A Post About Good Books

Over on SOCIAL MEDIA, an endless stream of everyone else's shit, sometimes you might find yourself TAGGED or CHALLENGED to, like, dump a bunch of ice water on your head or BE THE ONE PERSON WHO CARES ENOUGH FOR VETERANS TO NOT JUST LIKE BUT SHARE THIS POST or buy cheap RayBans from criminals, or something. Recently, I was tagged in one of those goofy nü-chain-letter tag-fests. Normally, I'd ignore it with appropriate, removed disdain, as one should ignore any awful social pestilence, like "the wave" at a sports stadium, for example. But this was about books! I like books!

"Just post the cover of seven books you love, no explanation required," went the challenge. "Here are very many words in journal/essay format only obliquely relevant to the parameters of the assignment," went I, both here and in my protracted academic career. Anyway, here is a list of books that are great. You should read them, or any other good book, if only because every fifteen minutes spent in the thrall of a great book is fifteen fewer minutes spent laboring for our rectangular metallic and glass algorithmic overlords. (...he said, via metal and glass and algorithm, to you, via metal and glass and algorithm.)

7. The Fall, Albert Camus

I have read The Fall all the way through probably four times in the last few years, and I've read the first third of it maybe another half-dozen times on top of that. I just read it again a few days ago, in fact. I suspect I'll keep coming back to it for a long time. I can't think of a book that has made me feel so thoroughly personally interrogated and uncomfortable and accused. Some hearty recommendation, eh?!

The book is a series of long monologues confessing in great detail the narrator's personal descent--or, you know, ahh, his *fall*. He was a professionally and socially successful bougie lib Parisian lawyer and is now a friendly drunk in a dive bar in Amsterdam--a self-styled "judge-penitent" in a constant state of dramatic self-accusation, attempting by his admissions of personal failure to draw out the confessions of those around him. It's an exploration of morality and truth and the possible impossibility of either, conducted by a terrifyingly honest and self-aware moral monster, basically from hell. What a hoot! And a quick 147 pages, to boot!

6. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester

My grandfather gave me these books when I was 13 or so, and I'm pretty sure they marked my introduction to hard sci-fi. The Stars My Destination is the better of the two, if you're reading along at home. Bester makes the hard work of future-world building seem effortless and almost behind the scenes as the stories unwind with screaming pulpy pace, and the telescoping scale of the narrative, from galaxy-jumping jaunts to mind-mining telepathic cops, manages to keep the focus on the punishingly human protagonists.

Bester has his limitations, as a writer. (Write women characters as atrociously and instrumentally as possible--which I believe is Sci-Fi Rule #11--is not a trope he cares to avoid.) But the stories and clarity of vision more than make up for any of my literary fussiness. He's not my favorite, but without him I don't know that I'd have been properly prepared for two of the best--PKD and Vonnegut, who often used sci-fi as a jaunting pad for more philosophical and moral and human concerns. Great books! Thanks for them, Pop-Pop.

5. Cain, Jose Saramago

Here is something I said about this book, somewhere else:

~~~
The thing that I love most about reading books is the way it feels like they can be in conversation with each other and with me across time. The way that I relate to a book, and how I connect it to other ideas I've found in other books leads to a unique conception of what this book is saying about the world, and one that itself is "in conversation with" what Saramago might actually have been saying, rather than a direct reflection of his intention.

Cain feels especially connected to Timequake, by Kurt Vonnegut, and it's interesting that each was their author's final novel. I think the time-travel motif is a good way for an author to put temporally separate events in direct conversation with each other, but it is also parallel to what it means to be telling a story in the first place. We are time-travelers as readers, finding ourselves led along by some authoritarian to whom we have surrendered a certain amount of control, left only to observe and reflect upon the events going on in the story.

In that sense, to put precisely too fine a point on it, we are Cain, that imperfect fella wandering the earth wondering just why he's expected to try to live up to the moral dictates of an increasingly erratic, opaque, violent, and malevolent overlord.

I don't think this is by any means a perfect book, and it feels very much like a last book, written by someone with the full confidence to go wandering off on asides that would be chopped right out of the work of a less well-regarded writer, or edited out of a book that was aiming for some sort of disciplined greatness. But as the final novel of a guy who spent a lifetime laughing and crying at the absurdities of the world and laughing even harder at the explanations offered for those absurdities, I do think it is a very good book, and I'm glad to have read it.
~~~

Saramago is a wonderful writer, and this is probably only my third favorite of his books that I've read. (Blindness is the best one, though I suspect one that I've not yet read--The Gospel According to Jesus Christ--will be a strong contender, too.) Still, this is a great little book, full of the sort of old-man fists-shaking and exasperated arms-raising of a guy who has fought the good fight against the absurdities of reality for a long time and is comfortable with having lost, as we all do.

4. The Shining, Stephen King

Flash game on point, here.

