Leonard Gardner: Fat City
A book that still excites me every time I page through it, though I first read it a year ago. Gardner’s novel thrives on contradictions. His characters say what they don’t mean, hope for what they don’t want, and act in ways that hurt themselves and those that they attempt, ever so slightly, to love. And the novel comes together splendidly.
Read my full review here.
Stephen King: On Writing
It's a great book--partly on his life, partly on language, and wholly on how the two intersect. King is hilarious, imaginative ... and his insane work ethic is evident on every page. He's also got a finally tuned bullshit-detector, which charmed me right off.
Read my full review here.
George Orwell: Down and Out in Paris and London
George Orwell is a damn good writer. Sure, he whipped out 1984 and Animal Farm, but it's from his essays and nonfiction that I'm learning Orwellian tricks--and by that I mean, the very best sort of craft points. Read my full review here.
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
Five reasons why reading Pride and Prejudice is ridiculously fun.
Charles Baudelaire: Twenty Prose Poems
Such ambition did nothing to stifle his sense of humor--evident just from his titles, which range from "Get Drunk!" to "The Soup and the Clouds" to "Let's Beat Up the Poor." Baudelaire's got a love of wordplay and a taste for epiphany. The doubleness manifested in his very genre--prose poem--finds constant textual echoes, from his scathing remarks on hypocrisy to his sight for the strange oppositions alive in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. I was particularly struck by the image at the end of "The Double Room" (natch)...
Read my full review here.
Maurice Manning: A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, & c.
One of the best books I've read in a long time. Innovative, funny, gorgeous...I could string together plenty of heartfelt adjectives, but I'd rather you not take any of my words for it; take Manning's words instead.
Wendy Wasserstein: The Heidi Chronicles: Uncommon Women and Others & Isn't It Romantic
The voices ring in my mind, after several reads of this play since last summer; the dialogue is remarkably honest, funny, and just plain old interesting. Rarely have I come across stories and plays where the human instincts to demarcate characters with sharp lines ("she's the funny one,"he's the misunderstood one") is so futile as here; the characters' many-sidedness is made plain on every page. Read my full appreciation here.
Andrea Barrett: Ship Fever
Smart extended stories, drawing from the most intriguing moments in natural history and adventuring. In my mind, Andrea Barrett challenges Alice Munro for the most talented living story writer in English.
Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones
Mind-bending. My favorite? "Three Versions of Judas"
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita
Featuring the personalities of Pontius Pilate, a life-size cat, Satan, and a master writer, this is a novel of Moscow gone mad with literality and fantasy. It shares the curious juxtaposition of being both one of the most powerful Soviet protest texts, and the inspiration for the song "Sympathy for the Devil."
Angela Carter: Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories
Boldly written, clever, hilarious, and strange. There's none like her. "The Fall River Axe Murders" remains one of my favorite all-time stories.
Anton Chekhov: Stories of Anton Chekhov
How could you not? Honestly, it took me awhile to appreciate the genius of Chekhov's stories, but it was only a matter of time.
Dorothy Day: Dorothy Day: Selected Writings
A well-edited text of Day's writing, and her life committed to a personalist approach to poverty and active nonviolence. I never was stunned by her writing, by I found myself reaching for it again and again. There's something that keeps calling me back to it...
Joan Didion: Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays
I've never read anybody who thinks like her.
Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
I fell in love with it in college; I'm loyal to it today. It's got murder, intrigue, and a brilliant scope.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Right on.
Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
A novel that crushes the heart and the brain. In a good way.
Anne Michaels: Fugitive Pieces
A novel I'd never heard of, by a writer I'd never heard of, mailed to me unexpectedly by a British fellow I'd only known for two weeks. Now, when people throw that "favorite book" question at me, I always, always name this one.
Flannery O'Connor: The Complete Stories
Stories with dark edges and beating hearts, sharp social satire and a load of humor.
Marilynne Robinson: Gilead
I bought this novel as a hardcover, without ever having read a word of Robinson's writing before. A rare case. And beyond worth it.
Peter Turchi: Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer
A clever book with gorgeous and eclectic illustrations, Turchi is in true affable form as he seeks to capture the nature of seeking...both on the page and in the world.
Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own
Let's just say it's a classic for a reason.
Isak Dinesen: Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass
Natch.
Alison Bechdel: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Fun Home is a timeshifting, living memory sort of story that leaves the chains of chronology far behind ... Bechdel plays at the ideas of artiface and fiction, using Camus, Proust, Nin, Fitzgerald and many other writers to tell the story of the 'reality' of the love, pain, and identity in a bookish family. Read my full review here.
Maurice Manning: Bucolics
Haunting and funny, innovative and heartening, this collection of seventy untitled, unpunctuated poems features a nameless narrator talking to his creator, whom he calls 'boss.' It moves like a reverie and it strikes deep. Read my full review here.
- Charles D'Ambrosio: Orphans
The eleven essays are haunting, hallucinatory, and so sharp-eyed that it rattles the bones. D'Ambrosio moves among landscapes like a watchful ghost--from oddball modular homes in Washington state, to the infamous Hell House, from Seattle in 1974 to a Russian orphanage, from a tent on a cold ocean beach to a utopian experiment in small town Texas to a courthouse multiplex where a teacher's on trial for becoming pregnant by her 13-year-old student. Read my full review here.
Michael Pollan: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Hyped? Yes. And it deserves every bit of it and more. This is an astonishing, engaging, hilarious and revelatory book that should be required reading for every American. At least every American that eats.
Edith Wharton: House of Mirth
I tell you, it was fraught; this is a great book that I viscerally responded to. So engrossing is the tale of Lily Bart and New York society at the turn of the twentieth century, we ended up bringing that second copy home and continuing to read til 3 a.m (there was a short spaghetti break). Read my full review here.
Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
It's perfect.
Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Thornton Wilder: The Bridge of San Luis Rey
The Autobiography of Malcolm X : As Told to Alex Haley
On the forty-third anniversary of Malcolm X's murder, I wrote about his life, his legacy and the warped way I'd learned of both until I read this brilliant book. Read it (that is, my reflection) here.
Per Petterson: Out Stealing Horses
And time: Petterson's collage of chronology plays like a human memory, feeding on associations and surprising juxtapositions, making the familiar revelatory. It is crafted of many long lines and leaps of moodiness and knowing. There is suspense and mystery in Out Stealing Horses--but it hardly moves like a step-by-step thriller; Petterson performs the writerly miracle of making mysterious what we already know has happened. And that "what" that has happened isn't itself easily defined, even as I can feel it's weight. See my full review here.
Yes, Winter doesn't begin to approach what happened, but I don't see much mystery, necessarily. Capote doesn't appear to me to have much by way of conviction about much of anything that would compel him to, or sustain him in, a not-so-easy art like novel making, not over the long haul.
As for Ellison, his novel Invisible Man is largely autobiographical, or at least related to his dynamic early life, cutting intimately and profoundly across age, class, region, race of course, and more. I'm not aware that his later life was remotely as dynamic, and it seems to me he had perhaps some other reasons not to write as frankly or honestly about it.
If you follow the development of their thinking, viewpoints, lives, and demonstrated capacities as writers - by reading their fiction, nonfiction, and some of the biographical work about them - their lines of progression or lack thereof seem rather understandable.
Posted by:Tony Christini | May 19, 2008 at 08:50 PM