Distant lands

Reading, in a way, is like meeting people. It is one of my dearest personal philosophies that everyone has an interesting story to tell. Some people tell theirs better than others. I think people who are lucky find someone to tell their stories to as they live them. Other people are compelled to write them, because their ambition is to reach a greater audience or because it's the only way anyone is going to hear them. Writers feel like they have something to share.

I've never gotten through Walden, but I really like what Thoreau says at the beginning, where he is trying to justify his use of the first person:

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

It's easy to feel ashamed of writing about ourselves. But I think if we do it well, people like to hear it. Art is not pure at all; it's a survival tactic, a means to recognition and immortality. If someone tells their story well, people enjoy it and people like them. It's an exchange. Writers want readers and readers want writers. Readers are interested in hearing a good story.

Why we read

A couple of weeks ago I picked up Publish and Perish by Sally Wright, which I've been sort of keeping in mind for future reading (why is it somehow humiliating to admit I voluntarily read something published by my former employer?) for a long time. It was actually a fine read. It won an Edgar Award for mystery writing, a respectable achievement. The characters are interesting, and it has a fun academic setting.

There is a good moral lesson to the story, not as heavyhanded as I think its publisher would have liked it to be, but true enough to traditional mystery style. The stories of Sherlock Holmes had morals. Agatha Christie wrote about good and evil. Mysteries necessarily deal with good and evil, right and wrong, but we seem to want to draw moral lessons even from literary fiction. I remember doing that in high school English, not just at my Christian college. It made me think a lot about why we read. In fact, I've been thinking about that since then. It seems to me that there are countless reasons.

Vladimir Nabokov had strong opinions on the matter. He told his students at Wellesley and Cornell, "I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations. I have tried to teach you to read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author -- the joys and difficulties of creation."

I think I have read (and still do) for infantile and adolescent purposes. I am quicker to dislike generalizations, mainly because I fail to grasp them. John Updike's wife, Martha (whom Professor Nabokov apparently recognized during her college days as "a genius") remembered this quote from Nabokov's class: "Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash." I like that quote a lot.

Why do we read? I have tons of thoughts on the subject. I'm not sure there's something wrong with caring about the characters. Must we be so detached?

On the other hand, surely we can't apply the same rules of love to fictional people that we do to real people...

My mind has been going in circles for weeks about why we read and what it means to read well. I've finally concluded it really isn't worth thinking about too much.

What do you all think?

The Prince

Machiavelli's The Prince is famous for the author's unapologetic advocacy of realpolitik, and I found it lived up to its reputation. It's a quick read, clearly written, and Machiavelli pulls no punches. I'd recommend it just to see for yourself what everyone means when they say "Machiavellian."

I don't have quotes, but I will paraphrase two bits of advice he gives. First, he recommends that a ruler be "cruel" rather than "kind," because a kind ruler will not be feared and will constantly have to be dealing with insubordination, insurrection, and the like, probably with harsh measures. Whereas the "cruel" ruler will quickly gain a reputation for cruelty, will be feared, and will not have to deal with much rebellion, thus in the end being in practice more kind than the "kind" ruler.

On whether to be truthful, Machiavelli advises that a ruler should keep his or her word as often as it is beneficial. The people you are dealing with will break their pledges to you as soon as it becomes advantageous to do so, Machiavelli says, so you should double-cross them first.

Very provocative, and gives very good insight into politics and politicians, although no politician today would be caught dead saying out loud what Machiavelli says. So while I find myself disagreeing with much of what he says, and softening other parts ("don't say 'be cruel,' say 'establish firm justice'"), I also find myself welcoming his forthrightness as a breath of fresh air.

Hail, Texas!

Some of you, like me, may have been required to read I Heard the Owl Call My Name in eighth grade English. I forget what the significance of the owl's call was. It was either a portent of death or a signal beginning the rite of passage into manhood. I bring this up because I saw a portent of parallel importance this morning. I saw my first big snake.

What this means, I reckon, is that the Republic of Texas is finally welcoming me without reservation, finally opening up her truest self to me, finally clasping me into her bosom. When one thinks of Texas, one often thinks of big snakes, but I have lived here for two years and five months without a single glimpse of one. It's been difficult.

It was a grand, thick serpent, nosing its way onto the bike path at White Rock Lake. As I pedaled past it returned on itself, folding itself beautifully alongside itself as only a creature with such majestic bendable qualities can do. I have a horrible memory for colors, so I forget whether its underside was a nuclear-moon-mold tint of green or a toxic-oil-spill hue of orange, but I am certain that it differed from the dull matte finish of most of its dark body. It was immensely satisfying to see.

Ah, Texas! Thank you!

Top 100 books

A few weeks ago, a friend asked me to list my top 100 books. It's hard, and it's taken some time, but I've finally done it. I would recommend this for everyone else too.