I was already a proper reader before I started reading Stephen King. Until I read C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, I generally considered reading a chore. Young me raced through that series three times, probably, before I realized that there might be *other books* that offered potentially transcendent, dislocational, transformative reading experiences. And I read a whole bunch of other stuff before I found King, sometime around 11 or 12 years old, I guess. But it was reading King that brought me to worlds I worried I wasn't supposed to go. Dark places. Adult places.

I don't know what the first Stephen King book I read was, and I can't say that I have one favorite, really. But The Shining stands out for how much of King himself leaks through it, not just in the book, but in how he talks about the Kubrick adaptation. And I don't know how you can be a Stephen King fan without appreciating all the ways he leaks.

The Shining--the book and the movie--is about a recovering alcoholic wannabe writer who tries, with an assist from an evil hotel, to murder his family. It is, by King's admission, a somewhat autobiographical work. Kubrick takes the monster and blows it up to the size of a small god, a meticulous megalomaniac bending local reality to its malevolent will--so, ahh, you could say that the film is a bit autobiographical, too.

I love how much Stephen King disdains The Shining, one of the greatest horror movies ever made. I *love* that he thinks the shitty TV mini-series, which he wrote himself, is the definitive adaptation. He is incredibly wrong about this! It's not even clear to me that Stephen King is aware that the evil he writes about, these forces that course through his stories and wage metaphysical war with The Good, I'm not sure that King is aware that these can be metaphors, that they can mean other things to other people. I got this feeling watching IT a couple of weeks ago--for all King's talk about how the monster in your mind is scarier than the one he can commit to the page, there's something very specific and literal and human overwhelming much of his work. His work often can't escape the constraints placed on it by the fact that it is a creation of a human. But it doesn't pretend to transcendence, either. For a body of work that stretches and flexes the imagination in almost unthinkable ways, it always stays incredibly grounded in King's humanity. This would be a limitation, maybe, if one were trying to say something more, to say something grandiloquent about TRUTH, and all the rest. But he's just a human, telling human stories, and telling them as well as anyone ever has. That's more than enough truth for me.

Anywho, Stephen King is great! And this is one of his best.

3. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson

It's a weird thing, to come back to something that was so important to me as a kid, and to find out that it was maybe actually *way more* important to me than I realized. The following is from the introduction to The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, which weighs like 25 pounds.

"For me, the world of Calvin and Hobbes was very small and private. (...) I did everything myself. I liked this control, as it fostered a sense of craftsmanship. (...) I also liked the responsibility of knowing that, succeed or fail, it was all my own doing. And most importantly, this approach kept the strip very honest and personal--everything having to do with Calvin and Hobbes expressed my own ideas, my own values, my own way. I wrote every word, drew every line, and painted every color.
(...)
My attitude toward the strip's production also put me in a strange position when the pressure built to license Calvin and Hobbes. (...) It provided a simple clarity in the decision to forgo all merchandising. I didn't think greeting cards, T-shirts, or plush dolls fit with the spirit or message of my comic strip, and I didn't like the idea of using this hard-won, precious job to peddle a bunch of trinkets. I wanted to draw cartoons, not run an empire, so the offers and requests were not tempting in the slightest.
(...)
Over the years, I've come to realize that it's almost impossible to make anyone understand why, five years into the culmination of my life's dreams, I was ready to quit the strip and lose everything, rather than get appallingly rich off Calvin and Hobbes products. All I can say is, I worked too long to get this job, and worked too hard once I got it, to let other people run away with my creation once it became successful. If I could not control what my own work was about and stood for, then cartooning meant very little to me."

I didn't know, in 1992, that Bill Watterson had spent much of 1991 fighting his distributor in court to keep his creation from being Garfield'ed into merchandising oblivion. I didn't know that he'd taken a stand for his art, turning down untold millions of dollars, to maintain the autonomy and integrity of his voice. I didn't know it, but could I feel it? I know the heart and authenticity and humanity of the guy is apparent in his work, but how could so much of his feelings about the world leak into my own, long before I would ever even think to give words to them? Why has he had so much trouble making people understand his unwillingness to sell out, when it seems to me that his course of action was so obviously the only good one?

How much of adult me did Bill Watterson create, one comic strip at a time, as I read those collections over and over again as a ten-year old kid?

We're reading the whole collection to the kids, at bedtime every night, six pages at a time. It's every bit as wonderful as I remembered it to be, and even more rewarding to be able to read it in order, and to completion. But it's unnerving, too, to read a series of black and white panels for the first time in maybe 25 years, and to see my current self reflected back at me. I can look at actual photos of myself as a kid and have trouble seeing myself in there--but give me a few pages of Calvin and Hobbes, and the lines of continuity come to life.

Books are really something.

2. All the Stuff I Read and Hate

It wouldn't be a proper list of things, as compiled by me, if there wasn't a proper dose of hatred mixed in, after all. Considering how much I hate so much of what I read, it would seem a bit disingenuous to have a list of things I read and only include stuff I love.

