Fifteen Sticky Books

Booking Through Thursday offered an interesting prompt today: “Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.”

These are the first fifteen that came to mind - and I was surprised by how near to 15 minutes it took - with a bit of commentary. I did notice that, in many cases, my connection or ongoing response to the book did have a lot to do with the circumstances under which I initially (or subsequently) encountered it. I'm not sure what that means, other than perhaps serving as a corollary the "no two people read the same book," principle.

1. Animal Farm - George Orwell One of the first really rapturous reading experiences that I recall - I read it through twice in one sitting one summer in high school.
   
   
2. 1984 -George Orwell I should clarify that I'm not an Orwellian socialist (nor a socialist of any other flavor), merely a high admirer of his style. At the same time, I've never been tolerant of youthful idealism (this was even more true when I was high school- and college-aged) so I always found the back story compelling - I love the fact that disenchantment can be so powerful as to yield that much vitriol and that much beauty at the same time. Incidentally, in real life Orwell and I share a surname, and if I ever have a male pet, he will be named Eric.
   
   
3. Girl Meets God - Lauren Winner This is one place I frequently turn to when I feel most isolated in the world of faith, and is probably one that I read at exactly the right time. I love this gal.
   
   
4. The Chosen - Chaim Potok I seriously doubt that Potok intended his themes to lend clarity to Christian eccumenical-cultural issues, but they help, enormously, nonetheless.
   
   
5. Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder A mysterious stranger befriends you to teach you all about the history of philosophy - it may not be every 14-year-old girl's dream, but isn't it yours?
   
   
6. Surprised by Joy - C.S. Lewis Christian apologists who hold up Lewis as an example of rationalist conversion need to look closer. I can't help but love this man as he presents himself here.
   
   
7. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame My first favorite book.
   
   
8. Perelandra - C.S. Lewis Paradise Retained. I'm a big advocate of the Space Trilogy, and love the spiritual cosmology Lewis created.
   
   
9. The Oresteia - Aeschylus "Evil for evil is no impiety." It sounds pretentious, but it's true - this made Western Civilization click for me, in the sense of starting to actively see how many ways the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian philosophical dichotomy has us all looking at the world with crossed eyes.
   
   
10. What Do You Care What Other People Think - Richard Feynman Feynman published several volumes of memoir, and though this one is less energetic than others, it's compelling in its own way. A good portion of the second half recalls the investigation of the Challenger explosion, which is interesting but occasionally bogs itself down. More moving is the story of his relationship with his first wife, which you can't help but feel like he consciously avoided in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. They were childhood sweethearts; he married her knowing she was dying of tuberculosis; she died in a New Mexico sanatorium while he was working on the Manhattan Project.
    
    
11. The Eyre Affair - Jasper Fforde High literature? No, but this is just one of the funniest things out there.
    
    
12. The Epic of Gilgamesh The language is riveting in any translation I've encountered, and I can't help but think about it any time I see lapis lazuli.


13. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Bronte My main impression was that the characters were good and bad in the way that real people are good and bad. No mean accomplishment.
    
    
14. Candide - Voltaire I have a soft spot for oozing satire. There are passages I feel gripped to read over quite regularly.
    
    
15. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen A prime example of the "circumstances of encounter" principle I mentioned in the introduction. Among other things, it's the first book I read when I first moved to Massachusetts for my first professional job. Austen in January became a tradition for the years I lived there.
    

