Finished: Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable aka The Trilogy (Beckett). I'm not at all entirely sure what I just read, especially the last 100 pages, but I'm pretty sure this was Samuel Beckett's big ode to what it must be like to be in the throes of death. Ugh. I have to say that out of the 295 books I've read in the past 2 years and 4 months, this trilogy comes in second to last...SECOND TO LAST! And yet, it is supposed to be one of the greatest works of fiction of all time! I just don't get it with some of these books. Are they supposed to be so difficultly profound that they are considered great fiction? The three separate books, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable were all combined into this trilogy intentionally I suppose. Molloy deals mostly with an old character named, Molloy, who appears to be speaking from his own room where he is about to die. He recounts an adventure where he wandered old and crippled through the countryside trying to find his mother. He kills another man he comes across. The second part of Molloy deals with Moran, the "secret agent" who is sent out to find Molloy. He ends up with much the same ailments as Molloy, also kills another man, and by the end of the book, I'm pretty sure we are to think Molloy and Moran are one and the same person. In Malone Dies, we are treated to the musings of Malone, who is now confined to his bed and dying. He can only reach things, like his daily soup bowl and his chamber pot, with his beloved stick. He also recounts the tail of another character Macmann...but I think they are all supposed to be the same person...Molloy, Moran, Malone, Macmann...hmm, definitely an M pattern here. Then, in The Unnamable, again we have a character babbling on about his surroundings. At first it sounds as if he may be in kind of a Danteish hell, as other characters kind of swirl around him as he is frozen in one spot. However, I think he is just the same character who is so close to death now that he is bedridden, comatose, and all the thoughts of existence that are in his head are just being regurgitated onto the pages of the book. I think he may be aware of other people standing around waiting for him to die. And, the last 6 or 7 pages of the book are one long run on sentence with the ending words being "....it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." I think it's all rather sad if you think about it, to be lingering long enough to have 400 pages of nightmarish thoughts, remembrances, and finally gibberish as one approaches death. :-( Anyway, this was just a step above Finnegan's Wake for me, in that at least you could, for the most part, understand what the words were saying. I can't tell you how glad I am to have this book off my list, and with a little sadness I can say that I will mostly likely NEVER pick up another book by Beckett again since the two of his I've read are in the bottom 3 all time of books I've read.

Bottom 10 I've read during this reading project, all, by the way, considered the absolute tops in fiction:

295. Finnegan's Wake (Joyce - you know why, total gibberish. Or should I say...gallop paper eix eix labba dabba excrement daisyloo peephole? That makes more sense than anything I read in the book.)
294. Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable Trilogy (Beckett - death by nonsense.)
293. Waiting for Godot (Beckett - waiting for nothing)
292. The Trial (Kafka - I was able to read several of his others, but this one was so confusing and nearly unreadable.)
291. Lolita (Nabakov - Not for bad writing, but for the horrific subject material alone.)
290. Gulliver's Travels (Swift - Just couldn't stand this one, ugh.)
289. On The Road (Kerouac - Whiny, self-absorbed people who many consider heroic?)
288. The Tropic of Cancer (Miller - Just unpleasant subject material.)
287. Heart of Darkness (Conrad - Didn't get the pull of this "classic" ATALL.)
286. Tristam Shandy (Sterne - Maybe funny a few hundred years ago, but didn't do it for me today.)