

http://www.cclapcenter.com/100book/

I totally recommend this to anyone who wants to see a classic novel get a good going-over. Each review has a section “The argument for it being a classic” followed by “the argument against” followed by JP’s personal view. Here are the books reviewed :

The Art of War, Sun Tzu
The Republic, Plato
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
Washington Square, Henry James
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Island of Dr. Moreau, HG Wells
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Candida, George Bernard Shaw
Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
The Call of the Wild, Jack London
The Man Who Was Thursday, GK Chesterton
Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
The Ripley Trilogy, Patricia Highsmith
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin
The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

(I have read a mere half of these.)

I don’t agree with JP all the time, far from it. Here he is on Washington Square, which is a poignant study of Victorian repression :

Washington Square comes and goes with the reader barely
noticing; just when you think the story's about to get ratcheted up and interesting, suddenly it's over, and you realize that the entire point was to provide not much more than a trifling and amusing afternoon of diversion.

Wrong, Jason, wrong! And The Sound and the Fury gets a strong beating :

So let me admit, I have a terrible confession to make today; that out of the 22 books I've now reviewed for this essay series, this is only the second I wasn't able to actually finish (the other being the 2,200-year-old Republic by Plato). And the reason I couldn't finish it, frankly, is exactly for the Modernist stream-of-consciousness style that it's so well-known for – because frankly, although I think the style has its strengths when used with a light touch, I also think it's a hacky unreadable mess when delved into with too much gusto, exactly what so many of the early Modernists did in their misguided zeal to just do anything new they possibly could.

Is it a classic? No.

Also, he loves Tropic of Cancer so much that I’ve half a mind to read another Henry Miller to see if I still hate him.

There are lots of fun things here. On The Catcher in the Rye:

So imagine my shock when I found myself finishing this book and saying to myself, "My God – JD Salinger is basically Judy Blume with more cursing." (Or to be completely fair, I guess that should be worded – "My God, Judy Blume is basically JD Salinger with Jews and menstruation.") I guess I had been expecting a lot more, given what a supernaturally high regard this book has among such a large swath of the general population; I was expecting it to not only be a good Young Adult novel (which it admittedly is) but also something that was going to reveal some sort of transcendent truth about the world to me as a fully-grown adult.

Er...it doesn't.

Anyway, although I heartily dislike only having a damned pdf file of this and not and a proper printed copy as I should have, nevertheless, for all you reviewhounds out there (that’s all of you ain’t it?) I RECOMMEND this for everybody.

So… where is volume 2 ?

[Jason Pettus · Rating 5 out of 5]

FTC DISCLOSURE: I am the publisher of this book.

My arts center's newest book is here! And in fact this is a book I actually wrote myself: it's a bound collection of the "CCLaP 100" classics essays I've been penning since winter 2008, in this case collecting up the first 33 of these write-ups that many of you have been enjoying here individually over the last couple of years. I hope you'll get a chance to download the entire collection and read whatever reviews you missed the first time they came out; and of course I always appreciate whatever donations and voluntary payments people would like to send, money which profoundly helps the center continue to put out eBooks such as this one. Stop by http://www.cclapcenter.com/100book to find all the formats available, from laserprinter-friendly PDFs to special editions for Kindles, iPhones and more.

[Rachel C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came across Jason Pettus when looking at other reviews of “Special Topics in Calamity Physics.” A few link-hops later, I found his CCLaP 100 project to read the classics. His impetus for the project was to widen his literary foundation and base of reference – this despite being (to me) demonstrably well-read and thoughtful about literature already.

(It is, I think, the rare person that can confidently declare themselves to be well-read. Everyone develops their own personal taste as a reader and, with diminishing time for pleasure reading in adulthood, it gets harder and harder to push yourself outside your comfort zone, while still keeping reading from becoming a chore. I spent three years in college mowing through the Western canon and reading is my most significant hobby time-wise, and I wouldn’t say I am, absolutely. I mean, I can hang, but I also have huge blind spots.)

And so Pettus chose his classics subjectively, skewing towards books to fill specific holes and titles by selected authors that were more in line with his personal interests. The reviews focus less on the literary merits of the books (which are somewhat assumed, given their place on the list at all) and more on their “classic” status, by which Pettus means everyone should read them before they die, as good and significant literature (as opposed to mere historical relics, or because some person in a position of authority said so).

Each review summarizes the arguments for and against, sort of like Amazon’s most helpful positive and negative reviews box, and then Pettus decides for himself. Some books get a simple “yes” or “no.” Others, interestingly, get a “for now” (The Age of Innocence) or “not yet” (In the Name of the Rose).

I really enjoyed these essays. They were the right balance of scholarly and colloquial. I liked getting Pettus’ thoughts on the books I’d already read (about 20 in the complete list) and also found them useful for books I hadn’t, for a sense of the historical context and the features and characteristics I might want to look for.

Finally, I love that he collected his essays into an ebook and made it available online for free, under a Creative Commons license. (A further forty or so essays are available on the CCLaP website and Goodreads, but haven’t yet been assembled into Volume 2. I hope they are soon.)

Sail on Jason!

[Oriana]

Holy shit, COOL!