Disclaimers:

Some of the books probably have a significance for me that has nothing to do with the book itself. I have a feeling that if I reread some of them I would like them less. I bet there are books I've read and not liked that I would love now, and vice versa. However, I think that one of two things is still true about each of these books: either I would gladly reread it, or it has made a difference in how I view my life.

Many of these are books I love but wouldn't necessarily recommend for everyone. I like to call them "best friends." You don't necessarily even want to share them. You fear other people not appreciating them, or making weird judgments about you based on them. So be nice to me.

The decisive standard is that each book is a book I love. Sometimes I had to choose between (1) a book that I thought was well-written or that I learned something from, and (2) a book that gave me a pleasant feeling. If I had the latter book on hand I would want to stroke it and look at it and think about it and, most important of all, reread it. These books (2) beat the admirable but not beloved ones (1). Of course there are still some of those that made it through, I think.

Where there is one book by an obviously amazing author, it is my favorite one and it doesn't mean that the other books by that author weren't better than some of the other books I put on the list. I just didn't want Shakespeare to take up a tenth of the list, for example.

Of course The Secret Garden should be on any self-respecting list of favorite books, but I didn't want to put two Burnett books, and I liked A Little Princess better. But, on the other hand, I didn't dig My Name Is Asher Lev as much as everyone else seems to, so you can't always assume that another famous book by a listed author is also a favorite book of mine. I guess you will always just have to ask, which is good, because reading is so lonely and one of the purposes of a list like this is to incite conversation and arguments and sharing of experiences.

In some cases I just gave up on picking a favorite book and mentioned a whole series.

I started out listing only novels and thought I might make separate lists for other genres, but I just haven't read enough great books, so I've mixed them all together. It's mostly novels.

Some of these books aren't even that great. I need to read more.

Of course it's inconsistent to put two books by Roald Dahl and not by other people. I have no defense. At some point you just have to stop floundering and post.

And I'm too lazy to put them all in italics.

Enough disclaimers. Here you go:

Agee, A Death in the Family
Alcott, Little Women
Andersen, Fairy Tales
Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Angier, How to Stay Alive in the Woods
Asimov, Foundation
Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal
Cleary, Ramona books
Blyton, Adventure books
Bronte, Jane Eyre
Bryson, I'm a Stranger Here Myself
Burnett, A Little Princess
Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Cather, My Antonia
Caudill, A Certain Small Shepherd
Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
Colette, La vagabonde
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Dahl, The Twits
Dahl, The Witches
Dinesen, Out of Africa
Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales
Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Duncan, The Brothers K
Edgerton, Walking Across Egypt
Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Eliot, Middlemarch
Enright, Gone-Away Lake
Erdrich, The Master Butchers Singing Club
Faulkner, Go Down, Moses
Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Flaubert, Salammbô
Forster, A Room with a View
Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Grimm, Fairy Tales
Harrer, Seven Years in Tibet
Heat-Moon, Blue Highways
Heller, Catch-22
Herbert, Dune
Herriott, All Creatures Great and Small
Higgins, The Eagle Has Landed
Jeffrey, People of the Book
Joyce, Ulysses
Kelly, The Trumpeter of Krakow
Lansing, Endurance
Latham, Carry On, Mr. Bowditch
Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Levine, The Mercy
Lewis, The Silver Chair
Lewis, Till We Have Faces
Lischer, Open Secrets
Lowry, Number the Stars
MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblins
Maclean, The Lonely Sea
Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel
Mauriac, Le noeud de vipères
McCourt, Angela's Ashes
Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Montgomery, Emily of New Moon
Morgan, The Truest Pleasure
Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Nabokov, Pale Fire
Paterson, The Master Puppeteer
Perkins, Haffertee Hamster Diamond
Potok, The Book of Lights
Potok, The Chosen
Qiu, Death of a Red Heroine
Robinson, Housekeeping
Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory
Rouaud, Les champs d'honneur
Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Saint-Exupéry, Le petit prince
Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Schlink, The Reader
Schultz, Peanuts
Shakespeare, King Lear
Sharp, The Turret
Smith, Fair and Tender Ladies
Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
Speare, The Witch of Blackbird Pond
Stevenson, Treasure Island
Stewart, Ordeal by Hunger
Stoppard, Arcadia
Streatfeild, Dancing Shoes
Sutcliff, The Shining Company
Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Voigt, Izzy, Willy-Nilly
Warren, All the King's Men
Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
White, The Once and Future King
White, The Trumpet of the Swan
Wilder, The Little House on the Prairie
Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters
Zolotow, Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present

The Hole exhibits life

Nerzhin! I was just about to post a cranky post saying that surely someone, somewhere, has read something. Even if it's Curious George Has a Colonoscopy or Peter Spier's Rain, we have to post about it! What is wrong with everyone? OK, so I pretty much gave you all the cranky post anyway. But dear Nerzhin can ignore it, because he posted at my darkest hour.

