Tropic of Cancer 

Though not on the reading list, I took the time to read a few books on my reading list over the break, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller being one of them. It was a novel someone had recommended me to read back in high school, but I never read, until now. I don't know how a high schooler managed to plow through it, since it was quite the read. 

The book was actually recommended to me by a classmate, when I mentioned that I enjoyed reading Beatnik literature, since we were doing a study unit on that particular generation during my Language Arts class. I can see why they would make that connection, because despite Tropic of Cancer being a few decades before the Beatniks really rose in popularity, Miller seems to write in the same "stream of consciousness" style that many of the Beatniks were very fond of. He also breaches very similar topics of writing such as the negative aspects of capitalism, sex, drugs, and his philosophies in life and politics. 

I think it's hard to consider Tropic of Cancer a novel, since it seemed to read more of as a personal diary of sorts. I remember reading a book called Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, which was literally just a book with Kerouac and Ginsberg's letters to each other, but that and Tropic of Cancer had more structural similarity than Tropic of Cancer and any other novel. 

Miller starts the book off with his life in Paris with his roommate Boris and after reading the first passage I immediately discarded trying to read it as I would a structurally sound book. Although it starts normally enough, with a brief exposition setting up his novel, he immediately spirals into sentences such as "He is the weather prophet. The weather will continue to be bad... there will be more calamities, more death, more despair... The cancer of time is eating us away... There is no escape. The weather will not change." Miller was obviously not talking about weather in terms of temperature and the rest of the book frequently falls away into these ramblings about how he feels about the state of the world. 

Not unlike the Beatniks, Miller's life is also full of bouts of homelessness, prostitutes, sex, and drugs. Although this way of life is typically viewed of as bad (which of course, Miller and the Beatniks both have very questionable life morals which can objectively be viewed as "bad"), he takes his "godless" life in stride, taking his pitfalls in life to generate into his writing and letting it be more experience to fuel his creative hobbies. Both Miller and the Beatniks seems to share the view of living outlandishly as possible, in order to write purposefully scandalous writing in order to shock the reader and offer a more "real" perspective on life. Although I personally do not enjoy the kind of lifestyle these creatives tend to live, I still enjoy reading their frank observations of capitalism-- which I usually do agree with-- and enjoy getting their perspective about life. The same could be said for Tropic of Cancer, where there are some pretty compelling thoughts written in, within the plethora of philosophies he throws at you.