Marcel Proust is a tough read, no doubt about it. That’s why I only read his quotes.
“Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”
I so vividly recall tectonic moments in my life, shifting my perspective so radically that I truly grew new mental parts. These rearrangements have revolved around the satisfying sigh of a book closing for the final time. The conclusive words uttered, that crowning period. I finished George Orwell’s 1984 in a corn field on my lunch break at Northrup King in Washington, Iowa, the summer before my freshman year of college, and stepped out of that patch of green and brown an expanded human. Granted, my mind had been blown hither and thither and the attendant void carried nothing but a confused clicking and twittering, but that novel created a space for society’s hidden reeds to hatch in my head and heart.
Danny Sugarman’s Doors expose, No One Here Gets Out Alive, was finished at the Iowa State Wrestling Tournament, which I had traveled back to from college. I didn’t know the taste of beer and couldn’t fathom a roach being anything you’d stick in your mouth. That book raised a black velour curtain on a whole counter culture I would tromp through for some number of years. And isn’t it just fantastic that I first yearned for LSD (whatever that was) while watching my old underclassmen teammates execute crisp single legs and Japanese whizzers?
Lessons, like rifts in my head swallowing up all the bullshit I thought I knew, have rent my life, books as combustion. To Kill a Mockingbird taught me, as a writer, what a true narrator sounds like, and what it is to love that narrator. All Quiet on the Western Front had me staring at my Doc Martins in college and wondering if I could infuse them with the significance of Remarque. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye and The World According to Garp drove me crazy with dreams of adventure, that I had better get to it, that Huck and Holden and Garp had lived more before 18 than I may in my whole life. The Metamorphosis taught me that a roach can also be a human, your neighbor, your lover struggling with a demotion at work. Though I owned a number of Coltrane albums, I heard jazz music for the first time in Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. It remains the only book I can reliably snap my fingers to, rhythmically. Notes from the Underground sent me to counseling in college, such was my mind rattled (true story). A Clockwork Orange, The Fall, The Roominghouse Madrigals, The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, The Road, The Stranger, Blood Meridian, Animal Farm, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Siddhartha, Journey to the End of the Night, American Pastoral, Native Son…on and on it went, challenging everything I knew, everything television would never offer. These books wrote the script for so many late night chats around a table with friends, became the inspiration for songs when I had hair and clubbed around Iowa City in a band, drove my fingers to massaging my temples in my bedroom, a bedside lamp warm and wonderful and a friend for lighting the word.
And that’s just the fiction! Non-fiction, which I switch to on a bi-bookly basis now, has crushed my ignorance and naivety so often that I wonder how deep that dank well runs. Seemingly, I have a never-ending supply of the stuff. Just a quick story, if you’ll allow me.
I was not a climber while enrolled at the University of Iowa. Indeed, if a sport didn’t involve a ball, I was totally unaware that it existed. Somehow, I had picked up Krakauer’s Into Thin Air while thumbing through the non-fiction section at the student union book store, ready to part with some more loan money I wish I would have saved. Except for that purchase.
One Saturday afternoon I was wrapped, the flu raging, in a gaggle of comforters in my college slum house, shivering on the Goodwill couch and reading Into Thin Air. Outside, sirens howled through the open screen door and fire engines and cop cars zipped by, one after the other. The screech rattled the windows. I coughed, licked my thumb, and flicked past another page. The sirens seemed to congregate just down the block, but I was just too sick to get up and gawk.
A couple moments later I heard a clopping up the wooden stairs and a pounding on the screen door. My friend Brian stood there, shirtless, hair in standing chaos, wearing only green slacks and combat boots, shouting for entrance.
“Come in, fer chrissakes,” I wheezed. His unlaced boots clapped the floor as he sprinted through the living room, halting directly over my cocoon.
“Dude,” he said, his chest heaving, “can I use your phone? My house is on fire.”
To this day, every fantastic Krakauer book I read, I think of combat boots, fire engines, and the flu.
Even the pop stuff is fun to read. I’ll take this opportunity to say NEVER trust a friend who only reads the classics. Especially when they let you know about it. Or harangue you for reading something not published early in the 20th century or before. Yes, I get it. You’re super smart and really, really hip and your mind an acute instrument of social dissection. I can’t quite string words together into an effective sentence displaying how nauseated this rare bird makes me.
You didn’t like The Da Vinci Code? Fuck you. You didn’t enjoy The Stand? You’re a mirthless prick. You can’t possibly deal with Bill Bryson’s cheekiness? Screw off. You haven’t even given Harry Potter a chance? Get…the fuck…out of my house.