Lucky pawns

It's been a long time since I read a book as good as Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro has the gift of presenting us with enormously deep and difficult emotions in an understated, tightly controlled, slowly paced manner that only serves to highlight the depth of feeling. The slow clenching in your gut that you feel as you read seems to come from the story and from the characters, not from the writing itself.

Never Let Me Go opens at an exclusive British boarding school, where the three main characters, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are students. The school, called Hailsham, seems nice enough, almost idyllic, but there are a few strange things. The students are never allowed to leave the grounds and don't seem to have families. And the only classes that are mentioned are things like art, music, and poetry; there is no chemistry or math or history. The students are pushed to be creative, and their very best works are taken away to be put in the Headmistress's "Gallery", a collection that the Guardians at Hailsham never mention but all the students are sure exists.

The book traces the relationships of Kathy (the narrator), Tommy, and Ruth as they leave Hailsham and begin the next phases of their lives, and as they begin to figure out who they are, what the Gallery means, what kind of institution Hailsham actually is. Ishiguro depicts the changing relationships with precision and poignancy; there is the sense, as in real relationships, of tension, uncertainty, and vagueness, and also the sense that understanding and working out these relationships is critically important.

The premise of the story lacks a certain realism if you think about it too much, but as it unfolds in the book you are so drawn in by the realism in the characters and the feelings that it doesn't seem to matter; the situation the characters find themselves in can be understood on an almost symbolic level. What makes this book great is that the lives of the characters, so different from ours externally, make us see our own lives in a different perspective.

John McPhee

Not only am I posting about reading a book of excerpts from other books (what do you all think about this? is it acceptable?), but I haven't even read the whole thing. I've read all the excerpts from Coming into the Country (about Alaska) in The Second John McPhee Reader. It does make me want to read Coming into the Country. It's on my list now. Although I confess I checked Basin and Range out of the library back in Oregon and never made it very far, I am convinced still more now that McPhee is a fabulous writer.

In the spirit of excerpts, since even the excerptable stories that make it into the reader can't fit here, I offer my own favorite little quotes from the part about Anchorage:

Anchorage is not a frontier town. It is virtually unrelated to its environment. It has come in on the wind, an American spore. A large cookie cutter brought down on El Paso could lift something like Anchorage into the air. Anchorage is the northern rim of Trenton, the center of Oxnard, the ocean-blind precincts of Daytona Beach. It is condensed, instant Albuquerque.

Books were selling in Anchorage, once when I was there, for forty-seven cents a pound.

And McPhee's storytelling is far more delightful than his little one-liners. I don't even want to study how he does what he does, for example, in his story (from Table of Contents) about meeting a game warden with the same name as him. It's magic. It has zany postmodern moments, shifts of time and viewpoint without transition, nested stories (eminently excerptable, I suppose). His best gift is just pure storytelling, survival stories good enough to make you cry with joy.

Dallas, Dublin

yes I said yes I will Yes.

These final words of Ulysses are the title of "A Celebration of James Joyce, Ulysses, and 100 Years of Bloomsday," edited by Nola Tully. It's a fun book. I got it as part of my quest to bring Bloomsday to Dallas. As far as I know, there are not even any Bloomsday celebrations in Texas!

It's weird how quickly one can absorb the Texan rhetoric about the state's being a world in itself, lacking nothing, doing everything better than everywhere else. I mean, it's easy to mock this attitude, because of course it's not true, but part of you wants to make it true. So when you see something lacking (like Bloomsday), rather than saying, "Aha! So much for bigger and better! Silly Texans!", you try to help Texas out. You try to make it complete. Rather than refusing to believe the myth, you work to make reality match it.

Dallas, Dublin. It can happen. Anything can happen for a day.

This (yes I said yes I will Yes.) is a really fun book, like I said. It's kind of a hodgepodge, including a term paper by Tennessee Williams ("speaking of Ulysses, there is, in the first place, too much of it"), a chart in which ten critics rank various authors, composers, characters, and periodicals on a scale of 25 to -25 (Krazy Kat gets a composite 7.6, Lenin a 0, Flaubert a 16.8, Joan of Arc a 3.3, Teddy Roosevelt a -9.5), quotes from friends and critics about Joyce and his novel, descriptions of Bloomsday celebrations around the world, essays, forewords, and so on.

Robert Spoo's essay on copyright is relevant while turmoil rages over that Harvard girl and her silly book. Spoo says, "The mustache on the Mona Lisa always washes off," which seems sound to me. Not that the people she borrowed from were deathless literary masters, but in any case time will tell who's the better writer. We sort and sift. We waste time on unworthy things. That's life.

I was sort of confused by the collection of statements about Joyce. You have people who say he was a true, loyal friend and all that, and then people who say he was insufferable and conceited. I guess you could say such divergent things about a lot of people. It reminds me that there are a lot of people I don't really want to be friends with, but I'm glad they can find people who do. It balances things out.