2008 Tally

The Tally for 2008: 28. 28? Hm. Less than usual, but that's ok. I passed through a couple of seasons this year in which I couldn't seem to finish anything, or nothing held my interest, or my mind and time were overly occupied by one thing or another in real life, or for one reason or another I just couldn't read. At any rate, here's the list

Read in 2008

• The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon (2007)
• Trespassers Will Be Baptized - Elizabeth Emerson Hancock (2008)
• Larry's Party - Carrol Shields (1997)
• Gertrude and Claudius - John Updike (2000)
• The Periodic Table - Primo Levi (1975)
• Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl (2006)
• Spiritual Formation As If the Church Mattered - James C. Wilhoit (2008)
• The Now Habit - Neil Fiore (1989)
• The Renaissance Soul - Margaret Lobenstine (2006)
• The Third Man - Graham Greene (1950)
• Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) - Jerome K. Jerome (1889)
• How Proust Can Change Your Life - Alain de Botton (1997)
• Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understaing Philosophy Through Jokes - Thomas Cathcart, Daniel Klein (2007)
• The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (2004)
• Possession - A.S. Byatt (1990)
• A Broom of One's Own - Nancy Peacock (2008)
• Miracle at Speedy Motors - Alexander McCall Smith (2008)
• God Is Closer Than You Think - John Ortberg (2005)
• Table for One - Camerin Courtney (2002)
• Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments -Michael Dirda (2000)
• Portuguese Irregular Verbs, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances - Alexander McCall Smith (2003)
• Bel Canto - Ann Patchett (2001)
• The Careful Use of Compliments - Alexander McCall Smith (2007)
• Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon - Jane Austen (1795, 1804, 1817)
• Book by Book; Notes on Reading and Life - Michael Dirda (2005)
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susannah Clarke (2004)
• Devil in the White City - Erik Larson (2004)
• The Know-It-All - A..J. Jacobs (2004)

Do you hate it? I hate it.

Sam at Book Chase pointed out this Times (of London) article in which various critics reveal the targets of their personal literary loathing - and the occasional leatherbound Waterloo. Predictably, there are a few common offenders: Crime and Punishment, The Lord of the Rings, Ulysses; various works by D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Ayn Rand.

It's a fun subject to discuss with friends. I know that Kit, my college roommate, did grave battle with Moby Dick; My Sister the Blond Artist once greatly objected to my recommendation to The Inn at Lake Divine.

In some respects, "What's the worst book?" is a more easily digested question than, "What's the best book?" because, in context and among similarly-minded people, it's readily understood to be shorthand for, "What book gave you the worst reading experience?" and for some reason that's a fairly comfortable flavor of subjectivity to indulge. Though I haven't encountered a great abundance of books that I truly hate, there are a few I can place on the spectrum from ambivalence to repulsion.

• Though I don't hate it - I actually quite like the story itself - The Lord of the Rings struggled weakly to maintain my interest, as do most works in the same general class of fantasy. This would probably surprise most of the people close to me - My Sister the Blond Artist is a particular Tolkien fan, and my parents like fantasy generally, as do most of my closest friends (you can't help but keep questionable company in engineering school - though my parents are a librarian and minister, so it's not just the geek factor). The genre leaves me cold. C.S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, gives an evocative account of being romanced by "the north," as he classed all the Norse-inspired imagery that frames up his own and Tolkien's fantasy. It's not an experience I've shared. The earthiness, the jaggedness, the savagery implied, all abraid, rather than excite, my own sensitivities.
  
  
• Steinbeck is a turnoff, and after writing the above, I think the reason for this is similar to my response to fantasy. Which sounds terribly odd, since I know few authors less fantastic. But it's the horrible bleakness, in combination with the Western and Country factors with which I find it hard to make a connection. It's not that I only like books in which pleasant things happen to happy people, as described by refined and delicate narrators - far, far from it. It's just that there's a certain type of terrestrialism that causes me so much anxiety, at a fundamental level, that it becomes to hard to appreciate the art that carries it, because it's too difficult to consume a novel-sized serving. If I'm honest with myself, this is probably also why I've never taken to Southern Gothic as much as I would like. Sometimes, I think I must be the reincarnation of a supporting character from a better Edith Wharton novel.
  
  
• I've also managed to source endless ambiguous dissatisfaction from the works of Dickens. Taken with the above, confessing this does nothing to improve my sympathetic image. But: corn should be sold by production volume. Fiction, like software, should not.
  
