Thursday, August 14, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

The Literary Issue: Canon fodder

Don't go to your grave without reading these essential books

"To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem."

--Henry David Thoreau,

Walden

There's reading, and then there's reading.

Walk into a Las Vegas cafe or fast food joint during a weekday lunch hour and you're likely to see somebody reading a book. That's a good thing. But more often than not, it's some paperback best-seller--a trashy romance (Danielle Steele) or international thriller (Tom Clancy). You can tell right away by the embossed lettering on the cover.

This is still not a bad thing--some best-sellers are actually quite good. And besides, any reading is good reading, right?

Yes, but we can do better. There are books, and then there are good books. Not all writing is created equal. And much "literary" writing, despite its reputation among the embossed cover crowd, isn't boring. Just once we'd like to wander into Quizno's and find somebody poring over something a little more challenging, a book that wasn't created solely as a means of escape.

In the interest of advancing that cause, we've asked a handful of Mercury writers--avid readers all--to deliver a list of books they believe are essential reading--books that taught them something, opened their minds to new perspectives, spurred them into action. We hope these lists will help readers sift through the many thousands of books out there and latch onto a few that just may have a lasting impact on their lives.

Geoff Schumacher

I read a lot of books--more than most people, I dare say, and usually pretty challenging stuff. And yet, as I compile my canon, I realize, shamefully, that there are many logical contenders for the list on my shelves that I have not yet read. I am ridiculously behind on the Russian novelists, for example. I have not read Proust yet. I've finished a couple of Saul Bellow novels but not the big ones. Jane Austen remains in my future, as does Faulkner. I've heard intriguing things about Pynchon but can't verify any of them. Still haven't gotten to Lolita or to Moby-Dick. Sickening admissions, I realize.

This doesn't necessarily make my list weak. The following are all fine, fine books that certainly require no apologies. But it does mean my list could and surely will change in the years to come.

1. Walden by Henry David Thoreau. You know how some devout Christians carry a Bible with them everywhere they go? I do this with Walden--it's in my car right now, readily available at stoplights or while my wife is in the store. Thoreau is simply wiser than everybody else, and his thoughts published in 1854 are still relevant today. A dozen times a year, at least, I sift through this book, seeking out old nuggets of wisdom and inevitably finding ones I hadn't noticed before.

2. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. This 1939 novel about Okie struggles in Depression-era California played a huge role in shaping my political views. Steinbeck's vast, heartbreaking, triumphant masterpiece is one of the great American novels. It should be required reading in all high schools.

3. The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. This 1944 novel about one man's search for the meaning of life is almost corny in its direct approach to the subject, and yet it struck a deeply inspiring chord with me. Larry Darrell is a true hero, if for no other reason than he spends years--literally years!--reading books in a crummy Paris apartment. Just imagine!

4. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. Simply one of the greatest adventure stories ever told, the premier tale of good vs. evil. Hobbits are an amazingly clever and enduring invention, and Middle Earth is as rich as any fantasy land ever envisioned. The Peter Jackson movies are extremely good but they can't quite capture the depth of Tolkien's genius.

5. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. No ink-stained wretch can resist Papa's purple-free prose. It's clean and terse and every word counts--all the attributes to which a good newspaperman aspires. Oh, and Hemingway tells a compelling story too. His first novel, a poignant saga of expats during the Roaring '20s, may be his best, though a few others easily could fill this space.

Other favorites: On the Road by Jack Kerouac, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley, 1984 by George Orwell, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates and The Collected Stories of Richard Yates, The Dog of the South by Charles Portis, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead, The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse, Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson, Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell, Hiroshima by John Hersey, Sweet Promised Land by Robert Laxalt, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

Andrew Kiraly

1. All Gall Is Divided by E.M. Cioran. Think you're an existential bad-ass for loving Nietzsche's aphorisms? The syphilitic slacker's got nothing on Romanian-born writer and dyed-in-the-hairshirt nihilist Emile Cioran. The essayist and philosopher's epigrams, arranged here by subject, are like a box of sour jawbreakers for your brain, a collection of relentlessly dreary, bitter but always intellectually precise observations. Check it out: "A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech."

