"More than one every two days?" he said. "Can you even absorb that much? I mean, you could read the Bible in a year, but you couldn't really take it all in..."
"Right," I said. "I suppose you'd get a broad acquaintance, but I think if you're reading carefully, and you have other stuff going on in your life, I'd aim for more like twenty-six books a year. One every two weeks."
So then I thought, what twenty-six books would I recommend, or would I want to read, or listen to?
(Generally I follow no reading plan--it's almost entirely haphazard.)
When I thought of books that have meant a lot to me and shaped my thinking, I hesitate to recommend them to anyone because I haven't read them in sooooo many years.
I would have to have a Recommend list,
and a Reread list.
For inclusion on a year's reading list, I would recommend
1. Maus (I & II), Art Spiegelman's 2 vol. graphic novel about the Holocaust, which I've read again in recent years.
Night, by Elie Wiesel, who as a boy survived the concentration camps where his family died?
It was hugely formative for me––in eighth grade.
Haven't read it since.
I would put that on my Reread List, along with Sophocles' Antigone. Ever since Orange Crate Art chose that as a book (play) all incoming college freshman could read, I've wanted to reread it.
Other books I read ages & liked ago and would like to reread:
Candide, by Voltaire
Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck
Nine Tailors, by Dorothy Sayers (though I still remember how the death was done, darn it!)
The Bhagavad Gita
So many to reread, come to think of it––must think more about which ones.
Also recommended:
2. Charlotte's Web, by E. B. White (I quoted it at my friend Barrett's funeral in 2011)
3. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson––a slightly wobbly first-novel that still makes me laugh out loud and is a great coming of age/leaving your family/religion novel
4. The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell, for a history of the funny, horrific, and paradoxically admirable wackos who settled the Puritan colonies. Human, all too human. Just like us.
5. Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, another graphic novel (memoir) and coming-of-age book, about growing up in revolutionary Iran (Satrapi was born in 1969)––
especially topical now with the rise of tribalism
6. Gospel of John.
One of the great opening lines in literature:
"In the beginning was the Word..." [top image: "First page of John's Gospel from the Coronation Gospels, c. 10th century"]
Whether you consider this history or fiction or God's actual words, for real, it's worth checking out.
I'd put some essays on the list too. Maybe three or four would equal one book? It depends...
7. "Consider the Lobster", by David Foster Wallace
I could not get into Infinite Jest (sorry! I tried!),
but this essay is one of my favorite pieces of writing:
Let's think about how we have festivals for boiling living creatures alive!
You can read it online: PDF "Consider the Lobster" here.
And some poetry! But I have to leave now––will get back to this.
Anyone want to chime in with books or other writings they'd recommend?
. . . or books they'd like to reread?
Whoa. The only book on your list that I have read is Charlotte's Web. It has one of the all time GREAT first lines: Where's Papa going with that ax? And the Garth Williams illustrations are delicious. I loved Templeton the rat.
ReplyDeleteBut I have not read any of the other books on your list. Not a one. No intersection at all.
I've read and re-read Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut. It's not the kind of book I usually read; I think I got my hands on it when I was in the Peace Corps and would have read the list of ingredients on a soup can to alleviate my boredom, but I got this book and was very much beguiled by it. The first three times I read it, it was a different book every time.: first, it was a science fiction story. The second time, it was a sad story about a lost soul. On my third reading, I finally noticed that it was about the bombing of Dresden. Yeah, it took me that long to notice that it was an anti-war story. I'm thick.
I also read Stranger in a strange Land (again, not my usual choice of reading material but I was in another "desert island" situation and was desperate) and I was very influenced by the philosophy behind the Fair Witnesses, and the Martian concept of art. I re-read it years later and I was shocked by the casual misogyny in it -- it is very much a book of the '50s. But the Fair Witness and the art bits still hold up.
A book that I recommend to a lot of people and which no one who has read it has liked as much as I, is The Names of Things by Susan Morrow. Yes, you have to like etymology to hang in there, but it's also a memoir and Susan Morrow is a very sophisticated story teller. I wish I had written this book.
Now I'm going to read Consider the Lobster, even though I will not eat lobster nor will I abide anyone else eating lobster if I am at the table because it is evil to boil any creature alive.
Oooh---fun! Thanks for playing Vivian!
ReplyDeleteI haven't known you long but I imagine you really might like Sarah Vowell's Wordy Shipmates--you'll know that part of the world and, I think? enjoy some of her humor, which is sometimes snark.
It's fun to get recs for books I've never heard of, and I've never heard of The Names of Things by Susan Morrow.
Looked it up and it looks intriguing--and I do love etymology.
I'll get it from the library.
But Slaughterhouse Five!!!
Wow, YES!
It also had a huge influence on me. I must reread that.
I wrote a paper on the bombing of Dresden in 9th grade because of that book.
(I still hold a grudge that the US History teacher gave me a B on that paper.
Looking back, I can't believe it wasn't an A paper--I was really into researching it, which has hard in those pre-Internet days, and I'm pretty sure I did a great job.
I wonder he downgraded it because he didn't like the topic--the US being the bad guys?)
Learning about Dresden was my first realization that we, the United States, had not necessarily been "great" in the past.
I grew up in the 1960s, fervently anti-war (and pro animal rights!),
but I thought we must have "lost" some greatness--I was sure that we'd never have bombed civilians in the past.
Ha!
How did I factor in Hiroshima & Nagasaki? Maybe I thought they were unfortunate but freak exceptions?
But they're not.
The American Revolution itself was basically a war of terrorism.
"Make America Great Again", or even just nostalgia for how rosier it was in the past is a self-serving illusion.
Rosier for whom?
I think Garth Williams illustrations are part of why I love Charlotte's Web. I can imagine reading it with NO illustrations, but not with another's.
I also loved Stranger in a Strange Land when I was in 9th grade (bad year, good reading)---I still use the word "grok" sometimes!
I loved the book for some of the same reasons I loved Mr Spock in high school--
teenagers can feel like aliens (I did!).
We can feel like anthropologists in our own lives, our own lands.
But as you say, Heinlein's casual misogyny is icky--
another example of how humans were not exactly great in the past is that that misogyngy was normal at the time; I don't know if I even registered it when I was 13,
but I couldn't get past it when I tried rereading it a few years ago.
Yes, that's DFW's point:
isn't it evil to boil a living creature?
I'm actually surprised Gourmet magazine went ahead and published his article!
I read "Consider the Lobster" and some of DFW's other writing, and loved it. (But not "Infinite Jest," not yet!) Anything by E.B. White is good by me. I once saw Sarah Vowell live when I went to a taping of David Letterman (I think, or was it Jay Leno?) and she was on the show. That was AGES ago!
ReplyDelete