  
• The Catcher in the Rye is an easy target. As a favorite book, Catcher ranks right between Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and On the Road on the "refuse a second date, and no goodnight kiss, either" scale. Unfortunately, it's also a durable member of the secondary education canon, at least in the U.S. I moved a lot growing up, so with changing schools and differences in local curricula, I actually had to complete coursework on Catcher several times. I haven't totally forgiven the universe for that. For an assignment in the eleventh grade, I did write a rather amazing satire of it that earned me loads of unsolicited extra credit. I'm still insanely proud of that. But it doesn't change the fact that Holden is a phony.
  
  
• Tender is the Night has plenty of devotees. Hemingway. Faulkner. Doppleganger. It drives me crazy. Yes, the plot is disturbing - a psychiatrist marries a madwoman in order to catalyze their mutual self-destruction. But my problem was that I didn't understand the book, in a very particular sense of the phrase. I recall re-reading the same paragraphs, over and over again, trying desperately to figure out what the component sentences had to do with one another. I believe myself to be a person of at least average intelligence, so I don't know what to think about that. But I don't like it. I love Gatsby; I fanatically adore every piece of Fitzgerald's short fiction I've ever read; I enjoyed his other novels in a nondescript way. But Tender does something unpleasant to my universe.
  
  
• There is exactly one book that I hate so extremely, so viscerally, so passionately, that I feel an immediate physiological change in myself whenever I see the cover. My remarks about it will be brief, since my reaction to the very thought of it is so overwhelming and involuntary that I absolutely cannot discuss it rationally. In melodramatic moments, I want to retire early and dedicate my life to destroying every copy in print with my bare hands. It's Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. If you're not familiar, the entire volume consists of a self-indulgent jeremiad delivered by the title character, who is both an ecoterrorist and a talking gorilla. Yes. Don't ask me how this happened, but I once found myself stuck on a transcontinental flight with this book as my only reading material. Never before or since have I been tempted to pray for an act of international terrorism to be performed in my presence. One word: Blech!
  

So, I want to know: who's on your list of published enemies?

Seasonal Illiteracy, Part 2

My devotion to the audiobook is well documented here. Without them, I doubt I ever would have managed to clean my last apartment, and I'm sure my previous commute would have driven me to insanity years earlier. The selection available in public libraries, particularly offerings on CD (versus cassette), has exploded in the last five or six years. Another brilliant advance is that many public libraries now have audiobooks available for internet download, generally through contract with a third party. Usage rights vary, but this is a really, really great thing.

I've been leaning heavily on the audiobook front lately, since I've been working on two very tedious projects - that is, work projects that involve tedious busy-type work but which are too technically involved to delegate to anyone cheaper. Through trial and error, I've discovered that boring-but-brainy work is most compatible with genre mysteries and children's fiction - amusing and undemanding fare. The former often come in series, of course, so it's not hard to find something acceptable; I have a standing list of recommendations for the latter from my mother, the children's librarian. Here's some of the selection that's been getting me through spreadsheet purgatory this month:

Because of Winn Dixie (Kate DiCamillo): From now on, I'm referring to my dad as "the Preacher." And I'll name my next dog Safeway.

Anastasia Krupnik (Lois Lowry): Poor kid. I wouldn't have liked it if my parents had had another kid when I was ten, either.

Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World (E.L. Konigsburg): Not that memorable. It involved a nursing home, a professional organizer, an expensive home theater system, and a ten-year-old with a far-fetched grasp of contemporary philosophy.

Wedding Planner's Daughter (Colleen Paratore): set on Cape Cod, so kind of nostalgic.

The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (Lawrence Block): not too terribly forgettable. I don't think I've read very many other books actually set in the 1970's. At least, I can't remember any.

Death of a Charming Man (M.C. Beaton): Part of a very redundant series set in the Scottish highlands.

The Jackal's Head (Elizabeth Peters): I need to learn not to bother with Peters books that aren't the Amelia Peabody series.