These aren't the scribblings of some melodramatic coffeehouse martyr. Cioran's insights lead to his cackling, despairing outlook--not vice versa. There's no hope for any of us, Cioran says, but there is pleasure in measuring, exactly, the dimensions of that hopelessness.

2. Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud. Don't let the Symbolist tag throw you off; that was the Frenchie term for these 19th century poets who would just make up crazy shit. Literary bad boy Rimbaud put to paper some breath-catching prose poems about paradise and apocalypse. What I cherish about Rimbaud is his stubborn "unpoeticness" that has seemed to endure innumerable attempts at academic enslavement. Even those uninitiated into the world of "serious" poetry will marvel at Rimbaud's raw, powerful use of imagery to create a world, indict a world or destroy a world.

A gem from his prose poem "City," a depiction of the Parisian middle class getting a major reality check: "And from my window I see new specters rolling through the thick eternal smoke--our woodland shade, our summer night!--new Eumendies in front of my cottage which is my country and all my heart since everything here resembles it,--Death without tears, our diligent daughter and servant, a desperate Love, and a pretty Crime howling in the mud of the street."

3. The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy. Rollicking picaresque about Sebastian Dangerfield, an American "student" at Trinity College in Dublin. And oh, what a semester abroad it is: An incorrigible rake, drunkard, cheat and all-around charmer, Dangerfield carves a swath of insanity across the city, drinking, stealing, breaking hearts, breaking faces and drinking some more. There's little that's sympathetic about the sodden trickster-king, yet we love him. Or, um, at least I do.

Funny how our Oprah-addled society, high on the myth of personal transformation, never talks about art changing your life for the worse. Well, here's your Exhibit A: Ginger Man--in all its vicious debauch--upped my drinking level considerably.

4. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. Henry James gets slammed for his density and difficulty, but that's because people don't know how to approach his work. Here's how. First, take a long, restful nap. Then make a pot of strong coffee. Open brick-like James tome. Portrait of a Lady is about Isabel Archer, a smart, independent American woman who succumbs to the wiles of a scheming European couple. But for geeks who read for technique, the real treat is James' approach to psychological realism; he dives into his characters' psyches for pages at a time, rendering traits, impulses and nuances of thought with almost obsessive detail...zzz...er, more coffee, please.

Heidi Walters

1. Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. Yes, The Monkey Wrench Gang instilled a fervent tendency in me to dream of torching billboards and blowing up dams (don't worry, Mr. Office of Homeland Security, I won't physically do it). But it is Abbey's lyrical, pissed-off, romantic, unsentimental, energetic descriptions in Desert Solitaire (1968) of Arches National Monument in Utah, where he spent a season talking with ghosts of the land's past and tending to/fending off visitors of the present--tourists, developers, desert rats, natives--that embody the spirit of a battle that today we appear to be losing: to save the ability of humans to appreciate the desert, beauty, silence, floods, overbearing heat, vultures, buttes and death by natural causes.

2. The Man Who Walked Through Time by Colin Fletcher. When I want to walk from one end of Grand Canyon National Park to the other--which is always--and fall into the "rhythm of the rocks," now and then crossing the Colorado River on a tiny air mattress with my heart in my throat, but I don't have several months of vacation nor the planning savvy, I pick up this book. It's not the same, but it helps me dream. Fletcher's writing is such an odd mix of practical--"look after the ounces and the pounds will take care of themselves," he says about packing for a long walk--and lyrical, that reading him is less like reading and more like doing and being.

