Challenge: Top Five Favorite Books
I know, lists are lame, but they’re also kind of fun. It’s one of the many reasons I love the movie High Fidelity, besides the fact that I’m a big John Cusack nerd. Anyhow, after the John Rybicki reading on Friday night (Check out his book We Bed Down into Water for a treat.) I was chatting with some of my creative writing pals, and somehow John Steinbeck came up. “Oohh, oohh,” I said, “I love Steinbeck. East of Eden is my favorite.” This, of course, set off a chorus of “Have you read Grapes of Wrath?” and “Cannery Row is pretty amazing.” and “Of Mice and Men will always be my favorite.” We were all so committed to our love for a certain Steinbeck novel, most of us only having read a couple of his books and so having little by way of referential wisdom for our opinions. But this got me thinking, what are the books that I really love? And to make it more interesting, what are the top five loves of all time? You do it too. Here’s mine in no particular order:
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck (Advice: Be patient. Once you get past the first hundred pages, you’ll love it.)
- The Kitchen Sink by Albert Goldbarth (Note: Yes, this is poetry, and it’s a big ol’ selected works, but I promise that prose writers/readers will appreciate this book, especially people who like creative writing infused with science and history and pure amazingness.)
- An Atlas of the Difficult World by Adrienne Rich (Another poet. A quote: “I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural / then yes let it be these are small distinctions / where do we see it from is the question” (p. 6) Also, check out the poem on p. 25, “(Dedications),” “because life is short and you too are thirsty.”
- The Teeth Mother Naked at Last by Robert Bly (The title poem is something like ten pages long, should be read aloud, and will blow your mind.)
- A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (Look, I’ve read this book like twenty times, as an adult and when I was a kid, and I still love every last word of it.)
Are these my desert island books?? I don’t know. That’s a lot of pressure, but I do love them. Give me your loves or your desert islands or however you want to classify them. Let’s have a book party!
I think my list is constantly changing, as do my reads of books. Last time I read The Known World, I didn’t like it as much as the previous time. Still liked it, just not as much. Last time I read Cloud Atlas, I liked it more. That might change the next time. Desert Island books, it seems, should be difficult, work that’s not going to exhaust itself in a couple of reads. So I’m going to cheat here and put the Riverside Shakespeare at number one, simply because it would be so difficult to exhaust. I’d also include The Sound and the Fury or Absalom Absalom, and for the same reason. I’ll take The Sound and the Fury — the version with the appendix. If I’m going to be exiled today, I’ll also include Under the Volcano, simply because I haven’t read it in a long time and want to spend some time with it. I might end up regretting that choice. That leaves two. Disgrace, by Coetzee is one of my favorites, but I wonder if I would use it up in three or four reads. That one feels risky. Same with To the Lighthouse. And I’m afraid the last section of that one would get old, though I don’t think the first section ever would. I think I’m going to take Fools Crow, because I don’t feel close to exhausting it and know it’s got great narrative drive. I don’t know what the last one would be. I’ll make that decision at the last minute. And while I don’t think these are my favorite books, and would have a harder time making that list, I think these four–Shakespeare, The Sound and the Fury, Under the Volcano, and Fools Crow — would last a long time.
(In no particular order)
1) Consider the Lobster, DFW. I know Infinite Jest would be the more obvious choice, but I think DFW’s a better essayist than he is a fiction writer, and I think Infinite Jest has been overhyped.
2) A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell. I haven’t talked to too many readers in the U.S. who know Powell. Dance is a twelve-novel sequence, but is considered a novel, so it wouldn’t be cheating. I could never get bored with this novel – there are nearly 500 characters, and while the pace is glacial, the psychology of the characters and how narrator Nick Jenkins perceives them is as captivating as it is addictive.
3) Fools Crow, James Welch. I’m with Sam on this. It’s timeless, has perhaps the best narrative drive I’ve ever read, and besides, if I’m gonna be alone on an island, I’d better have some mystical experiences, dammit, and it would be nice to have some examples of them in a book.
4) The Art of the Personal Essay, compiled by Phillip Lopate. This may be cheating, but considering the grotesque amount of time I’m going to be spending thinking about myself, I wouldn’t mind a little help on how to do so correctly.
5) Candide, Voltaire. Yeah, yeah – I’m probably throwing this away, but Pangloss and the others just had to deal with it and tend the garden, just as I’ll have to deal with it and tend the…grains of sand and the buzzard skulls.
I’m going to steal from Sam as well and choose Shakespeare and Fools Crow. I’m also taking Journey To The End Of The Night because I’m going to need some out-loud laughs that aren’t psychotically based. I’ll also choose Ullyses because then I will finally read it. I’m tempted to use my final choice on Faulkner as well, but I think I’m going to take DeLillo’s Underworld. I’ve only read it once, but it was one of those books where I felt 100 pages in that it could be read several times and more would be revealed each time.
Maybe on my desert island, thinking of Sam’s qualification about difficulty, I’d take a Spanish/English dictionary and some Neruda and Marquez in Spanish that I could work on translating. I think I’d also bring some T.S. Eliot so I can finally try to figure that dude out. Then for variety some Proust, who I’ve never read, and the collected Emily Dickinson so I could practice memorizing brilliant lines to read to the parrots in the coconut trees. Did I say desert island? I meant tropical island!
Lists rule!
These aren’t my desert island books — these are just five books that had an outsize influence on me:
1 — The Sound and The Fury. because it becomes more coherent and straightforward as it proceeds, it was the first of the really difficult books that I loved and wanted to read again.
2 – Where I’m Calling From. My fiction writing was waning when i first read this. i feel like a cliche saying it, but reading these stories recharged my desire to write fiction because, 1) these lives and situations were familiar to me, and if they could be the stuff of great fiction, then etc., and 2) they look deceptively easy to write.
3 – The War Against Cliche. Essays by Martin Amis. Before i read this, I had not read Lolita, Augie March, Ulysses, Underworld — on and on. It got so i felt like I was simply following his program and I had to stop. I think this book even helped persuade me to have a child, because of a fantastic line, which goes, more or less: “Children escort you from the biological desert, where all you hear is the chattering of sex and death.” Also: “All writing is a campaign against cliche.” Right on.
4 – Lord of the Rings. I was young. Sue me.
5 – Blood Meridian. Sometimes I feel as if this has become my Bible. Or maybe my Book of Mormon.
On a desert island, I might not want these along. I might want super-long stuff — collected Shakespeare, Proust, etc.
[...] light of last week’s sudden burst of list activity, I should say that I have something of an obsession with lists: the categorizing, [...]
Not my desert island list, but books of the outsize influence that Shawn mentioned.
Fitzie: Toss up between his stories and Gatsby.
Russell Edson: Hard to pick just one. Maybe Why The Closet Man is Never Sad.
Barthelme: Sixty Stories.
Elizabeth Bishop: Collected Poems.
Robert Bly: Silence in the Snowy Fields
[...] hard for me to just pick one favorite, or even a top five list (which I see as different from my desert island list). But it’s also because I want to paint myself in a certain light to certain people. [...]