2026

1. Stoner by John Williams (5/5)

In John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, he writes about true stories. Specifically, he writes that all good stories are also true, and the only way a story could survive is if the readers can see themselves and their lives reflected in the characters and the plot. And therefore, the oldest stories are the truest of them all.

Stoner is a great story primarily because it is a true story. In summary, it narrates linearly the life of William Stoner, who was born on a farm to parents who made ends meet by punishing toil, and is sent to college so he can major in agriculture science and return to help his father, but switches his major to English Literature and remains in the university until his death. Along the way, he has to part from his parents, along with their hopes and expectations for him. He remains in a destructive marriage and slowly becomes estranged from his daughter. His career is outwardly undistinguished, never rising above his initial position due to university politics and vicious altercations with the chair. The only light in his life, a love affair with a teacher, is snuffed out by said vindictiveness from the department chair. This ordinary story is a great story because stories of “hardship and hunger and endurance and pain” are true stories. John Williams writes that this stoicism was “the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak.”

He turned on the bare, treeless little plot that held others like his mother and father and looked across the flat land in the direction of the farm where he had been born, where his mother and father had spent their years. He thought of the cost exacted, year after year, by the soil; and it remained as it had been—a little more barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of increase. Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.

Having said that, I couldn’t care less for Stoner. Leaving aside the fact that Williams was unnecessarily harsh to all his characters, I don’t really relate to Stoner’s passivity. In that sense, he is the anti-Napoleon. He lacks will. He is a docile observer of his life, and is very rarely spurred into action to improve his circumstances. No major reason is given for his switching of his major to English Literature, but I cannot bring myself to fault him for succumbing to the allure of the written word. He stays in university because he cannot imagine a life outside his comfort zone, something that is reinforced by his friend’s thoughts on the university—”It is an asylum or… a rest home, for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, and the otherwise incompetent.” He realizes his marriage is a failure within a month but stays in it for the rest of his life, causing irreparable damage to everyone involved, including his daughter. I could go on. His daughter desperately needs his help, and he instead retreats to the comforts of his reading and teaching. He repeatedly takes abuse from his colleagues and students. I was so annoyed by this that I read the book hoping for a resolution that never came.

Well, in a way it did. The final few pages detailing his thoughts on his death bed are some of the most moving lines in a book I have read. On his death bed, while going over his memories of his life, William Stoner asks himself, “what did you expect?”, over and over. It is both interrogative, as well as vindicative of himself. As if he’s talking directly to the reader, asking them to not judge him too harshly.

Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be.

He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind; he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks of the living that…

He had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage; he had had that, too, and he had not known what to do with it, and it had died.

He had wanted love; and he had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it go into the chaos of potentiality. Katherine, he thought. “Katherine.”

And he had wanted to be a teacher, and he had become one; yet he knew, he had always known, that for most of his life he had been an indifferent one.

He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance.

And what else? he thought. What else?

What did you expect? he asked himself.

I place it in the pantheon of great books about the simultaneous necessity and futility of hope as a reminder to myself about the importance of living life with relentless optimism and limitless energy.

2. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (3.75/5)

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt

The thing I remember most from my first reading of this book was how absurd it was that Samsa’s first reaction to finding out about his transformation was wonder about how he was late for work, and how he could still make it to work. This time, I was even more struck by how much Samsa tries to be accomodating towards his family when he’s the one who needs the care and concern. He initially tries to play it cool in from of the chief clerk, and then hides himself away so that his sister doesn’t have to see him, and slowly wastes away in his room, his self-denial of life culminating in his death and freeing his family.

The most heartbreaking part was when Gregor came out of his room to appreciate his sister’s music and this resulted in her final betrayal. Of course he gave up and died after that. And how relieved his family were after his death. Hope could only return once Gregor was removed from their lives. In a way, Gregor’s psychic transformation was complete way before his physical transformation. When he took on a job he disliked and became less than human. Ein ungeheuren Ungeziefer.