3. The Faber Book of Reportage (a.k.a. Eyewitness to History) edited by John Carey. This is the ultimate journal, at least up through its printing in 1987. It starts in 430 B.C., with Thucydides' firsthand account of the plague of Athens, and ends in 1986 with James Fenton's account of the fall of President Marcos in the Philippines. Along the centuries Plato remembers the death of Socrates, Pliny the Younger tells of the eruption of Vesuvius, and much later Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin recount landing on the moon on July 21, 1969. There is violence, tragedy, torture, deaths of kings and queens and presidents; telling cultural scenes; assassinations; wars. Moments of odd sweetness glimmer through: villagers in 1150, in East Anglia, tell of finding two "little green children" in the bean fields; Henry Knighton recalls a day in 1348 when women in the village decided to "ape" the men by dressing and acting like them; Benvenuto Cellini tells an odd little tale of seeing a rare salamander in the fire in the family hearth in 1505, when he was 5 years old, and of how his father boxed him on the ears to make him remember the sight; D.H. Lawrence gives an incredibly sad-sweet account of walking into a dark winter house of glass where lemon and orange trees lurked in shadows, their sweet-smelling fruit "hanging like hot coals in the twilight."

Other favorites: The 20-book Jack Aubrey-Steven Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian; Sweet Promised Land by Robert Laxalt; everything by John Steinbeck, Herman Hesse, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ray Bradbury, Barbara Kingsolver; Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun; The Metamorphoses by Ovid; The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin; Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell; Black Spring by Henry Miller; Selected Verse by Federico Garcia Lorca; All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque; Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton; Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown; 1984 by George Orwell; On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin; Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty edited by W.L. Rusho; and The Survival of the Bark Canoe by John McPhee.

John Ziebell

1. Solo Faces by James Salter. Based on the short, enigmatic life of mountaineering legend Gary Hemming, this is a book about alpine climbing the way Moby-Dick is a book about a whale. I've read it probably a dozen times, and it continues to hold up. Salter never makes a misstep; from the precision of his language to the architecture of his narrative, this is the most perfected contemporary novel I'm aware of, period.

2. Democracy by Joan Didion. Politics are tedious in fiction, and the 1970s are tedious in general, and Joan Didion is among the very few authors who can make both fascinating. The story of Inez Victor, swept away like one of Dante's adulterers by the windy confusion of America's post-Vietnam malaise, is a minimalist masterpiece. This is the kind of love story that movies don't ever get right. Didion's deliberate blending of "real" and fictional worlds makes for a credible and compelling work, pioneering a narrative strategy echoed by writers like W.G. Sebald.

3. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. A nasty, violent story about nasty, violent people couched in prose so elegant it borders on baroque. Only a wholly overpowering writer could save this text from being a catalogue of heinous atrocities, and McCarthy manages to do it. If Faulkner had practiced for another 20 years, and most of those were spent in a maximum-security prison without the benefit of sour mash, he might have become the exquisitely bloodthirsty stylist that McCarthy is here.

4. White Jazz by James Elroy. The smartest crime novel to come out of L.A. since Raymond Chandler. The novel is Elroy's fictional acme; nothing before or since is as finely balanced as this savage, brilliant work. The story is driven by a vacuum of innocence, the characters motivated by their pathologies. Everybody shares some kind of guilt in a story that ranges from caustic to comic in tone as it creates a City of Angels so nefarious that a crooked cop turned hit man gets to claim the moral high ground.

Tod Goldberg

1. Rock Springs by Richard Ford. Ford's debut collection of short stories was assigned reading when I was in college, so, naturally, I avoided it like a sorority girl with morals, leaving the whole book to be read the night before the midterm. I cracked open a sixer of Keystone Gold and began reading. Several hours later, the sixer long since absconded by my roommate Mike Lecocq, I finished the book and realized, holy shit, this is writing! This is true life! This is my Tai Chi, my Art of War, my first, my last, my everything!

2. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. Say what you will about Irving--like, for instance, what a jerk he was for not signing books at last year's Vegas Valley Book Festival--but this novel is one of those rare classics that lives up to the hype and delivers on repeat readings the same emotions it garnered the first time around. "I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice," Irving wrote in 1989 and since that time I have been equally resigned to my fate.

3. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. O'Brien's novel in stories is the most powerful book about Vietnam I've ever read, and perhaps the most accurate portrayal of how humans react when innocence isn't merely lost but obliterated and left to die.

4. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The great American novel and the ultimate unreliable narrator exist together in Fitzgerald's timeless classic. There isn't a wasted word in Fitzgerald's seamless prose and each character is as pure and refined as a piece of obsidian. Whenever I sit down to write, I aim for the green light at the end of the dock and hope for the best.

Lynnette Curtis

1. The End of Alice by A.M. Homes. Read this book, but, for goodness sake, don't admit how much you enjoyed it. People will think you're one sick puppy, which--let's face it--you are. Told from the point of view of a pedophile who raped and murdered 12-year-old Alice, the plot is at turns graphically violent, erotic, disturbing and bizarre, and--much like my school years spent with the nuns at Sacred Heart--will leave you feeling simultaneously manipulated, disgusted, guilt-ridden and aroused. In other words, you'll love it as much as I do. See you at confession!

2. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender. I think Bender was acid-tripping while writing many of the quirky stories in this collection. Which is a good thing. Her style is whimsical, cheeky and surreal. It's nice to see short fiction that's smart without being pretentious. Bender's highly original characters prove what I learned long ago--those librarians really are a randy bunch, and following strangers home from the subway isn't necessarily a good way to get laid--it may instead only get you tied to a chair while your would-be lover watches public access TV.

3. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. It's very Gen X of me, but I love Eggers' clever, self-conscious style chockfull of pop culture references so much that, even though it's been awhile since I read AHWOSG, I'd still donate a lung to Eggers--whether he needed one or not. AHWOSG is a brutal, honest memoir about a 21-year-old Eggers who's forced to raise his young brother when both their parents die of cancer. Sounds hilarious, no? Well, somehow, it is. Though I'd hate to be there when the laughter stops. Shudder.

4. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. My favorite book of all time is laugh-out-loud funny. No, really. It's got fart jokes. A loveable, sincere cannibal who travels around peddling human heads. Latent homosexuality (shame on you, Herman). Sperm-squeezing. Chapters with titles like "The Crotch" and "The Nut." It's fun for the whole family! I'd advise you to skip the cetology chapter, though, unless you have an unhealthy obsession with whale anatomy.

Mike Prevatt

1. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. Since reading Chbosky's 1999 debut--read for a book review on MTV Books' debut novels--I have bought something like 10 copies for various friends and, as a bookseller, have urged countless recommendation-seeking shoppers to purchase a copy or two. I think I deserve something of a royalty cut, but so might the countless adolescents and Gen Xers who have made this beautiful work an instant word-of-mouth classic. Perks is the story of, and told in letter/journal-entry form by, Charlie, an extraordinarily thoughtful high school freshman juggling efforts to both understand the world and fit in among his peers. What is so captivating and bittersweet about it isn't so much Charlie's adventures, but the way he tells them. While Holden Caulfield's hipster cynicism is a touchstone for alienation, Charlie's hopeful and heartwarming narration brings out the idealist in even the most sullen of spirits.

2. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. One night during my senior year in college, I woke up with a horrible stomachache and decided since I could not go back to sleep, I'd just as well read my Children's Lit assignment, which was The Little Prince. I devoured it in an hour and after I picked my jaw back up from the floor, I had no idea where my stomachache had gone. It's more than existentialism for curious kids--it's perspective for jaded adults who get bogged down in the grown-up muck that distorts and de-emphasizes the important things in life.

3. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. The justification of my music geekness resides with this hilarious, desert-island ode to love and rock 'n' roll.