Seasonal Illiteracy, Part 1

My reading concentration has been feeble lately, for one reason and another. I've been flitting from book to book, finishing little or nothing; unable to engage the unfamiliar, re-reading instead; collapsing into essay collections. The congregation on my nightstand is eclectic:

• Orwell: A Biography - a children's volume, shelved in the adult section of the library. I've always had a mild brain crush on this guy.
  
  
• The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) - I always thought this was the one Fitzgerald novel I didn't loathe - I adore his short fiction - but I don't think I'm in the right mood at all for that sort of re-read.
  
  
• Girl Meets God (Lauren Winner) - I love this woman. I love any book that includes observations like, "There are no great movies about Jewish trees."
  
  
• At The Corner of East and Now (Frederica Mathewes-Green) - I love this woman, too. The first chapter includes the stories of her hippie-Hindu wedding and, many years and life turns later, of her husband, now an Orthodox priest, driving to a north Virginia feed store, dressed in his cassock, to buy a horse trough in which to perform immersion baptisms.
  
  
• Edgar Allen Poe: Collected Stories
  
  
• Please Understand Me (Kiersey) - for a review inspired by this conversation, of course.
  
  
• Understanding the Enneagram (Riso and Hudson) - ditto.
  
  
• The Young Learner's Bible Storybook - Something I often give at baby showers. The only Bible storybook I know of that includes the story of Jeremiah in the well. Actually, it's a very cool book - really an educational activity book, using very well told Bible stories as carriers for exercises in counting and colors. But I don't know why there's a copy by my bed.
  
  
• Dr. Zhivago (Pasternak) - I finished this last year. I should put it away.
  
  
• The World of Jeeves (P.G. Wodehouse) - Is there anything to be said about Wodehouse?
  
  
• In Cold Blood (Truman Capote) - I haven't even started it, but it's been sitting there for a long time.
  
  
• How to Pray (R.A. Torrey) - I promise, I didn't forget how.
  
  
• Collected Stories of Arthur Miller -an impulse purchase. Also a happy shade of yellow.
  
  
• The Curtain - An Essay in Seven Parts (Milan Kundera) - recruited to be carried downtown recently, almost exclusively on the basis of its portability. But Kundera is another brain crush candidate.

More later.

2007 Wrap-Up

Final Count for 2007: 54

• The Good Husband of Zebra Drive - Alexander McCall Smith
• Love Over Scotland - Alexander McCall Smith
• The Church in the Marketplace - George Carey
• I Like You - Hospitality Under the Influence - Amy Sedaris
• Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations - Alexander McCall Smith
• The Monsters of Templeton - Lauren Groff
• Dream Angus - Alexander McCall Smith
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
• First Among Sequels - Jasper Fforde
• The View From Saturday - E.L. Konigsburg
• The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers - Lilian Jackson Braun
• Men and Cartoons - Jonathan Lethem
• Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles - Agatha Christie
• Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor
• Portrait in Sepia - Isabel Allende
• Summerland - Michael Chabon
• A Bell for Adano - John Hersey
• Matilda - Roald Dahl
• Wicked - Gregory Maguire
• The Mysterious Affair at Styles - Agatha Christie
• Howard's End - E.M. Forster
• On Beauty - Zadie Smith
• The Top Ten - ed. J. Peder Zane
• Moby Dick - Herman Melville
• The Bad Beginning - Lemony Snicket
• Bridge to Terabithia - Katherine Paterson
• The Labors of Hercules - Agatha Christie
• The Brinkmanship of Galahad Threepwood - P.G. Wodehouse
• The Life of Pi - Yann Martel
• Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell
• The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
• Whale Rider - Witi Ihimaera
• The Razor's Edge - W. Somerset Maugham
• Blue Shoes and Happiness - Alexander McCall Smith
• The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - Umberto Eco
• Funny In Farsi - Firoozeh Dumas
• Remarkable Reads; 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading - J. Peder Zane, ed.
• What Do You Care What Other People Think? - Richard Feynman
• The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
• Carry On, Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse
• The Fourth Bear - Jasper Fforde
• Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Verne
• The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life - Steve Leveen
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
• Selected Early Stories - John Updike
• Death of a Snob - M.C. Beaton
• No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days - Chris Baty
• Isabel's Bed - Elinor Lipman
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman - Richard Feynman
• The Big Over Easy - Jasper Fforde
• Eldest - Christopher Paolini
• Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
• The Last Gentleman - Walker Percy