Perhaps writers, those most discerning page turners, have the most to say about the importance of a good book. Here are some undeniably good reasons to pick up a book – right after you finish reading this little blog and peppering it with loving and fawning comments that will leave its author blushing and muttering, “Why, you shouldn’t have.”
Robert Byrne said, “Nobody ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have while trying to write one.” You see? Reading as suicide prevention, writing as taunting suicide. Read more, write at your own caution.
The great education reformer Horace Mann noted, “A house without books is like a room without windows.” This reminds me of another quote, admittedly by the less roundly esteemed director, John Waters. He said, “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have any books, don’t fuck ‘em!” If truer words were never spoken… By the way, I have TONS of books in my house, so…ladies…
So many people I meet, when I ask them what books they’ve recently enjoyed, invariably riff on how busy they are, how they don’t have time, how they used to love reading. Perhaps they should read this quote from Confucius, “No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.” Were he leaning over my shoulder right now he’d nudge my side and say, “Hey, add this…’Fox News is a cesspool of ignorance, MSNBC is a charlatan, and one of the History Channel’s most popular shows espouses the legacy of ancient aliens. Gently strangle your television with its own rubbery power cable. It won’t teach you as tenderly or reliably as a book.’”
And if that isn’t enough to shame the non-reader, perhaps this will. “I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book.” You know who said that? Coolio. Coolio said just those words. If Coolio can do it… Well, you get it.
I could go on and on, but let’s get to the heart of the matter here. A couple days ago, my friend Kyler asked if I was going to write up a “Best Of” blog of the books I’d read in 2011. It was like I’d been socked in the face.
“You read my last ‘best of’?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He didn’t say it was good. He didn’t say it changed his life. He said, “Yeah.”
Proof that one person reads this blog is all the fuel I need, baby! And with that, I present to you a wee list of the best and worst books I read in 2010 and 2011, seeing as my last list appeared in 2009. They weren’t banner years, but I did put down exactly 65 books over the last two years. Some were stinkers, some I think about almost every day. I was introduced to authors I wish were still alive, and others I wish to be quickly exiled to an island – sunny, comfortable, that’s all fine; I don’t care – without any means of outside communication. I hope you’ll be inspired to pick up one of these books, and maybe we’ll chat about it in the coming year, sharing impressions, getting caught up in the greatest debates in the history of the world – the ones about books. Maybe you’ll just be inspired to read more this year, as would be my New Year’s wish for everyone, including myself.
As Mark Twain once grumbled through that nasty white broom pasted to his upper lip, “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” So true. Perhaps this should be the year, though, eh? Infinite Jest? Finish it. War and Peace? Tackle it. The Brothers Karamazov? Tear it asunder! And then, just think of how you can brag about it to all your philistine friends…constantly.
Top 15 Best Books Read of 2010/2011
• City of Thieves, David Benioff (F)
• Matterhorn, Carl Marlantes (F)
• Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace (NF)
• True Grit, Charles Portis (F)
• Born to Run, Christopher McDougall (NF)
• The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, David Grann (NF)
• Zeitoun, Dave Eggers (NF)
• Alas, Babylon, Pat Frank (F)
• The Good Soldiers, David Finkel (NF)
• Warlock, Oakley Hall (F)
• Zone One, Colson Whitehead (F)
• The New Kings of Non-Fiction, edited by Ira Glass (NF)
• Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, David Lipsky (NF)
• War, Sebastian Junger (NF)
• The Great American Derangement, Matt Taibbi (NF)
Top 10 Honorable Mentions
• The Lost City of Z, David Grann (NF)
• Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane (F)
• The Third Man Factor, John Geiger (NF)
• A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo (NF)
• The Devil’s Highway, Luis Alberto Urrea (NF)
• Point Omega, Don Delillo (F)
• In Search of Captain Zero, Allan Weisbecker (NF)
• Good Omens, Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman (F)
• Strange Piece of Paradise, Terri Jentz (NF)
• Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer (NF)
Top 10 Gross Pukes and Bummers
• Regulators, Stephen King (F)
• The Army of the Republic, Stuart Archer Cohen (F)
• The Accidental Billionaires, Ben Mezrich (NF)
• Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk (F)
• Under the Dome, Stephen King (F)
• The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch (NF)
• Ultramarathon Man, Dean Karnazes (NF)
• The Wall, Jeff Long (F)
• The Man from Beijing, Henning Mankell (F)
• Copper Canyon, Dick Fischer (NF)
Alphabetical Order
F=Fiction, NF=Non-Fiction
Best wishes, my friends, for the New Year. But know this: If you don’t read more books, I will find you. I will break into your home, perhaps with a crowbar. And then I’ll tie you up to a chair in itchy manila rope and read Stephen King’s Under the Dome to you, out loud, with dramatic pauses and great flourishes. Trust me, you don’t want this to happen…