Newt Briggs

1. The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman. Need a surefire cure for a chronic case of rah-rah-U.S.A. patriotitis? Read Berman's book and marvel at our society's utter impudence in the face of political corruption, eroding school systems, celebrity worship and rampant materialism--a general condition Berman convincingly equates with the decline of the Roman empire. For example, he writes: "Roughly 60 percent of the adult population [of the United States] has never read a book of any kind, and only 6 percent reads as much as one book a year, where book is defined to include Harlequin romances and self-help manuals." The rest of the book paints an equally grim picture--particularly focusing on mass culture's dependence on the entertainment industry--but unlike most critics, Berman offers a solution: the "monastic option." Whether you choose to embrace it or not, The Twilight of American Culture will make you think twice about the "gigantic dolt-manufacturing machine" that is 21st century America.

2. Air Guitar by Dave Hickey. Forget what you've heard about Dave Hickey stalking the halls at UNLV like some holier-than-thou academic terror. Forget, also, about the $500,000 MacArthur Foundation genius grant that Hickey scored last year--the first Nevadan to revel in such elite company. Instead, consider Hickey the man: the penniless art dealer, the ceaseless wanderer, the gonzo pop culture critic and the reluctant writer. Reluctant because, in his words, "writing, even the best writing, invariably suppresses and displaces the greater and more intimate part of any experience that it seeks to express." Hickey, though, smashes his own platitudes, writing prose so lucid and radiant that it's almost like it's you, not him, spinning wrenches on a two-tone 1957 Chevy Bel Air or watching afternoon reruns of Perry Mason as a ritual in the "Church of Unemployment" or riding shotgun in Waylon Jennings' tour bus as it speeds out of a Hotlanta rock 'n' roll riot. In the process, he reminds us that real art isn't exclusive, that it exalts the mundane and the extraordinary alike. No matter what you may think of Hickey himself, that's a lesson from which we all can benefit.

F. Andrew Taylor

1.Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I still think of myself as a cartoonist who writes ("No shit," shout my beleaguered editors in a weary unison), so I have to include the graphic novel Watchmen. While it isn't my favorite of the medium, it is undoubtedly the most influential. The book is a masterpiece and textbook on graphic novel pacing, composition and any number of other elements of the form. On top of that it has a dense, complex script, which seems deceptively simple on the surface but rewards repeated readings. It twists, turns and heads off into interesting side trips, all of which come together seamlessly in an unforeseen climax. Frighteningly enough, its vision of a society in which a nasty sort of kinder, gentler fascism is foisted upon the nation in the name of public safety is even more to the point in Bush's America than when I first read it 14 years ago in, uh, Bush's America.

2. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at least once a year. It elevates my mood, sharpens my wit and still cracks me up after a score of readings. I could cheat and claim the whole series as I have a lovely hardcover, including all five books in the trilogy, but it's the first one I come back to.

3. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. Although my esteemed colleague Kiraly seems to feel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance falls into Marshall McLuhan territory, I found it a thought-provoking treatise on the father/child relationship, the complications of educational theory and the unfortunately thin line between genius and madness. It did not, however, instill in me a desire to strap several hundred pounds of steel between my legs and careen down the highway aiming my head at the pavement. I'm more of a "Zen and the Art of Sprinkler Maintenance" guy at this point.

4. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. This book certainly can be blamed for a lot of creepy right-wing politics, but I'll still cop to The Fountainhead being a major influence. Her vision of an uncompromising creator, unswervingly sure of his artistic vision, nags at the back of my head more often than I care to admit. Additionally, her brilliant attack on the architecture of the Parthenon led me to sharpen my critical thinking skills. I still disagree with her on a lot of points, but at least now I try to think my opinions through and shun jingoism.

Other favorites: Harlan Ellison's Strange Wine (particularly the opening essay), The Martin Gardner Annotated Alice, Dante's Inferno by Dante, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, Amphogorey by Edward Gorey, A Clockwork Orange (the British version with the all-important last chapter) by Anthony Burgess, Cerebus in High Society by Dave Sim, The Odyssey by Homer, Booth Again by George Booth, Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, The Brass Ring by Bill Mauldin and everything by Colin McEnroe, H.L. Mencken, Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber and H.P. Lovecraft.