The List of Lists

Everyone's been writing about this year's meta-literature standout, The Top Ten, edited by J. Peder Zane, book review editor for the Raleigh News & Observer. It took me a while, but I finally managed to get my hands on a copy.

The book comprises 125 lists of “the ten greatest works of fiction of all time,” as provided by American and British authors, as well as several essays interpreting the possible significance of the selections. Naturally, we have to take a package like this in good humor, since we’re inundated by “Top Ten” and “Best Of”, of dubious importance, from all corners of the media. (Remember 1999?) Personally, I doubt that anyone is really deluded into thinking such things are important; he reason books like this are published, and the reason we pick them up, is that they're fun. They provide an abbreviated intimacy between all of us who love books so much that we love books about books.

Whenever I see “top” lists, I’m curious to know the criteria actually specified. As David Orr points out in his essay, “Reading the Lists” (p. 31), there may be several interpretations of “greatness”:

1. “Great” means “books that have been greatest for me.”
2. “Great” means “books that would be considered great by the most people over time.”
3. “Great” has nothing to do with you or me – or people at all. It involves transcendent concepts like God or the Sublime.
4. “Great”? I like Tom Clancey.

In this case, the authors were free to interpret “greatest” however they desired, and their responses populated the continuum from subjective to objective. In total, the contributors named 544 individual books, but the most popular weren’t surprising. Topping the list were Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and War and Peace.

The interpreters, in their essays, search for commonalities among the listed books, ideas crucial to their selection, and, perhaps most importantly, the possible meaning of the exercise. The recurring conclusion is that writers are compelled to see greatness in their influences, in those works which best represent the forerunners of their own craft. Norman Mailer provides himself as an example when, in a preface to his own list, he claims, “I find that the books I think of as great were read when I was still a young and unpublished writer." Sven Bikerts concludes in his introductory essay, “If [the list] didn’t tell us about greatness, it certainly said something about how writers read.”

Yet, the selected works dated from classical times to the present – twentieth century authors on the list included DeLillo, Garcia Marquez, Morrison, Ishiguro. (Though, indeed, some contributors excluded more recent works from consideration, because, as Mary Gaitskill put it, “I can’t see them clearly enough to judge their greatness.”)

One appealing feature of this book is that many of the contributing writers offered brief essays in appreciation of a book on their list – generally a little-known work. So if you’re looking for the secret gems of literature, this book offers many for consideration. I added a title or two to my own list.

So, is their any meaning or purpose to this “reader sport,” as Bikerts dubbed it? As banal as the “top ten” concept has become, why does it continue to appeal? George Saunders concluded in his list’s introduction: “We need a concept of greatness so we can know in what direction we should morally aspire.”

You can read more about the book, read some of the lists, or create your own list at http://www.toptenbooks.net/list.html.

Art Appreciation

Via Bookliness is Next to Godliness, something to make the bibliophilic pulse race:

Surprise bibliophile extraordinaire Art Garfunkel has listed every book he read between 1968 and 2006 - nearly 1,000 titles, and fine selections they are. He's also listed his 135 favorites, including Jane Eyre, Notes from the Underground, The Aeneid, Rousseau's Confessions, and The Bell Jar. If you're looking for a model for your own reading life, or even for just a few good tips, you could do far worse than to start here.

(What was Art reading the day I was born? The World According to Garp. Yikes!)