When I was a kid, I read The Hardy Boys and the Boxcar Children series even though I didn't like them. They were just there, for some reason or another, full of paper-thin characters traipsing through stupid stories with obvious conclusions, and I read them because I was bored and we didn't have cable television. I would later read The Hunger Games for much the same reason, and I *hated* those books. I loved hating those books. For the same reason I like watching creationist "documentaries" and bad Christian movies like FIREPROOF and GOD'S NOT DEAD, I like to read books with serviceable plots and terrible writing. I am fascinated by people's willingness to humiliate themselves in service of something they believe, or a dollar, or both. Bad writing reflects something important lacking in the very core of the person who wrote it. (You go read READY PLAYER ONE and tell me there's not a gasping, thirsty void where Enerst Cline's soul ought to be.) Thinking this absolutely makes me a jerk, of course! Writing, especially good writing, is just a weird trick, often enough. It's a conman's skill, a felicity with language that masks vacuousness or mediocrity more often than it eases the hard work of adeptly communicating good, complex thoughts. But it looks damn fine on the page.

Not all my hatred is reserved for silly little plot-machine contrivances, though. I took a Philosophy of Social Science class in the spring of 2004. I know it was spring of 2004 because I can open up Jurgen Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action to any number of pages within and find a small rectangular crossword puzzle from the Red & Black from the spring of 2004. They are half-completed and marking pages full of indecipherable highlighted passages and were the only thing that kept me awake during class. I will now open to a random page, and select a random sentence. "I am referring here to the *objectivating attitude* in which a neutral observer behaves toward something happening in the world; to the *expressive attitude* in which a subject presenting himself reveals to a public something within him to which he has privileged access; and finally to the *norm-conformative attitude* in which members of social groups satisfy legitimate expectations." Ahhhhhh! Eat shit, Jurgen!

Then there's the books that I read and enjoy but hate, too, despite being perfectly well-written. Hermann Hesse's Siddartha is an example of this. I think I fundamentally disagree with the philosophical motivations and conclusions of that book entirely, to the extent that I'm confident I've accurately teased them out. But I wrote thousands of words across three essays in response to that little book! I may have hated what I thought it was trying to say, but it did a damn fine job of demanding a thoughtful response. What's not to love about that? (Don't answer that.)

This is probably why I read so much news and endless blogs, too. There's a part of me that honestly can't fully understand the concept of the "media bubble"--this idea that people willfully or algorithmically end up reading only the news that reflects their own worldview. I know it's a thing, but it's just not something I can imagine getting any satisfaction from. I want conflict! I want conflict with others and with myself and with the things I think I know. I read to find out the ways in which the world is stupid, and also the ways in which I have been stupid up until ten seconds ago. (Now I know better!) Just yesterday I read a piece in Slate that I hated as much as anything I've read in a long time. But it gave me something to yell about with first Lori and later Abe. (A highlight -- "Woke: going far enough to understand a subject right up to the point where the x-axis of maximal personal offense meets the y-axis of the dimmest possible view of the character of your subject.") This led to a much longer, interesting conversation about something else entirely--all because of an article I hated! There is great value there, or so I tell myself, as I read the eleven-hundredth article of the week.

I read (and finish) all sorts of stuff I hate--way more than stuff I love. Whether it's evoking anger or provoking self-reexamination or just amusing me by virtue of its authorial infirmity, I love it nonetheless. Except Habermas. Fuck Habermas.

1. Kurt Vonnegut

If I had posted the covers of my seven favorite books, as CHALLENGED, there's a pretty good chance I'd have posted seven Kurt Vonnegut books. He's my favorite writer, and has been since approximately July of 1998, when I read Player Piano at the beach because it was on my brother's summer reading list, and I'd already plowed through whatever Grisham and King I'd brought along.

The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions are five perfect books that I think every single human being should read. I don't think that there's a human being who has ever lived whose life would not be markedly better for having read Kurt Vonnegut. Read one! They're at your local library! Maybe even the audiobook version is available there, and you could just listen to one of them. (Don't get the James Franco-narrated Slaughterhouse-Five, though, because it is weird and bad.)

Vonnegut tells simple, obvious truths. He often starts off his books by telling you exactly what the entire point of the book is going to be, so as to avoid any confusion. In the introduction to Mother Night, for example, he says, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." He also says, "If I'd been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides. So it goes." These sentences, they are basically the whole point of the book! And he just comes right out and *says them* in the first few pages! He pulls the same exact trick in Slaughterhouse--a trick that really shouldn't work. But then the books unfold into perfect, hilarious, and heartbreaking masterpieces, and the son of a bitch has somehow earned it--he has justified coming out and telling you the moral of the story on page one, with 300 pages that point to the simplicity and obviousness of that truth with every word.

Vonnegut isn't the reason I'm a writer--or imagine myself to be a writer, anyway--but he might be the reason why every perfect sentence I've ever written feels like a failure. He makes the truth seem so obvious, and makes telling that truth seem so easy, that everything I attempt to put to paper feels like artifice and obfuscation in the shadow of his work, save for very occasional moments of clarity and beauty, almost always produced by accident. I hope to be a writer like he was, to tell truth like he did, to be human like he was, right there on the page.