A Passage to India Is a Book About . . . .

*If you haven't finished the novel and don't want to know what happens, for the love of Pete, don't read this!*

When I finish a novel, I find it useful to complete the sentence, "This is a book about . . ." I am having a very hard time doing that with this novel.

This is, in its broadest sense, a book about "British India," although in those terms, Gone with the Wind is a book about the American Civil War, and that tells us nothing.

This is book about cultures crashing together, whirling with many arms like a "mythical monster," and tumbling into the water - again, yes and no, for I would never read a book based on that description; it is a description, but not the story itself.

So what in the hell is this a story about? Of the three sections of the book, only one has a clear, driving plot, and despite this, A Passage to India is clearly not a he-said, she-said story about an "insult" in a cave.

Now that I have finished, I think this must be a story about a doomed relationship between Mr. Fielding and Dr. Aziz, two men who cannot be friends in their time and place because politics and power prevent any truly mutual connection between them. For a time, during the "Caves" section, they are almost friends, both of them banding together against the English, who are in turn banding together against them, but Fielding and Aziz cannot remain friends. Fielding's sympathy for Miss Quested breaks them apart, and by the time Fielding returns, he has changed, as the men in the very first chapter predicted he would. (Aziz changes, too - at least in his rhetoric.)

This book is more than that story, too, of course, but one needs a way to pin it down, at least to start.

Book 1, Page 1

I just received my copy in the mail. Here is a picture of it along with the lubricant I plan to use to aid in the digestion of it. This is, of course, subject to change on a nightly basis.

I doubt my review of the novel will approach the comprehensive assessments already put forth by our fearless leader (or our fearless leader's husband, as it were, I guess that is something for the D's to decide). But I will do my best. I'm just happy to be on board.

Passage to India Discussion - SPOILER ALERT

A Passage to India was a great way to start this project. It is beautifully written and contains incredible insight into human interactions and our relationships with each other and the world. Within this post we can discuss the novel in a detailed fashion, full of spoiled info. Once you've finished the book, join this thread to share your thoughts.

All of Your Questions, Answered Psychically

Q. How long is it going to take you to read 100 books?

A. We don't rightly know. We're not in any big hurry, so sometime between now and the apocalypse (give or take a Horseman), we will get there.


Q. I want to read books, too. How fast do I need to go?

A. As fast as you want to. This is casual. We don't expect this to take over anyone's life. It's not going to take over ours.


Q. How do I participate?

A. You'll be able to tell where we are by consulting the book cover at the left or the top post. You can chime in on the discussion of the book you're reading by making a comment.

About to Start A Passage to India

We have received our first copy of A Passage to India from the library, so let the reading begin!

The List, in Order

We are reading the Time list in the following order:

1 A Passage to India (1924)
E.M. Forster

2 An American Tragedy (1925)
Theodore Dreiser

3 Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Virginia Woolf

4 The Great Gatsby (1925)
F. Scott Fitzgerald

5 The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Ernest Hemingway

6 Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
Willa Cather

7 The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)
Thornton Wilder

8 To the Lighthouse (1927)
Virginia Woolf

9 Red Harvest (1929)
Dashiell Hammett

10 The Sound and the Fury (1929)
William Faulkner

11 Light in August (1932)
William Faulkner

12 A Handful of Dust (1934)
Evelyn Waugh

13 I, Claudius (1934)
Robert Graves

14 Tropic of Cancer (1934)
Henry Miller

15 Appointment in Samarra(1934)
John O'Hara

16 Call It Sleep (1935)
Henry Roth

17 Gone With the Wind (1936)
Margaret Mitchell

18 Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Zora Neale Hurston

19 At Swim-Two-Birds (1938)
Flann O'Brien

20 The Death of the Heart (1938)
Elizabeth Bowen

21 The Big Sleep (1939)
Raymond Chandler

22 The Day of the Locust (1939)
Nathanael West

23 The Power and the Glory (1939)
Graham Greene

24 The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
John Steinbeck

25 The Man Who Loved Children (1940)
Christina Stead

26 Native Son (1940)
Richard Wright

27 The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter (1940)
Carson McCullers

28 Loving (1945)
Henry Green

29 All the King's Men (1946)
Robert Penn Warren

30 Animal Farm (1946)
George Orwell

31 The Berlin Stories (1946)
Christopher Isherwood

32 Brideshead Revisited (1946)
Evelyn Waugh

33 Under the Volcano (1947)
Malcolm Lowry

34 1984 (1948)
George Orwell

35 The Heart of the Matter (1948)
Graham Greene

36 The Sheltering Sky (1949)
Paul Bowles

37 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
C.S. Lewis

38 The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
J.D. Salinger

39 A Dance to the Music of Time (1951)
Anthony Powell

40 Invisible Man (1952)
Ralph Ellison

41 Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953)
James Baldwin

42 The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
Saul Bellow

43 The Lord of the Rings (1954)
J.R.R. Tolkien

44 Lucky Jim (1954)
Kingsley Amis

45 Under the Net (1954)
Iris Murdoch

46 The Recognitions (1955)
William Gaddis

47 Lord of the Flies (1955)
William Golding

48 Lolita (1955)
Vladimir Nabokov

49 The Assistant (1957)
Bernard Malamud

50 On the Road (1957)
Jack Kerouac

51 A Death in the Family (1958)
James Agee

52 Things Fall Apart (1959)
Chinua Achebe

53 Naked Lunch (1959)
William Burroughs

54 The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
John Barth

55 Rabbit, Run (1960)
John Updike

56 To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
Harper Lee

57 Revolutionary Road (1961)
Richard Yates

58 Catch-22 (1961)
Joseph Heller

59 The Moviegoer (1961)
Walker Percy

60 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
Muriel Spark

61 Pale Fire (1962)
Vladimir Nabokov

62 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)
Ken Kesey

63 The Golden Notebook (1962)
Doris Lessing

64 A House for Mr. Biswas (1962)
V.S. Naipaul

65 A Clockwork Orange (1963)
Anthony Burgess

66 The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1964)
John le Carre

67 Herzog (1964)
Saul Bellow

68 The Painted Bird (1965)
Jerzy Kosinski

69 Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
Jean Rhys

70 The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Thomas Pynchon

71 The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)
William Styron

72 Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
Philip Roth

73 The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)
John Fowles

74 Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Kurt Vonnegut

75 Ubik (1969)
Philip K. Dick

76 Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (1970)
Judy Blume

77 Play It As It Lays (1970)
Joan Didion

78 Deliverance (1970)
James Dickey

79 Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Thomas Pynchon

80 Dog Soldiers (1974)
Robert Stone

81 Ragtime (1975)
E.L. Doctorow

82 Falconer (1977)
John Cheever

83 Midnight's Children (1981)
Salman Rushdie

84 Housekeeping (1981)
Marilynne Robinson

85 Money (1984)
Martin Amis

86 Neuromancer (1984)
William Gibson

87 White Noise (1985)
Don DeLillo

88 Blood Meridian (1986)
Cormac McCarthy

89 The Sportswriter (1986)
Richard Ford

90 Watchmen (1986)
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

91 Beloved (1987)
Toni Morrison

92 Possession (1990)
A.S. Byatt

93 Snow Crash (1992)
Neal Stephenson

94 Infinite Jest (1996)
David Foster Wallace

95 American Pastoral (1997)
Philip Roth

96 White Teeth (2000)
Zadie Smith

97 The Blind Assassin (2000)
Margaret Atwood

98 The Corrections (2001)
Jonathan Franzen

99 Atonement (2002)
Ian McEwan

100 Never Let Me Go (2005)
Kazuo Ishiguro